Digital Exclusion (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths. Like him, I find myself largely in agreement with many of the contributions from the Conservative Benches, which is not always the case, although I disagree with him that a knowledge of Plato and Aristotle should be seen as mutually exclusive with knowledge of STEM subjects and digital skills; I am always very keen to see these joined together and working cross-disciplinary in the broadest sense.

I join other noble Lords in thanking the committee for its excellent report, and join it in expressing disappointment with the government response. What I will seek to do today, however, is mostly to add some different points, some of which I take a slightly different perspective on and some of which the committee perhaps felt were outside its scope but none the less, I think, have a significant impact on its work. The report talks throughout, quite rightly, about confidence—the word “confidence” appears all the way through—but there is very little discussion of fear. I think we need to acknowledge that people have a rightful fear of going on the internet.

Because I do joined-up-ness, I work in many different areas in your Lordships’ House, but last night I was unable to take part, due to another commitment, in a debate on the Victims and Prisoners Bill, on Amendment 112 in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, about compensating victims of financial fraud. A great deal of financial fraud happens online, of course, and its scale is terrifying. People are frightened to go on the internet because of the scale of that fraud. They are often being warned, rightly, about that, and we need to acknowledge that it is a genuine problem; it is not just a case of giving people confidence. To cite a couple of figures I was looking up, the City of London Police says that courier fraud, affecting particularly the over-70s, cost £12.6 million last year. Romance fraud, which affects people of all ages, cost £93 million.

It is not just fraud that makes people fearful of going online. I happened to see one of our national newspaper consumer champions addressing the case of a pensioner who was left without any money over Christmas because, using telephone payment, she had accidentally pressed one extra zero and paid £1,000 instead of £100 for a service. That got fixed only when a national newspaper champion got involved. People are fearful of engaging with these services, with good cause, and there is an urgent need for much more to be done, to have regulation and protection, to ensure that companies react very promptly and rightly and do their absolute best to set up systems that do not go wrong in that manner.

I slightly disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell. We want everyone to have access. The noble Baroness said there should be no digital exclusion, but I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, in acknowledging that this is not something we are going to miraculously make disappear. At different stages in our life, we will have different levels of capacity to engage with digital. Many of us, at some point in our life, might find ourselves without the skills to deal with digital. This is where I pick up the point of the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, about libraries. I put to your Lordships that we will always need to have everyone able to access a facility where they can go and say, “I have a real problem; can you help me sort this out?”. Libraries are a very obvious place, and the collapse in the provision of libraries is a huge tragedy. It is a logical place. The noble Lord identified other places as well, such as churches, but we need libraries as a place that people can go when their digital skills are not adequate for the task at hand. I stress too that many voluntary groups do great work. I know many people who have learned their digital skills through the University of the Third Age, but lots of those groups need a bit of government funding to enable them to function.

I want to pick up some points about digital exclusion because of poverty. Figures from Ofcom show that 7% of households now do not have internet provision, and 20% said it is because of the cost. Also, currently 23% of people, 12.2 million people, are looking for cheaper data plans because of the cost. Perhaps we need to coin a new phrase here. Because of the cost, people are going to see their data flows squeezed down; they might maintain a trickle of data but they will have data starvation. We all know that digital provision is using more bandwidth all the time. We need to think about whether there are low-bandwidth options available that people are actually able to afford.

Good things are happening, but they urgently need to. As noble Lords may know, the UK is the second-largest producer of electronic waste in the world per capita. This is a huge environmental issue but also a huge prospect in solving some of the problems we are talking about. Liverpool City Region has just signed up to the National Device Bank, a recycling network run by the Good Things Foundation that is looking to take some of what could go into electronic waste, repurpose it and give it to people who cannot afford to buy computers and high-tech mobile phones. It also operates a national data bank, which is like a food bank but for mobile data. These are very good things that the Government, with a bit of funding, could help enhance.

We need to look at austerity. I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. Local government has to be at the core of providing and funding these services, but its lack of funding means that it is struggling to do so. The head of 100% Digital Leeds has recently been focusing on it, and Leeds is leading the way. Many others would like to follow but simply do not have the funding to do so.

Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sikka. I very much share his concerns about the Government prying into the bank accounts of benefit recipients and pensioners. This is a historic moment, for all the wrong reasons, with the Government looking to pry through the private lives of millions of people, with no evidence that it is in any way necessary. The biggest problem with benefits, of course, is the large amount of money that is left unclaimed or unpaid, due to errors made by the Department for Work and Pensions.

I will also pick up the noble Lord’s point about economic crime. I note that this happens to be the week that, in a Frankfurt court, the former global head of tax at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer acknowledged in his testimony that he had

“glossed over the fact that my legal advice was used for illegal means”.

This was a man who, until 2019, was earning €1.9 million a year.

I have a direct question for the Minister. The Government have talked a great deal about the DWP and their plans in that area. What does the Bill do to tackle economic crime, given that the head of UK Finance described the UK as

“the fraud capital of the world”

and that we have an enormous problem with enablers, down the road in the City of London, who we know are getting around sanctions from the UK Government and others, swishing so much dirty money through London that it is now known as the “London Laundromat”? What does the Bill do on these issues?

I will tick off some points of agreement and concern from previous speeches. The Minister spoke of

“the highest standards of data protection”.

From what I recollect of the Minister’s speech, there was a surprising lack of the Government’s favourite word, “world-leading”. What does it mean if these data protections are not world-leading?

The Minister also said the Bill was “codesigned all the way”. A number of noble Lords pointed to the 260 amendments on Report at the other place. That really does not look like a codesigning process. The benefit of working across many Bills is that this Bill reminds me—and not in a good way—of the Procurement Bill, where your Lordships’ House saw a similar deluge of government amendments and had to try to disentangle the mess. I fear that we are in the same position with this Bill.

I pick up the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron —spectacularly excellent, as always—and her points about edtech and the situation with technology and education systems, and the utter impossibility of teachers, nursery nurses or people in similar positions dredging through the fine detail of every app they might want to use to ensure that their charges are protected. That is obviously not a viable situation. There have to be strong, protective general standards, particularly for apps aimed at children. The Government have to be able to guarantee that those nursery nurses and teachers can just pick up something—“It’s approved, it’s okay”—and use it.

I will also pick up the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, made about the importance of data being available to be used for the public good. She referred to research, but I would like—and I invite NGOs that are interested—to think about community uses. I was recently with the National Association of Local Councils, of which I declare that I am a vice-president, in Shropshire, where we saw parish and town councils doing amazing work to institute climate action. I am talking about small villages where data protection is not really an issue, as everyone knows everything about everybody. But we might think of a suburb of Liverpool or a market town, where people do not have the same personal knowledge of each other but where a council or community group could access data for good reasons. How can we make it possible to use these tools for positive purposes?

Briefly picking up on the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Allan—another of our experts—I echo his stress on the importance of EU equivalency. We have dumped our small businesses, in particular, in the economic mire again and again through the whole process of Brexit. There is a reason why #brexitreality trends regularly. We have also dumped many of our citizens and residents in that situation. We really must not do it again in the technology field.

I have a couple of what I believe to be original points. I want to address specifically Clauses 28 and 30, and I acknowledge here a briefing from Rights and Security International. It notes that that these clauses enable the Government to grant an opt-out to police forces from having to comply with many of the data protection requirements when they are working with the intelligence services. For example, they could grant police immunity from handling personal data unlawfully and reduce people’s right of access to their personal data held by the authorities.

In the Commons, the Minister said these provisions would be “helpful” and “efficient”. I put it to your Lordships’ House that to interfere with rights such as these, at the very least the Government should claim, to have any justification, that they are “proportionate” and “necessary”. That is an area that I suspect my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb will pick up in Committee. There are also issues raised by the Ada Lovelace Institute and by other noble Lord, about the oversight of biometric technologies, including live facial recognition systems, emotion detection and the foundation models that underlie apps such as ChatGPT. These already limited legal safeguards are being further undermined by the Bill, at a point when there is general acknowledgement in the community that we should be heading in the opposite direction. I think we all acknowledge that this a fast-moving area, but the Government are already very clearly behind.

There are two more areas that I particularly want to pick up. One is elections. There has only just started to be focus on this. The Bill would allow the Government to tear up long-standing campaign rules with new exemptions. Now we have safeguards against direct marketing. These are being removed and,

“for the purposes of democratic engagement”,

anyone from 14 years and above can be targeted. I feel like warning the Government: my experience with young people is that the more they see of the Government, the less they like them, so they might want to think about what messages they send them. Seriously, I note that the Information Commissioner’s Office said during the public consultation on the Bill—and we can really hear the bureaucratic speak here—

“This is an area in which there are significant potential risks to people if any future policy is not implemented very carefully”.


The discussion of the Bill has reflected how this could put us in a situation where our elections are even more like those in the United States of America, which is of course no recommendation at all with the place of big money in their politics. I note that we really need to link this with the Government’s recent decision to massively increase election spending limits. Put those two things together and I suggest that is a real threat to what limited democracy we already have left in this country.

There is a further area which I am not going to go into in great detail, given the hour and the day, but which I will probably come back to in Committee. There is an extensive briefing, which I am sure many have seen from Understanding Patient Data. It is really important how the Bill comes up with a different definition of identifiable data. In the health sector, it is very common to use pseudonymous information from which key bits are removed, but it is still quite possible to go backwards and identify an individual from their data because they have an extremely rare disease and they live in this area of the country, or something like that.

This new Bill has, instead, more of a subjective test; the definition seems to rely on the judgment of the data controller and what they know. If the Minister has not looked at the briefing from Understanding Patient Data, I really urge him to because there are concerns here and we already have very grave concern in our community about the use of medical data, the possible loss of anonymity, and the reuse of data for commercial research. We are, again, coming to an Americanisation of our health system.

I conclude by saying that we have an enormous amount of work to do here in your Lordships’ House; I am trying not to let my head sink quietly on to the Bench in front of me, but we are going to have a break first, of course. I say to all noble Lords and—echoing the comments earlier—the many members of staff who support us by working so hard and often so late: thank you very much and Merry Christmas all.

Research, Development and Innovation Organisational Landscape Report

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, when talking about research, the Government often seem to be most excited by and focus on the kind of research that generates new profits and services. But very often research is into social innovation: for example, the subject of antimicrobial resistance. Looking for new drugs is something that we need to do, but social innovation and changes in medical practice can reduce the need to produce new drugs and protect the drugs we have now. Will the Minister perhaps look into seeing how we can focus more on that social innovation as well as the profit-making kinds of research?

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

The science and technology framework sets out five priority areas for research and innovation and those areas are then pursued across a mix of public sector, private sector and other bodies, each with their own goals for the research they are conducting. Within that, there is certainly room for all manner of research as the noble Baroness suggests.

EU Programmes

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for the question. I recognise the issue, and although my ability to fix that is pretty limited, I will of course take that back to my colleagues.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, a number of noble Lords have referred to the stress, pressure and extra work that the scientific community has had to suffer through the years of see-sawing and uncertainty about what is happening with Horizon. On 10 and 11 July, I was with ABX, the Antibiotic Discovery Accelerator Network. On 10 July, the papers were reporting that we were about to sign Horizon, which I told them. Then, on 11 July, I had to say, “No, apparently Rishi Sunak has kiboshed it, so it’s off”. Can the Minister therefore say whether the Government will put in extra resources and support to ensure that the scientific community is in fact able to access this opportunity, which has finally arrived after so many years of waiting?

I have a second question. The Statement refers to what might be described as two of the “buzz” areas of science: fusion, on which we are not joining the EU—I will refrain from commenting on fusion—and artificial intelligence. Can the Minister tell me whether the Government will really focus on and support systems biology, an area of science that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, referred to—the kind of work that produces agro-ecological methods of producing food and managing our landscapes—and the modern, non-reductive biological sciences, given that the EU is, in many areas, far ahead of us in this research and this practice?

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

To the noble Baroness’s first point, I am pleased to say that the EU has agreed jointly with us to help to publicise the new arrangements with the UK and our association and to make sure that all existing participants become rapidly aware of the opportunities for associating with UK institutions and working with us on programmes. I really welcome that as a positive step towards taking full advantage as quickly as possible. Engineering biology is one of the science and research priorities set out by DSIT and will indeed, therefore, remain very much part of our laser focus.

Science and Technology Superpower (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I join everyone in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, and her committee; I look forward to its future work and future reports—which I hope will be debated more promptly.

This report from August 2022 reveals gaping holes where government action should have been. I thank Imperial College London for its useful briefing, which identified how some of those gaping holes have been plugged, at least with stopgap measures. However, as many other noble Lords have already noted, the remaining enormous holes in the house of scientific and technological endeavour, out of which human and financial resources are fast flowing, are the lack of UK association with the Horizon Europe programme; the disastrous hostile environment immigration policies; and the collapse in the genuine official development assistance support. The Royal Academy of Engineering also provided useful reflections, stressing principles including a willingness to act for the long term; moving with agility and at pace; trusted and capable leadership; and action that accelerates progress. Those are not, I am afraid, anything with which this Government are associated.

However, rather than taking pot shots—as tempting and easy as that is—I will seek to bring a unique Green perspective to this debate, and make three challenges to the very foundations of the Government’s approach and, in some respects—and with respect—to that of your Lordships’ committee. The first is the assumption, underlying much of the Government’s rhetoric, that the aim of the science and technology framework—with its talk of bringing technologies to market and of private sector involvement and profit—is to make things, or to create services or intellectual property, to sell.

Certainly, when one looks at the UKRI five-year strategy from March 2022, I am not going to argue with the aim of driving the development, adoption and diffusion of green technologies, but also in that list is developing preventive measures to improve the nation’s health and well-being. The new Secretary of State talks of helping British people to live longer, smarter, healthier and happier lives, but what if achieving that means not making things or creating services to sell, not improving profits but finding ways in which to heal lives and environments without making a profit, thus cutting demand for expensive drugs or invasive treatments, ending the need for farmers to use pesticides or herbicides, or co-creating essential knowledge, working with researchers and communities in the global South and sharing that knowledge for free? Identifying the bad things that we do now and stopping them is also science, even if that means cutting profits and reducing GDP. We need to think hard about how we find funding for research and development for such measures, and that has to be a government priority.

Secondly, I disagree with the five critical technologies identified in the science and technology framework. Crucially, there are two things that are not there: ecology and social innovation. I disagree particularly with one that is there:

“Engineering biology–the application of rigorous engineering principles to the design of biological systems”.


That is such a 20th-century reductionist and outdated view, the kind that we saw on full display in the creation of the so called Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act. Are they really the same Government who occasionally, at odd moments, will claim to believe in the principles of agroecology and to understand that the survival of human systems on this planet to maintain a liveable climate and natural systems means working with the incredibly complex and still little understood natural systems of animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses and archaea that together have created life on this planet?

Finally, although noble Lords may think that I have been radical enough, I am going to finish with an even more radical thought. The UKRI again speaks of securing UK strategic advantage in game-changing technologies, but rather than thinking about beating others in a world facing the climate emergency and nature crisis, with epidemics of poverty and ill health, rampant pandemic threats and a planet poisoned with plastics, pesticides and pharmaceuticals, we have to co-operate with others to make the best possible collective use of human ingenuity, skills, talent and time to survive and thrive through this next dangerous century.