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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 109. With rights of appeal, we come to a very important part of the Bill. It seems absolutely clear that where an ordinary person gets caught up in the provisions of the Bill, they will be confused and uncertain. In many cases they will feel that what they have done is not wrong; that they are being chased unnecessarily; that they do not have the information that they require to state their case properly; and that they are faced with a series of technical allegations that they may find difficult to relate to what they have done. Therefore, we need to be clear, ideally in the Bill, about the rights which somebody who faces accusation under this Bill has by way of clearing their name. Certainly, I would very much like to understand what the Government’s proposals are for the timescales involved in this. When we were talking about earlier amendments, we came to the conclusion that this was the only thing on which we could pin the system down and that the question of the number of accusations which had been made was going to be pretty variable and really depended on whether this was a particular person on whom the copyright owners had chosen to light. So the comfort that a citizen has that they will be dealt with properly very much depends on the timescales. When they receive a notification, how long have they got to appeal? How long will the appeal process take? Are we looking at a double-decker appeal; that is, after the first notice and appealing it, is there then, as the noble Lord hinted earlier, a second, tougher letter and an appeal on that before we get to the point when a person’s details are actually given to the copyright owners? What exact timescale and process are the Government proposing for this? Will an appeal process be free to the subscriber, or will he have to pay to go through this process? In other words, will it be a friendly, supportive process where he will feel that he does not need to have legal advice? Will there be limitations on the grounds of appeal? That is a feature of the traffic tribunal, for instance, where there are five stated grounds of appeal. That means that in many cases the tribunal has no ability to exercise common sense, as one of our colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches found out a year or so ago. Will there be a definite defence for those subscribers who have done all that they reasonably ought to do—to my mind, "reasonably" for an ordinary individual means something like an hour’s work, but what does it mean to the Government—or that they reasonably should do to make sure that they were in a position to prevent the offence complained of; in other words, that their defences had been overwhelmed and they should not be blamed for it? The reasonableness of what we are letting potentially hundreds of thousands of our citizens in for depends on the process of appeal. We have discussed how the accusation and the letters are going to work, and I think that I have a reasonable grasp of that, but I do not have a grasp at all of the quality of the appeal process. I should be very grateful for the Minister’s help with that. I beg to move.