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. 38. I reflect that this House is not without its influence, as the responses of the noble Lord opposite make clear. This must be a matter of satisfaction. The purpose of the amendment is to avoid data users having to grant subject access to two sets of data which will be virtually identical. As a security precaution—when I say "security precaution" I do not mean things pertaining to secrecy and the protection of money, but against defects in the machine—almost all data users take copies of their data so that, if there is some kind of accident to the data or a failure in the machine that results in the corruption or, indeed, the loss of the data, all will not be irretrievably lost.

1182 They will have a copy of the data from which they will be able to reconstitute that which they have lost or which has become unuseable. The copy is referred to as a back-up tape or disc. The back-up data may be very slightly out of date since they will be a copy of the data as they stood at a fixed point in time. How much out of date they are likely to be will depend upon the nature of the operation for which they are used. Some data may be updated and copies taken daily while other data may be updated and used less frequently, perhaps weekly or even monthly.

The important point, however, is that the back-up data will never be used without first having been brought up to date by means of a separate log which users maintain and which records the transactions which have taken place since the copy was taken. There is little point, therefore, in giving the subject access to both the data in current use and the back-up data, particularly since the latter may well be kept in a form which does not lend itself to easy access.

This amendment therefore exempts for the subject access provisions data which are kept only for the purpose of replacing other data in the event of the latter being lost, destroyed or impaired. It removes what would otherwise have been an unnecessary and troublesome burden. I beg to move.