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Data Protection and Freedom of Information

There is a serious point: we do not look at these salaries in the round. The proposal is for one salary for one person for one post; some salaries either come to the whole House or go to a Committee upstairs, and we should look at them comparatively. I take that point. There is an argument that Ministers, who are politicians, might for all sorts of reasons be paid relatively much less than people who are not, but we certainly ought to have the debate. I also looked at some of the comparisons, as did the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs. The Library gave me the figures. The chair of the Judicial Appointments Commission gets paid £92,000 for a three-day week. The chair of the Office for Legal Complaints gets £70,000 for 80 days a year. The Children's Commissioner gets £175,000 a year—considerably more than the Information Commissioner's salary will be after today. The other argument in favour is that I understand that Richard Thomas is due to retire next year and therefore this will be the salary advertised for his successor, and a good range of applicants is needed for the job. However, I have not heard the Secretary of State for Justice deal with the one thing that is an oddity about the motion. The salary increase will be backdated to the end of November last year, and that seems a very odd thing for us to do. We should determine the salary either in advance or when it comes up for change. I should be grateful for an explanation of why, all but 12 months later, we will backdate it all that way. That seems to be less justifiable. I join the absolute, clear support for Mr. Richard Thomas as Information Commissioner given by the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs and on behalf of the Government. Mr. Thomas has done an unarguably good, competent and robust job. The reason that I am happy to speak in support of the commissioner being allowed to do his job better, if that is the outcome—and I have a request for one bit of his work to be improved if he is going to get all this extra money—is that he has done some good things in his term of office. He was clear that there should be criminal sanctions, including jail, for people who breach data privacy laws. As one of the people in the House who was affected by that, I was glad that he was robust, because one case ended up with some people being sent to prison. We need clear sanctions for people who break the law for gain and sell data that they are not authorised to have in the first place.