My Lords, I looked behind me in vain for interventions from our side of the House. I am happy to provide as short a contribution to this debate as others, and very happy that my noble friend Lord Foster—if I may call him that—has made some of his usual penetrating comments that leave me free to look at things at another level. As the Minister said, this SI seems a simple matter of tidying up an area that had not been previously dealt with in full. I cannot comment on why some of this was not done earlier, but it is being done now. When I got it and saw the pages and pages of sheer drudgery that our very talented Civil Service has had to give its best time to, my heart sank.
It also occurred to me that debating it today is very ironical because the Prime Minister does not want a no-deal exit—neither do the Lords or the Commons. Nobody wants it, but we look as if we might be in danger of drifting into it. Once upon a time, a Roman emperor played the violin while the city around him burned. Now, our contemporary empress is fiddling in European capitals and burning our boats while she does it. We must ask ourselves very seriously whether this exercise of 500 or more statutory instruments being pushed through our procedures in this way has been beneficial to anybody.
I note the substantive point that the statutory instrument intends to deal with the,
“notification of personal data breaches by providers of publicly available electronic communications service”.
I have learned so many acronyms in reading for this debate—indeed, it has been on a par with “Line of Duty”, which I watch rather assiduously when I can. The replacing of “competent national authority” references with references to the “Information Commissioner” seems to tidy everything up. I looked and, as has been mentioned by others already, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee drew attention to the facts about these calls. Indeed, it added an appendix to one of its committee meetings to ask technical questions of the Minister. He has answered those and I need not therefore repeat them.
With the ground adequately covered and tidiness brought to a fundamentally futile exercise, I am happy to rest the case there. I invite the Minister to say some reassuring words and answer our questions so that we can move on to other business.