Fighting Fraud (Fraud Act 2006 and Digital Fraud Committee Report)

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Friday 30th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I too was not of a member of the committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, but was compelled to come today. I hope your Lordships will forgive me a short personal detour about why I was particularly keen to come and speak this morning. I have been absent from the House for many months, partly because of severe hospitalisation. I will not bore Members with physical details but I am lucky to have a leg and a life right now, so I feel as if I am winning in being able to stand up here and talk about this subject. I particularly wanted to come this morning because of two personal reflections from that time.

First, as Members are fully aware and as has just been mentioned from across the Chamber, this issue affects people at their most vulnerable. When you are at death’s door, you are at your most vulnerable, and in hospital I met several people who related to me, in waiting rooms or while I was lying on tables in various places waiting for doctors and nurses, how anxious they were about what was happening in the online world, particularly while they were in hospital and unable to cope with the volume of things being sent to their devices. It really struck me how I normally manage this in my daily life, being a relatively competent technology person—so that was the first point.

Secondly, coming back into the working world after a long absence, the volume of text messages and emails—not to my parliamentary account but my personal email, which is in my own name, so I guess it is relatively easy for scammers to come to—was absolutely appalling. I was taken quite by surprise and felt somewhat that the scales had been lifted from my eyes. So forgive the personal detour, but that is why I am so pleased to be able to speak this morning and to make three short points in my contribution.

My noble friend Lord Colville of Culross has already mentioned the first of them, which is that the biggest and most dramatic shift in technology that has occurred not just while I have been slightly absent from the House but over the last few months is that of generative AI and the platform shift happening there. Everyone is reading the headlines and I am not going to repeat what I am sure has been much debated here in the Chamber. But it is striking to me that this report was published last November and I think the committee would probably have put many different points about the use of AI just in the short period of time since. I cannot come up with a solution, but it is important to recognise how fast technology is changing and how innately complicated it is to keep up with the massive developments in how platforms are being used and individuals are able to create and generate content.

My noble friend Lord Colville mentioned the appearance of deepfakes, but this has been amplified exponentially with these new technologies. It is not only the volume and scale but the sophistication: synthetic people can now be created. I was reflecting that my voice is probably the last one a scammer would choose to use, thank goodness—I do not think anyone would fall for an outward call from a “Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho” suggesting an entrepreneurial opportunity. Looking at my own entrepreneurial adventures, they would probably put the phone down immediately.

In all seriousness, as the bank example already given has shown, this is a very complex issue. While I recognise that the report suggests that AI should be used to look at sets of data, and I agree with that recommendation, we also need to proceed with caution and think carefully about the boundaries and guardrails around how the latest wave of technology is used. This is an extremely urgent matter, in my opinion.

My second point is that, as the new president of the British Chambers of Commerce, I think it essential, as the report suggests, that we link up with business. I would like to make a case again for small businesses to have special treatment. It is very hard right now to run a small business: you face cash flow pressures, increasing energy costs, wage inflation and all the other things that I know are debated frequently in this Chamber. In addition, I have noted from multiple conversations with our members their profound anxiety about how the names of their own organisations are being used by others—let alone the things for which they have their own responsibility. While I recognise that corporations need to take responsibility, and I certainly believe that technology and telecoms companies should be doing more, I think there is still work to be done to educate small businesses to build the cyberdefences they need.

I was talking to a small insurance company in Doncaster which had faced a horrible issue where somebody else was using its name for outbound calling. It was not something the company had the capacity to look after and worry about and it did not get help from any of the law enforcement agencies locally. It was providing the already stressed entrepreneur with another point of stress in these economically difficult times.

So, generative AI and small businesses are mentioned; the final thing mentioned frequently through the report is the skills we need to address this challenge being so profoundly lacking across all sectors. I have thought about this deeply over the last decade. We are still in a very profound skills crisis in this country. Just yesterday, the Open University, of which I am chancellor, released a report examining the extremely deep level of skills we need across multiple sectors, including cybersecurity. This is true across many businesses, both in the public and private sectors. We need to make this an urgent part of the agenda. I do not believe we will be able to be as resilient as we should be unless we have a deeper skills strategy. We have local skills investment partnerships, which I understand are working well. We should be using them more and thinking sectorally about how we can make sure that we have the skills we need. Those are the things that struck me from reading the report. I am delighted to be able to share my thoughts again in the Chamber and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan.

To close, I was reflecting on being at lastminute.com back in 1999. I clearly remember a moment when I found a fax on our fax machine—despite the appearance of incredible technology, we were using fax behind the website—that had a customer’s credit card details on it. I was about to fax it to the supplier to get the booking confirmed. I remember thinking “Maybe this is not such a good idea”. Fast-forward to now: we never imagined that this is where the technology would have led us—to the incredible speed, pace and ability to create this fraud at scale. It is depressing. It is not what I think the technology landscape should have tilted towards, but we are where we are. The massive shift in generative AI recently, as I have said, combined with the economic climate we face, makes these recommendations vital. I hope we can go further and faster than the report suggests.