Lord Markham (Con)

My Lords, I want to come in on Amendment 5. Although I am very much in favour of the intent of what we are trying to do—making more use of the sharing of data—I have to remember my old Health Minister’s hat in talking about all the different terms and speaking to the different angles that we are all coming from. Noble Lords have heard me speak many a time about the value of our health data and the tremendous possibilities that it offers for drug discovery and all the associated benefits. At the same time, I was very aware of loads of companies purporting to own it. There are GP data companies, which do the systems for GPs and, naturally, hold all the patient data in them. In terms of their business plans, some have been bought for vast sums of money because of the data that they hold. My concern is that, although it is well intended to say that the use of health data should be allowed for the general good, at the same time, I do not believe that GP companies own that data. We have been quite clear on that. I want to make it clear that it is actually the NHS that will benefit from the pulling together of all this, if that happens in those sorts of formats. Similarly on student loans data—I shall not pretend that this is a subject I know a lot about—I can see a lot of good causes for the student loans, but I can also see that it would be very useful for financial services companies to understand customers’ creditworthiness. In all these cases, although the intent is right, we need to find a way to be clear about what they can and cannot use it for, and there lies a lot of complexity.