My Lords, my name is attached to Amendment 80A, but I fully subscribe to the points that have been made so far about Amendment 80. A range of issues is involved and the Government would do well to think very carefully about that. I will come back to that in a moment.
On the assumption that HMRC has a role, Amendment 80A simply says that,
“an arms-length management organisation, tenant management organisation or local housing company wholly owned by its local authority which is managing social housing”
should also be counted in terms of being bodies which can receive information from HMRC. It is not clear in the Bill so far that that is the case. I suspect that is an oversight, but I look forward to the Minister’s confirmation that that indeed is the case.
There is, however, a broader issue about the role of HMRC. There is the role of third parties getting access to private information and the control of that.
That has been very well put by noble Lords in this grouping so far. However, there is another one which I think has to be looked at very carefully. That is how the information flows from HMRC in the first place, the reason being that with tax returns, for example, it may be straightforward for many individuals but for some, perhaps self-employed people, it may not be, and people have to file tax returns months after the tax year, so there could be significant levels of fluctuation in people’s income.
We have heard all the arguments around this, of peaks and troughs during the year and so on. A lot of thought needs to be given to this issue about the security of data and the bureaucracy that is being created. We heard in the last group about reimbursement of costs to local authorities for the work they have to undertake. Of course, there are ways of getting round this—a number have been suggested. I hope the Minister will take very seriously the fact that we do not want to create an enormous bureaucratic structure to deal with this when there are simpler methods to achieve the objective.