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Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (Disclosure of Information by SOCA) Order 2010

My Lords, the noble Baroness raises a number of points. The reason that we have the arrangement of SOCA being willing to provide information to an NDPB is because the sporting community is extremely unwilling to see an extensive criminalisation of the control of doping in sporting activity and wants to try to pursue a policy where best practice, peer pressure and effective action by the sports’ regulatory bodies are the way by which it is controlled. That accounts for doing it this way. Clearly, if it was concluded that that was not effective, one would have to look again at the arrangements, but the doping that goes on at the moment is not so excessive that it is thought necessary to bring in SOCA in a big way. On the number of people needed, unless I am mistaken, I think that the eight extra staff will not be employed by SOCA but will be acquired by UKDA, because it has to set up a unit to process the information that it gets from SOCA and to decide the action that needs to be taken. Those individuals need some security clearance, so there is a reason for needing a specialised staff. For SOCA, it is true that the information that it is able to supply is in many respects a by-product of other investigations, but it is extremely useful to the sporting regulatory agencies. As for the question of drugs cheats, one reason why it will be increasingly necessary to go down that road is that the testing procedures have been shown to be only partially adequate, because practices have developed where either substances are used which are extraordinarily difficult to detect in tests, or they are being dosed in such small amounts that they do not show up in a test, such that one has to go to a more forensic approach to dealing with those cheats. That is why, in the end, one has to bring in an agency which might have information about suppliers. It is, in the end, the suppliers whom we need to try to choke off so that the substances never reach the performers. We are witnessing a change in the nature of the doping culture that, in turn, leads to new investigative techniques having to be employed.