Lord Teverson (LD)

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 185J, which is on the GDPR, the general data protection regulation, which I am sure we all have to deal with on the internet every day when we make an inquiry on anything. It is around the issue of transparency versus data regulation. As we have talked about before, one of the key things about the planning system is that it has to have public confidence. One of the key ways that it has public confidence is through transparency. When that transparency disappears, it becomes a real issue. This is one of the conflicts that has come out between planning and GDPR. It really came about in 2017, when Basildon Council—which I do not know well, I have to admit—received a £150,000 fine for disclosures that it made of personal information during a planning application. It was a major case, clearly, as reflected in the fine, but it was due to the failure of the council to redact certain personal information in that planning decision and procedure. The reaction to that from local authorities generally was to go into panic mode and decide that—quite rightly, as far as council tax payers were concerned—they did not want to be seen to be risking public money by making mistakes on procedural issues on planning and by contraventions of the GDPR. Having done some research on this, as far as I can see, I think that this is the only example or incidence ever of a significant GDPR fine for planning on a local authority. However, I have come across in my local community people who have suffered from local authorities, in terms of planning, particularly in the area of enforcement, going through a process of overredaction or restricted disclosure—in fact, blanket non-disclosure on a number of occasions. This means that transparency is disappearing. People are often unable to find out what is happening in terms of enforcement cases, meaning that community confidence in that procedure and its outcomes is lost. There is also a definite inconsistency between local authorities in how this is applied.