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e-Government

: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for reinforcing my point. He possibly makes it more elegantly than I did. The hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston makes the important point about consent. That is one of the great restrictions on the marketing industry: it is only allowed to hold data and use it for the purposes for which consent has already been obtained and, where that is explicitly sensitive personal data, the burden of consent is even greater. However, the Government have started to introduce opt-outs, exclusions and ways around that. In some cases, that is valuable. I believe that Members of Parliament have such an opt-out and are allowed to assume that we can obtain from public bodies sensitive information on behalf of our constituents in a way that ordinary members of the public cannot. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the ways in which the opt-outs can be used in government are a risk and that, just because the principles exist, does not mean to say that the Government cannot find ways around them?