Protection of Freedoms Bill

The noble Baroness has referred to the figures that she gave us at the previous stage. She said that 23,000 criminals a year would no longer be on the database who could commit 6,000 further crimes. She has answered the point of my noble friend Lord Phillips and confirmed that these include minor offences. Rereading Hansard, I was not clear whether the 23,000 were those within years four to six, because some of the cases mentioned in the debate related to crimes where there had been more than a six-year period. As noble Lords said on the previous occasion we discussed this matter, it is not entirely black and white. As we discussed in Committee, if one asked a random group of the public about this, most would want a longer period of retention. That is possibly correlated with those who watch entertaining but unrealistic television dramas; I know that I am affected by these things. We all know that if you asked the same group of people about capital punishment, you would probably get a very hard-line answer, which is why most of us try to avoid asking that question. My noble friend Lord Phillips said that though we would all agree that a society with a full range of surveillance would be a different society, few of us would be able to articulate why that was so. I have to say that I am among the less articulate on this. I do not think anyone could say that what the Government have proposed is in any way a casual approach to retention or one which completely reverses the current approach. Indeed, it is a pity that what is proposed in the Bill is so hedged about with conditions that this is not so very different a piece of legislation. I agree that, of course, we should not be casual about crime and the prevention or detection of crime. Similarly, we should not be so cautious that we are casual about privacy, our culture and the intervention of the state in our privacy. The noble Baroness said in Committee that, "““there is a fine line between the preservation of … freedom and privacy””,—[Official Report, 29/11/11; col. 146.]" on the one hand and the delivery of justice and the protection of citizens on the other. I also acknowledge the fineness of that line but I think that I am on the other side of it from her.