Data Protection (Hansard, 30 October 1992)

§ Mr. Cohen
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether the proposals from the European Commission with respect to a data protection directive are of the kind that will be subject to subsidiarity arrangements; and whether he will make a statement.

§ Mr. Peter Lloyd
The principle of subsidiarity is defined in article 3b of the treaty on European union, when that treaty comes into force it will apply to all proposals for Community legislation.
The main objective of the data protection directive is to ensure free flow of personal data across the internal frontiers of the Community. The Government accept that a prerequisite for this free flow is harmonisation of minimum essential data protection requirements, and consider that the 1981 Council of Europe convention on data processing provides such requirements.
We considered that the procedural requirements in the Commission's original proposals were matters best left to national authorities to resolve. We are now considering how far the Commission's amended proposals meet this objection.

§ Mr. Cohen
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what steps he has taken to satisfy himself that the Data Protection Registrar has sufficient funds to carry out his functions; and what response he intends to make to the comments made by the registrar in his annual report on the financing of his office.

§ Mr. Peter Lloyd
The Government determine the resources which should be made available to the registrar in the light of the statutory responsibilities laid upon him, the registrar's own assessment of what he needs to discharge those duties and overall public expenditure constraints.

§ Mr. Cohen
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he will summarise his main objections to the revised proposals from the Commission with respect to a data protection directive; and whether he will make a statement.

§ Mr. Peter Lloyd
The Commission's revised proposals have only just been released. The Government will now be considering them in consultation with all the interest groups likely to be affected. The Government's policy, in discussions with their Community partners, will continue to be to ensure that it strikes a proper balance between the interests of data users, data subjects and others.