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Coroners and Justice Bill

Yes, that is the case. One has to take into account the interaction of different Government policies. The more the Government want to use the private sector and the voluntary sector to a greater extent in the delivery of services, the worse the problem will get. The second reason I do not accept the Government's point is illustrated by the recent controversy about Google Street View, where Google supplements its maps with photographs of every house and building in many towns and cities. That demonstrates that private organisations, even when acting purely as such and not working for the Government, do not confine themselves to data they acquire voluntarily. My house is on Street View; Google did not ask me about it, and I am sure that it did not ask anybody else. Thirdly, what worries people about data is what can be done with them, especially data they gave voluntarily at some point in the past without realising how they could be used at some future point—for example, data about which websites someone has visited or which products they have bought from a shop. Bringing all those forms of data together using sophisticated data-mining techniques and analysis can reveal vast amounts about people that they did not intend to reveal, even though technically they voluntarily allowed the data to be handed over to private organisations. Liberal Democrat Members think that there is an overwhelming case to extend the scope of the assessment notice system beyond the public sector, as narrowly defined. That view is also taken by the Information Commissioner. After all, the assessment notice system introduced by the Bill is a very gentle form of preventive intervention, not the full panoply of the law. Given that, and given the other options that the Information Commissioner has, there is a strong case for the broader extension of these powers. I urge the Government to resist the lobbying that has been going on and to look at the point of principle from the position of ordinary members of the public who are worried about what is being done with the data they handed over.