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Sale of Student Loans Bill

It is often noted that our job in this Committee is to give in-depth, line-by-line scrutiny to legislation that sometimes gets rushed through another place. I do not necessarily want to suggest that the Bill has been rushed through, but that does not remove the mantle of our responsibility to give it a thorough inspection. There are two kinds of scrutiny. There is scrutiny that arises out of the particularities of the policies in a given Bill. Yet other issues arise, not because of the policies themselves, but because of the Government’s history in handling and implementing particular schemes. This, then, requires us to keep in mind a different way of approaching legislation. The amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, in this group are a good example of this second kind of scrutiny. To reiterate the noble Baroness’s point, the Government's history with data protection is not good. In fact, saying it is disappointing would be euphemistic. Whether it is keeping diseases in labs or disks in offices, this Government do not seem to be able to keep track of a great number of extremely important things. The 25 million people whose data were lost have been discussed at great length. I do not really want to make a cheap political point but, considering the sensitivity of the information that will be stored and passed around in connection with the Bill, why should we believe any assurances about data protection this time? We understand the Government’s amendments and the need for data to be used to generate models so that the loans will be saleable. Yet with so much sensitive information being transferred out of the Government’s hands, what policies are in place to guarantee that personal data are protected? As some anonymous data will be transferred out of the Government’s direct control, how will the procedures for ensuring data protection differ from their own safeguards? I am sure that the Minister will tell us that there will be sufficient safeguards. Why, then, can the requirement to protect data not be transferred with the loans? If the Government are committed to that kind of protection, why are they shying away from putting it in the Bill?