Q651 Lord Strasburger: […] My question is: what does the wholesale retention of communications data over a period of 12 months do to enhance law enforcement and all the other agencies who want to get this? The message I am getting from the whole panel is that apart from, perhaps, some Facebook accounts that might have been deleted over that 12 months, there is nothing.

Simon Milner: In fact, it could make things worse by redirecting resources in an inefficient way. In the context of how we currently work with law enforcement, you have heard from all of us that we already have some very effective arrangements for dealing with law enforcement and for providing information to lawful requests on a timely basis. Those are improving all the time and we have dedicated resources for doing so. Were this Bill to come in, one would expect that there could be quite an extended period in which some of those resources are being used to negotiate over a very difficult kind of order, with lots of resources focused on how much this is going to cost and on the engineering involved in it.