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Serious Crime Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for spelling out the position. She said that the Audit Commission can decide which sets can be matched, but obviously it does not cover all aspects of the matter. She went on to refer to various bodies and the Data Protection Act, and talked about the rules that apply to anti-fraud organisations. As I see it, the difficulty is that these rules have been developed one by one over time to meet the developing situation, and are likely to develop further as we change the law and move on. I go back to the British Bankers’ Association’s support for the development of such a code or codes of practice as those endorsed by the Information Commissioner. The British Bankers’ Association understood the importance of public confidence and of having something comprehensive that we could see as a whole. The trouble with what the noble Baroness has been saying is that, yes, I dare say that if you search with all the resources that she has available you can find exactly what the rules are, how they are operated and what the protocols are. I suggest that this is a case where we need something more. We need something more because the situation is developing the need for it. We need it because public confidence is important. It is not good enough to refer back to a whole lot of previous rules and regulations with which people are wholly unfamiliar.