Contribution
My Lords, in moving Amendment 464 I will speak to Amendments 467, 468 and 503, in my name. These amendments collectively address the governance of Clauses 192 to 194, which grant the Secretary of State broad powers to make regulations giving effect to international law enforcement information-sharing agreements. Following the recent passage of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, we are now operating in a new legal landscape, where the statutory threshold for protecting data transferred overseas has been lowered. These amendments are not just desirable; they are essential safety mechanisms to fill that gap.
Amendment 464 would be a safeguard of, so to speak, look before you leap. It stipulates that, before regulations are made under Clause 192 to implement a new international agreement, the authority must publish a comprehensive privacy impact assessment. The necessity of this assessment has intensified following the enactment of the Data (Use and Access) Act. The UK’s new test for onward transfers of data has lowered the bar. It no longer requires foreign protections to be essentially equivalent to ours, but merely not materially lower. This creates a dangerous new risk profile. The European Data Protection Board has explicitly noted that this new test omits key safeguards against foreign government access and removes redress mechanisms for individuals. If the general statutory floor has been lowered, Amendment 464 becomes the essential safety net. We must assess these specific risks via a privacy impact assessment before we open the digital borders, to ensure that we are not exposing UK citizens to jurisdictions where they have no legal remedy.
This brings me to Amendment 467, which addresses the nature of the data being shared. Where regulations authorise the transfer of highly sensitive personal data, such as biometrics, genetics or political opinions, this amendment would require enhanced protective measures. All this highlights the illusion of data protection when transferring data to high-risk jurisdictions that lack the rule of law. We know that in authoritarian states domestic intelligence laws will always override the standard contractual clauses usually relied on for data transfers. Because the Data (Use and Access) Act has removed the requirement for foreign safeguards to be essentially equivalent, we cannot rely on the general law to protect highly sensitive biometric or health data. My amendment would restore the requirement that transfers of such sensitive data must be demonstrated to be strictly necessary and proportionate. We cannot allow efficiency of data sharing to deny the reality that, in some jurisdictions, once data arrives, the state will have unrestricted access. Transparency must follow these powers.
Amendment 468 would mandate the production of an annual report on international law enforcement information sharing. This is vital because we are entering a period of divergence. The European Commission, at the urging of the European Data Protection Board, will be monitoring the practical implementation of the UK’s revised data transfer regime. If the EU will be monitoring how our data laws operate, surely Parliament should be doing the same. We need an annual report to track whether these law enforcement transfers are inadvertently exposing UK citizens to jurisdictions where they have no effective legal redress. Without this feedback loop, Parliament is legislating in the dark.
Finally, Amendment 503 would ensure that regulations made under Clause 192 are subject to the affirmative resolution procedure. Given that the primary legislation governing data transfers has been loosened, it is constitutionally inappropriate for these specific law enforcement agreements to slip through via the negative procedure. Amendment 503 would ensure that these regulations, which may involve the transfer of our citizens’ most sensitive biometric data to foreign powers, must be actively debated and approved by both Houses of Parliament.
We support international co-operation in fighting crime, but it must not come at the cost of lowering our standards. These amendments would restore the safeguards that recent legislation have eroded. I beg to move.