Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her explanation on the comments and I am grateful for the general acceptance of the government amendments, which just tidy up where we are to date. I hope I can reassure the noble Baroness on the concerns that she expressed in Amendment 396. First, I am clear that Clause 138 is intended only to tidy up existing legislation to ensure that all those who need access to DVLA driving licence data have a clear legal basis to do so. The police currently use automatically accessed DVLA data for Road Traffic Act enforcement, but are unable to use such data when investigating serious crime. The Bill, together with future regulations and a code of practice, will allow wider use of data obtained automatically. I want to be absolutely clear for the noble Baroness that the aim is to allow the DVLA to provide information to the police. It is not designed to allow the police to send an image to the DVLA and for the DVLA to search its database for the identity of an unknown person. I hope that that gives some clarity. I say to all three noble Lords from the Liberal Democrat Benches who have spoken that the code of practice and future regulations that we are producing under Clause 138 will be tabled under the affirmative procedure in both Houses of Parliament. I say to the noble Baroness that this is only tidying up and the revised legislation will be under the affirmative procedure. I hope that I gave a considerable amount of detail on facial recognition in our previous discussions. We have a consultation, which closes on 12 February. We want to provide strong regulation of facial recognition and, as I said previously in Committee, I hope to have a useful, constructive dialogue on that going forward. Based on those comments, I hope that the noble Baroness will not press her amendment and I commend the amendments in my name on the Marshalled List.