Mr. Dale Sunderland:

I thank the Deputy. We have had very good engagement with the Department of Justice and Equality, as I mentioned already on the drafting of the heads of this Bill. We are quite certain that engagement will continue and the Department has very positively received all of our views to date.

As I said at the outset this Bill is about giving certainty, clarity and confidence to public sector managers and public sector policy makers to actually engage in data sharing but it does not address some of the issues that are required under the data protection law, such as the lawful basis for sharing information in the first place, the transparency requirements and the data minimisation that one only shares as much data as is required. They will always need a legal basis but also a proper assessment and that will be in part carried out by a privacy impact assessment. The issues we have raised and suggested we believe will enhance and underpin the clarity and certainty that is required, for example a statutory instrument proposal will give that further legal certainty to Departments and agencies that what they are doing is based on a proper legitimate legal basis.