Public Service Broadcasting Online

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Wednesday 9th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My noble friend is right to raise these points. Indeed, it is vital also for practical reasons. Given that just over half of the country have access to a video-on-demand service, the role of public service broadcasting continues to be crucial.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB) [V]]

I declare my interests as noted in the register. Can the Minister confirm that there will be a special focus, in the strategic review that she mentioned was coming next year, on the relationship between young people, public service broadcasting and information? With just two minutes a day of news being consumed by people under 24, as other noble Lords have said, the case for the veracity of news and the authenticity of information is so important at the moment.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right. Obviously, I do not want to pre-empt the conclusions of that committee, but across our legislative programme, the importance of children and young people is pre-eminent.

Data Strategy

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Wednesday 24th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB) [V]]

My Lords, one of the things that I found while digital champion for the UK was the shocking lack of data literacy within government. What plans does the Minister have to ensure that all people working as special advisers, Cabinet-level Ministers or those within their departments are equipped to understand the implications of the data strategy? Does she think that there should now be a more high-level “Minister for Data”, responsible for unleashing the silo-based approach that has hitherto been used?

[Baroness Barran]

The noble Baroness makes an important point; I think it is one she has perhaps made previously, but it definitely bears repeating. We are clear in what we have said already that this will never be successful without raising data literacy skills, not only within government but across the nation. That is work in progress and her point about the importance of strong leadership, given the complexity and scale of this challenge, is well made.

Cairncross Review

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Kidron for her timely debate and draw attention to my interests in the register, including as board director of Twitter and adviser to a bunch of media start-ups, predominantly through Founders Factory. Therefore, noble Lords will see immediately that I am entirely conflicted. On the one hand, I have seen many times the extreme benefits that technology has brought to the vibrant media sector. My dear friend Amelia Gentleman should be name-checked in this Chamber. She single-handedly discovered the Windrush scandal and would say herself that using Twitter and other mechanisms to reach the people she was trying to interview and to build relationships with them was immensely important to her journalism. But, clearly, as well described by my noble friend, we face a very complex landscape. That is why I will focus my brief remarks on innovation.

I was impressed by the £10 million commitment to innovation, but it is 10 times too little. While it is of course important to defend the old world, we must build a positive future for a new kind of journalism. It does not mean a journalism without integrity, which is not based on investigation or that has no strong local news element. But my reading of the very important work that Dame Frances Cairncross did was that there was a defence of the old, perhaps with a lack of creativity about the building of the new.

We need to put innovation far more deeply at the heart of this sector. I am lucky enough to work with a bunch of start-ups from many different angles. One that I would name check, Serelay, is building an amazing weapon against the spread of misinformation and fake news. Another, Black Ballad, is building long-form journalism for black women in Britain. They are wildly different, but both are going to contribute to the problems and challenges that are described here.

Innovation will help us build a strong and robust sector, but it will also move the sector on. I have very much enjoyed the long-form, slightly different-take journalism started by James Harding, the ex-director of BBC News, at Tortoise. It is not for everybody, but I find myself drawn to it many times. I feel that we need to put more investment into innovation in the sector, both from existing organisations but also through organisations such as Nesta, where feet must be held to the fire to make sure that the investments are meaningful and contributing to the challenges that Dame Frances Cairncross described.

The second mode of innovation comes from companies and media organisations themselves. I was heartened to read about the recent experiment in the Times. Noble Lords may raise their eyes to heaven when I link data science and journalism in this Chamber, but surprising results happened. The paper did a long-form project where it looked at all the articles spread out across the web, thinking that volume of content would lead to volume of revenue—but it was wrong. The Times has dramatically changed the nature of its journalism by looking at what people are actually reading. Guess what—that was original articles, deep investigative journalism and journalism that was new and interesting. So the paper reorganised its newsroom to reflect that. Innovation is the way that we must build a new future for journalism.

Social Media: News

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lady Kidron for this debate. We joined the House together and I remember clearly her saying to me, “Oh, I really do not know anything about technology”. That is clearly untrue and I learn from my noble friend all the time. If the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, is a hypocrite, I am afraid that I am Judas, as I must confess early on that I am a board member of Twitter—I shall come back to that in a second.

I was lucky enough to give the 2015 Dimbleby Lecture, in which I presented the case for believing that the Silicon Valley giants would come for a tumbling over the next few years, but even I could not imagine how quickly they would fall. My own small think-tank charity, Doteveryone, did some research that has been released this year showing that 63% of the UK’s adult population does not trust technology. Only one in five people believe that technology companies are doing something valuable with their data. More than 90% of people want to know what is being done with their data, and only 30% can find out what. These are staggering statistics, and it is important to put in the context of today’s debate that failing wider consumer and civil trust in technology, because it is corrosive. As we have heard it most eloquently said by many people around the House, technology is not going away.

Perhaps I may return to Twitter. I joined the board because I am an avid user—not quite with the 5 million followers of the noble Lord, Lord Sugar; my own small number is a fraction of that—and because, when I became UK digital champion in 2009, it immediately gave me a route to some of the local community groups working on aspects of digital inclusion that I knew nothing about. It enabled me also to tap into the biggest brains in the sector and build up my own small following of people who were interested in what was happening. I have learned three things from being on the board that I would like to share with your Lordships today as they are very relevant to the debate.

First—and this perhaps is the most important—nuance, complexity and specificity of argument, policy decision and change are incredibly important. Twitter is not Facebook; Facebook is not Amazon; Amazon is not Google. Yes, they share many characteristics. On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, I wish that Twitter had even made a profit. I am sure that many of your Lordships in this Chamber would think that it had, but it has not. We have enormous reach—350 million users; we have fewer than 3,000 members of staff and, as yet, no profitable revenues. Google, as is well documented, has $70 billion on its balance sheet. As noble Lords may have seen from the front page of the Guardian today, Jeff Bezos is now the richest man in the world with $106 billion of wealth personally to his name, which could pay off the UK national debt twice. It is incredibly important if we are to make good decisions in this Chamber and beyond as users and citizens that we are specific in our discussions.

Secondly, I have learned more than anything that diversity of thought and view is vital. I am surprised and happy that the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, remarked on parliamentary candidates’ roles on social media. We must fight for more equality of representation in all those companies at the most senior levels. I was the second woman to join the Twitter board. There are only two women on the board of Facebook; one is Sheryl Sandberg; there is only one woman on the board of Snap. We will never get to a point where some of the counter-winds that we face are recognised and some of the incredibly unpleasant behaviours nailed in engineering terms if we do not fight for more women to be at both board level and engineering level. What action can the UK take to build the role of women in the technology sector in this country? It is vital.

My final point concerns something we have under-egged in the debate today: I do not really believe that many countries understand the internet but I very much believe, as I said in a recent debate here, that Russia, China and North Korea do. We ignore that at our peril. They are the experts in social media. China has built a parallel internet, as we are all aware. They are now monitoring their own citizens, building huge profiles of them and will reward them in the future with services and different mechanisms to keep them incentivised to behave well. Yes, our UK issues are very important, but we are a minnow. The entire European tech sector is just 7% of that of the US. We have to keep focused on our role globally and the big geopolitical headwinds we face.

Data Protection Bill [HL]

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 10th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, happy Ada Lovelace Day. How prescient of the Whips and the Minister to pick today for Second Reading. To remind colleagues who might be wondering: she was one of the great innovators of computing in the 19th century. She worked with Charles Babbage on his computational engine, she was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and, in fact, she probably created the first algorithm intended to be carried out by that machine. As part of that, she is often regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of computing, so it could hardly be more apt to pick today for this Second Reading debate, in which we are probably looking at the consequences of the work that she started all those years ago.

The Government’s ambition is to,

“make Britain the best place to start and run a digital business; and … the safest place in the world to be online”,

as detailed in the Conservative manifesto. This Bill is intended to,

“ensure that our data protection framework is suitable for our new digital age, and cement the UK’s position at the forefront of technological innovation, international data sharing and protection of personal data”.

This aspiration to be the best, to make the UK a world leader and set a precedent for good regulation of our digital worlds, is admirable, but that means that the Bill must set the bar high. It must be the very best it can be, especially as we head towards Brexit, where having the highest standards around the collection and use of data will be vital not just to digital businesses but to our continued ability to trade. This Bill must be the foundation for that. There is much that is good in the Bill, but I do not believe that it is yet the best that it can be.

I must start with a confession. Despite the kind references today to my career and supposed expertise, I found this Bill incredibly hard to read and even harder to understand. I fear that we will not do enough to stop the notion, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, that we are sleepwalking into a dystopian future if we do not work hard to simplify the Bill and make it accessible to more people, the people to whom I feel sure the Government must want to give power in this updated legislation. Let us ensure that the Bill is a step forward for individual power in the rapidly changing landscape in which we sit, a power that people understand and, importantly, use. Let us make it an indicator to the world that the UK balances the importance of tech start-ups, innovation, foreign investment and big businesses with consumer and citizen rights.

The Government should be commended for getting ahead of movements that are growing all over the world to free our data from the tech giants of our age. As data becomes one of our most valuable resources—as we have heard, the new oil—individuals have begun to want a stake in determining for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is held and communicated to others. So I welcome the clear data frameworks, which are important not only for the best digital economy but for the best digital society.

I agree with much that has been said today but want to make three specific points on the Bill. First, from any perspective, the GDPR is difficult to comprehend, comprising sweeping regulations with 99 articles and 173 recitals. The Bill contains some wonderful provisions, of which my favourite is:

“Chapter 2 of this Part applies for the purposes of the applied GDPR as it applies for the purposes of the GDPR … In this Chapter, “the applied Chapter 2” means Chapter 2 of this Part as applied by this Chapter”.


Giving people rights is meaningful only if they know that they have them, what they mean, how to exercise them, what infringement looks like and how to seek redress for it. There are questions about the practical workability of a lot of these rights. For example, on the right to portability, how would the average person know what to do with their ported data? How would they get it? Where would they keep it? There was a funny example in a newspaper recently where a journalist asked Facebook to send them all the data that it had collected over the previous eight years and received a printed copy of 800 pages of data—extremely useful, as I think you will agree. What about your right to erase your social media history? I should declare my interest as a director of Twitter at this point. How can you remove content featuring you that you did not post and in which people may have mentioned you? What happens as the complexity of the algorithm becomes so sophisticated that it is hard to separate out your data? How does the immense amount of machine learning deployed already affect your rights, let alone in the future?

Awareness among the public about the GDPR is very low—the Open Data Institute has done a lot of work on this which is soon to be published. It is very unlikely that ordinary people understand this legislation. They will have no understanding of how their rights affect them. A lot of education work needs to be done.

For businesses, too, the learning curve is steep, especially for foreign investors in European companies. Some are betting that the sheer scope of the GDPR means that the European regulators will struggle to enforce it. When the GDPR came up at a recent industry start-up event, one industry source said that none of the people to whom they had spoken could confidently say that they had a plan. Every online publisher and advertiser should ensure that they do, but none of them is taking steps to prepare.

So much has been done by this Government on building a strong digital economy that it is important to ensure that small and start-up businesses do not feel overwhelmed by the changes. What substantial help could be planned and what education offered? What help is there with compliance? By way of example, under Clause 13, companies have 21 days to show bias from algorithms, but what does this mean for a small AI start-up which may be using anonymised intelligence data to build a new transport or health app? What do they have to think about to make good legal decisions? As my noble friend Lord Jay so brilliantly argued, how can we ensure post-Brexit legislative certainty for them in building global successful businesses?

This brings me to my second question: why has the right of civil groups to take action on behalf of individuals been removed from the UK context for the GDPR? Instead, the Bill places a huge onus on individuals, who may lack the know-how and the ability to fight for their rights. As has been mentioned, article 80(1) of the GDPR allows for representative bodies—for example, consumer groups—to bring complaints at the initiation of data subjects. Article 80(2) allows those groups to bring complaints where they see infringements of data rights without an individual having to bring the case themselves. These give consumers power. It supports their rights without them having to specifically understand that the rights exist, or how to exercise them. Unfortunately, article 80(2) is an optional clause and the UK has omitted it. This omission is worrying, given how stretched the ICO’s resources are and the impact this could have on its support for the public. Granting rights over data to individuals is meaningless if individuals lack the understanding to exercise those rights and there is no infrastructure within civic society to help them exercise those rights. However, we have many organisations in this country—Citizens Advice, Which?—which have these kinds of rights of free-standing action in relation to other regulations. There does not seem to be any good reason why the UK has chosen not to take up the option in EU law to allow consumer privacy groups to lodge independent data protection complaints as they can currently do under consumer rights laws.

Citizens face complex data trails. It is impossible for the average person to be able to know which organisations hold their personal data. Enabling privacy groups to take independent action will ensure these rights are enforced. As it stands, under the Bill the ICO is currently the main recourse for this.

Resourcing the ICO, Part 5 of the Bill, is essential and my third main area of interest. The ICO has considerable responsibilities and duties under the Bill towards both business and individuals: upholding rights, investigating reactively, informing and educating to improve standards, educating people and consumer groups, and maintaining international relationships. I feel exhausted thinking about it. The ICO’s workload is vast and increasing. It lacks sufficient resources currently. In March 2017, the Information Commissioner asked Parliament if it could recruit 200 more staff but the salaries it offers are significantly below those offered by the private sector for roles requiring extremely high levels of skills and experience. These staff are going to become ever more important and more difficult to recruit in the future.

The ICO currently funds its data protection work by charging fees to data controllers. It receives ring-fenced funding for its freedom of information request work from the Government. This income can increase the number of data controllers only as it increases: it is not in line with the volume or complexity of work, and certainly not with that in the Bill. Perhaps it is time for another method of funding, such as statutory funding.

Finally, I would like briefly to add my thoughts on how the Bill affects children. As many noble Lords have said, the YouGov poll does indeed say that 80% of the public support raising the age to 18—currently it is 13, as detailed by the Government. However, there are many other surveys, particularly one by the Children’s Society, which show that 80% of 13 year-olds currently have a social media account and 80% of people under 13 have lied or twisted their age in order to establish one. This is the realpolitik in the war of understanding the internet with our children. I respectfully disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and others in the Chamber: I feel strongly that it is wrong to place policing at the heart of how we deal with relationships between children and the internet. We need to take a systems-based approach. I have seen my godchildren set up fake accounts and whizz around the internet at a speed I find alarming. We have to deal on their terms. We have to help educators, parents and people supporting children, not use the long arm of the law.

There are many anomalies, as has already been detailed, as well as discrepancies with Scotland, differences between parental oversight and explicit giving of consent, problems with data collection and how the digital charter will work, and so on, and those are all important. However, I am optimistic too—I always am—and there is much to welcome in the Bill. I am particularly optimistic if we can work in tandem on the wider digital understanding of our society, as so brilliantly detailed by the noble Baroness, Lady Jay. I wish I could discuss the important themes in the Bill with Ada Lovelace, but in her absence I will have many good discussions with people in this Chamber so that we can all work hard to ensure that citizens and consumers reap the benefits of the Bill.

Digital Understanding

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho]

That this House takes note of the case for improved digital understanding at all levels of United Kingdom society.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, the last time I secured a debate in your Lordships’ Chamber, it was to mark the 25th anniversary of the world wide web. We marvelled at having Bach and da Vinci at our fingertips and celebrated 94 year-olds on social media. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, called the internet,

“the greatest transformative force in history bar none”.—[Official Report, 16/1/14; col. 403.]

However, even on that day we were cautious. I said that,

“we are sleepwalking into assuming that the platform underpinning so much of our daily life is not changing”.—[Official Report, 16/1/14; col. 396.]

I am sad to report that nearly all of us, including me, have spent too much of the past three years continuing to sleepwalk. If that debate was a birthday party, today’s must be a mid-life crisis.

We are in the midst of some major geopolitical shifts. The planet is hotter than it has been in 115,000 years. Populism has seen a worrying resurgence, both at home and abroad. Stagnating wages mean that young people are earning thousands less than generations before them. Alongside these, we are living through the staggering transformation brought by the internet. Technology is changing our world at a speed we have never seen before, a speed that I believe will now never be reversed. That is a challenge, but if we allow ourselves to awaken we can make it a source of tremendous opportunity: if we seize them, if we own them, we can harness the power of these technologies to address the other great challenges we face. I am calling today for digital understanding to be improved everywhere because I believe it is central to our ability to create better outcomes for people in the next century.

For as long as we have had the internet, we have had the internet’s promise. The internet promised us energised democracies and a world where all could speak to one another. In a way, it has fulfilled that promise: we can register to vote, petition the Government and support candidates who match our values with just a few keystrokes. But in addition to that, we have emotionally manipulative advertisements that target us based on our gender, our faith, and even our sexual preferences. The Vote Leave campaign last year spent 98% of its budget on digital adverts and boasted that the advantage of doing so was that it was so poorly scrutinised by the political media. Just this morning, as many noble Lords will have heard, Facebook revealed that many thousands of dollars of political ads were bought by Russian trolls during the US election, and I am sure there will be more revelations to come.

The internet promised us flexible, creative work that could be done anywhere. Again, it delivered: today we have the biggest tech industry in Europe, with 1.5 million people employed and £7 billion invested last year alone. However, alongside that we also have Amazon delivery drivers receiving as little as £3 an hour with no breaks, while CEO Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth surpasses $92 billion. Not a day goes by without headlines wrestling with the nature of artificial intelligence and how it will affect the world of work. Enormous and extraordinary leaps in quantum computing and machine learning somehow feel dislocated from the people who will inevitably be affected by the ways these innovations are deployed.

The internet promised us free access to the world’s information. We now live in a world where every single piece of art at the Tate has its own web page, but also one where fake news is an art form, slickly produced by anyone who wants to profit from our confusion. The internet promised access to new ways of learning and creativity for our children and in many ways, again, this has been true: learning has become democratised and more accessible, with everything from Khan Academy to the amazing BBC resources. But who in the early days of the web would have imagined the creation of Instagram and foreseen its damaging effects on young people’s self-esteem?

For a dotcom dinosaur like me, one of the most surprising developments is the domination of our experience of the internet by a handful of companies. Twenty years ago the rise of these so-called platform businesses was not anticipated. Now the flows of money, power and usage are controlled in a way far removed from the open, distributed, fragmented early years. We can point to these tech giants, the monopoly platforms, the wily political strategists who have shaped these phenomena, and try to blame them for all this, but the truth is that they only created some of the hollow vessels. We are the users.

Every time we use the internet, we leave a data trail of valuable information to be transformed into personalised and targeted advertising. That may be a tantalising holiday home in Europe for some of us, but for the poor and vulnerable it is likely to be a high-interest loan or a bad insurance deal. Every time we share some outrageous piece of invective or agitation, we encourage the creation of even more content which erodes the factual base of our public conversation. Every time we tap our phone to choose the convenience of a short ride home, we buy into the idea that it is okay for a driver to have no job security or holiday pay. To paraphrase John Lanchester recently in the London Review of Books, “We are the product”.

Now we are seeing the outcomes of these contributions. Expertise has been devalued and emotion reigns supreme. Take a look at the climate crisis. The internet has helped to drive the exponential increase in information, but the public’s ability to accept it has slid. YouTube videos with titles such as “What They Haven’t Told You About Climate Change” and “The Great Climate Change Hoax” have driven millions of views. Is it any wonder that in the UK, Australia, Germany, Canada and the US the average partisan divide over the climate crisis is now 40 points?

We have let these things come upon us, but it is not too late to wake up. If we want to change this dynamic and shape the future we need to recapture some of the internet’s original promise and more of its positive transformative power. That means we need to understand—at all levels of society—what our digital world really is. We need to address the challenges that already exist and pre-empt the ones we do not know about.

We live our digital lives this way because we have the skills to do so. Some 91% of us in the UK have the ability to use the internet. This is a remarkable achievement. It is important to continue the work to close the remaining gap and include those who do not have the skills or access. But we also need to move beyond skills to understanding. Nearly all UK internet users have the digital skills to use a search engine but only half know how to distinguish between search results and adverts. Around two-thirds of our digitally skilled population can shop and bank online but a third of those do not make any checks before entering their personal or financial information. More than 1.4 million of us work in tech-related jobs but, as the recent WannaCry attack showed us, hardly anyone is investing the time, resources or expertise to keep our systems safe. This list could go on for ever.

Becoming a nation of people with digital understanding will be different and more complicated than becoming one with digital skills. For starters, skills are tangible and teachable—can you download this app, programme this device or complete this transaction? They also reinforce the notion that digital is something we do. It is time-bound and transactional. But in a world where we spend more time online than we do asleep and where everything from televisions to kettles can connect to the internet, digital is something we are. Understanding is not a race to be run. It is a lifelong process of learning unique to each of us.

We in this House have a particular responsibility as we have the privilege of playing a role in public life. We must ask ourselves whether we have the digital understanding to provide the leadership needed in this time of technological change. I cannot stress how vital it is that we—parliamentarians, policymakers and politicians—absorb and engage with the realities of how digital technologies work. We must see where our country can make the most of them and be alert to the potential dangers.

In recent months I have heard frankly anodyne comments such as “enough is enough” or “we must scrap end-to-end encryption”—the very system that keeps our personal information safe. This is alarmist and a disservice to the people we serve. Just as it would not be acceptable for a Minister not to understand how her departmental budget works, it is not acceptable for her not to understand how technology affects her brief. It is not an insurmountable task. We live in 2017, not 1817, and we have form to follow.

I had the pleasure of working at the beginning of the Government Digital Service. It has shown how digital understanding can be applied to the world of government, from scrapping paper car tax discs to simplifying the appointment of power of attorney. It has also shown us how not to do it. It saved us £4.1 billion by not creating expensive and complicated apps and by salvaging doomed projects such as universal credit. But the good work being done to help the Government modernise and to make it work for people who live their lives digitally is being dismantled. Departmental silos are creeping back, replicating cost and inefficiency. GDS is celebrated and copied around the world. Last year we were ranked top for digital government by the UN. How ironic if we fail to recognise and nurture this great asset because of a lack of digital understanding.

There are other pioneers making digital understanding a reality. The Open University—in which I declare my interest as chancellor—makes digital literacy integral to its students’ experience. OU students graduate able to manage their digital identities, separate fact from fiction and make sense of what they find online. It is sharing its experience with other institutions. Citizens Advice—a reassuring hand on our high streets since the war—now has a digital dashboard showing what advice people are searching for and is helping millions of its users navigate the new challenges in their lives, from Facebook scams to online identity theft. London has just appointed its first chief digital officer, making our capital a role model for making the city digital. This is not about shiny new gadgets. It is about using technology so we can recycle better and have fewer potholes and more effective parking.

I call on the Government to support and amplify the good things happening and to bring these people together in a more structured way. How about we create a formal network of public organisations that can tangibly build our nation’s digital understanding? Much of their work is admirable but it is co-ordination and focus that will embed digital understanding in the fabric of our lives. Perhaps too this network could have a more formal role as a resource for elected and public officials needing support. But while we do this at a granular level, we need to do it with a purpose and a destination. We need to know what kind of digital world we are trying to shape. For this reason, I welcome the Government’s role in developing a digital charter. It presents an opportunity for us to argue and articulate what we want and to design a moral compass for our digital age.

We know that the digital landscape is currently monopolised by a few American-based platforms—although I would watch out for the Asian digital tigers which may soon join them—which are steeped in the world-view of Silicon Valley with its love of the First Amendment and libertarianism. We can build a charter of our own—an articulation of the nation we want to be and then perhaps we can globally find our commonalities and create the basis of a Geneva Convention for the web. I believe we must come together and attempt to put some of these universal principles in place for the next phase of our digital world.

No matter how we move forward, we must do so in modern ways. We do not need a Select Committee on digital understanding beavering away in a closed-off room. We need smart people working in creative and agile ways to get to the bottom of what is really going on. Difficult or not, this work must be done and done now. It is an issue not just of technology but of fairness. It is simply not fair that only a few people understand technology and are taking advantage of the billions who do not. None of this means that we can rest in the mission to bring basic digital skills to everyone or roll out high-quality broadband to the rest of the country. It just means we need to expand our goal. It is not an either/or but a both.

If there is anyone still struggling to comprehend the universality of tech in our lives, I recommend taking a look at today’s list of speakers. We have a composer, a neuroscientist, the Astronomer Royal, a filmmaker, businesswomen and a Bishop—not to mention the man who brought us Amstrad. I am heartened by the fact that, as this Chamber debates digital understanding for everyone in the UK, we are not simply hearing from those whose careers, like mine, have been built around technology. Members from all over the House will speak and, if a 700-year-old institution can see the value of digital understanding, I have no doubt the rest of the British public can too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho]

My Lords, you would have thought that, as a director of Twitter, I would be expert in reducing complicated content to just 140 characters—but even I am flummoxed by how to concertina such an erudite and interesting debate into the few short seconds that I have left. I feel as if I had opened a huge dam—or perhaps that is not the right expression. Anyway, a huge amount has come out and a huge amount of emotion has been expressed. I hope we can continue the conversation. We need to have it, and more importantly, the country needs us to have it. I hope that Sir Alan—or rather, the noble Lord, Lord Sugar—will forgive me: I was on my device, but I was making notes, because I too have learned a lot this afternoon. I thank noble Lords for their contributions.

Motion agreed.

Data Ethics Commission

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for raising this because we agree that these issues are vital. It is critical that we get the rules right so that we can give the public confidence in how their data are being used. I completely agree with her that things are moving very fast. I can be more specific about the timing when we have consulted various groups that will be set up or have been set up, and when we have looked at the reports, particularly the Royal Society and British Academy report. When we have considered those reports we can be more specific, but we aim to update our thinking later in the year.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, the necessity of an ethics component in a structural engineering degree is well known: you cannot become one unless you have completed an ethnical component to the course. Would the Minister consider the other points at which we could insert an ethics course in our computer science degrees or other points of learning?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

That is a very good idea. This affects many areas of work and our society: data are part of everything. Many degrees, not just the ones the noble Baroness mentioned, should consider the ethical issues surrounding this. A careful consideration of ethics is part of any good education.