Data Protection Bill [HL]

My Lords, I felt entirely comfortable with my noble friend’s examples, but they do not fit with what the Home Office has been doing. What it has done with the national pupil database is not to ask targeted questions when it has a problem with an individual but to collect the whole lot so that it has the ability to trawl, look at, match and use the whole of the dataset. That is a much more dangerous thing because of the consequences it has for the integrity of the data and for the way in which the lawfulness of gathering it is questioned. It is that sort of practice that troubles me. I had not read this clause in the narrow way in which my noble friend described it. I will obviously go away and read it again carefully, but if she would add a letter to her noble friend’s letter enlarging on why this is a narrow provision and giving us comfort, that would be worth while for me.