Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

Debate between Baroness Harding of Winscombe and Lord Davies of Brixton

Committee stage
Wednesday 20th March 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I will be brief because I associate myself with everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, just said. This is where the rubber hits the road from our previous group. If we all believe that it is important to maintain children’s protection, I hope that my noble friend the Minister will be able to accept if not the exact wording of the children-specific amendments in this group then the direction of travel—and I hope that he will commit to coming back and working with us to make sure that we can get wording into the Bill.

I am hugely in favour of research in the private sector as well as in universities and the public sector; we should not close our minds to that at all. We need to be realistic that all the meaningful research in AI is currently happening in the private sector, so I do not want to close that door at all, but I am extremely uncomfortable with a Secretary of State having the ability to amend access to personal data for children in this context. It is entirely sensible to have a defined code of conduct for the use of children’s data in research. We have real evidence that a code of conduct setting out how to protect children’s rights and data in this space works, so I do not understand why it would not be a good idea to do research if we want the research to happen but we want children’s rights to be protected at a much higher level.

It seems to me that this group is self-evidently sensible, in particular Amendments 8, 22, 23 and 145. I put my name to all of them except Amendment 22 but, the more I look at the Bill, the more uncomfortable I get with it; I wish I had put my name to Amendment 22. We have discussed Secretary of State powers in each of the digital Bills that we have looked at and we know about the power that big tech has to lobby. It is not fair on Secretaries of State in future to have this ability to amend—it is extremely dangerous. I express my support for Amendment 22.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

I just want to say that I agree with what the previous speakers have said. I particularly support Amendment 133; in effect, I have already made my speech on it. At that stage, I spoke about pseudonymised data but I focused my remarks on scientific research. Clearly, I suspect that the Minister’s assurances will not go far enough, although I do not want to pre-empt what he says and I will listen carefully to it. I am sure that we will have to return to this on Report.

I make a small additional point: I am not as content as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding of Winscombe, about commercial research. Different criteria apply; if we look in more detail at ensuring that research data is protected, there may be special factors relating to commercial research that need to be covered in a potential code of practice or more detailed regulations.