§ Mr. CohenI beg to move amendment No. 4, in page 22, line 30, at end insert—
'(2) The Secretary of State may by order, where personal data are held on a public register, lay down conditions which shall be complied with by any person who has access to the register.(3) An order under this section may make specific provisions with respect to a particular public register.'.
§ Mr. Deputy SpeakerWith this, it will be convenient to discuss amendment No. 5, in clause 67, page 41, line 3, at end insert 'section 34'.
§ Mr. CohenThe purpose of the amendments is to enable the Secretary of State to impose statutory conditions to protect lists of shareholders, the electoral roll and other public registers. Publicly available registers are unprotected. They are wide open to abuse, and, in most cases, there is no control over who has access to them or how they are used. On 22 April 1997, The Times noted that the Mayfair rapist selected his rich victims from the electoral roll.
I note from my recent parliamentary questions to all Government Departments that several Ministries are not sure for what public records they are responsible. The Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions said that information on what public records it was responsible for was not held centrally. That is astonishing. Several public registers are not actually publicly available. The Home Office keeps a register of forensic pathologists that is available to the public, which is useful information for criminals to access.
Public registers get scant protection under the Bill. The most familiar example of a public register is the electoral roll, copies of which can be obtained by any person for any purpose. Electoral registration officers have no discretion on whether to provide information, even to the most disreputable of characters. The position on data protection and the electoral roll is intolerable.
§ Mr. AllanIs the hon. Gentleman aware of the recent confusion about whether electoral registration officers can give access to the register in computerised as opposed to paper form? It is a problem for political parties if they cannot obtain access to the computerised form. We are interested to know how that will be dealt with in the Bill. Both the paper and the computerised form will be covered by data protection principles.
§ Mr. CohenThe hon. Gentleman makes a good point. The way things are going, I suspect that the computerised form and other forms will be available to whoever wants them.
Data subjects are obliged by law to provide names and addresses; failure to do so could result in a hefty £400 fine. Any person can obtain a copy of those details 595 without the data subject being informed. Under clause 34, the electoral returning officer, as data controller, has no obligation to inform data subjects about who has accessed. the register. A clear condition could be imposed that those who access the register should be required to identify themselves, and that list could be publicly available.
I am in favour of certain limits on public registers. For example, the electoral roll should be used only for electoral purposes, unless the elector consents to its use for other purposes. However, I recognise that many organisations have developed goods and services businesses on the basis of this publicly available information. My amendment would not stop any misuse directly: it would merely provide a mechanism to permit the Secretary of State to protect the public should the need arise, and to introduce new rules gradually, so that, if appropriate, such organisations could adjust their practice and be weaned off public sources of information over a period.
Paragraph 11(c) of schedule 8 delays the implementation of the eighth principle on the transfer of personal data abroad for personal data currently processed from the electoral register. As far as I can see, that provision negates any protection afforded by paragraph 14 of part II of schedule 1. If the eighth principle does not apply, it is difficult to see how the Secretary of State can define restrictions by order.
MPs usually live and vote in their constituency. Under the provision in schedule 8, there is nothing to prevent Saddam Hussein or any terrorist or malicious person from being able to purchase copies of the register, in computerised form, to find out where MPs or other well-known individuals live. Admittedly, it is a crude method. Because of his common surname, my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith) might evade detection. However, one wonders how many people appear on the electoral roll with the surname of my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Stinchcombe) or of the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Mr.Öpik). Someone might even look up the name Beckham for malicious purposes. Will the Minister explain why data protection legislation seems to expose MPs and others in the public eye to that risk?
After the passage of the Bill, the Minister should take a co-ordinated look at how public registers are kept, who has access to them and what uses are permissible.
§ Mr. HoonI thank my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Mr. Cohen) for allowing us to have this short debate, which will be of assistance. He is concerned about clause 34, which performs an important function. It ensures that certain key provisions of the data protection regime do not conflict with the rules relating to information that is required by statute to be made public.
As my hon Friend's amendments recognise, the provision is essentially about public registers. He gave a number of examples: the registers of births, marriages and deaths, registers held by Companies House, the electoral register, and so on. The essential feature of all those registers, which is recognised in clause 34, is that they are all governed by their own discrete legislation.
Those statutes will determine the detailed conditions that apply to the information contained in the registers. They will cover matters such as the nature of the 596 information contained in the registers, the conditions governing access to the registers, the accuracy of the information, and so on.
The purpose of clause 34 is to ensure that the detailed rules of the specific statutes, rather than the general data protection rules governing the registers, determine those matters. I hope that my hon. Friend will accept that that is sensible. The information contained in the registers is collected for a specific and particular purpose. It is much more appropriate for the specific statute to determine the relevant conditions that apply than for the general data protection legislation to do so. That is not to say that the data protection rules do not apply at all. To the extent that the data protection principles, and other provisions of data protection law, are not dealt with expressly in the specific statutes, they will apply. That is the position under the 1984 Act, and it will be maintained in the Bill.
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I remind my hon. Friend that clause 34 does not provide an exemption for the subsequent use of data collected from the registers. To the extent that any of those who obtain personal data from public registers process those data in a way that would be caught by the Bill, they would have to comply in full with the requirements set out in the Bill.
My hon. Friend wants to go a little beyond that. He wants to provide the Secretary of State with the power to specify conditions governing access to specific public registers. I hope that I have made it clear why the Government do not believe that that is the right approach. Moreover, I invite my hon. Friend—who I know is extremely knowledgeable on this matter—to consider how his proposed new arrangements would be enforced. Not all those seeking access to the registers would become data controllers, so the conditions could not be enforced through the various mechanisms set out in the Bill. Again, that argues for the conditions applying to particular registers to be set by the parent enactments—if I may use that phrase—which will be able to make suitable arrangements for enforcement.
I hope that my hon. Friend will accept that that is the right way forward, and that it is better for these issues to be dealt with in the specific context of the Acts that deal with registers rather than in the context of wider data protection legislation. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing the matter to the attention of the House, but I invite him, in the light of what I have said, to withdraw the amendment.
§ Mr. CohenMy hon. Friend is right in saying that I want to go further and impose more general data protection controls on public registers. However, I acknowledge that he has made some good points, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
§ Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.