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Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 (Duty to Share Information and Disclosure of Information for Security Purposes) Order 2008

My Lords, this order, along with the others in the package, will have a wide-ranging effect on the control of our borders and on the freedom of individuals within our country to come and go without questions being asked. The orders themselves raise a number of questions and I hope that the Minister will forgive me if I go through them now. The Explanatory Memorandum refers to the transfer of ““bulk information””. Can the Minister explain what that means in this regard? In view of the amount of information likely to be gathered from passenger lists, other passenger information and travel documents, is it the Government’s intention that it will be possible to transfer it between agencies in total? Could a whole passenger list or even umpteen passenger lists be transferred from one agency to another? Will such a transfer require a request to be made from one or other of the agencies and, if so, what requirement under these circumstances will there be in respect of the protection of those data? What did the Minister mean when he said that all agencies would have shared access to the information? I suspect that ultimately this is all going to take place within e-borders, but will there be a common IT system to which the agencies outlined in the order will automatically have access so that information transfers between them? I would be grateful for a little more explanation on that point. The Government’s IT systems and the transfer of data have taken a bad beating over the past few months. What further assurances can the Minister give that e-borders will be secure in this respect? Will the method of transfer be one that does not put individual travellers at risk of having their details lost in the post? Does the secure government network to which the Minister referred exclude any possibility of physical transfer by disk, for example, rather than a network transfer, so that there are clearly closed and secure methods of transferring the data? At present, Operation Semaphore covers less than 12 per cent of all routes into and out of the United Kingdom. The calculated number of passenger movements annually is 250 million. Can the Minister tell us for how long it is intended that the information garnered will be kept on the system and, indeed, whether it can all be held on one system? A brief consideration would suggest that, at a minimum of five years of holding the information, over 1 billion loggings will take place—my maths is not very good, so there may even be another zero to add to that figure. At the current rate of some 16,500 alerts mentioned in the Explanatory Memorandum—although the Minister mentioned the figure of 20,000—in 30 million movements, there will be a vast amount of data that is of no interest whatsoever to any agency. How and when will all that data be pruned so that the names of people who have no reason to be on anyone’s database are taken off? Will there be a maximum amount of time that data on persons who excite no interest in any of the agencies can be held? Will the Minister tell us what sharing of the information gathered will be available to other countries? Would such a facility be subject to their having a similar system to our Information Commissioner in order to guarantee the integrity of any information passed on, if it is intended that it should be, as I strongly suspect must be the case? What costs will the requirement for information put on carriers? They are going to have to hand information over to the Government. Will they have to upgrade their systems to deal with requests from the approved agencies and, if so, what help will they get with this? It is a sad fact that experience of terrorism, illegal immigration and crime, including the importation of drugs and the trafficking of women and children, seems to lead us to the inevitable situation where practically everything will be known somewhere about every person in this country. That may be an inevitability, but it is up to Parliament to ensure that this results only in the protection of our citizens and not harassment. The proof of that in terms of this order will be known only when and if the system breaks down, so it behoves the Government to ensure that, unlike some recent experiences, this does not happen with e-borders. Can the Minister confirm that e-borders is a stand-alone system and that it does not and cannot link up with any other IT system holding information on individuals in this country?