My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their questions. Regarding the question of the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, about whether there will be another appeal, not from us but from those groups represented, it will be a matter for
them as to what they decide to do. I thought that it might be helpful at this point to give a bit of a background on the measures.
The Home Office introduced into the Data Protection Act the immigration exemption, as noble Lords know, which came into law on 3 May 2018. The Open Rights Group and the3million issued a judicial review later that year to challenge the legality of the immigration exemption, their case being, first, that the exemption was not expressly mentioned in Article 23(1) of the then GDPR and, secondly, that it did not satisfy the requirements laid out by Article 23(2). Our position was that it fell to be covered by Article 23(1)(e) under,
“other important objectives of general public interest”.
The Court of Appeal agreed with that position, thereby putting the matter to rest. It agreed with the appellants, though, on the second point, in that the requirements of Article 23(2) needed to be contained within the immigration exemption itself and not, as we had argued, covered elsewhere. It is that point on which we are bringing forward the legislative changes necessary to address the findings. In doing so, as noble Lords said, we have consulted the Open Rights Group, the3million and the Information Commissioner’s Office, and taken on board any issues that they have put forward.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, asked me to detail those issues. I cannot do so today but will provide those responses if they are not data-protected.