COMMONS AMENDMENT (Hansard, 29 June 1984)

§ Lord Elton

My Lords, I beg to move that this House doth agree with the Commons in their Amendment No. 43, to Clause 34. It heralds an old friend, a friend whose appearance would, I think, have been particularly welcomed by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury. Clause 34 of this Bill imposes on the registrar a duty to promote the observance of the data protection principles, and Clauses 10 to 12 provide him with his armoury—the weapons which he needs to ensure that the principles are complied with.

There will be very many data users—so many that the registrar could not realistically be expected to supervise them all without assistance from data subjects. That assistance will take the form of complaints from subjects about the activities of data users. We have always seen complaints as providing the registrar with the basic information which he will need to fulfill his duties, and it was partly because this was implicit in the scheme established by the Bill that we felt it unnecessary formally to place him under a specific duty to investigate complaints. We also wanted to avoid introducing an undesirable degree of rigidity into the system.

The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, clearly was not alone in believing that the investigation of complaints was such a crucial and integral part of the registrar's functions that it ought to be recognised statutorily. The same point was pressed with some force in another place, and the Government decided therefore that it would, after all, be right to make explicit mention in the Bill of the registrar's function in respect of complaint. This amendment therefore makes it clear that the registrar has a duty to consider complaints which appear to him to raise matters of substance, provided the complaint has been made to him without undue delay by a person affected directly.

The formulation used in the amendment should avoid the danger of the registrar getting bogged down with trivial or ill-founded complaints, while making it clear that he retains a discretion to investigate complaints even where they are not covered by his general duty—for example, where a complaint is made by someone not affected directly but which reveals a matter of some importance. I beg to move.