Hansard

Presiding Officer, thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the debate on behalf of the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. The UK Data Protection and Digital Information Bill has been making its way through the UK Houses of Parliament over the past couple of years, having been introduced on 18 July 2022 and paused between 5 September 2022 and 8 March 2023.

According to the UK Government, the purpose of the bill is to update and simplify the UK’s data protection framework. The bill seeks to reduce burdens on organisations while maintaining high data protection standards. The bill covers a wide range of policy areas, including data protection, smart data, digital verification and law enforcement data sharing.

Currently, the bill is at report stage in the House of Lords, and there is only a small window of opportunity in which this Parliament can consider the Scottish Government’s legislative consent motion before the bill completes its amending stages in the last house.

For the previous two legislative consent memorandums, the Economy and Fair Work Committee was designated lead committee. For the second supplementary memorandum, the Social Justice and Social Security Committee was designated lead committee. That is because the bill was amended by the UK Government on 29 November 2023 to include a power to require information for social security purposes. Those provisions were informed by the 2022 publication “Fighting Fraud in the Welfare System”. Clause 128 and schedule 11 to the bill will allow the UK Government to issue information notices that require third parties, such as banks, to provide information relating to all accounts that they hold, which are linked to people in receipt of welfare benefits.

Schedule 11 also contains provisions in relation to the publication and revision of a code of practice in relation to information notices, penalties for non-compliance, appeals, and amendments to the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.

The committee acknowledges that the Scottish Government recommends legislative consent because it believes that the implications are theoretical only and unlikely to be applied to devolved benefits. Critically, however, the Scottish Government does not want to put at risk agency agreements with the Department for Work and Pensions. Conceivably, if the Scottish Government refused consent, the DWP could take the view that that undermined the principle that governs the agency agreements. As such, it would no longer be possible to follow the carefully planned process of transferring cases from the DWP to Social Security Scotland.

Having considered the memorandum, the committee agrees with the Scottish Government’s position, because full roll-out of the information-seeking powers will not occur until agency agreements have ended. Moreover, the initial focus is on universal credit, with no intention to use the powers for devolved agency agreement benefits. Therefore, we are also of the view that the implications are only theoretical.

It is because of those considerations and to ensure that there is no uncertainty that the committee recommends that the Parliament agrees to the legislative consent motion.