Member

I therefore found the Government’s response to this amendment, when it was debated in another place, particularly interesting. My right honourable friend Sir Iain Duncan Smith moved substantially the same amendment. The Minister, Kanishka Narayan, said that he agreed with much of my right honourable friend’s diagnosis—indeed, he agreed totally with his objective. The Government’s objection was instead principally about the mechanism. The Minister was concerned that placing an explicit fair trial safeguard in this particular information-sharing regime could create uncertainty about how other statutory information-sharing regimes should be interpreted. That may be a legitimate drafting concern, but it does not answer the underlying policy question. Indeed, the Government promised in the Commons to continue engaging on precisely this issue, so I hope that the Minister can tell us what progress has been made since then. If the Government accept the diagnosis and the objective, what alternative safeguards do they propose?