— Took the Oath or Affirmed.

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.

My Lords, since May 1979. 48 specific by-passes and diversions have been completed on trunk roads in Great Britain—34 in England, 9 in Scotland and 5 in Wales. A further 35 are either under construction now or will be by the end of this year—19 in England, 10 in Scotland and 6 in Wales. By-passes on other roads are the responsibility of local highway authorities.

My Lords, while thanking my noble friend for that very encouraging Answer, may I ask him whether there is any information about a particular by-pass in the West Midlands, namely the Bewdley by-pass? May I also ask him whether there are further bv-passes in the road programme intended beyond 1985?

My Lords, in response to my noble friend's last supplementary question, there are 160 by-passes and diversions in the current road programme, the planning for which takes us up to the mid-1990s. Regarding the particular by-pass which was mentioned by my noble friend, he will appreciate that I do not have information on every one, but thinking that he might ask about this one, I can say that it is a local authority scheme—a matter for the Hereford and Worcester County Council—and we still have to receive that county council's transport policies and programme document for 1984–85. Therefore I am not able to tell him yet exactly what that county's plans are.

My Lords, as the criterion for by-passes has been towns of at least 10,000 population, can the Minister say how many will not have been by-passed by the end of the 1980s? Can he also say whether any of the projected plans are likely to be affected by the proposed public expenditure cuts?

My Lords, about 161 or over 65 per cent, of historic towns situated on trunk roads will already have been by-passed. When the current construction programme is completed, all but a handful will have been relieved of most of their through traffic. As to the second question of the noble Lord, Lord Underhill, at this present time there is no plan to cut the road programme.

My Lords, may I ask my noble friend whether the concept of the continuance of the M23 has now been abandoned, and if not, when would it be restarted?

My Lords, the M23 is not a by-pass and I very much regret that I am not able to give my noble friend that information; but I will certainly investigate and acquaint him with the answer.

My Lords, may I ask the Minister whether the ancient City of Ripon is to have a by-pass? It has one of the oldest cathedrals in the country, the foundations of which are being shaken by the heavy traffic which comes thundering round Ripon, totally blocking it up and spoiling this lovely old city.

My Lords, there are so many instances that I think the noble Baroness will excuse me if I say that I am not able to remember; nor, in a great long list of some 160, can I turn my eye to it at the moment. However, I will certainly see that she is given information about that.

My Lords, can the Minister say whether he knows whether the Secretary of State for Scotland has in mind the acceleration of the completion of the Edinburgh by-pass so that it can be finished before the Commonwealth Games in 1988?

My Lords, I very much regret to have to come to this Dispatch Box for the third time and say that I do not have the required information because it is just one of a great number; but I will certainly write to my noble friend.

My Lords, I notice that May 1979 is mentioned in the Question. I assume the noble Lord will agree that many of these by-passes were initiated by the previous Government?

My Lords, as the House will be well aware—and the noble Lord, Lord Jacques, perhaps even more so—road construction programmes are of a long duration and they embrace a number of administrations.

My Lords, is it not time that we by-passed all these by-passes with a few brand-new cargo waterways? Also, although this may be a different question, would the noble Lord not agree that it ought not to be a different question?

My Lords, indeed I do agree with the noble Viscount, Lord St. Davids, that it is a different question. Perhaps I may refer him to an Unstarred Question with regard to the waterways which is to be discussed on Monday. We may perhaps find that we can proceed further down those waterways that evening.

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.

My Lords, the courts must already impose a minimum of one year's disqualification on all those convicted of causing death by reckless driving or of driving while under the influence of drink or drugs, and the maximum penalty for causing death by reckless driving is five years' imprisonment. Her Majesty's Government are satisfied that these penalties are adequate, and we do not propose further to restrict the discretion of the courts to impose the appropriate sentence in each case.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Elton, for his reply, somewhat disappointing though it is. Will he agree that there is considerable public disquiet over a recent and perhaps not untypical case concerning a motorist, convicted of killing a motor cyclist as a result of dangerous driving and having twice the legal limit of alcohol in his bloodstream at the time, who not only had his prison sentence suspended for somewhat inconsistent reasons but was banned from driving for a mere 12 months —which, of course, is no longer a ban than that which is applicable to very much less serious offences? Would the Minister agree that such short periods of disqualification for killing people unlawfully not only have little deterrent value but are perhaps something of an insult to the families of the victims?

My Lords, even if I had all the details of the case before me the noble Lord would not expect me to undertake the task of the court and come to a judgment. It is for the courts to decide when they have the material before them.

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the first Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.

My Lords, I have nothing to add to the reply I gave to the noble Lord yesterday.

My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that, even before the launching yesterday of the Campaign for Fair Votes, the opinion polls showed a large majority in favour of proportional representation and an even larger majority in favour of a referendum? Is he aware that, if the majority of MPs rejected both of these demands and insisted on deciding how they themselves were elected, and chose the electoral system most convenient to themselves and their parties, this would be an outrage and a kind of political curruption?

My Lords, the elected representatives of the people are doing what they were elected to do. They are choosing how to run this country and the electoral system. Seventy per cent, of them voted against the parties which want proportional representation, and I see nothing unjust in that.

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that to adhere to what is suggested in this Question would mean the Government abdicating their responsibilities? They won the election on the very clear understanding that they would preserve the tried and trusted system which has served this country successfully over very many years. A referendum gives an alibi to a Government and no Government—

Speech!

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that to give a Government an alibi by referring to a referendum weakens the power which a Government can have? They have a responsibility for success or failure which should be clearly seen.

My Lords, first, as to a referendum, a referendum works only if you can ask one straight, simple question to which the answer is yes or no. That cannot be the case with proportional representation, because there are so many different sorts. The Government believe that they are standing in the path of a hallowed national tradition, which is respected by all except those who feel that they could gain political advantage by changing it.

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the real outrage requiring electoral reform relates to those people who, because they are away on holiday, are not able or cannot afford to change their holiday, cannot vote in a general election? Can my noble friend give an assurance that all citizens will have a democratic right to vote at the next general election?

My Lords, if my noble friend likes to ask me such a question, I shall answer it, but it is a different one from the one that I am answering now.

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the second Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.

My Lords, I believe that the result of the recent general election represented a decisive vote of confidence in the policies being pursued by the Government. As we have made clear, we shall continue to pursue these policies, which we believe offer the best hope of ensuring continued security and economic recovery for this country.

My Lords, is the noble Viscount aware that he won widespread respect in all parties for introducing proportional representation in Northern Ireland? Does he recall that the system which he chose, the single transferable vote—perhaps, for brevity, we might call it the Whitelaw system—meant that if a party had fewer votes it had fewer seats? Why has the noble Viscount now changed his mind, and why is he supporting a system which, as he saw at the election, enables a party to get three-quarters of a million fewer votes and yet many more seats?

My Lords, I think it would be fair for me to reply to the noble Lord that things in Northern Ireland are not exactly the same as in other parts of the United Kingdom. In that respect it was for a local Assembly and not for a national Parliament, which I regard as being quite different.

My Lords, may I ask the noble Viscount how he can possibly use the word "decisive" and say that the party in power had the "decisive" support of the electorate in this country when only 31 per cent, of the electorate voted for that party?

My Lords, having myself fought I think 11 general elections in my time, I have come to regard the number of people returned to the House of Commons as a decisive answer in a general election. On that basis, I should have thought that the result was very decisive.

My Lords, can the noble Viscount explain why it is that so many members of the Tory party are in favour of proportional representation?

My Lords, I do not know that there are. If there are, it is their affair and not mine; and I am not in favour.

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that there were a number of members of the Tory Party who were at one time misguidedly in favour of proportional representation, including myself, but who had good reason to change their minds when they saw that there was no longer a danger to this country from the election of a Marxist or near-Marxist party, which had the support of only about 29 per cent, of the people?

My Lords, I recognise the point made by my noble friend. I still maintain that a system of proportional representation would not be in the best interests of this country. That is what I believe, and I am sticking to my belief.

My Lords, could the Minister tell us the reason for the completely disastrous decline in Tory support in Scotland, where they lost two Ministers and gained about one-third of the seats? What effective change will this mean in the policy of the Government towards Scotland?

My Lords, I appreciate the position in Scotland, but I think that the noble Lord and others wish Scotland to be part of the United Kingdom and, therefore, it is the result for the whole of the United Kingdom that really matters.

My Lords, does the noble Viscount's reply to his noble friend Lord Renton indicate that he approves of a position where the votes of the people should not represent the wishes of the people but should represent the wishes of another person? In other words, he said that he changed his mind when he found that there was no longer any danger. Does the noble Viscount believe that the votes of the people should not represent their wishes?

My Lords, I do not think that that would be a construction to be placed on my remarks. My noble friend was giving his reasons for having changed his mind. I gave my reasons for not having changed my mind.

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the Question he is asked is: what changes of policy is he likely to recommend? Is he aware that the policy as announced has brought the credibility and the creditability of this country higher in the eyes of the world than they have been for a quarter of a century?

My Lords, I am always grateful for such comments from my noble friend.

My Lords, with regard to that supplementary question by the noble Lord, Lord Harmar-Nicholls, would the noble Viscount agree that cuts in public expenditure of the magnitude which have been reported in the press and which the Cabinet are said to have discussed this morning will impose serious changes of policy which will affect the National Health Service, the education service and other aspects of the welfare state in this country?

My Lords, I am surprised that the noble Lord, with his great experience of politics, should believe everything he reads in the press. I can assure him that the deductions he has reached are not accurate.

My Lords, it may be for the convenience of your Lordships if I announce that it is hoped that the House will resume after the Summer Recess on Monday, 24th October. As I announced last week, the House will rise for the Summer Recess on Wednesday, 27th July.

Your Lordships may also wish to know that dinner will be available this evening at the usual time. The House will adjourn at approximately 7 p.m. for a short period, and during this adjournment the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973 (Section 111) Amendment Order 1983 will be taken.

rose to move, That the First Report of the Select Committee be agreed to.

My Lords, I have one small reservation about this. Can the new amendment be treated with a certain amount of latitude? It is in my recollection that occasionally a paving amendment may lead even to a series of schedules. It would be rather ridiculous if whole schedules were to be printed immediately after the first amendment.

My Lords, various difficulties were put to the Committee of that very kind. That is the reason why we suggest that it should be only for an experimental period to see how it works. In those kinds of circumstances, if the schedules are not important to the series of amendments being proposed I hope that the noble Lord in question who is moving the group of amendments will not ask for them to be printed.

My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Gowrie, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time.

My Lords, in view of the convention which applies to this House, we on this side of the House cannot of course divide against the Bill. May I, however, inform Her Majesty's Government that in view of the fact that Argentina continues to re-arm and that there is no guarantee that the £100 million which is being advanced to Argentina will not be used for armaments purposes, we shall return to this question again and monitor progress very, very carefully indeed.

My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.

moved Amendment No. 1:

I put my name to this amendment for slightly different reasons from those of the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock. I did so because I believe that Section 137 gives very important powers to local authorities—particularly in the fight against unemployment. The powers allow an authority to help local businesses to start up or expand, and they are handled by chief executives who have their ears to the ground and who know about businesses and about the need for them. I remember that two years ago, I was so enthusiastic about this power that I suggested that instead of a 2p rate there should be a 4p rate in this respect.

I believe that this power could usefully be confined to the lower level of councils, such as district, borough and parish councils. I understand the worries of the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, about the use of this power by the GLC, and I agree entirely with her. Anyway. I do not believe that that level of local government has its ear sufficiently to the ground to know how to use this particular power.

The point of this amendment, as I see it, is to protect that power from abuse by some local councils. I do not want such abuse to become so widespread that it will give the Government a chance to say that the whole power should be abolished. I believe I am right in saying that, when we discussed this particular section in the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 1982. there was a moment when the noble Lord the Minister suggested that the total of the rate for this purpose should be reduced from 2p to 1p. That seems to be an indication of the fact that there is a danger of the Government trying to use this as an excuse for abolishing the power altogether. I should just like to quote an opposite indication which was given by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas of Chilworth, two days ago—and I see him sitting on the Front Bench. The noble Lord said:

"But that is no good reason for certain local authorities moving outside the general bounds of good management and it is the Government's job to set down those general bounds". [Official Report. 19/7/1983; col. 1043.]

I suggest that this amendment would help the Government to set down those general bounds.

The noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, made a very good forecast of what he expected me to say, because I am going to say exactly what he anticipated—although I believe that I should explain why. Before doing so, I must say to the noble Lord, Lord Spens, that, as he knows, a 4p rate would place £77–6 million in the hands of the GLC; and £38·8 million under Section 137 is already a lot of money.

The noble Lord made a very important point when he spoke about the abuse of this power—as indeed of any other very important section of any legislation—leading in the end to pressures for action to be taken which is wider than perhaps a Government might wish. Surely the answer to that point is that the whole of local government itself has to say. "Enough is enough". I am one of those people who, being ever optimistic, hope that this is what we shall see happen in the future, because I believe that local government is not at all happy about some of the things which are taking place in its name. I hope that local government itself will do something about that.

I quite understand and agree with the feeling that lies behind this amendment—but having said that, I must ask the Committee to reject this addition to the Bill. The noble Lord's amendment is, quite properly, drafted simply to apply to the scope of the present Bill. It would apply to grants, loans and guarantees made under Section 137 in connection with land acquisition and building work. I ask your Lordships to note carefully that it would apply to land acquisition and building work. It would not affect the generality of use of Section 137, and I will deal with that factor in a moment.

This amendment is identical to that put down by the former member for Islington South and Finsbury when this Bill was being debated in another place prior to the general election. The arguments advanced by my honourable friend the Parliamentary Secretary still hold good and, in response, I must rehearse them today to the Committee. There can be no room for doubt about the Government's attitude to the way in which some authorities are using Section 137. I had strong words to say on that matter during Second Reading. Yet, as has been said, Section 137 is a most useful provision. It enables authorities up and down the country to carry out useful expenditure in circumstances where they have no specific powers. In particular, in some cases, it authorises the valuable social programmes of expenditure on urban programme and urban development grant schemes.

But, as we have been told and as we know, there are cases where some local authorities have stretched the previously accepted conventions. I said during Second Reading that we are aware there is a problem here and are considering whether steps to deal with it are called for. But I have to say again that this Bill is not the place to take that action and I do not consider that the noble Lord's amendment represents a satisfactory way of dealing with this issue.

The Committee is invited to consider applying to the limited area of expenditure authorised by the Bill the restrictions contained in the amendment. We are also asked to approach this in a particular way. I fully appreciate why there is a wish to prohibit the use of Section 137 to assist party political organisations or political causes. But legislation has always adopted a careful approach in its references to political matters.

I should like to repeat a point made by my honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary. While we cannot give authoritative rulings on the interpretation of the statutes, it is our view that expenditure on purely party political purposes cannot satisfy the tests required by Section 137 as it is drafted at present, and it is open to a ratepayer or to the auditor, even now, to approach the court in respect of a particularly bad case of a politically-motivated grant.

To import into Section 137 a prohibition of grants and loans to politically-motivated bodies gets us into problems of definition, to which I have to say the noble Lord has not produced an answer. As it happens, I am far from sure that the amendment would prevent authorities from incurring many of the examples of expenditure which are rightly criticised. Few, in fact, are related to expenditure on the acquisition of land or the execution of building works for the benefit of an area. Let us be quite clear: this is the sole extent of the present Bill; and while more generally under Section 137 there are undoubtedly grants going to bodies of a political colour, it is likely to be extremely difficult to prove that their membership is restricted to representatives of political parties. How is "restricted in practice" to be interpreted? What are "representatives" of political parties? What are "activities calculated to promote a political cause"? These are very imprecise terms, and they illustrate the great difficulty of moving away from convention to specific legislation.

There is also the other effect of the amendment to which I have to draw the attention of the Committee. If the noble Lord's amendment were accepted, we would find ourselves in the position that one area of activity under Section 137 was qualified in the manner contained in the amendment while the rest of Section 137 would not be so qualified. The inference might well be taken that there was no prohibition of political expenditure other than in the limited context of the present Bill. Similarly, there would be the same inference to be drawn in relation to other discretionary powers of local authorities. The burden of proof placed on auditors or ratepayers in seeking to challenge a provocative case of expenditure, either under Section 137 or another power, would be heavier if Parliament had by implication seemed to suggest that politically-motivated expenditure was possible in those other circumstances.

So, finally, let me say again that the Government are by no means happy with the uses to which some local authorities are putting the proceeds of their twopenny rate. We recognise indeed the mounting anger in the country against those mischievous authorities which are by their abuses putting an ever greater burden on their ratepayers. Nor are we complacent about these problems. The authorities involved should not assume—and I hope the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, will note this—that the Government do not have the will or the ability to rectify the problem. I am bound to say that this Bill—essentially a technical measure—is not the right vehicle through which to tackle these problems. In view of that, I would invite the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

I do not doubt, and I am sure many who are apprehensive about the situation disclosed by my noble friend will not doubt, that the Minister and his colleagues are seriously concerned about what has been happening in a number of London boroughs and elsewhere, where the activities of the extreme Left, which has taken control of those local authorities, have done grave damage to the reputation of English local government. I do not doubt, and I am sure nobody else does, the noble Lord's general condemnation of such behaviour. But the question he has to answer is a rather different one: what is he going to do about it?

The noble Lord and I had the opportunity to discuss a not dissimilar question some little time ago concerning the London Borough of Southwark. What the London Borough of Southwark had done, in order to demonstrate their disapproval of the military base at Greenham Common, was to say that any public works contractor who carried out work at Greenham Common and secured a Ministry of Defence contract there would be debarred from securing any contract with the London Borough of Southwark. A debate took place in this House. The Minister made a very forceful speech in which he indicated his deep disapproval of the behaviour of Southwark. He indicated that he would discuss the matter with the Office of Fair Trading, and he indicated that the Government were keeping a very close watch on these developments.

What has happened since? The Office of Fair Trading said it had nothing to do with them or that they could not take action, or something of that sort, and the situation remains as it was when this matter was discussed in your Lordships' House; namely, a statement by the Minister—wholly sincere, I do not doubt—condemning the local authority concerned for what, in my view, was clearly unlawful action, quite apart from any other considerations, but no action by the Government themselves to take account of this very serious development.

Now we come to what the London Borough of Islington is going to do with the noble Lord's Bill. Have no doubt: it is this Bill they are waiting to see put on the statute book so that they can spend up to £100,000 of public money on a Left-wing newspaper which is going to be created in the London Borough of Islington. I have in front of me a document giving the view of the Islington borough's solicitor which was submitted to the Employment Grants and Financial Assistance Sub-committee of that authority on 18th April this year. I propose to quote it, because I think it will indicate to the Committee the situation which we are in reality debating in terms of my noble friend's amendment. In paragraph 1 it says:

"These observations are written before a package of assistance has been worked out. but officers met on 7th April representatives of the Co-operative".

That is the Islington News Co-operative, the body that has been established in order to publish and distribute this give-away newspaper.

"They explained their financial requirements and other sources of funding, though without exact figures I believe the Co-operative's request to the council is comprised of four elements:

"(a) a loan towards the acquisition of 322 Upper Street;

(b) a loan towards the cost of the refurbishment works;

(c) a grant towards either the cost of acquisition or the cost of works or both; and

(d) a grant towards working capital required".

That gives a general indication of what the cooperative is trying to get from the London Borough of Islington.

We now turn to this particular Bill and its relevance to what the Islington News Co-operative is endeavouring to achieve. Under a subheading in paragraph 4 of the solicitor's note, the document reads as follows:

"Grant towards cost of acquisition or costs of work, or both:

"There is at present no statutory power to make such a grant. Section 137(1) of the Local Government Act 1972 does not apply because comparable power to make a loan exists in the shape of Section 3 of the Local Authorities (Land) Act 1963. As I have advised members previously, this legal difficulty is a recent one, accidentally engendered by the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982, which was intended to extend the ambit of Section 137, and is about to be remedied by the Local Authorities (Expenditure Powers) Bill currently in Parliament. If and when this Bill is passed, then, subject to what is said generally about Section 137 and local authorities' powers generally, there would be power under Section 137(1) to make such a grant, and it is fairly clear from the information provided by the Co-operative that some funding under this head would be required."

That is a substantial document, and if the Minister would like to see it I will gladly make it available to him.

So it is clear that Islington News Co-operative is to exist and will obtain its financial assistance from the London Borough of Islington entirely because of the passage of this Bill. That is the legal advice made available by the council's principal legal officer. Since the Bill did not proceed quite as briskly as the council had hoped, so far no public money has been made available to the co-operative.

Now we may ask a different question. There is no doubt that Islington is a left-wing local authority, as most of your Lordships know, and one could expect this of it. But is there any other reason why Islington local authority is keen to have this give-away newspaper? The answer is, Yes. The council has been having a feud with the Islington Gazette. The Islington Gazette, unlike this free newspaper which the council intend to publish at public expense, is a normal weekly newspaper relying on its income from sales and from advertising. I shall not go into the whole background of this dispute because it would take far too long. I know that the Minister is well aware of it. When the Labour Party again secured power in Islington in May of last year a decision was made by members of the authority to instruct its officers, and indeed the members of the authority itself, to have no contact whatever with representatives of the only newspaper circulating in the London Borough of Islington. The reason was that there had been an industrial dispute caused by the closure of a sister newspaper in the group owned by the Islington Gazette and as a result there had been a strike in a number of other newspapers in that group including the Islington Gazette.

The dispute came to an end, by and large, in May of last year; but, notwithstanding that, the instruction has continued. No officer of the London Borough of Islington has been allowed to answer any question from a journalist working for that newspaper; no committee chairman will speak to a representative of that newspaper; no council advertising has been allowed in that newspaper save for a few statutory notices where the council has been advised that it would be taking a considerable risk were it not to publish them in the columns of that newspaper.

I think that is an outrageous abuse of power by a local authority. That view is shared by the Press Council, I am glad to say, which has severely criticised the London Borough of Islington for its action. The council has also been severely criticised in a report by the local government ombudsman. There is some indication—but no certainty—that the council, as a result of the unremitting pressure it is getting from the local government ombudsman, may change its blacklist policy, at least to some degree, but there is no certainty.

That is the history of the row over the Islington Gazette and it is primarily for that reason that the council is now deciding to publish a newspaper at public expense. It has two aims in mind. The first is to serve a useful role in providing a propaganda arm for the majority party on the Islington borough council. The second is to try to put the weekly newspaper out of business. That is the objective and there is no doubt about that whatever. Moreover, by publishing a free newspaper it will be able to offer extremely competitive advertising rates compared with a commercially produced newspaper.

As I have made clear, it will only be able to do this because of the passage of this Bill through this House. Therefore, what I am hoping to hear from the Minister today—and if not today, on Report and if not on Report, on Third Reading—is not simply a wholly sincere statement condemning such abuses of power—I am sure we will hear that and will welcome it—but much more. We shall want a positive indication that firm action is to be taken.

When I was a Minister I did exactly what the noble Lord has also done on a number of occasions; that is, to explain how in fact an amendment is wholly inappropriate and unacceptable in the form in which it is drafted. But I hope that the Minister will agree that what is called for here is something quite different. What is needed is some indication that the Government are prepared to look at the language of this short Bill and consider whether action can be taken before the Bill finally leaves the House so that we prevent a further abuse of power taking place in Islington. If he does not I must make it quite clear that we will fight this Bill at every stage, otherwise we shall be permit- ting a local authority, which has won itself one of the worst reputations of any local authority in London, to continue its campaign of persecution against a newspaper that it does not like and to do it at public expense.

May I intervene before the Minister replies? I listened very carefully to what the Minister said in reply to the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, and I must confess that I agree wth almost everything he said. We have to get right back to the beginning of what this small Bill is about. It is to clarify a doubt which arose on whether local authorities would be in legal difficulties if they used Section 137 of the Local Government Act 1972 for urban grant development. With that doubt remaining numbers of local authorities of all political complexions are concerned about continuing with work which is extremely important to the development of the economy and, indeed, to employment.

The noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, when promoting the amendment, largely concentrated his attack on what is happening in Islington. But he said that the pressures had resulted in a change in his attitude and, as he has probably seen in the Guardian this morning, the ban has now been lifted. Publicity, knowledge of what is going on, the right of ratepayers to make their voices heard and as the Minister said action that can be taken by auditors, are all ways in which in our democracy public opinion can make itself felt. I am not pretending that there are not abuses with which most of us would fundamentally disagree; but what I am certain about is that this Bill is not the right vehicle to deal with them.

The noble Lord said that if the Government did not like the amendment they could bring forward something else. It is clear that the Government have rightly taken the view that they cannot bring forward anything else which would fit properly into this piece of legislation. The situation remains as the Government say. How does one define political? Also how does one define what is and what is not an abuse? It is a matter of judgment. The Bill is concerned only with land transactions and economic development. It does not cover many of the alleged abuses to which the noble Lords have referred and to which reference was made on Second Reading.

If this amendment were approved, it would completely change the nature of the Bill from the technical and clarifying piece of legislation which it is at the moment to an ill-conceived attempt to deal with an ill-defined problem. We should not promote such legislation. Legislation is difficult enough anyway. But it is absolutely and entirely wrong to allow something like that to go through with one's eyes open. Had there been a way to meet the point, I am sure that it would have been done in an amendment, but there is no way to do it and it should not be done.

I support what the Minister has said in this area. Incidentally, very often a great deal is made of what are perhaps a small number of abuses by authorities. One should come down to earth and realise that of the £38 million budget under Section 137, to which the Minister referred, £24·9 million is devoted to industry and employment; £3·3 million to ethnic groups; voluntary community groups get £4·9 million (and this includes the citizens advice bureaux), and the grant to Gay organisations, about which much was made on Second Reading, totalled £23,000—which, to be realistic, considering the numbers in the population, is not terribly untoward. If we kept our eye on that point, and considered what is being given to industry and employment, and put things in their right perspective, it would be very much better. We on these Benches also feel that it would be much better if this Bill went through as it is and any other problems that arose were discussed in their proper context.

Before my noble friend replies, may I briefly associate myself with the observations made by the noble Baroness, Lady Birk. I find myself in very substantial agreement with them. I agree that there is a serious question of abuse. But in the long run surely it is publicity, public opinion and the electors themselves who should if possible be left to seek to remedy this abuse. In the short term specific legislation along the lines of this amendment is unwelcome in so far as it is designed to restrict payments to political parties, because this involves a degree of overlap with the existing machinery by which such matters can come before the courts and be challenged.

As regards restricting payments to politically motivated bodies, surely that is inappropriate, as it gives rise to serious questions of definition and perhaps a veritable mare's nest of litigation. Lastly, this amendment, although a valuable vehicle for an informative and most interesting speech from the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, is outside the intendment or the Short Title of this Bill.

I recognise absolutely the great depth of feeling with which the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, spoke. One has to respect that. It is a great bitterness that is felt by many people. First, I am sure that the noble Lord will be pleased to know, with reference to the article in the Guardian, which I too had intended to mention, that we understand Islington has withdrawn its ban on the Islington Gazette. That must be a good thing if it is true. I hope that it is, as I am sure does the noble Lord.

This Bill truly is about the acquisition of land or the execution of building works for the benefit of the authority. Of course I shall ask the noble Lord to let me have a look at the document to which he refers. He knows that I will do that. But I do not offhand see quite how what this Bill is proposing would have the results to which he refers. Nevertheless, I would want to see the document. But at the end of the day I have to fall back on what I said before. The noble Lord says that it is all right our saying that we shall do something about it, but what will we do. If it was that easy, something would have been done long ago. There is a problem with the issues of definition.

This Government above all have so often been accused of trying to curtail the powers of local authorities, and so on. That is just not true. We are reluctant at all times to do that. The fact is that it is a question of the extent of the pressures that build up. My noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway said what is needed is publicity, and so on. Yes, it is; but what is also needed is the condemnation by local government itself on every possible vocal and written occasion. Local government has to face up to what is happening. However, that is for another time and not for today.

I ask the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, seriously to consider withdrawing his amendment. He knows what the feeling is. This Bill is about enabling local authorities to get on with things. I am sure that the noble Lords, Lord Kilmarnock and Lord Harris of Greenwich, must want to see that there is this facility for local authorities. Every day that we delay makes the matter more difficult. It is not what we should be doing.

I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate on the amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, suggested that my amendment was too narrow to be fully effective. From what he said, he appears to be contemplating a wider attack on local authority powers along the lines that were feared by the noble Lord, Lord Spens. I thought I heard him uttering rather threatening noises in that direction. That seems to me to be a very good reason for limiting the damage through the present Bill before your Lordships' Committee. The noble Baroness, Lady Birk, said that there is no way of doing it. I must say that I would not accept this. If the amendment is defective in the way suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, before I decide whether or not to withdraw it I should like to ask him whether he is prepared to meet us after the Committee stage of this Bill in order to discuss the matter constructively on the lines suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich.

So far as this Bill is concerned I think that the noble Lord knows that we would not be willing or able, (a) to accept the amendment or, (b) to try to put into it another amendment along the lines of what he is saying. The problem as a whole is there for discussion and for consideration. I shall gladly meet both the noble Lords, Lord Kilmarnock and Lord Harris of Greenwich, to talk about that outside in other contexts. But so far as this Bill is concerned there is in my view an imperative to get it on to the statute book. The longer we delay doing so, we are holding up work which everybody in the Committee wants to see take place. I think that we should get on with it.

It was a most remarkable statement that the noble Lord has just made. The Bill arrived in this House only on Monday for Second Reading. Is the noble Lord saying that he will oppose any amendment to this Bill at any stage before he has read the terms of an amendment? Is that what he is saying?

We are talking here about scope. The noble Lord will not draw me on that. The fact very simply is that we are talking about these amendments. I said that if there are any other amendments on similar lines the same thing will apply, and that is really where I stand.

I think that I understood the noble Lord to say that he is prepared to meet us to discuss the whole matter in general terms, but not within the scope of this Bill. I do not wish to delay your Lordships' Committee, and there is another amendment to be considered. So on this occasion I beg leave to withdraw the present amendment.

moved Amendment No. 2:

I really must ask the noble Lord to withdraw that. It is not what I said. It is not what I intended, and it is wrong of him to say that I did.

Will the noble Lord then explain what he did intend? If I have inadvertently misrepresented him I will of course gladly withdraw, but, as I understood it, he was wanting to indicate to us, indeed he did indicate to us, that it was so vital to get the Bill on the statute book quickly, as fast as possible. Urgent work remained to be done. It was at the very least a quite clear implication that if he was not going to take objection in principle to any amendment put down, he would approach it in an extremely negative spirit. If I have got him wrong, I will gladly withdraw.

I cannot keep getting up to repeat the same thing again and again. I think that what I have said was clear enough. I look around me and it seems that most of your Lordships appear to think that it was so. I do not think that I should expand on it.

I shall now come to the terms of the amendment, because we will be coming back to this on Report stage—I should not leave the noble Lord in any doubt on that matter—and we will be coming back to it on Third Reading as well, in the form of amendments. What we have to say to him is that of course the Labour Party agrees with him on this matter because we are discussing the behaviour of a Left-wing local authority. So it is hardly surprising that when he looks for comfort from the Labour Benches he gets it. Of course he does. What we are concerned—

If the noble Lord will give way for one moment, I should like to say that this Front Bench happens to stand for fairness. Therefore, it was in the interests of fairness that we made a protest to the noble Lord, Lord Harris, in regard to his version of what the noble Lord the Minister said. We were quite clear what he said. It had no politics in it at all. There were merely equity, justice and fairness in the protest that we made together with the noble Lord the Minister.

I take note of what the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, has said, but I shall look with interest tomorrow at the Official Report to see what the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, said. If inadvertently I have done him an injustice, of course I withdraw what I said. I think that we know one another well enough to say that. But I wish to draw this matter to his attention, and I hope that the Whip on duty on the Government Front Bench will take note of it as well. I know of very few precedents for a Bill receiving a Second Reading on Monday, having its Committee stage on Thursday, with a suggestion that it is going to have to be, or should be, or deserves to be, on the statute book by the following Wednesday. That, as I understand it—again, I hope that I am not misrepresenting the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin—is what he seemed to be at least suggesting.

Noble Lords opposite should be aware that when this matter is eventually put to a vote, as of course at some stage it will be, the Government Whips will find the Labour Party going into the Lobbies in support of the Government's position on this question. But they should also have no doubt that what they will be doing—and I say this in particular to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, to whom, as always, I listened with close attention—will be allowing the London Borough of Islington to spend up to £100,000 of public money for purposes which I have described. That is not simply my view; it is the view of the chief legal adviser of the London Borough of Islington; and I shall gladly be making the document concerned available to the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin.

I hope that it be will possible for us to have a harmonious and agreeable meeting before the next stage of the Bill, by which time the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, will have had the opportunity of reading the document. Then, no doubt, he will be in a position to advise the House at Report stage whether the extracts that I have read today are in accordance with the advice that he receives from his own department. But I repeat that noble Lords opposite should know quite definitely what they are doing. In this case in Islington this is the way in which £100,000 of public money is going to be spent if the Bill goes through in its present form. The amendment which I now propose—I do not intend to push it to a vote today because I hope we shall be meeting the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, before the next stage of the Bill—would seek to restrict this.

I ask the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, and other noble Lords opposite, as well as indeed noble Lords in other parts of the Chamber, if Islington gets away with this, what do they think will be going on in some of the other London boroughs? What do they think will be going on in the London Borough of Southwark. What will be going on in the London Borough of Greenwich? What will be going on in the London Borough of Camden? Once they have some statutory cover of this kind on the basis of the legal advice made available to the council in Islington by its principal legal adviser, there is a likelihood of large sums of public money being spent for these purposes.

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, says that there is a solution to that. The solution is that we will leave it to the electorate. But of course it will be years before there are any more local government elections in Islington, or Camden, or Greenwich, or elsewhere. Even then it does not necessarily do them much good, because most of the people in Southwark voted against the present majority party in Southwark and a lot of good it did them! They still have a local authority behaving in a wholly unreasonable fashion over the Greenham Common contracts.

So all I would say to the Government and their supporters is that, if this matter eventually comes to the vote—and I very much hope that it will not—they will undoubtedly have a number of members of the Labour Party supporting them in the Lobbies. But they should realise that the last time they had the Labour Party in their Lobbies was on 2nd August last year, when the Labour party was just as vigorously supporting the then Government spokesman, the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, when he was telling the House that we should resist an amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, himself (though eventually he sought to withdraw) which would in fact have made trade unionists contract in rather than contract out of the political levy. We know what developments there have been in Government thinking since then.

I would just repeat that I hope that we shall be able to discuss this matter with the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin. I recognise his problems. I know perfectly well that of course he wants to get the Bill through as quickly as possible. But I must say to him quite clearly that I very much hope that he will agree to talk to us if only on the basis that his mind is at least open to argument when we do in fact meet him.

Before the noble Lord sits down, I should like to ask whether he accepts that I wholly share his concern. I wholly share it and in no way seek to denigrate it. Will he accept that where we differ is on the question of whether this Bill is an apt vehicle for the amendment which is proposed? But this in no way detracts from the concern which I think we both share.

I want to speak only very briefly to this land amendment, part of the upshot of which I think was not explained by the noble Lord, Lord Harris. It means in fact that every transaction regarding land which comes within the clause would have to go to the Secretary of State. It really is the most ludicrous and outrageous suggestion.

On grounds of efficiency alone, it is wrong and absolutely impossible. There would be a huge backlog of applications. For quite different reasons, we on these Benches would not go along with more legislation, and an amendment that gave the Secretary of State even greater power, when, in regard to so much previous legislation, noble Lords on all sides of your Lordships' House—including, from time to time, those in the noble Lord's party, when they are present—have argued against the erosion of local government power by central Government. This amendment should be thrown out immediately.

I am sure that the whole local authority world will be delighted to see the end of this amendment, whether at this stage or any other stage. It means an enormous increase in bureacracy, and is bound to result in a great deal of diminution of freedom of local government. I hope that the Government will resist it. The amendment has not been explained by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and I hope that it will not be. I do not think it will get him very far.

Some of us had mixed feelings about the previous amendment. It was a badly drafted amendment to the wrong Bill. However, it represented the view, which many of us have held—my former colleagues in local authorities will confirm that I have always held it—that local authorities should not support party political activities. To that extent, there was some justification for the previous amendment. In contrast, the present amendment seems one of unalloyed wickedness. I am not surprised that it should be moved by Lord Harris. The noble Lord has been a centralist all his life, whether inside the Labour Party or outside it. I am, however, surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, should have put his name to it, because I thought that he was a libertarian.

We have here a proposal from the Government in a simple Bill to remove an anomaly from the application of Section 137 of the Local Government Act. I remind the Committee that Section 137 and its predecessors in previous Local Government Acts have been some small sign of independence of local authorities from permitted expenditure and the ultra vires laws ever since local authorities started. They have been the occasion when local authorities have engaged in their most creative and worthwhile new ventures. Anything that seeks to diminish Section 137 and diminish the powers of local authorities to act totally independently of central Government under the section should be resisted.

This Bill is designed to remove an anomaly that was not expected when the last Local Government Act was enacted. It is designed to recognise the fact that support for local activities can just as well take the form of support for acquisition of land and for building on land as for giving grants in other ways. There is no difference in principle between them. To seek to have that power referred to central Government and to allow central Government into Section 137 of the Local Government Act seems to me, as I have already remarked, an act of unalloyed wickedness. I hope that the Government will resist it.

The noble Lord, Lord Harris, said he hoped we would have a harmonious and agreeable meeting. He makes it harder for me to have a meeting that will be harmonious and agreeable by the way he always goes on at me. Nevertheless, as he well knows, I shall do my best with him when the time comes.

I am rather sad to see this amendment, which is totally out of touch with everything that one is seeking to do. By his remarks the noble Lord, Lord Harris, obscures to some extent some very real concern. I am sorry that even my noble friends and the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, have felt it necessary—I understand why—to miss the point that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, is basically making. That is his considerable concern for what is going on.

All I can say in repeating why we cannot accept the amendment is to express my hope that no one in local government (I weigh my words carefully) will believe that for ever one can go on watching abuses of Section 137 of the kind that are taking place at the moment. It is not the Government that should be doing something about this—and something must be done. It is local government itself that must do something about it. I appeal to those in local government to make sure that something is done. There is no way in which we can accept the amendment.

Will the noble Lord accept that the amendment under discussion was favoured by his honourable friend Sir George Young in Standing Committee in another place when the matter was last discussed?

I cannot comment on that. I do not know. I hear what the noble Lord says.

I was about to remind the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, of that point. I can understand the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Mcintosh of Haringey; and I congratulate him upon the degree of indignation that he managed to get into his speech. I wish that a little part of that indignation had been directed at the anti-democratic behaviour of his political colleagues in Islington; but, as we noted, it was not.

If the noble Lord will forgive me, I think I stated clearly that throughout my time in local government I have been against expenditure by local authorities for party political purposes, and I am now. I thought I had made that clear.

Indeed. What I had hoped that the noble Lord would join me in doing was to condemn the examples I have given of what the Labour councillors at Islington have been doing. Of course, the noble Lord's position on the general abuse of power is well known. I have been indicating, like my noble friend Lord Kilmarnock, the disgraceful behaviour of the Labour Party in the London Borough of Islington. Further examples of this have been given. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, has indicated his concern, not only this afternoon but on the last occasion that we had the opportunity to discuss the matter. At that time we were discussing what the Labour Party was going in Southwark. It was behaviour defended on that occasion by the Opposition spokesman in your Lordships' House.

I do not propose to press the amendment today. I find it a little surprising that the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, was so antagonistic towards it, given the different words used by Sir George Young during discussion in Standing Committee in another place. One would normally assume that Ministers of the same Government in the same department would at least have a common approach to matters of this kind. Sir George Young indicated that he would look at the matter carefully, but the Bill then died and we did not get any further with it in the last Session of Parliament. I look forward to an early meeting with the noble Lord, Lord Bellwin, in the next day or so. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now again resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.

moved Amendment No. 37:

Page 21. line 4, after ("Crown") insert ("after consultation with the Registrar")

When we considered last Session's Data Protection Bill, considerable attention was paid in Committee to Clause 27. Various comments, criticisms and suggestions were made and on Report I was able to bring forward a revised Clause 27 which, I was glad to discover, met most of the points that had been made in Committee. One of them was the importance of ensuring that an exemption on national security grounds was not available without the authority of a Government Minister at the highest level. We recognised the force in that argument. And we revised the provisions of Clause 27 accordingly. It now provides that any question of whether an exemption is required for the purpose of safeguarding national security must be determined by a Minister of the Crown. And a Minister of the Crown is defined in subsection (6) as a member of the Cabinet, the Attorney-General or the Lord Advocate. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, does me too much honour in suggesting that I might be included among that number in the foreseeable future. We thus sought to ensure that decisions of this kind—of a sensitivity and seriousness that are perhaps unique—rest where they can only properly be taken—at the highest level of government.

The noble Lord is now suggesting that an extra dimension is given to the decision-taking process; that before a Minister decides whether or not an exemption is required for the purpose of national security, he shall consult the registrar. I have to say to the noble Lord that I am sorry, but it is not practicable, for two reasons: one of principle and one of practice. As I said in responding last Session to an amendment to Clause 27, national security data are in a field all of their own. They are of a particular sensitivity, and the number of people with access to them must be kept to the absolute minimum; that is in the interests of the nation as a whole. I know that in other countries some other intervention is provided, but as the noble Lord has not raised that matter, I will not go into it.

The noble Lord's purpose is that what the registrar shall be consulted about is not the needs implicit in the protection of data subjects, in which he is expert, but those arising from the protection of security, of which he knows almost nothing. Supposing the registrar were given a role and had to be consulted by the Minister before the requirement for an exemption was decided. How could he properly and constructively express a view?-—because the question he will be asked will be about the needs of national security, not of data protection. The Data Protection Registrar will undoubtedly be a person of eminence and wisdom. He will be a man of integrity, of absolute trustworthiness. But what he will not be is an expert on national security. He will have no qualification or basis or corpus of knowledge on which to express a view as to whether the needs of national security are such as to require action to be taken. Only a Minister can properly do that. It would be wholly wrong—as well as unfair—to give the registrar this really quite inappropriate role. And that is why I cannot advise your Lordships to accept the noble Lord's amendment.

The Committee will appreciate the validity of much of what the noble Lord the Minister has said, but at the same time it will share some of the anxieties of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury. There is no doubt that this is a terrible power which quite innocently can be used in order, for example, to list individuals as security risks, and to do so quite mistakenly. It is not so much a question of the abuse of the power—although that was a very real point that was made by the Minister—as the fact that somebody has made a mistake and that it can go on being repeated, or continue to be on the record of some perfectly innocent citizen, and nobody will ever see it except the Minister who has had a report made to him by somebody.

I shall content myself with the following observation: if this amendment does not commend itself to the Minister and to the Committee for reasons that I think will become apparent, I would hope, if I may say so on behalf of my noble friends, that between now and the Report stage the Minister could give consideration to some other "safe" person, be it an ombudsman or someone else, who has the power to see whether or not records are erroneous and the Minister is, in fact, correctly carrying out the power given to him under the Bill. It is a very large power; it is a very dangerous power.

If there is some other person who has to look into the question, who is actually going to do it? Is he not also going to have to rely upon the same security forces as produced the first report? If it is a question of national security you cannot get an outside agency to look into it because that would be breaking security. I am wondering who the noble Lord anticipates will do the investigation. Will this other person himself go round and do the investigation?

I wanted to make my reply brief and I am going to try to do that in answer to the intervention. The situation is difficult. One does not know whether it will be some person with judicial authority who will have the power to investigate generally and to see, for example, how reliable is the information which is being given in order for certain classifications to be made. I appreciate that it may have to be a general investigation and not a particular one in all cases, but at least one would know that there was some periodical review of procedure so that the procedure looks as though it is right and safe.

I was not even going so far as the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon. I was not demanding that some other person should have the right periodically to scrutinise these records; but I was simply asking that when the Minister signed the certificate which is mentioned in Clause 27(2), he should at least notify the registrar that he proposes to do so and that the registrar, who would have a suitably qualified person on his staff, would give any advice within his power. It was part of my submission that, as the Lindop Committee recommended, the registrar must have a person with the highest possible security classification as a member of his staff to perform these duties, as indeed the Minister reminded us is the case in other countries. However I shall not press that.

I merely ask the Minister between now and the Report stage whether he would be good enough to deal with the point that I made, which is that the certificate which the Minister signs may be lodged within the department and not with the registrar, and therefore no other person besides the Minister and presumably those who gave him the advice that this particular data should be dealt with under Clause 27(1) will even be aware that the exemption has taken place. It was that danger with which I sought to deal in my amendment and which, in the absence of an amendment of this kind, could mean that very large blocks of data were excluded from any consideration whatever by the registrar or supervision of other kinds under Part II of this Bill.

As I said, although there is no suspicion in my mind that anything irregular would happen—not just under the noble Lord, Lord Elton, when he is a member of the Cabinet but under any of his colleagues—I thought it was necessary to take precautions against irregularities being committed by some future Government which would be of a less enlightened complexion than the present one.

I am relieved to find that in his secret heart of hearts the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, regards this as an enlightened Government, because much of his correspondence has suggested the contrary. I can answer one specific point and one general point. On the specific point, the noble Lord is right—the certificates would not be lodged with the registrar. Certificates would be held by the Minister and produced where necessary to provide evidence that the exemption is required for the purpose of safeguarding national security. That is the general practice where certificates of this sort are concerned. So the noble Lord is right in that.

I am reluctant to give a very convincing undertaking at this stage because we have gone such a long way since the last time the Bill was before us to meet the anxiety of noble Lords that this power should not be misused. Having said that, of course we always take very careful note of what is said.

The noble Lord has addressed himself to a precise and I think probably marginally new area of concern—at least, he expressed it differently—and I shall certainly take it away, although I do not wish to hearten him with any indication of what I shall do thereafter. But it will be very carefully considered.

I certainly do not want to delay your Lordships when there are so many more important amendments to consider later on. Perhaps I may ask the noble Lord, Lord Elton, whether the certificates, which he has explained are maintained within the department, presumably in the Secretary of State's office, will be accessible to any scrutiny whatever, or whether they will only be wheeled out, as I put it, in a case where someone has sought to access the data and it is discovered that it is covered by a certificate under Clause 27(2). Will it only be when somebody asks for forbidden data that the existence of the certificate is discovered, or will there be a list which the registrar or the public may access in the department?

No, they will not be available for display; but they will be produced as individually required.

I should like to give the matter some further thought and perhaps discuss this again on Report. In the meanwhile. I am grateful to the noble Lord for the information and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

moved Amendment No. 38:

Page 21, line 24, at end insert ("or").

Unlike most other noble Lords in the Committee I do not think that I have spoken on this clause before. I think everybody else has. However, the noble and learned Lord has said enough for me to be brief. From these Benches, and I think from all parts of the Committee, we are ashamed of the fact that this will almost certainly fail to satisfy the convention. We have had too many cases in the past where this has happened. We feel that it is important not to expose ourselves again, particularly in such a disagreeable way.

When the noble Lord, Lord Hatch, was discussing this. I think at Second Reading, he said that this was an insult to the black and immigrant population in this country. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, seized on the only possible excuse he could make, which was that the other day there was a Bulgarian who appeared in the newspapers in the same way. I shall not stretch this. The fact that one man is a dark but not coloured immigrant is nothing whatever to do with the argument.

The argument is absolutely clear. Of course this applies to all immigrants of whatever nationality, colour, or anything else, but the fact remains that of those immigrants I cannot give a figure but over 90 per cent, must be from the Caribbean, Africa, India, or South-East Asia and not from Europe. The noble Lord knows this perfectly well. I rub it in because I thought his was a rather feeble reply, and I do not think that he has a better one.

There is not any doubt that this is not—at least in my opinion—a Government intention secretly to annoy the immigrants. It is a purely bureaucratic attempt to avoid possible trouble in one or two rare instances. The instances that the Home Office have given of what possible use you could make of this exemption in relation to immigration to an action which was not criminal are too feeble to go into. They are unusual, unlikely to happen, and extremely unimportant if they do.

I do not think we want to go over the arguments again and again. They are simple. We believe this to be an unnecessary and, in its results, more or less disastrous contribution to the social life of this country, which is now a mixed community, and proud to be so. We have to be careful how we treat people who have not been here and were not bred here all their lives, and who are beginning in different parts of England to settle down extremely well, and in one or two parts are not settling down so well. This is extremely dangerous and entirely unnecessary. I am happy to support the noble and learned Lord.

There are three points I should like to make to the noble Lord the Minister. He will remember that on Second Reading he made a statement contradicting an instance which I had given earlier. In that statement—and I do not think I am doing him an injustice in telescoping it—the burden of the statement was contained in these words:

"it does not abolish or diminish any shred of existing civil rights available to our citizens".—[Official Report. 5/7/1983: col. 543.]

I had already pointed out that in the present circumstances an immigrant who is asked for medical data for the purpose of immigration control is given a form which he signs so that the DHSS can obtain the information and pass it on to the Home Office. The question that I want to put to the noble Lord—he did not allow me to intervene in his speech, you will recall—is this. Is it not the case that this clause takes away from an immigrant the right to know that data concerning him, or her, is being obtained by the Home Office?

Is it not the case, as I pointed out in my Second Reading speech, that under this clause it is perfectly possible, and will happen, that medical data passed on by the the doctor in perfectly good faith to the computer, which the doctor does not control and does not own, can then be obtained by the Home Office without the knowledge of either the doctor or the patient? It is for this reason that the British Medical Association itself has expressed its concern. That is the second point I want to make, which naturally leads on from the first.

The BMA has informed me that according to its handbook of medical ethics it is stated:

"In all medical records information should be regarded as held for the specific purpose of the continuing care of the patient, and should not be used without appropriate authorisation by the responsible clinician, or the consent of the patient, for any other purpose".

Naturally the BMA and its members are deeply concerned that this clause can breach this first principle of medical ethics of the relationship between the doctor and the patient, and in many cases without the knowledge of either doctor or patient. Is this not, to return to my first point, a diminution of the existing rights of the immigrant population?

Thirdly, my noble and learned friend Lord Elwyn-Jones has stressed the importance of what we consider to be, and what many lawyers consider to be, a breach in the European Data Protection Convention, and he has quoted it. I would add to that that, to the best of my knowledge, no other European country has legislation which, for the purpose of immigration control, exempts the protection of individual privacy so far as computer data are concerned. Why is it necessary in this country? I would suggest that if it is not necessary in the rest of Europe, it would be wise for the Government to consider whether they should continue to thrust forward what, as my noble and learned friend Lord Elwyn-Jones has already pointed out, has been seen as a highly objectionable clause on all sides by those who have considered this issue since we started debating it early this year.

Lastly. I make an urgent and desperate plea to the Minister that as the issue of immigration control is not in any way connected with crime, with breach of the law or with fraud, he could tell the Committee this afternoon that he will reconsider this question between now and Report stage, and particularly consider whether he cannot remove this objectionable, insulting linking of the purposes of immigration control with criminal and fraudulent activities. If he thinks it is essential still to have some form of immigration control within the Bill then he should separate if from these, have a clearer definition of it and remove the objectionable aspect. Not only Members of your Lordships' House but members of many other organisations—who frequently support his own party—have found it just as objectionable as we have.

Otherwise it would seem as though the Government consider that there is a special kind of morality which is peculiar to immigrants. They do not have to break the law or be guilty of fraud, but they may do things that the Government do not like or which the Government do not think are right, but which the Government have covered here in a dangerously wide and loose phrase which can only bring pain and insecurity and, from these Benches, anger if they are persisted with.

I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Hatch of Lusby, was in the Chamber when this Bill was before your Lordships previously when I asked the Minister whether each Ministry would have to register separately. I was told that they would and that computers were not all registered as one under one system by the Government.

On Tuesday of this week we were told, in answer to a question of mine, that if computers were interlinked in any way, that linkage would also have to be registered. I think, therefore, that the noble Lord will find that the Home Office is unable to ask its computers about details of medical records of immigrants or anyone else because it would have to have permission to ask the Department of Health and Social Security. If the two computers were connected that would be public knowledge because they would have to be registered.

To make one remark on the words of the noble Lord, Lord Swinfen, it is not necessary for computers to be linked for information to be transferred from one to another. It can be done by other means, as the noble Lord, Lord Swinfen, will be aware. We are talking here about the subject access provisions. We shall come on to the subject of transfer of data from one system to another when we discuss Clause 28(2). The noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, has already said most eloquently everything that needs to be said about subject access. I need add very little to the remarks that he made because I am sure the Committee would like to reach a decision. It is about the fourth time that we have discussed the matter and it is unlikely that at this late stage I could produce any new points that the Minister has not yet considered.

I rose to my feet to give the noble and learned Lord my support and to say that when on the last amendment I was talking about the possibility that a less enlightened regime might at some future date take office, I can hardly imagine that, whatever its nature would be, it could pass a measure that was more horrific in its possible consequences than Clause 28. Therefore, I entirely support what the noble and learned Lord has said. I hope that your Lordships will take action to see that this provision is struck out of the Bill.

Although as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has made abundantly clear this is a very familiar issue, I have listened with the greatest of interest to the arguments put forward by noble Lords on matters that are both very complex and, I readily concede, highly sensitive.

Your Lordships will be aware from lengthy exchanges on this subject when we dealt with it under the earlier Bill of why computer records are a necessary part of immigration control. The immigration officials handle a very large flow of individuals through our entry ports. They also deal with a considerable number of applications from foreign nationals for an extension of stay and other matters. Ready access to records is clearly essential for this purpose and the need to call them up swiftly, efficiently and economically makes a computer a necessary instrument.

Most of this information is purely factual and routine. It will be of little but administrative interest, and it will be freely accessible to the data subject in the normal way. But some of it will be very different in character. It may relate, for instance, to smuggling or other criminal activities. Nobody in this House would want those activities to go unhindered. That is why the Bill carries exemptions for the apprehension and prosecution of offenders from both the subject access and the non-disclosure provisions. Their Lordships' amendment is not concerned with those. A very few computer entries include Revenue matters; a history, perhaps, of tax evasion. Those are similarly and properly exempted and, similarly, the amendment leaves the exemptions intact.

Between the very large number of entries that are perfectly uninteresting and routine and the much smaller number of which the criminal or fiscal content carries exemption, lies a third category, also a small one, upon which the present amendment bears. That category is made up of entries which contain information about the data subject which does not relate to the prevention or detection of crime, to the apprehension and prosecution of offenders or to the assessment or collection of any tax or duty, but which reveals that the person in question is not, or may not be, qualified to enter or remain here under the immigration rules. That category also carries exemption under the Bill and it is that exemption which the amendment seeks to remove.

No one looking at the size of these islands, and at the number of people who at present live somewhere else but who would like to live here, can doubt that control of immigration is not only desirable but essential. Our discussion is not about that. It is about how it should be done. At this stage I must ask your Lordships to consider immigration officials not only as keepers of the gates of this country, admitting those with a right to come here and remain, and turning others away; we have to see them also as the guardians of the principles of nationality and right to reside. Their duty is to discover those who have entered this country and settled here without the right to do so—stowaways in the ship of state. It is the success of both sorts of official activity together that serves not only to detect those who breach the regulations but also to deter attempts to do so by large numbers of others.

That deterrence is an essential part of the means by which the state protects its individual citizens from the encroachment upon their rights and freedoms that an ineffectively controlled flow of immigrants would undoubtedly produce. It is for this purpose that the Bill makes exemptions. The first is exemption from subject access by people concerned with illegal entry or residence in this country to personal data held by the authorities which would reveal to them the extent to which the authorities were aware of them and of the means of identifying them. The second is exemption from the non-disclosure provisions, so that people holding data necessary either for the officials I have called "the gate-keepers" or for those I called "the guardians" are free to pass it to them if they so wish.

At that point, may I remind the noble Lord, Lord Hatch, that there are no rights at present about the use of information; there are only certain voluntarily observed administrative arrangements by the Department of Health and Social Security, doctors, or whoever holds the information. The exemption in the Bill allows those arrangements to continue just as they do now, and I can assure the noble Lord that the Home Office will certainly continue to obtain the written consent of the person concerned before medical information is sought from his doctor.

The number of individual cases altogether will not be large but the public interest at stake is very large indeed. When I last addressed your Lordships on an amendment to the same effect, your Lordships made it clear that they well understood the reasons of Her Majesty's Government for making these exemptions. They did so on the basis of the arguments I put before your Lordships today, supported by others in more detail that I have not advanced. I hope that your Lordships will not forget that this issue was decided once before.

I have outlined the central arguments against the amendment and I have explained the case for the exemptions and why we believe they contribute to the protection of the rights and freedoms of our individual citizens. Without elaborating further on that side of the equation, let us look at the other. As I have said, I have listened to it with care. Many individual points have been made, some perhaps with a good deal of hidden complexity; but the overall impression I have got is of a deep anxiety that powers are being taken in the Bill which, though they may be little used, give a great many of our own citizens a feeling that records about them are being secretly kept, perhaps to their detriment, and that information about them is being secretly sought, perhaps to their very great harm. Noble Lords have been at pains to suggest that the whole weight of this anxiety and this part of the Bill is directed against black and coloured people. They have said that they would thus feel themselves to be discriminated against by the very state which, in another statute, declares such discrimination to be totally unacceptable.

I believe those fears to be entirely misplaced. The regulations, and therefore the exemptions, bear equally upon those who come to us from every corner of the globe and they bear also, incidentally, upon whites as well as blacks who may be involved in immigration rackets. But be that as it may, we recognise the anxiety expressed by noble Lords and we recognise that, ill-founded though it is, it may be reflected and shared (as the noble and learned Lord. Lord Elwyn-Jones, has suggested) in important parts of our own community outside this Chamber. That, as the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, has said, is a matter of the gravest importance. I do not wish, therefore, to sweep aside everything that has been said in favour of this amendment, even though some of it has been very wide of the mark. We would rather take time to reflect further on everything that has been said on this issue by your Lordships and to consider, as we have been asked to do, whether this anxiety can be in some way allayed. I very much hope therefore that noble Lords opposite will forbear to press their amendment to a Division this afternoon.

Before the noble Lord sits down, may I ask him to clarify one point? He said that, although there were a number of aspects which did not involve breaking the law, it was important for the immigration authorities to know them. I do not know what they would be. But if they do not break the law why should they not say so? Why must they conceal from the data subject that they want to know whether he had an aunt in Timbuktu or somewhere? To me, the noble Lord has made no case at all and I think that before we finally vote, whether now or on Report, we must have an explanation. It really has no meaning whatever. If the immigration authorities think that somebody may be trying to get here, or approach his cousin, or something of that sort, surely if it is not illegal they can say, "We are trying to find out because we thought you wanted to approach your cousin". I cannot understand it at all.

Can I perhaps save the noble Lord from getting up twice by adding to this before he sits down? Can he clarify absolutely crystal clearly whether I heard him aright when he said that the Home Office, before asking for medical information for the purpose of immigration control, would ask the permission of the doctor? Secondly, would he address himself for a moment to the question I asked him as to why it is necessary for the United Kingdom to include this exemption under the term of immigration control, when no other European country does so?

I think the issue to which the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, directed your Lordships' attention was the issue that criminal information was already covered by exemptions and that non-criminal information must be so innocuous that there is no harm in revealing to the person to whom it related that it was being sought. In fact, as I understand it, the regulations applying to those who are and who are not entitled to live in this country are complex and are not entirely a part of the criminal law. There are occasions when people in this country seek to foster the introduction or the concealment in this country of people not entitled to be here. It is not in the interests of controlling such activities to reveal at the outset of an inquiry that this information is being sought.

If the requirements were a part of the criminal law, the noble Lord would have no difficulty in following the argument, if he will forgive me. The fact that they are not does not make them any less important for the regulation of the people who come to live in this country and who are not entitled so to do. I suppose it would be possible to make them criminally enforceable. I do not put that forward as Government policy because it would be a draconian measure; all I am saying is that where immigration officials need to seek out operations—where there are spurious language schools, for instance—it does not make a lot of sense to announce the beginning of the inquiry by a loud knock on the door and to say, "We are asking questions about you".

As to the noble Lord, Lord Hatch, I can indeed repeat what I said: the Home Office will certainly continue to obtain the written consent of the person concerned before medical information is sought from his doctor. As to why other countries do not have exactly similar legislation, I can only say that they do not have exactly similar circumstances to cope with.

Having said all that, may I remind your Lordships that we are aware of the general anxiety which lies behind this amendment. We have taken serious note of it, afresh, as a result of your Lordships' concern. Your Lordships' earlier concern may have done something to heighten that anxiety; I know not. But we see this as a real issue. It would be quite wrong—and I hope that your Lordships will not put me in the position of having to do this—to try to slam the door on consideration of this by marching firmly into the Lobbies against it. But if that is what noble Lords opposite want us to do, then I shall have to advise my noble friends so to do. I think it would be wise that I should take this to my right honourable friend; that we should consider developments in this now familiar but no less sensitive and important field in the spirit we have been asked to do; and that is what I hope noble Lords opposite will decide.

I am perfectly sure that the Committee will have heard with a great degree of pleasure and, if I may say so, with quite a degree of admiration what the noble Lord the Minister has said. I know he will have in mind that not only is this introduction of immigration control causing a great deal of concern, but it is a new measure in this Bill in the sense that when the Government's White Paper came out and the question of exemptions was thought of in regard to subject access and non-disclosure, immigration control was not mentioned at all. It is significant that that should be so, and that the White Paper went on to say, so far as I remember, that the exceptions to the rule must be made as small and as few as possible.

I wonder whether the noble Lord the Minister will bear with me for a moment, if I take the liberty on behalf of my noble friends of saying that we welcome what he has said. We are not anxious to have a Division for the sake of a Division. What we are most anxious about, bearing in mind especially that your Lordships will not further consider this Bill until next October at Report stage, is to know where we have got to.

In these circumstances, could the Minister help us by saying whether the further consideration which he will be giving with his right honourable friend will include the possibility of taking this immigration control out of the exemptions that we have been discussing? Obviously, I do not ask him for an undertaking in advance that that will be the result, but is he prepared to say that the matter that is being reconsidered will be the total exclusion from this clause, or indeed from any other similar clause, of immigration control records? I repeat that I am not asking him to say what will be the result of that reconsideration, but he would help us tremendously in coming to a decision if he could say that that will be the item that he will be reconsidering with his right honourable friend the Secretary of State.

I shall be very careful in my reply to that quite understandable intervention, because I do not want in any way to inhibit what now takes place. I have said that we are aware of the anxiety to which the amendment is addressed and that we will seek to alleviate that anxiety, if that appears to us both proper and feasible. By what means that might be, I really could not say; and if I were to answer the noble Lord's question in terms I am afraid it could only be read outside this Chamber as making one solution or another more or less likely.

What I will try to do—and I am sufficiently green in matters of administration not even to be able to undertake it—is to see that our amendment, if there is an amendment, when formulated, goes down sufficiently early for the noble Lord to get together with his friends, because I think we shall be dealing with this very soon after we return. I would hope to give him enough time to consider with his friends before we return whether what we are offering is, in fact, what he is looking for. I have gone on for rather a long time. I hope that I have not been too precise.

In view of the indication of the noble Lord on behalf of the Government that, at any rate, a fresh look is being given to this most difficult and very serious problem, we shall await impatiently the arrival of the Fall, and we hope it will include the fall of this proposal in the Bill. In the circumstances, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

moved Amendment No. 40:

Page 21. line 31. leave out subsection (2).

I wonder whether the Committee would be so kind as to allow me to speak not only to this amendment but also to Amendment No. 41. The view that we take is that Amendment No. 41 seeks to bring about exactly the same result as that which is enshrined in the purpose of Amendment No. 40. The effect of Amendment No. 40, if carried, would be to delete completely the provisions of subsection (2) of Clause 28. It would still mean of course that although no reference was made in that part of the Bill to those conditions, disclosure would still be possible under compulsion of law. That is the very wording of Amendment No. 41.

In the submission of those of us who sit on these Benches, the provisions of subsection (2) are quite as objectionable as the provisions of subsection (1). Subsection (1) deals with the right of a data subject. Subsection (2) deals with the authority of a data user to communicate some very volatile information to a third party who may be very hostile to the interests of the data subject—as, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has so clearly pointed out.

The area which this particular subsection covers is about as sensitive an area as one could ever have in our society. It is impossible, of course, to list the number of people or, indeed, the types of groups that would be prejudicially affected by this provision if it were allowed to go through unamended. Nevertheless, one can say that it is likely that the doctor-patient relationship will be more affected by this provision than possibly any provision that has ever been passed in any other Act of Parliament. It does not of course legislate to the effect that a doctor must disclose. What it says is that he can disclose. In our submission, it means in many cases that there will be active encouragement to disclose: that a climate will have been created in which it is more likely that disclosure will take place rather than less likely. Nevertheless, what is important is that whereas now millions of confidences are passed to doctors, in the confident knowledge and belief that they will never on any account be passed to anybody else, that confidence can no longer subsist once this provision becomes law.

It is therefore not unnatural that there has been very heavy objection to this provision. My noble and learned friend Lord Elwyn-Jones referred to it on a previous occasion. He spoke of the memorandum which was sent by Sir Norman Lindop's Committee to the Home Office on this matter. The phrase used was this—and this is not the phrase of people who are involved with this legislation in any political partisan way: it is the phrase of people who were involved with the Second Royal Commission Report on this particular matter:

"that it would be a palpable fraud upon the public if this subsection were allowed to become law".

Even stronger were the representations of Sir Douglas Black, the President of the Royal College of Physicians, in a letter which was sent to the Home Secretary in or about March of this year. He was speaking on behalf of a group of associations which included the British Medical Association, the British Association of Social Workers, the British Dental Association, the British Psychological Society, the Council for Professions Supplementary to Medicine, the Health Visitors' Association, the Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Nursing. These are the measured terms of Sir Douglas Black's letter:

"The group has asked me to express to you as a matter of urgency their grave concern about the effect of Clause 28(2) of the Bill on the confidentiality of health information and on public confidence in that confidentiality".

I do not think there is anything which anybody in this Committee, with great respect, could say which could possibly add to that very sincere expression of fear on the part of those most distinguished bodies associated with medicine.

As I say, the wording of Amendment No. 41 does not add anything, in effect, to the amendment which the Committee is now considering. Amendment No. 40. But it does perhaps spell out what the situation would be if subsection (2) were to be deleted completely. The compulsions of law would still remain. It would still be possible for this information to be ordered to be disclosed—for example, by a court making an order under the Bankers' Books Evidence Act or, indeed, by an order made by a court in respect of powers that are enshrined in very many of our fiscal Acts: in Acts relating to import duties and control. All those powers would still remain, as would the general power to issue a subpoena.

The compulsions of law in this realm are very considerable. It is our argument that they are sufficient. By the deletion of this subsection, one avoids driving what would otherwise be a massive salient into the whole structure of this legislation.

I must begin with an apology because I am going to repeat myself. I explained the need for the exemption in Clause 28(2), and sought to dispel some of the misapprehensions about it, at some length in our Committee consideration of last Session's Bill. I did so again on Report, and I did so once more at Second Reading of the present Bill. I now find myself required to do so yet again. I do not believe that arguments gain strength from constant repetition. At least, that certainly goes for other people's arguments and therefore I accept that it must go for mine as well. But I have no choice, because noble Lords opposite have trod the same measure again and I must join in.

We have before us not one amendment but two. As the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, has said, their effects are identical even if they differ in tone, and I must refer to both. Both discard from the Bill the general exemption of personal data from the nondisclosure rules for particular purposes. The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and his ally does so with no gesture of apology for all the difficulties which would then arise, or for all the purposes which would no longer be served. The amendment in the names of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, and his friends makes such a gesture. But as the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, has pointed out, because of the operation of Clause 33(4) it is not so much an apology as a tautology.

The exemptions with which both amendments concern themselves are all those relating to the purposes of Clause 28(1). We are not now considering the particular merits of law enforcement, taxation or immigration control; we are discussing the general principle that there are certain ways in which the state protects the public interest which ought not to be obstructed by introducing a brand new prohibition against citizens willing to assist its agents in their duty. The movers of these amendments want to introduce what is in effect a brand new prohibition. Those who at present innocently hold information which, in the hands of Customs and Excise, could lead to the smashing of an infamous gang of heroin importers are at present at perfect liberty to give that information to the authorities. They can do so without let or hindrance; and they can do so without informing those to whom the information relates either that they are doing so or that they may do so in the future.

To my mind, that is as it should be. If a wholesaler of goods innocently holds information which could lead to the exposure of evasion of duty by the importers of those goods, he is at liberty, as the law now stands, to pass on that information. The same goes for us all. If a crime has been committed or a law evaded we are perfectly free to help put the matter right; whether we are giving the police information to test an alibi, or giving the Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise or immigration officials the jigsaw pieces they need to help them enforce the laws which we in Parliament have enacted for the greater good of the people. We are free to do so without preliminary notice and without advertisement. We are free also not to do so. That applies to all the information we have—whether it is in our heads, in our diaries, or in our filing cabinets—except in those cases where already the law tells us we must give the information.

The only difference now is that such information may not be in our heads, our diaries or our filing cabinets but may be on our computers. Once there, noble Lords who have spoken say it should be sacrosanct; that the computer should be to the user as the confessional is to the sinner—a safe repository of the most damning as well as the most trivial confidence. They say that only if such people are publicly warned that their fellow citizens may help to apprehend them with a vital clue to the identity of the fraudster who has cheated the Inland Revenue of millions or even hundreds of pounds, of the rapist who has ruined a dozen fives, or of the drug smuggler who has brought thousands in misery to their deaths, will they be at risk of justice and detection.

The same applies to the routine as it does to the exceptional. Information of assistance in investigating a burglary, a road traffic accident or a mugging consisting of no more perhaps than an address, a work record or physical description is equally important to the law enforcement agencies—yet would be equally impeded under the amendments.

Let me say again—as I hope I have made clear before—that there is no question of Clause 28(2) empowering the police or anyone else to require information. I am grateful to noble Lords who now accept this, but there is still such a belief in some quarters—encouraged perhaps by some of the more extravagant claims made at an earlier stage (and not only in your Lordships' House) that, under Clause 28(2), data users are compelled to disclose data.

Who said that?

I always find it charming when the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, makes himself heard above my voice when he is seated. He will forgive me if I do not respond.

I wonder whether the noble Lord can tell us who said it, because nobody in this Committee has ever made such a claim.

The reactions of people and comments which the noble Lord himself has made suggested that this must be the case, because otherwise there is no explanation of them. But it is a belief that has been more generally current among many people outside this Committee.

That is something quite different.

I shall be obliged if the noble Lord will let me get on, or else stop me.

Nothing of the sort is the case. Clause 28(2) is 100 per cent, neutral. There is neither encouragement nor legitimisation of such disclosures. Some professional bodies with ethical codes of confidentiality do now recognise, as they have always recognised, that in certain circumstances the public interest will outweigh the obligation of confidence and that information can be given. It is so with Clause 28(2). In the same way, it acknowledges that holders of information can, if they themselves judge it right and proper so to do (and it is a decision entirely for them), disclose data where the interests of crime prevention, and so on, outweigh those of confidentiality. And they can refuse to do so when they do not.

To enable that to happen, the prohibitions on unregistered disclosures which the Bill erects elsewhere will not apply here, as the Bill is now drafted. That leaves the balance of consideration by the burgled data user, or the data user in any other way involved, exactly where it stands at present. It may be difficult for him to decide what to do, but it will be no more difficult than at present. I am really puzzled by the assertion made by the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, that this will undermine confidence in the medical profession. They are free under the law to reveal all now; they are free under the law to reveal nothing now. Exactly the same will be the case if this Bill is passed in its present form.

My sorrow is that we have failed to get that across to all the bodies which noble Lords have mentioned and to which the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, referred a moment ago. That is the central issue to which this amendment is addressed, and I believe that it is mistaken.

Before I sit down, may I say two things to the noble Lord, Lord Avebury? First, I gave an undertaking to the noble Lord, Lord Hatch of Lusby, about inquiries by the Home Office. Inadvertently or otherwise, the noble Lord imputed to me an undertaking that all inquiries about health records will be notified to the data subject. I would not at this notice be able to endorse so wide a policy statement; I have merely told the noble Lord what I am in a position to say.

Secondly, I have a note on the position of the data user in deciding whether or not to disclose information. At the end of the day. the user will be able to use as his defence against a prosecution for unauthorised disclosure the fact that he had reasonable grounds for believing that the disclosure would have been likely to cause prejudice: that is spelt out in Clause 28(2). But the key point is that the user is free to make his own decision, as he does now—but he will of course know that if he decides wrongly he may be open to prosecution. That is surely the kind of disincentive to disclosure which the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, himself would want.

If that is all the noble Lord the Minister has to say then I am extremely disappointed. He has not answered my direct question at the beginning of my remarks as to whether or not the undertakings he had given the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, about subject access provisions also extended to the non-disclosure provisions, because in my opinion they are far more important.

If the noble Lord will be kind enough to give way, I regret that I mislaid my note on that point. The answer is that indeed they do; the consideration extends to the whole of Clause 28 and therefore to both the subsections the noble Lord is interested in.

That is certainly a relief, because it will shorten the discussion on the next amendment when we come to consider the question of nondisclosure as it affects immigration records in particular. But, even so, the noble Lord has really not given any guidance to the data user, he has simply repeated the phraseology we find in the Bill, that the data user must have reasonable grounds for believing that any of the purposes mentioned in subsection (1) are prejudiced if he is to hand over the information.

The noble Lord did not answer the question I put, which is really of great importance for the mass of data users who will have to try to interpret this Bill: that is, whether when an individual police officer, customs officer, tax inspector or immigration officer comes to him and he makes the unsupported assertion that the purposes in question are going to be prejudiced, that will be a sufficient defence when the data user finds himself in court for a breach of confidentiality. If this is the way "reasonable grounds" are to be interpreted it makes the Bill quite simple from the point of view of the data user, but it could encourage such a mass of disclosures as to undermine public confidence in the Bill. That is why I asked the question and it is a very important one.

The second reason for my disappointment with the Minister's answer is that the examples he gave were all drawn from the private sector, whereas the anxiety felt in the minds of the public about the exemptions from non-disclosure provisions relate almost entirely to what may happen in the public sector, to the exchanges the noble Lord, Lord Swinfen, was talking about earlier between one Government Department and another, and whether or not, because of the permissive character of Clause 28(2), these are going to be widened beyond what is the practice at present. I have already mentioned what the Inland Revenue do, but there is a general principle operating here, which was outlined in the report of the Royal Commission on Standards of Conduct in Public Life, paragraph 94:

"A substantial conflict of public policy is involved in any proposal that information collected under compulsion by an official agency for a specific purpose should be released to any other agency for a different purpose. Although there are some exceptions, the philosophy behind most legislation for at least 50 years has been that when the State takes power to require an individual or firm to surrender a degree of personal or business privacy it gives in return an assurance that the information thus coming into the hands of an official agency will be safeguarded and used for no extraneous purpose. We are aware that there is public anxiety about the transfer of personal information between official agencies and modern methods of data storage have sharpened this anxiety".

That is the crux of the matter: whether or not the information contained in one department is going to be transferred to another under Clause 28(2) without the knowledge of the data subject and without any remedy being available to him.

Equally, there is the lesser case, which the noble Lord concentrated on, where the private sector data user is asked for information, generally not in the dramatic circumstances the noble Lord outlined where there is some mass conspiracy to smuggle heroin, but when some far lesser problem has arisen in connection with the apprehension of offenders, detection of crime and so on. It is in these smaller cases of a day-to-day nature, thefts and burglaries and so on, which are infinitely more common than the sort of serious crimes the noble Lord mentioned, that the data user will have an impossible task. This is why I believe subsection (2) of Clause 28 as it stands is unworkable and will bring the Bill into disrepute. If the noble Lord is not prepared to accept this amendment, or even to contemplate any amendment which gives the data user proper guidance, we shall have no alternative but to test the feeling of the Committee.

I quite understand, but I think when the Committee comes to decide it should do so on the right facts. I must return to the first part of the remarks the noble Lord made, rueing the terrible dilemma which will face a data user when the bobby knocks on the door and wants to know whether Fred was at work last Tuesday. This is no more and no less than the terrible dilemma which now faces him if the records are manual; he still has to decide whether the bobby is legitimately after facts or whether he is being misled. He has to rely on his own judgment now and he will have to rely on his own judgment in the future.

It is fair enough to say that this Bill does nothing to resolve that time-honoured dilemma, which has faced people asked to assist the authorities in their inquiries since the authorities started asking them to do so. It may be that legislation for that is overdue; I rather doubt it, but it might be. But that is not what the noble Lord is suggesting; he is suggesting that because of this Bill there is a new difficulty. The only difference is that the information, as I said earlier in my perhaps over-lengthy speech, is not on paper or in a head or in a filing cabinet but on a floppy disc, and it will say whether Fred was there or not. If the noble Lord really thinks that a reason for not assisting the authorities in pursuit of even minor crimes, let alone rape, murder, drug smuggling and so on—I am prepared to leave those on one side because the argument so obviously does not need to be stated—is that people ought not to help the authorities without first telling Fred that they are going to help the authorities, and giving Fred a chance to do a flit, then I think the noble Lord is just wrong-headed and I hope we do divide and we defeat the amendment.

If the noble Lord will allow me, the difference is that when the data is on a floppy disc instead of in manual records a wrong decision by a data user renders him liable to proceedings for contravening the provision in Clause 26(3)(a). If it was in a manual form he would not be liable to proceedings. That is the difference which the noble Lord has ignored between the manual and the computer records. But in his second speech he has again ignored the major question of the public sector user, which is the question uppermost in my mind. The noble Lord has said nothing to make me change my view of these provisions.

As a co-signatory to the amendment, I would prefer not to divide the Committee on this but to consider what the noble Lord has said, because it seems to me that the fact that the liability is exactly the same now as it was before the Bill is a relevant argument. I am not entirely happy. I hope my noble friend will withdraw the amendment and look at it again for Report, because it has been a long and difficult argument and it is rather a complicated situation.

Of course, I am perfectly happy to defer to the advice given by my noble friend, so particularly since I do not feel we have reached a satisfactory conclusion on this.

May I just repeat, because the noble Lord invited me to repeat, the fact that the liabilities are exactly the same now; the informant is already under such a threat as there is in the Bill. That is the point the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, has latched on to, and I would like to say that that is valid. I will not go into the other matters the noble Lord raised.

The noble Lord the Minister could have saved himself the trouble, because I was about to say to my noble friend Lord Donaldson that I felt there was weight in his advice; and particularly because I felt that we had not reached a conclusion on this argument, and it would be desirable to return to it on Report, I was going to ask your Lordships' permission to withdraw the amendment.

moved Amendment No. 41:

Page 21. leave out lines 33 to 42. and insert ("the disclosure is made under compulsion of law.")

I understand that the noble Lord is seeking to divide the Committee and I merely say that I stand by everything that I said.

moved Amendment No. 42:

Page 21, line 34, after ("(1)") insert ("(a), (b) or (c)").

The noble Lord is right in thinking that the considerations he is concerned with will be swept up in the considerations on the earlier amendment which he and his noble friends were good enough to withdraw. Therefore, I do not think there is much point in my referring at length again to the anxieties to which he has referred. My acknowledgment of them was genuine, as was my undertaking to review. I hope it will stand on the record of our consideration of both provisions that this is so, and I shall not return to it.

As to the way in which our considerations will be conducted, I shall of course consider the advice that the noble Lord has given us about looking at the situation in Germany. The noble Lord revealed in his remarks that he knows not only the ropes but the routes, as I always suspected he did. If there is something useful to be learned therefrom, I do not doubt that we shall be able to glean it.

I am grateful to the noble Lord the Minister for his further assurance on that point. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

had given notice of his intention to move Amendment No. 43:

Page 21. line 37, after ("in") insert ("sub-paragraphs (a), (b) or (c) of)

Is the noble Lord by any chance referring to Amendment No. 44? I think that Amendment No. 43 goes with Amendment No. 42.

I am so sorry. I do apologise. Amendment No. 43 goes with Amendment No. 42, and I withdraw it.

I presume that the noble Lord does not intend to move Amendment No. 43, so Amendment No. 43 is not moved.

moved Amendment No. 44:

I fear that I cannot match the noble Lord's admirable brevity. I well recall that at various stages on last Session's Bill the noble Lord and his noble friend moved amendments to the effect that disclosures made under Clause 28(2) should be notified to the registrar, who might then be required to take action of one kind or another. The idea is not without attractions, and they have put it forward in various forms. The data user had to publish details of the disclosures and provide data subjects with a copy of the data about the subject that had been disclosed. At Report stage the provision was reduced to a requirement to notify the registrar, but then there was nothing further that anybody had to do, and on Third Reading the noble Lord was suggesting that the registrar should publish the facts and details of disclosures within 10 years.

The proposition now before us is closest to the second of the three earlier ones. It is suggested that it should be a condition of the Clause 28(2) exemption that the fact of any disclosure, a copy of the data disclosed, and details of the recipient and the purpose of the disclosure, should be notified to the registrar. But no duties are placed on the registrar in respect of any action that he should then take.

I did two things in response to the amendments last time. First, I undertook to look carefully at the proposition of notifying what we came to refer to as "exempt disclosures" to the registrar. When first put to us it was a novel idea. We felt that it deserved close attention. But, secondly, I also laid emphasis on the many difficulties that it raised, and I hope that I was careful enough not to give any false indications. I say that because we spent some considerable time examining the possibility of requiring notifications to be made to the registrar, and as a result we feel, rather regretfully, that the advantages are outweighed by the difficulties.

Under the amendment before us the registrar would receive a notification every time a data user made a disclosure to the police or some other body under Clause 28(2). It would consist of the fact that the disclosure had been made, and would presumably include the name and address of the data user and the date as a minimum, together with a copy of all the data disclosed, a note of the person to whom it was disclosed, and a statement showing for which of the Clause 28(1) purposes it was disclosed. What have been brought home to us in our consideration of the proposition are the bureaucratic procedures that would have to be gone through to sustain the notification mechanism. The user would have to make a note of all the necessary details, copying out the precise information that is disclosed. I do not suppose that he would often have thought it worthwhile to design computer systems to cope with irregular occurrences such as these. He would then have to file it all, since if the procedure is to have a purpose it is to check at some later date on disclosures. If he does not have a precise record, the user making the disclosure will be unable to confirm just what were the circumstances and details.

But of course it is not only the person making the disclosures who is involved. The recipient of the data will have to go through precisely the same procedure, for he, too, will need to be able to check back at some later date on precisely what occurred. The burden will be greater on him because while most of the data users concerned will be concerned only once or twice, or intermittently, it will be the recipients who will be involved regularly.

Finally there is the registrar. He will have to take receipt of the notifications and in some way process them and scrutinise them. The bureaucratic implications of all that are considerable, and of course the principal victims—those required to devote most manpower and time and effort to this new bureaucratic task—will be, first, the registrar and, secondly, the police, who will be the most frequent recipients of exempt disclosures. We had to consider whether this would be a desirable use of their time.

A further effect arising from all this, and an important one, would be this. The necessity for these procedures would place on users an annoying burden which could act as a disincentive to them. At present they can make disclosures as and when they think fit, without trouble, and this proposal would mean some difficulty and could hamper police work by making the acquisition of even routine information such a form-filling exercise that the holders of the information might be reluctant to help.

These are practical, down-to-earth factors, but none the less real for that. As for the advantages of the amendment, I cannot help feeling that they are a little limited, for it is not at all clear what the registrar is to do with these notifications when he has got them. Since no duties to publish them are imposed, they will presumably act as a basis on which he can monitor and check exempt disclosure. But the notifications will give him very limited information to go on. The fact that user X disclosed to the police on such and such a date Mr. Jones's address for the purposes of the detection of crime will not of itself tell the registrar very much; or the fact that user Y disclosed the names of 10,000 customers who had bought rat poison in the past year —and of course there would have to be a list of 10,000 names together with the report—will not tell him much.

So the prospect, I regret, would seem to be that we would put a lot of work on quite a number of people and dissipate some of the resources of the data protection registrar without producing any very tangible benefits to show for it. Therefore, I cannot help feeling that the gains offered by the amendment, attractive as they are at first blush, are outweighed by the losses. I know that the noble Lord has already thought very often about this point, and therefore I much regret having to ask him whether he would be kind enough to think yet again.

I do not want to say a lot about this matter, but I think that the noble Lord's advice about how difficult this would be to operate in the computer world is absolutely remote from the facts. All of these things, including stamping the envelope, could be done at the beginning of each entry. This is what computers do. There are a series of functions that have to be carried out. They could all be done by way of a single, though rather complex, order to the computer. The idea that it is labour intensive shows no appreciation at all of what we are talking about. However, I do not wish to encourage my noble friend to press the amendment. I just think that the noble Lord's evasion of it was inadequate.

I do not know whether "evasion" is the right word; it was meant to be a response. I may be out of date with my mechanics, but we are still left with the registrar (are we not?) opening this vast pile of envelopes and deciding what they tell him. It is very difficult to know what they will tell him, and it is even more difficult from the amendment to know what he would then do about it.

The noble Lord the Minister is very skilled at producing far-fetched examples. I think that in referring to 10,000 customers buying rat poison he has excelled himself, since one could hardly imagine that the police would be capable of dealing with such a vast amount of information. But it is a useful illustration from one point of view, in that the data user who had such a large number of customers would presumably print out that information from his computer, or he would transfer to the police a disc or a tape which contained that information. If he did that, it would be very simple for him to provide a copy of it. Just as he had printed out the 10,000 names, he could print out two copies of the 10,000 names. I admit that it would involve him in a minor additional expense, but I do not think that the administrative burdens that it would impose on the data user would be all that great.

The noble Lord also very skilfully twisted around what the amendment says. It would not be the recipient of the data who would have to notify the registrar; it would be the data user who made the disclosure. Therefore although, as the noble Lord says, the police will probably be the largest recipients of data disclosed under Clause 28(2), they will not necessarily be the data user who made the largest number of reports to the registrar under this amendment, if it were passed.

However, I certainly do not want to press the matter here. Since the noble Lord has the whole of the Summer Recess in front of him, and obviously he is going to use this very productively in the way that he has already explained, I should like to make a suggestion to him. As he says, the principal anxiety which people have in this matter is about the number of disclosures and their nature. It would perhaps be possible, without going to the extent of requiring data users to make individual reports of this kind, to enable the registrar somehow to provide a statistical picture of the disclosures under Clause 28(2). That would probably be accomplished by a much simpler form of report than the submission of copies as envisaged here. I would be grateful if the noble Lord can consider that suggestion and so enable us to discuss it, no doubt, before we return to the matter on Report. I am delighted to see that the noble Lord wants to intervene.

I was about to say that the noble Lord's plans for my summer holiday are beginning to diverge a little from my own. However, I always like to take advice in good heart. I do not want to impose too much work on others. Most of the ground has been gone over previously. If it seems to us that there is ground that has not been gone over and that has been revealed by what the noble Lord suggests and by what the noble Lord. Lord Donaldson, has remarked, we shall certainly look at it. I shall perhaps be writing to the noble Lord if he will give me his holiday address, preferably in the United Kingdom.

I assure the Minister that I shall be at my desk throughout the whole of this summer. I shall be delighted to hear from him and to enter into discussions about how the principle behind this amendment can most readily be achieved. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

moved Amendment No. 45:

Page 21, line 42, at end insert (", but this subsection does not apply to persons carrying on computer bureaux who provide services in respect of personal data.").

I hope that what I am about to say will address the noble and learned Lord's concern. If it does not, he will have to put me right and I shall return. As Clause 26(3) indicates, the non-disclosure provisions include Clause 5(2)(d), which prohibits unregistered disclosures of personal data by data users; Clause 15, which prohibits disclosures of personal data by computer bureaux without the authority of the data user who holds the data; and, speaking in general terms, any of the principles inconsistent with a disclosure. Thus, where the Bill exempts personal data from the non-disclosure provisions it allows a data user to make an unregistered disclosure and allows a computer bureau to make a disclosure without the authority of the data user. This amendment seeks to disapply the exemption from the non-disclosure provisions in Clause 28(2) in the case of computer bureaux. The effect would be that where the police or some other law enforcement agency approached a computer bureau seeking information in connection with, say, the prevention or detection of crime, the bureau would be prohibited by law from giving them information without first having sought the authority of the data user.

The argument that seems to underlie the amendment is that only the data user who holds personal data is in a position to judge whether personal data should be disclosed to the police and so on under Clause 28(2). On this argument, a person carrying on a computer bureau cannot be trusted to make a sensible decision on whether data should be disclosed. I fear that in answering this amendment I shall be returning to familar argument.

The Bill before the Committee includes a number of prohibitions and restrictions on the disclosure of personal data which will, in general, regulate access to personal data by third parties. This is obviously an essential part of any legislation designed to give effect to the principles set out in the Council of Europe Convention. But the convention accepts that some interests must override those enshrined in it and the Government are also determined that the legislation should not prejudice the essential work of the various law enforcement agencies, such as the police.

The police and other similar bodies often have to request information from numerous unexpected sources and, if I can hark back to the last exchanges, other people do. too. If a market is suddenly flooded by suspect tinned salmon, for instance, there are large numbers of inquiries to be made. The Government therefore take the view that it is necessary to make exceptions to the various new prohibitions on disclosure. Thus, Clause 28(2) disapplies these prohibitions in specified circumstances. The effect is not to produce some new threat to confidentiality. It is simply to ensure that the position as it exists now, before enactment of the Bill, remains exactly as it is and has been for many years, without difficulty or complaint. This means that when the police ask for information the person concerned will have to judge in the light of any professional or other constraints whether to disclose the data or not.

I do not see sufficient reason to depart from this argument and the policy already embodied in the Bill in the case of computer bureaux. I should like to ask the noble and learned Lord to consider a number of points. Before doing so, I should perhaps find out whether I have said enough to address his principal concern.

I think that it might be convenient for me to give careful consideration to what the noble Lord has said. If he would care to amplify his remarks with any further material that would be helpful to determine the matter between now and October, I shall be happy to listen, if it does not put too much burden on him.

The burden is nothing to me. I fear that it might be too much for the House. Would the noble and learned Lord prefer me to do this now, or by letter?

By letter.

With pleasure.

In the light of that, and in the expectation that there will be leisure in which to examine a highly technical point within the long period of time when the noble Lord is working every day in the Houses of Parliament, I shall undertake to look at this question again and return to it in due course. In the circumstances, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

moved Amendment No. 45A:

Leave out Clause 29 and insert the following new clause:

I know that the Committee is very hungry and I shall be brief. I was about to speak on this matter on the Question that the clause stand part of the Bill, but my noble friend has tabled an amendment so I shall say just a few words about the amendment. For a good many years I was chairman of the National Committee of the Family Service Units. They are social work units which take the most difficult families in the area and try to sort out their problems. In the days when I was connected with them—which was 10 years or more ago—the reports used to be extremely frank and very often quite unrepeatable, and with very good reason.

Therefore, I rang up the Director-General of the FSUs today, Tim Cook, who is a very experienced social worker in many ways. He said that there will be difficulties about this matter but that the general feeling in his organisation is that social workers are changing their minds. He said that increasingly they feel that as a general rule they should not write down opinions but should write down facts and let the next social worker who takes over form his own conclusion from the facts. I do not think that you can do that entirely, and I think there will always be cases—as this document to which my noble friend has referred makes perfectly clear. I wish I had had time to read it more thoroughly, for I just glanced at it this afternoon. There will be a number of cases which you cannot allow to be passed on.

What worries me is that both my noble friend's amendment and Clause 29 have a very distant approach to what happens to this information. You cannot ask the Secretary of State each time a social worker wants to say "This will be bad for the child". Nor will the matter necessarily reach the stage of going to court. Both the Bill on the one hand and the amendment on the other seem to leave the way in which the decision is made far too high up the hierarchy to make sense at all. So I do not think it will do as it is. It being so near dinner time, I shall say no more than that, because it seems to me that, if the noble Lord will agree at all, we shall have time to study this document, and the Government will have received the response to it by the Report stage. I think it is likely that the noble Lord would like to change Clause 29 in a way which would suit my noble friend Lord Avebury, myself, and various other people. So adding to the noble Lord's vocational pleasure, I propose to say no more.

As I explained when we discussed amendments on Clause 29 of last Session's Bill, these order-making powers have been included in order to allow us to undertake full consultations before deciding what, if any, restrictions upon the right of subject access shall be imposed in this area. As your Lordships obviously appreciate, difficult and sensitive issues are involved, issues that were also obvious to the authors of the convention. That is one of the reasons why Article 9(b) permits derogations in the interests of protecting the data subject.

I was to have enlarged on the kind of difficulties that there might be, but that has been done very capably by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and with great close knowledge by the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson. So I can say that the Government are convinced that there are difficult issues here that should only be resolved after the fullest consultation. On the health side the Government have had the benefit of advice from an Interprofessional Working Group on Access to Personal Health Information, with membership from the medical, nursing, social work and other health professions. The group has welcomed the general principle that individuals should have access to their health records; but it has suggested that unrestricted access could on occasions be harmful. It has proposed therefore that health professionals should have discretion to prepare subjects to receive the information; and that they may sometimes need to be able to withhold information altogether.

The group is of the view however that in those circumstances some avenue of appeal should be available to the individual deprived of his normal entitlement to subject access. The next step will be for the Government to issue a consultative document setting out proposals for the content of an order under Clause 29(1), and work on this is now underway. Obviously these consultations will include representatives of patients as well as those of the health professions. It is also worth noting that the proposals of the interprofessional group are arguably less restrictive than the amendment proposed by the noble Lord. Its approach provides for filtered access in some cases rather than an absolute refusal.

As to social work records, the Department of Health and Social Security has already, as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has said, issued a consultative document discussing the content of the order to be made under Clause 29(2). I must say that I listened to the noble lord's strictures about the shortage of time in which to consider it with a certain amount of wry amusement as we received his amendment only about 55 hours ago, and our consideration of that has been somewhat restricted. The document has been sent to representatives of clients as well as to the relevant professional bodies. I ought to tell the noble Lord that Paper I, to which he referred and about which he said the time was so short, in fact has nothing to do with data protection as such at all. Although the timescale may be of concern to him, it is not of proper concern to the Committee.

Paper II is to do with orders under Clause 29(2) of the Bill and the timescale there is until the end of September. As I said, it has been sent to representatives of clients as well as to the professions. The two options discussed in the document would involve a right to seek the opinion of an independent social worker where access was refused. The second would involve a further right to contest refusal through the registrar or the courts. Comments on the document have been requested by 30th September, and I think it would be proper if I were to bring to the attention of my honourable friends in another department the comments made by the noble Lord. Lord Donaldson, about the changing style of work in the social work services, although I do not doubt that they may well be aware of it already. It is a very necessary consideration.

In conclusion, we are approaching the issue of subject access to health and social work records with very great caution. There are difficult issues here which cannot be swept aside simply by regarding the right of access as sacrosanct. The order-making powers in Clause 29 are subject to full parliamentary control within the limits rightly described by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury. But I hope that the timing of the consultations and the noble Lord's continual presence at his own desk will ensure that he at least is very well armed when we come to discuss this, as I presume we will, at the Report stage.

I should like to add one point. It is very important to remember that records of this kind will be referred to from years ago, so that there must be a retrospective cut. The Bill must not apply to records made before the Bill becomes law.

I am seized of the point and I am sure that my honourable and right honourable friends will be.

I am most grateful to the noble Lord for his reply and for mentioning the rights of appeal, which I ought to have dealt with in my opening remarks and which I think are very generally to be welcomed. Where a person is denied access to his medical or social works record obviously there ought to be some procedure for him to go to the registrar or indeed to a court of law. That sounds like a very useful provision.

I am also grateful to the noble Lord for his assurance that there will be full consultation with bodies representing the interests of patients and clients, and that they have received the two discussion documents to which I have referred. The first document is of as much concern to the Committee as is the second—the one for which the timeseale for reply is so short—because if the noble Lord would care to look at the contra-indications to disclosure in Paper I, he will find that they are almost identical to those which are given in the second paper dealing with the Data Protection Bill.

Therefore, if some firm decisions were taken on non-disclosure under the circumstances outlined in Paper I, they would inevitably have repercussions on the order which the Secretary of State is ultimately to make. Maybe that is a small quibble. I was grateful to the noble Lord for the general information he gave the Committee and for the approach he is adopting to the consultations. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

moved Amendment No. 46:

I cannot help thinking that this amendment contains something of a contradiction in terms. It speaks of exempting from subject access data consisting of information which is "confidential to journalists' sources". That of course means that if a journalist's source holds data and attaches a label of confidentiality to the data, he can refuse subject access at will. Now, both I and the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, qualify as journalists' sources—we have both provided material for stories at one time or another. But surely the noble Lord is not suggesting that for that reason we as data users—and all the thousands of others in the same category—should be able to refuse subject access to data we hold. So we must assume that this is not the purpose of the amendment but merely the product of loose drafting, and that the real purpose is to protect the journalists who may hold data.

Here is the contradiction. If a journalist holds information that is confidential to his source, how has he come by it? It cannot properly be confidential to one person yet given by that person to another. So again we have to translate. Perhaps I might describe briefly what I think the noble Lord is aiming at in this amendment: that is, information that is held by a journalist and was given to him by a source that wishes not to be disclosed.

So let us examine the merits of that amendment. The suggested scenario is that a source goes to a journalist with information about, let us say, one of your Lordships, saying that it must not be revealed who the information comes from. The journalist is a thoroughly modern one who transcribes the information onto a computer and "processes" the resultant data in the terms of Clause 1 of the Bill: that is, builds up a computer file on the noble Lord concerned, using it perhaps to extract information at the press of a button in order to compose a story—saying either what a fine person the noble Lord is or, much less likely, what a villain he is. That is the picture before us. Now. the first thing I have to ask is whether the noble Lord concerned should not have access to the data to check whether the information is accurate, and the rest. I am not aware of the journalistic profession —who are generally in favour of data protection—arguing that they should be excused from one of its principal elements. Indeed, they might fear that they would be accused of double standards if they did. So where is the reason that the subject of journalists' data should have a lesser degree of protection than the subjects of others' data?

It is presumably that the knowledge that subjects will have access will discourage sources from coming forward and giving personal information about people to journalists, because they fear that they will be revealed as the source, and that this will be generally detrimental to the fifth estate. But we have special provision in the Bill to cover that point. In the subject access provisions, Clauses 21(4)(a) and (5) taken together have the effect that users, in giving subject access, do not have to reveal who has given them the information about the subject that they hold. It may be argued that some subjects may be able to deduce that only so-and-so could have possibly furnished the user with the information he holds. But surely that will apply at the end of the day anyway when the story is published. I do not see how it can be convincingly argued that the fear of a deduction of sources warrants exemption from subject access, when the whole point of the journalist holding the information must be to publish it eventually, when the fear of deduction must be even greater.

A parallel with last Session's Police and Criminal Evidence Bill has been drawn which I must challenge. The Government did amend that Bill to apply a special procedure to material held by journalists when it came to police powers of search and seizure. But this is not a true analogy. The question of the powers of the police to require the production of evidence in the form of material held by journalists is one thing. It is quite another to try to apply the same arguments to whether an individual should be able to have subject access to data about him that a journalist holds on a computer. I applaud the disinterested concern of the noble Lord in seeking to ensure maximum protection for journalists. But I am not sure that they themselves would seek it, particularly since subject access will not oblige them in any case to reveal their sources. I would therefore ask him to think again about this amendment.

May I ask the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, how he would define a journalist for this amendment? Would that include freelance journalists or only salaried journalists —journalists working for a certain paper?

I referred to the difficulty of denning a journalist, and I accepted in my earlier remarks that that was one of the problems. I accepted that there were journalists, or perhaps non-journalists, who are a little uneasy about a statutory definition of what is, or is not, a journalist. I can think of a number of ways of doing it. One could have a member of the National Union of Journalists. One could perhaps have a member of the Institute of Journalists. There are many other ways of doing it. But I doubt whether I am the person qualified to give advice to the Committee on a definition of that kind.

May I return to the words of the noble Baroness. I was grateful for that part of her reply which came later in her speech which appeared to give me some reassurance and suggested that the points about which I was anxious—namely, the confidentiality of journalists' sources—was covered elsewhere in the Bill, and she drew my attention to certain clauses of the Bill which I shall look at closely later. However, in the earlier part of her remarks the noble Baroness gave me a somewhat inadequate reply to a later amendment which I have not yet moved. In other words, about people who are perhaps defamed by things which are published and which have previously been stored electronically. That is a matter for later and I do not want to go into that here and now. The noble Baroness referred to people being defamed. The defamation of course would occur on publication. There would then be a remedy through the courts in the ordinary way. That is an entirely separate matter.

In so far as the noble Baroness has given me some reassurance with regard to the confidentiality of journalists' sources, I had better look at that carefully and consult with those who advise me. With regard to the fact that the amendment is said to have been drafted defectively, I have to plead that it was drafted by somebody who worked for some years in the Public Bill Office but now is employed otherwise. Perhaps your Lordships may think that is wise! I shall nevertheless go back to my sources and seek further advice and consider further what the noble Baroness has said.

Before the noble Lord takes the course that I think he wishes to take, I wonder if one thing could be clarified by the noble Baroness, whose participation in the Committee's proceedings we all very much welcome. I am not clear about whether there is a specific exemption in the Bill which covers the situation where the source clearly appears on the record that has been made and if there is something in the Bill which enables the data user in this case to tell the data subject that the data subject is entitled to a copy of everything, but not the source which is on the computer. I am not clear about that. If it is not in the Bill a different consideration arises.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, for his kind words. Words of kindness in a hungry House are welcome indeed. If he reads what I was saying and considers Clause 21(4)(a) and Clause 21 (5) he will find the exemption for which he is looking.

If the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, will return to his point on a further amendment, as he has suggested, perhaps we might have what is known as a natural break.

Once again I am deeply grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, for his brief intervention making the substance of my point rather clearer than I made it earlier. That was precisely the anxiety that I had in mind when I moved the amendment. I have listened to what the noble Baroness said and, as I have said, I will have further thought about it. In the meantime I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

I understand that through the usual channels it has been agreed that this might be a convenient moment for the main protagonists in the business of the Committee to break for dinner.

My Lords, before the next business is taken, I wonder whether the noble Lord will indicate at what time we shall return to the business on the Data Protection Bill?

My Lords, I must apologise to the noble Lord and indeed to many hungry and vociferous noble Members of your Lordships' House. I understand the usual channels agreed that the period should be three-quarters of an hour, 45 minutes. I believe that your Lordships would wish that we should give the protagonists an extra minute so perhaps we should re-commence further business on the Bill at eight o'clock.

My Lords, I beg to move that the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973 (Section 111) Amendment Order 1983 be approved. One of the difficulties about becoming a Member of your Lordships' House while a Government Minister is that one does not have the opportunity of selecting one's own occasion to make one's first remarks at your Dispatch Box. Devoted as I am to the cause of restraint where the spending of taxpayers' or ratepayers' money is concerned, I have to admit that the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973 (Section 111) Amendment Order 1983 would not have been among the front runners were I to have chosen my own subject on this occasion. Nevertheless, I realise that it is an essential order and I am privileged to have the opportunity of asking your Lordships to approve it.

For the past 13 years I was in another place where I had the honour of representing the old constituency of Ross and Cromarty. That was terminated at the last election and I am now deeply aware of the privilege which has made it possible for me to continue to serve in your Lordships' House.

The title of this order describes its purpose, which is to amend Section 111 of the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973. This section enables the Secretary of State to make regulations with respect to rates. I shall come to these powers presently. But your Lordships may find it helpful if I first of all describe briefly the powers under which the order itself is made. These are contained in Section 5(6) of the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1966. Subsection (6) is part of the measures introduced last year into Section 5 of the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1966 by Section 1 of Local Government and Planning (Scotland) Act 1982, and it provides that the Secretary of State may, by order, repeal or amend any enactment relating to the determination, levy or payment of a rate and where such is affected by a determination (or deemed determination) under section 5(4) (b)

An order made under subsection (6) has no effect until approved by resolution of each House of Parliament. If approved this order will amend primary legislation. The statute in question is Section 111(1) of the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973 which enables the Secretary of State to make regulations with respect to rates. Under Section 108 of that Act rates are to be determined by local authorities only once a year in advance of each financial year. The Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) (Scotland) Act 1981 introduced a new provision into the 1973 Act (Section 108A(1)) which allowed a local authority to determine a lower rate than that determined under Section 108. The 1981 Act also amended the 1973 Act to allow the Secretary of State to make regulations as regards a lower rate determined under Section 108A(1) for the repayment of sums paid in respect of a rate determined under Section 108 and for the cost of levying and collecting the lower rate to be borne by the authority. This new provision became paragraph (f)of subsection (1) of Section 111.

No such provision was made by the Local Government and Planning (Scotland) Act 1982 with regard to a rate determined by an authority under Section 5 of the 1966 Act as amended by the 1982 Act and the purpose of this order is to make it clear and beyond doubt that the Secretary of State may with regard to a rate determined under Section 5(4)(b) make a regulation, under the new provision in Section 111 (f) with regard to the repayment of sums paid under Section 108 and to the cost of levying and collection to be borne by the authority concerned. This order is a minor technical paving step which will allow measures to be put into effect which Parliament have already approved in principle and to which specific approval will be sought in another place. I commend the order to the House.

My Lords, it falls to me to greet the noble Lord after his maiden speech—a maiden speech at the Dispatch Box. I think it is the longest speech I have heard him make. I have known him for 13 years, and for a long time I remember him in the Scottish Grand Committee, when the 1973 Act to which he refers so dramatically and so tellingly, was going through the House. I remember how I used to look across and see him, and as soon as I saw the eyes glisten and him edging on his seat, I knew that he was about to get up and make his usual speech—

"I beg to move that the Question be now put."

He was a Whip at that time; and now here he is, a living symbol of the defeat of his Government in Scotland. He was not the only Minister who was defeated in Scotland; and may I remind this crowded House that of the 72 seats in Scotland, Labour won 41, the Tories won—was it 21?—the Alliance won, I think, eight and the SDP two. So wherever the Government have a mandate, it is not in Scotland.

The noble Lord has become the successor of not one of the oldest offices in Scotland—in fact it has been in existence just over 32 years, the office of Minister of State for Scotland. But I should warn him that nine of the 10 holders are still in the House; and when you add to that four ex-Secretaries of State for Scotland and at least two former Under-Secretaries of State for Scotland, the noble Lord will realise just exactly what he has to put up with in terms of the experience that is around. He is not the first defeated Tory Minister who has found a comfortable and secure refuge in this House, so he has not broken any records. Nor yet is he the first to receive the consolation prize of being Minister of State for Scotland. I could name two who, having been defeated at a general election, suddenly appeared here as Ministers of State for Scotland; so he is following a tradition.

But let him not think that this is a dead-end job that he has. It is not the end of the political road—far from it. I remember Lady Tweedsmuir, who is the only one of the 10 who is no longer with us. She went on to shine at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Then there was the first of them all; he became Prime Minister. He was known in those days as Sir Alec Douglas Home. He was the first Minister of State for Scotland, and I am sorry that my old friend, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, is not in his place, because he was one of the longest serving Ministers of State. Then there is the last man who has followed: he has been promoted to Northern Ireland. I refer to the noble Earl, Lord Mansfield. So let the noble Lord think of all these glittering prizes that are ahead of him. He has been the victim of his own Party's failure in Scotland. There may have been an element of redistribution in this, but I can assure him that the Member who formerly had Skye did not want to lose it. He regarded it as a good fall-back position for Liberals. I remember of course the man that he defeated, Alasdair Mackenzie—a very nice good Scotsman—and how he must have felt. There was no consolation prize for him in the shape of a seat in the House of Lords.

The new Minister brings to Scottish Affairs some Ministerial experience, and we are glad of that. He has some insight into the wayward ways and the mysterious ways of the Scottish Office, because he was a Scottish Whip for quite a time. There is no doubt that he has first-hand knowledge of Scotland's problems. No-one knows better than he the mood of Scotland at the present time. I sincerely hope that he will bring a sense of purpose to the Scottish Office, as we have known it over the years. I, too, have an advantage: he knows me and he knows what a reasonable man I am. He knows that I may sometimes be wrong (but I am always right!) and I look forward very, very much to seeing him handling Scottish affairs in this House. He will have a couple of tea boys occasionally. He will have the noble Lord, Lord Lyell; and, when he can free himself from the responsibilities of the Crown Office, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, will probably come in too to lend a hand. So the noble Lord need not worry. I think he will find this a very much friendlier place that the other Chamber and I hope that he does well.

I am very glad to welcome my noble friend Lord Strathclyde who is now in his seat. He will be glad to know that I gave him an honourable mention in his absence, but he can read about that in Hansard. I ask him, please do not write to me about it. The noble Lord, Lord Gray, said that this order is not the kind of thing he would have picked and that he might have picked something more important. But there cannot be anything more important than this. He finished by saying that this was just a little technical amendment. It is not, you know. I objected to the Government taking the power that it took in the 1981 Act, which it repeated in the 1982 Act—that Section 5(6) which gives the Secretary of State this power, which it is not to make regulations; it is the power to amend primary legislation. Those were the words that were used by Lord Ancram in another place when he mentioned this particular order.

Instead of bringing in primary legislation, the Government took the unusual power of amending by order. I objected to it at the time and I object now. I object even more, because he certainly wandered through all these statutes, though I am not absolutely sure that he is entirely familiar with all of them because he had pre-occupations elsewhere. But they all deal with the important business of local authorities and rates. There was a time under the 1966 Act when the local authority had a fair amount of freedom, and it is a freedom that is pretty basic to local authorities—the right to determine their own expenditure and to raise money to meet that expenditure. Take away that power, take that power to the central government, and local authority becomes meaningless from a democratic point of view.

What we have had since 1979 is decision after decision backed up by new Acts of Parliament which went through this House and which have extended the power of the Secretary of State in respect of local authorities. There was a power—I think it went back to 1929 and was consolidated within the 1969 Act, having been carried through all the various Acts—which gave the Government the right to reduce a grant if the expenditure of a local authority proved unreasonable and excessive. But he could not do that until he had proved it was unreasonable, after they had spent the money. Nobody ever applied that sanction to local authorities in all that time. Then the Government said that they were going to do it and they discovered of course that this was not good enough; so they decided to reduce the grant or any element of a grant purely and simply on the basis of what their estimated expenditure was going to be. Once you take a Government into the realm of determining the estimated expenditure and reducing a grant because they think it is excessive, that is a very serious matter. But the ratepayers were still penalised and the Treasury was that bit better off by the grant that was withheld.

So they started thinking again and said, "We will make them give the money back". They decided that they would take powers in the 1981 Act so that a local authority could reduce its rates in the middle of a year, after the usual time for fixing rates. Some of the local authorities did, and some of them did not. But then they discovered that they required still more power, which they took in the 1982 Act, under which the Secretary of State could determine exactly the amount of the reduction of the rate.

The report has to go through the House of Commons—it does not come to this House—and it is being dealt with here at the present time. There are four orders in respect of Glasgow, Stirling, Kirkcaldy and Lothian, and if they do not do what the Secretary of State wants within 26 days then it is deemed to have been done. I do not know what happens thereafter, but I suppose that if they do not put it into operation they are in default and can be charged by any individual ratepayer with illegally withholding a reduction of rates from him.

This is a serious matter, and it is what this order is about. Until this order is passed—it is an affirmative order, and it has already been passed by another place, but it has to be passed here—the Government cannot proceed with the regulations. Although they have certain power, they do not have power to make the regulations. My first question is: why on earth did the far-seeing Scottish Office civil servants and Ministers not see what had to be done? I cannot blame the noble Lord because he was not there, and if he had been there he would probably have seen it like a shot. The noble and learned Lord the Lord Advocate is a bit to blame here, too. He is the legal giant among them. They were his draftsmen who were drawing up this Bill. Why did they not see that what had to be done in 1981 would also have to be done in 1982 to cover the regulations, if they had to apply for a report and make a local authority reduce its rate poundage? It is a very serious matter.

Now this House is in a position where, if we vote against this order, it will be very difficult for the Secretary of State to proceed with his punitive expedition against Lothian, Stirling, Kirkcaldy and Glasgow. So the question is: is he justified in doing what he is doing? I do not suppose that the Government have finished yet. We shall probably have another local government Bill later this year. They will discover some further flaw, some noose that they have not tightened, and will make a further attempt to strangle local authorities.

We have a very intricate web which has been spun around local authorities and which is denying them the democratic freedom that people expect. They are forcing Glasgow to reduce their rates by 3p in the pound; in the case of Stirling it is 2p., as it is for Kirkcaldy; and in the case of Lothian it is 6p. I think that, in Glasgow, it is 19p per week which the average householder will get back. What they lose for that is something that will be determined. Libraries will probably not open on certain days of the week; there will be a slowing-up in dealing with planning applications; and other departments, such as recreation, will be affected—all because the Secretary of State has decided that, in his opinion, their expenditure is unreasonable and excessive.

Just before the general election there was a meeting with Glasgow Corporation and the Secretary of State discovered that he had made a mistake of £4 million out of £10 million. So instead of reducing the rates by 5p, he said that 3p would do. But what about all the other things that are there? We shall be opening in Glasgow—and I daresay that the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot, will be delighted because of her connection and her husband's connection—the Burrell Collection and the new art gallery. It is one of the finest in Britain. The Government want it open, and they paid half the cost of it. I was Secretary of State at the time when we came to the formula. Glasgow has an additional £1 million, and we can understand it, because they have to staff the gallery, heat it and maintain it. That is expenditure which is additional to last year's. Is that excessive and unreasonable? Or are they to open the museum on one day and close it the next because the Government say, "You are spending more than last year"? As a matter of fact, they are not spending very much more than last year, when this £4 million is extracted.

The Minister mentioned only Section 1 of the 1982 Act, which was an amendment of Section 5 of the 1966 Act, but the rest of that Act transferred responsibilities from regions to districts. Tourism now comes under Glasgow, which it did not last year. Recreation also comes under Glasgow, which it did not last year. Having transferred the functions, are the Government now to deny them the opportunity to raise the additional monies? This is crazy. In the last Session of Parliament we had a Mental Health Act. I remember the feeling of triumph in your Lordships' House when we got the Government to agree that there should be mandatory after-care attention for mental health patients. What is the use of loading new functions on to local authorities if the Government say, "If you are going to spend money on that, it is excessive and unreasonable"? This is the reality of life in local authorities today.

Of course, the rates are going up, but why are they going up? I ask your Lordships to ask the Chamber of Commerce in Glasgow why the rates are going up. They are going up because the Government are cutting their share of the cost. The noble Lord. Lord Lyell, is shaking his head. I will gladly sit down. We have three quarters of an hour.