Baroness Kramer (LD)

My Lords, I will be very brief. I laid Amendment 92 in the same spirit as the amendments that I laid in an earlier group. The part of paragraph 3 of Schedule 5 that I find most difficult is a subset of the requirement for banks to provide information. The overarching requirement instructs banks to hand over to the Government, on request, three months of account statements for them to examine. The schedule says that the information must be used only to help determine whether or not to make a deduction under the Bill. I was trying to find out from the Minister what assurances there are that the use will be that narrow. It may be that I have misread it, but I cannot see any form of transparency or accountability that would provide that kind of assurance. It all seems to be completely internal to the DWP. My first question to the Minister is therefore this: how will the scheme verify that the information is not used for other purposes, because detailed account statements undoubtedly have information that could interest all kinds of people? Most importantly, will that information be destroyed after an investigation is closed? The part of paragraph 3 that exercised me the most, in the original language of the Bill that came from the Commons, is that which prohibited banks from ever notifying the account holder that their information has been handed over to the state and for what purpose. To the Minister’s credit, that now seems to have been amended to say that the account holder can be told after three months. I am unclear whether that is an automatic notification, notification at the bank’s choice, or notification that requires a request from the account holder. To me, this matters, because I suspect that transparency is the only way to ensure that the information in the account is not used for purposes other than those stated in the Bill. I am generally exceedingly uncomfortable with the idea that the original version basically required a sort of covert process, in which the information held on an individual by the state was not disclosed to that individual. The Minister has often suggested that the monitoring of accounts is to start a dialogue to see if a person has made a mistake in overclaiming rather than committing fraud. If somebody is not told that their information has been taken, read through, examined and dealt with in detail, I cannot see how they can possibly enter into a constructive discussion to explain what is happening. I want to draw the attention of the Minister to an underlying principle. Jonathan Fisher KC has published part 1 of an independent review of disclosure and fraud offences, which was commissioned by the Government. I want to quote his words on transparency, because it seems that transparency was not built into the original Bill and is still limited in the revised version. He said that: “A modern disclosure regime must require the prosecution”— he is talking about the courts— “to be honest concerning the reasonable lines of inquiry that have been pursued and how investigative material has been gathered, handled, and interrogated”. I would very much like to see those principles embedded in this part of the Bill. I think we need assurances from the Minister that if we cannot find the language then they will in practice be embedded in this part of the Bill, because transparency is fundamental.