Jon Trickett

I have tabled new clause 18, which is about health and instituting a new public interest test. There is an existing test, but it is not very accessible or useful nowadays. I will explain why. Probably the largest—or the most sensitive—database in the United Kingdom is the one held by the NHS. Almost every human being in our country is on a file somewhere, hopefully for beneficial and clinical reasons, in the NHS. I have had a series of medical issues in the last few months, and I am astonished by how much data is held about me. That will be the same for all of us, I guess. That database is filled with the most vital, private and intimate details about all our lives, and if it is going to be sustained, it is important that it retains the confidence of patients and of citizens as a whole. The truth is that the Information Commissioner is not convinced that the Bill goes far enough in protecting us and the NHS data, and if the Minister has time at the end, I hope he will be able to comment on whether he is persuaded by the Information Commissioner that we should move further. This data, which is intimate and private, as I have just said, can also be the basis of major advances in human welfare. We can imagine all sorts of ways that our interests as human beings are being advanced by the use of that data every day. I am thinking, for example, of the search for a covid vaccine, which was led by a British scientist and partly based on the data that was available from the NHS. We should be celebrating that—that scientific research is essential—but there is a threat to this database as well, and in my view it comes from two separate sources. First, there are hostile—or even friendly—state actors. Secondly, there are private interests who want to use the data not for human welfare, though that might be a fig leaf that they use, but for private profit. That cannot be right, given what that data has been created for.