Data Protection Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2017-11-06
Topic: Civil Rights
Robert Stevenson (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate. It has lasted one hour and 25 minutes and there is a little more to go. The hour is late and I do not think one wants to rush to judgment on the many important things that have been said today. As I am sure many other noble Lords do when faced with such an intense and important debate, I want to reflect a little on it, read what it looks like in Hansard the next day and then form a view on it. However, I shall share one or two things with the Committee that come to my mind and I think we should take away from this Of course this is about the balance between privacy and freedom of expression. It was interesting that the noble Lord, Lord Black, was at pains to point out in his intervention that he did not think there would be any country in which the sort of systems that are discussed in some of the amendments here took place. I ask him: is there a country that he would be happy to live in that did not have a statutory protection of privacy and freedom of expression, however well balanced and proportionate that would have to be? The answer would be very interesting My memories from this will be of the long campaign that the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, has fought to try to get this troubled area of our law into better shape. The perhaps reluctant speech by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, in opening up the way for the noble Lord to debate issues relating to earlier approaches to this area, struck home for me. I thought it was a powerful intervention and one we should think hard about My ultimate feeling about this is that we may be talking about the very narrow issue of data processing in relation to journalism, but of course it engages all the issues that arise from any decision that we make about the balance between privacy and freedom of expression. As I tried to demonstrate in the discussions on day one of Committee, if there were better protections between a right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression than there currently are in the Bill, maybe this would be an easier process, but they are not there yet. We need some movement here. The genuine offer that I made to the noble and learned Lord to try to find common ground on this and move forward, which was picked up by others, seems to have been rejected. That is sad, and we will not get very far if that is the attitude we are going to encounter At the end of the day, we may not have a choice on this. If Parliament is unable to act, it may well be that the privacy law we end up with will be judge-led, arising from cases that happen to come in, out of which a body of law will be built up that does not suit the noble and learned Lord and his friends. He should think very carefully about where we are at the moment, where the political power lies, where the interests of those engaging with this are coming from and how long it would be before we got to a point where we could take this forward I think we will come back to this on Report more than once. There are issues here that will survive the helpful comments made by the noble and learned Lord, who covered the detail of the amendments very fully. I will read what he said very carefully. I do not think we have got to the bottom of how you get the balance in law for a long time so that it works. It is not to do with definitions of which code or otherwise we are talking about; we are talking about real principles here that need to be addressed.