My Lords, I will be brief on this group but I have two points to make. One is a question in respect of Amendment 51, where I congratulate the insurance industry on its lobbying. Within proposed new paragraph 15A(1)(b) it says,
“if … the controller has taken reasonable steps to obtain the data subject’s consent”.
Can the Minister clarify, or give some sense of, what “reasonable” means in this context? It would help us to understand whether that means an email, which might go into spam and not be read. Would there be a letter or a phone call to try to obtain consent? What could we as citizens reasonably expect insurance companies to do to get our consent?
Assuming that we do not have a stand part debate on Clause 4, how are the Government getting on with thinking about simplifying the language of the Bill? The noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, is temporarily not in her place, but she made some good points at Second Reading about simplification. Clause 4 is quite confusing to read. It is possible to understand it once you have read it a few times, but subsection (2) says, for example, that,
“the reference to a term’s meaning in the GDPR is to its meaning in the GDPR read with any provision of Chapter 2 which modifies the term’s meaning for the purposes of the GDPR”.
That sort of sentence is quite difficult for most people to understand, and I will be interested to hear of the Government’s progress.