Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (Disclosure of Pupil Information by Welsh Ministers) Regulations 2011

I certainly see that the people of Wales might think that there would be an equal case—and because I am not a brave person, I would support that. The Explanatory Memorandum refers to a series of outputs. Paragraph 7.4(ii) refers to, "““differentiating migrants in order to improve our understanding of moves within and between local authorities in England””." Once again, I am not clear what a migrant is. Is it somebody moving from Shropshire to Monmouthshire, or somebody with no connection to the United Kingdom who finds themselves in Wales as the first place they come to? Does it include somebody who comes from outside the United Kingdom who goes first to England and then to Wales? What level of granularity are we talking about when it comes to migration? Are we talking about small movements or larger ones? Finally, I must say a word or two about confidentiality. The essence of much of the data-gathering law in this country is that it puts barriers between departments so that they cannot look at each other’s data, in order to maintain confidentiality. We then break down those barriers in order to use the data in a richer way. That is an entirely reasonable thing to do, but it is equally reasonable that whenever the barriers are broken down, as they are by these regulations, we should seek assurances that we are moving forward on confidentiality. It is no secret that there were unfortunate lapses under the previous Administration. I am absolutely sure that they were not in any way malicious. We acted in good faith and I am sure that this Administration, too, will act in good faith. However, have they made progress towards being able to assure us about improved confidentiality? Are there any new techniques, audits or penalties that will allow the Minister to say that confidentiality when this barrier is taken down will be even better than it was in the past? With those few comments, we are quite happy to support the regulations.