Leaving the EU: Data Protection — House of Commons, 2017-10-12
Topic: Law and Crime
Robert James MacGillivray Neill (Conservative, Centre-right): The clear evidence given to us was that the only viable contingency plan would be a significant transitional period. It would not be possible to replicate those systems in the event of a supposed clean-break arrangement, and it would be necessary to have transitional measures. The evidence did suggest that those could vary from sector to sector, in terms of the length of time required and the amount of detailed work to be done, but it would be a serious setback for us to leave the European Union and the current data-sharing arrangements without something being put in place to bridge us over the leaving period for implementation or a clear end state for our ongoing relationship in the areas of data sharing and criminal justice co-operation. It is in everybody’s interests that we achieve that and it is an important issue to bear in mind We concluded that data sharing is not an area in which we can take a risk. Indeed, we concluded that these matters are so important that one would ideally wish to see them decoupled from the rest of the Brexit negotiations. Divorce bills or otherwise, public safety and security work for our interests and for every one of the citizens of the EU27, too. The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point and I agree with him I have talked about two key systems and I want to highlight their interrelated and technical nature because it is important to put that on the record. As well as those two systems, we also have access to Prüm, a regime for exchanging biometric information and vehicle registration data. It reduces the time taken to find matches from tens of days to 15 minutes when fully in place. We have recently gone into Prüm, and the chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, Francis FitzGibbon QC made the point to us that—and I shall quote his stark words in full to highlight their significance— "if someone lets off a bomb in Berlin and makes his way to London, the police will be able to get hold of the fingerprints of the chap they arrest for double parking, or whatever it is, instantaneously." That gives us the swift ability to track down serious threats to our safety across the continent. We have not yet implemented Prüm, but we have signed up to do so and I hope that we will make it clear that we will implement it while we remain in the EU and we will seek to continue in it once we leave Our concern was that both Norway and Iceland—which are not members of the EU, although they are Council of Europe countries and have association arrangements with Interpol and others—have waited some years to have access to Prüm. We have started from a closer position and it would be a tragedy if we went back to the same place in the queue as them, giving away something that we are already moving into. I hope that the Minister will reassure us that the Government will attend closely to those specific points during the negotiations Our conclusion was that all these matters, extradition arrangements, the EAW, the data sharing that underpins prisoner exchange arrangements, together with our arrangements on judicial co-operation—on which British judges work closely with their counterparts—and of course our membership of Europol are all part of a system that comes together to protect us in criminal justice and security matters. They were described by our witness Professor Wilson as part of a system that "you cannot disaggregate because, in my view, if you take out elements of the system, you have a less effective system for protecting British citizens on the streets." That was also the clear evidence from the Northumbria Centre for Evidence and Criminal Justice Studies. The evidence was overwhelming. Sometimes, as lawyers, we get cases in which the evidence all points one way, and that was very much our conclusion from the evidence to the Committee’s inquiry. These are all important matters. Of course, they are but one part of the data protection and sharing regime, but they are critical We received the clear message from practitioners that whatever we do and however we get to these arrangements —I hope that the Bill, when it is brought to the House, will help us to achieve this—the end state has to include a means of making sure that our data sharing and data protection regime are sufficiently close to those of the EU27. We shall, therefore, have to have a means of tracking changes and replicating them when it is likely to be to our mutual advantage to do so. Otherwise, with the very best will in the world, a law enforcement agency or police officer in the EU27 might not be able to share potentially critical information with his or her UK counterparts because he or she might find themselves in breach of the data regulations in his or her own EU27 country. That cannot be in anyone’s interest. I hope that the Minister will reassure us that creating such a system will be the centrepiece of our objectives on data sharing in relation to criminal justice and co-operation matters.