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Session 2008 - 09 Publications on the internet General Committee Debates Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords] |
Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords] |
The Committee consisted of the following Members:Gosia McBride,
Chris Shaw, Committee
Clerks † attended the
Committee Public Bill CommitteeTuesday 9 June 2009(Afternoon)[Miss Anne Begg in the Chair]Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords]Clause 14Use
and disclosure of customs
information Amendment
proposed (this day): 9, in clause 14, page 10, line 7, at
end add— ‘(8) Nothing in
this Act shall enable any of the officers designated under this Part to
use any personal data of UK citizens to restrict their right to enter
or leave the United Kingdom for legitimate
purposes.’.—(Damian
Green.) 4
pm Question
again proposed, That the amendment be
made.
The
Minister for Borders and Immigration (Mr. Phil
Woolas): It is a pleasure to serve under your
chairmanship, Miss Begg, on this important Bill.
Amendment 9
would prevent a designated customs official from using the personal
data of a United Kingdom citizen to restrict that citizen’s
right to enter or leave the UK where there is an apparently legitimate
purpose for the journey. In other words, the amendment tabled by the
hon. Member for Ashford probes the circumstances under which UK Border
Agency officials could stop a legitimate journey by a UK citizen, and
the nature of the information that could be used to apprehend or
inspect a
person. The
provision is an essential tool in support of law enforcement and is key
to the agency being able to secure the optimal deployment of its
resources across all of its functions. However, the hon. Gentleman may
be reassured to know that the provision is subject to any restriction
or prohibition on the disclosure of information imposed in part 1 or in
any other enactment or agreement to which the UK is party. Those
restrictions and prohibitions will be particularly important for
personal customs
information. Tom
Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD): I would like a
little more clarification on the circumstances in which action could be
taken. One can clearly understand the case of a terrorist to which the
Minister referred, but what level of offence is covered by the
provision? Is non-payment of a parking fine something that might lead
to action? Will he clarify the level at which the provision will be
enforced?
Mr.
Woolas: The hon. Gentleman raises a good point, which was
also made in the other place. The information to which I refer is
customs information, but he refers to a wider point, which is very
valid but is outside the clause’s scope, relating to information
from watch lists activity. Parking or speeding offences are certainly
not covered, otherwise I imagine that the immigration Minister would be
in serious trouble at this point in time—although perhaps not at
another point in time. More seriously,
the watch lists relate to the criminal watch lists from our security
forces, but they do not relate to the aspect of information under
discussion. The hon. Gentleman’s point is valid, but it is not
directly
relevant. Damian
Green (Ashford) (Con): Welcome to the Chair, Miss Begg. I
would like to pick up on the point made by the hon. Member for
Carshalton and Wallington. It is ironic that he used the example of
parking fines. Perhaps he, like me, has spent part of the past couple
of hours looking at the ID card statutory instruments that we will
debate next week in which the Department for Transport is specifically
mentioned as one of the Departments that, if the provisions are passed,
will be able to use information from ID cards for its own purposes. The
Minister is right that the hon. Gentleman’s point may not be
directly relevant to amendment 9, but the hon. Member for Carshalton
and Wallington is spot on that the Government plan to collect private
information about people and then use it to perhaps enforce things such
as parking fines. I suspect that the Minister and I will conduct that
debate next
week. The
Minister has sought to reassure me about clause 14. I should point out,
again in relation to the intervention by the hon. Member for Carshalton
and Wallington, that amendment 9 specifically
mentions “officers
designated under this Part to use any personal data of UK
citizens”, so
the clause does not cover customs information only. Just before lunch,
the Minister said that he felt my argument had a weakness because it
suggested that the police could not be engaged by immigration officers.
If we had not been interrupted, I would have replied that he was making
an ideal argument for a unified border police force. In the case he
specifically advanced of an anti-terrorist operation the police would
be involved and therefore the powers would be police powers. At that
point, his argument falls, inasmuch as it has validity; it is precisely
an argument for a border police and for those police powers and all the
police training to be available to a wider set of officers than is
currently the
case. As
we have said several times over the course of day, this is a debate for
another time later in Committee. I am not entirely convinced and
reassured by the Minister’s arguments. The powers given for
using and disclosing information in this clause are potentially
dangerous. Not unfairly, he pointed to other clauses where
there is a prohibition on disclosure of personal customs
information—for example, the next clause that we will discuss.
Nevertheless, many of those are hedged around with restrictions, for
instance in clause 17, that the information cannot be
disclosed
“without the
consent of a relevant official (which may be general or
specific)”.
The intent that there
can be a general permission for the disclosure and use of private
information infuses a lot of the Bill. That is dangerous. We will
return to similar issues, especially consent, when we discuss the next
group of amendments. Although I will not withdraw the arguments that
lie behind it, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn. Clause
14 ordered to stand part of the
Bill.
Clauses
15 to 19 ordered to stand part of the
Bill.
Clause 20Supply
of Revenue and Customs
information
The
Chairman: With this we may discuss the following:
amendment 11, in
clause 20, page 14, line 25, leave
out ‘consent (which may be general or
specific)’ and
insert ‘specific consent’.
Amendment 12,
in
clause 20, page 14, line 29, after
‘relates’, insert
‘exclusively’.
Damian
Green: This is a new set of amendments in that they were
not debated in another place. This is very much a continuation of our
previous debate in the sense that we are seeking to achieve much
tighter controls over the use and disclosure of customs information.
This is one of the most serious weaknesses in this part of the Bill. We
have all agreed that we are in favour of the principles behind it, but
the problems with the clause illustrate both the practical and
principled difficulties of moving in such a direction. There are a
number of key questions that the Bill, as it stands, fails to address
satisfactorily for us to avoid any abuse of the important personal data
that will be shared between
people. The
Minister knows the sorts of questions that are likely to be asked. Who
will hold the data, for a start? Will they be held entirely inside UKBA
or HMRC, or will they be held by private contractors if the data
management is given to them? Will important personal data be held
outside this country, as we have seen in some cases? There is no reason
in principle why that should be any more or less secure than data held
in the country, but is he aware from previous problems that when data
that have been stored outside this country go missing, people feel even
less secure than they do when they discover that they have been lost
here?
Another
important set of issues relates to proportionality. Are the data
collected worth collecting in terms of the rewards that will come from
the successful use of them? There can always be arguments along the
lines of, “Well, if it helps to stop one serious criminal and
solve one case, then it is worth while,” but we need to have a
debate at a slightly higher level than that, and suggest that we
introduce some kind of test of proportionality about the widespread
collection and retention of important personal
data. The
other issue that I hope the Minister will address is cross-referencing.
In many ways, that is at the heart of the group of amendments and of
the wider issue, about which my party and I feel very strongly. Across
Government—more specifically, across the Home Office—many
databases are being set up, each of which contains people’s most
private and personal information. They are gradually being linked with
each other. If the Minister has his way, the heart of the scheme will
eventually be the national identity register. But even without that,
there will be nothing left that cannot be collected by the Government
and switched from database to database, searched by other parts of the
Home Office and Government. He will recognise the genuine and
increasing public alarm at that. Although each individual database
may be justifiable in some sense, it is the aggregation of all the
information that rightly causes people to be increasingly
concerned. We
want our amendments, particularly amendment 11, to be
accepted so that they challenge that whole process and start reversing
it. For example, amendment 11 would remove the phrase
“consent (which
may be general or
specific)” and
insert “specific consent”, which would exert much more
control over what can happen to the data. Amendment 12 talks
about “exclusively” relating to the information. Again,
that would narrow the field where activity may happen. We also suggest
leaving out subsection (2)(b), so removing the Secretary of
State from the clause. We are seeking to ensure that any onward
disclosure of personal information is approved by the individuals
concerned.
I dare say
that the Minister will argue that that kind of principle cannot be
applied to criminals, as we need to be able to chase them. My
response—which goes to the heart not only of this argument, but
a lot of other arguments—is that the problem is that everyone in
the country is now a suspect. Every individual is now being treated as
though they are a potential criminal, and the gains for fighting crime
that we might get from that approach are outweighed in the long run by
the losses of turning every citizen in the country into a potential
suspect, and treating them as such through the collection,
dissemination and cross-referencing of information by the
Government.
4.15
pm All
of that would be true, and I would argue it just as strongly, even if I
believed that the databases were 100 per cent. accurate and
secure. However, the arguments that I advance are much stronger given
the situation we are in, as we know that any large database inevitably
contains a huge number of errors. Furthermore, as has been dramatically
illustrated many times to the general public, none of those databases
is particularly secure.
The
Government, and some private operators, have an appalling track record
when it comes to storing and securing personal data. Every breach of
data security not only endangers the privacy of the individuals
concerned, but inevitably costs the taxpayer thousands of pounds in
investigations, internal reviews and potential litigation. If someone
were to look at the matter dispassionately, they would ask whether the
British state is the sort of body that should be allowed to collect and
disseminate large amounts of private information. If the state were a
private company that had to obtain a licence to do that sort of thing,
it would have lost its licence by now as it is simply not fit to do
it.
Last
November, the Prime Minister said, in what I thought was a moment of
blinding
candour: “We
can’t promise that every single item of information will always
be
safe.” He
is right—practicality tells us that—but he does not go on
to think about whether we should be collecting all that information and
whether, through this part of the Bill, we should be allowing ourselves
to collect information and supply it around the Government.
This is not a
general complaint, it is specific to HMRC and some of the people who
now work in UKBA and whose powers we are extending. November
before last, the Chancellor of the Exchequer had to reveal that HMRC had
lost two discs containing the names, addresses, bank accounts and
national insurance numbers of 25 million people. That was probably the
most dramatic and damaging of all the data losses. Beyond that, the
personal details of thousands of criminals have been lost—the
names, addresses, details of conviction and even the jail release dates
of 130,000 criminals were lost when a computer memory stick went
missing. It was being used by an employee of PA Consulting, the firm at
the heart of the identity card plans.
The
Department for Transport has already featured in our debate, and the
Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency lost the details of 3 million
learner drivers after a computer hard disk went missing. Perhaps worst
of all, last year we discovered that the Crown Prosecution Service had
lost a disk containing more than 2,000 DNA profiles received
from crime scenes in the Netherlands for over a year.
Even when
fighting crime, and introducing the sort of measures that the Minister
will argue that the legislation is about, we cannot have much
confidence in the Government’s ability to use efficiently the
vast amount of private information that is being obtained to fight
crime. There are many other examples with which I will not weary the
Committee. I
hope that the Minister recognises the principle behind our argument. We
should not simply be allowing ever-increasing amounts of data to be
collected and ever-wider numbers of individuals or institutions within
Government to pass that information between each other, without proper
checks and without, at the very least, specific knowledge of why they
are doing it, who is allowed to do it and who is allowed to give
consent for it to be done. A couple of our amendments have concentrated
specifically on that last point. General permissions should not be
given such that whole classes of people can start exchanging the
private information of British citizens. If there is a specific reason
to do it, that is arguable, but specific, not general, consent has to
be
necessary. As
I observed in one of our debates this morning, it is easy for people to
make general points about how Parliament should act in better ways to
uphold the privacy of individuals in this country. It means, in
practical terms, that we must get to the heart of the legislation to
see whether another piece of the protective undergrowth is being
cleared by small, apparently innocuous, parts of the Bill, which do not
appear to be very much to do with personal privacy, and stop that
happening. We are seeking to do that with our three amendments. I hope
that Members on both sides of the Committee who actually care about
privacy and the ability of people to keep information about them
private will recognise the strength of the arguments behind the
amendments.
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