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Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, indeed, we regularly share our heartfelt sympathy. It is just that we do not seem to be able to move her right honourable friend the Home Secretary in the right direction. He keeps on showering Parliament with these Bills. A couple of clauses in the Police and Justice Bill refer to computer misuse. I think that it would be helpful if we were able, between now and Third Reading, to see whether there is any read-across. I confess that when I downloaded the Bill in PDF format at the weekend, it took some while to do so by remote. I did not get to the stage where I could read every part of that Bill, but there may well be some read-across. By the look on the face of the noble Baroness, I hope that there may not be. We welcome the objective behind Clause 29, which is to create a criminal offence of disclosure without lawful authority of information that is held on the national identity register. Amendment No. 98 would put an obligation on the prosecution to prove that the person made the disclosure ““knowingly or recklessly””. We are merely seeking to ensure that somebody who accidentally makes a disclosure is not treated in the same way as somebody who has malicious intent in making that disclosure or, perhaps, is so unprofessional that he does not adopt what is normally good practice in his methods and therefore allows the material to be leaked. I was rather puzzled by the response of the Minister in another place to a similar amendment. He held that the amendment was unnecessary because an individual who was conscientious and acting responsibly could find a defence in subsection (4). The difficulty in subsection (4) is that the defence only covers somebody who believes at the time of disclosure that they have reasonable grounds or lawful authority to make the disclosure. I am concerned about the situation that may well arise—and this may reflect what the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, has said regarding the assiduity of the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, and the huge workload that she carries—where somebody who works wholeheartedly according to good practice throughout their career, but is very tired at the end of a long day, particularly if the Opposition have kept them in the House until 12.30 am, follows what they think is the normal procedure. This person does everything they possibly can to do the right thing, but when sending information by e-mail they simply press the wrong button and send out the information to the wrong recipient. Alternatively, perhaps they send out the information but it is corrupted and is not sent in the right way. My concern is that at that stage that person does not have the authority to disclose the information to the person who receives it, so although they think that they are doing the right thing—that they have the authority to make the disclosure—they disclose it to the wrong person, albeit not irresponsibly. Can we be assured that such a person will not come across any difficulty as a result of the current drafting of the Bill? I beg to move.