Data (Use and Access) Bill: Labour government revives police surveillance proposal that threatens rights

27th November 2024

On 23 October, the UK government introduced the Data (Use and Access) Bill (DUAB). This bill is the current government’s attempt to change data protection law, after the prior government failed to pass the Data Protection and Digital Information (No. 2) Bill (DPDIB) before July’s general election, in the face of widespread political and public opposition.

The DUAB re-introduces many of the same provisions that Parliament refused to pass when they were in in the DPDIB. Specifically, clauses 87-89 of the DUAB would:

• Give the Home Secretary the power to issue ‘national security certificates’ to police, which would enable police to sidestep data protection laws and grant them immunity when they commit crimes by using our personal data illegally.
• Give the Home Secretary the power to issue ‘designation notices’, which would grant police the same powers as the intelligence services when handling our data and – by doing so – allow them to take advantage of more relaxed data protection rules.
• Grant the Home Secretary broad discretion to authorise the police’s viewing and use of personal data, without people’s knowledge and without any parliamentary or court oversight.

These clauses have been copied almost verbatim from the DPDIB, and they threaten the human right to privacy while undermining the rule of law by creating impunity for police rule-breaking. The right to privacy is essential for other rights, such as free expression.

RSI advocated changes to the DPDIB when Parliament was considering that earlier bill; we highlighted how clauses similar to those listed above would grant unnecessary and unaccountable powers to the police and the Home Secretary. Both MPs and peers raised RSI’s concerns in parliamentary debates and called on the government to explain why these clauses were necessary.

However, even though the new government has had the opportunity to take a new approach, clauses 87-89 of the DUAB replicate, almost word-for-word, the problematic clauses that RSI and other civil liberties organisations pushed the previous government to scrap from the DPDIB.

RSI urges the government to remove clauses 87-89 from the bill.

For more information on these clauses, see our original briefing on the DPDIB here.