GENERAL DUTIES OF REGISTRAR (Hansard, 5 June 1984)

§ Mr. Waddington
I beg to move amendment No. 32, in page 27, line 34, at end insert— '(2) The Registrar may consider any complaint that any of the data protection principles or any provision of this Act has been or is being contravened and shall do so if the complaint appears to him to raise a matter of substance and to have been made without undue delay by a person directly affected; and where the Registrar considers any such complaint he shall notify the complainant of the result of his consideration and of any action which he proposes to take.'.
This amendment is a consequence of an undertaking which was given in Committee to consider sympathetically the introduction of a statutory provision on complaints. At previous stages of the Bill we had reservations about placing the registrar under a duty in this 236 respect. We feared that he might find himself with no choice but to spend valuable time and resources pursuing complaints of little substance, when he would be serving both data subjects and data users much better by concentrating on other matters
Of course we have always seen it as essential that the registrar should spend a good deal of his time investigating complaints. The whole Bill is structured to enable him to do that because complaints will be his major source of information about breaches of the data protection principles. We worried about obliging him to pursue complaints, feeling that we might be forcing him to tie up his resources in what might sometimes prove to be unproductive work, but the Committee clearly felt that there should be some reference in the Bill to the registrar's function of considering complaints. I think that we have reached a reasonable formulation, which clearly points to the importance of him looking into complaints made by individual data subjects.

§ Mr. Denis Howell
I am grateful to the Minister. I want to express our appreciation. This is a matter of some importance, which we debated in Committee. It seemed to us important that the registrar should act when he is satisfied that a complaint is a matter of substance. We regard this as a considerable improvement in the Bill. On behalf of the Opposition I express appreciation that the Minister has met us on this matter.

§ Mr. Maclennan
I too am extremely grateful to the Minister for bringing forward this amendment. It is most satisfactory that at this stage, after the Bill has been debated, I think, four times, these amendments are coming forward from the Government, fluttering down like leaves in the autumn. We are only too delighted to have played some part in concentrating the Government's mind and bringing about this satisfactory change of heart.