Newport Wafer Fab

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I am sorry to hear about my noble friend’s Land Rover key; I hope it is restored to him as quickly as possible. We have a very active semi- conductor manufacturing and research and development facility in this country. We have over 100 companies actively working with compound semiconductor devices. Around 5,000 UK companies, 90% of which are SMEs, are designing and making electronics components devices, systems and products. The Chancellor announced an increase in funding in this area. The south Wales cluster is particularly important. We are spending hundreds of millions of pounds promoting it. We are very proud of it. This has no implications beyond that specific transaction, which was considered on national security grounds under the legislation, as the Secretary of State is required to do.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

Does the Minister agree that it is not just a matter of intellectual property or the number of research and development staff, but that we must manufacture stuff and not be totally reliant on foreign supplies? Reinforcing what the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, just said, it is a bit like being unable to grow crops and feed your people. If we cannot manufacture, we will collapse because we cannot import the stuff. It could be bog standard chips or bog standard anything. We need to get our manufacturing capability up in this modern world, where there will be a shortage of all this stuff.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I agree with the noble Lord. That is why in 2016 we set up the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult, with £50 million of funding. Since then, it has initiated over £100 million of projects and collaborative projects which have generated or saved over 4,700 jobs in the UK. Therefore, we are very active in this space. This decision has no implications for that investment, which will continue. It was a quasi-judicial decision on national security grounds, which is what the Secretary of State is required to do.

Office of the Whistleblower Bill [HL]

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 25th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, this is an important Bill which addresses an area that needs thoughtful sorting out. I agree with the points the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, made. There is no point in me repeating any of them, but one I think is particularly important is the whole area of financial redress to whistleblowers. They cannot be left out of pocket and many of them without work. Their whistleblowing has harmed their employment and their future, and that is very serious.

I have two caveats about whether there should or should not be total anonymity. The French experience during the Second World War resulted in France not allowing anonymity for whistleblowers nowadays, because the quickest way of getting your neighbour’s property was to make an anonymous report to the Gestapo that they were members of the resistance, at which point they disappeared. We must always be careful of people using this mechanism incorrectly for their own business ends and that it does not become a weapon, but this is not to say that everything the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, said about protecting whistleblowers was not right.

I also remember back to the 1980s, when I was in software development. If you lost a software developer to the opposition, the best thing was to get an Anton Piller order, at which point you walked in and seized all their files and records because you said there had been copyright infringement. That closed them down for at least a week and put them at a serious disadvantage. It was even better if you could actually follow up with a Mareva injunction—which we never did—because, with a bit of luck, they would go bankrupt. You have to be very careful about some of these things being used in that way.

One of my sons commented on the disturbing tendency that there is no longer the principle of innocent until proven guilty. You can now force people to resign, often from high-profile public positions, by an accusation that many years ago they behaved inappropriately by today’s exacting standards—and this resignation must happen immediately, before any examination of context, veracity or circumstances. Two consequential thoughts came to me from this. The first is that there must not automatically be an unquestioning belief that any blown whistle is true. You will get ones that are not, but it must be handled terribly carefully. The second is a bit broader than the Bill, but I thought I would slot it in here, and it is relevant to stuff that has happened recently in the news. Carelessly worded and overhasty tweets made by someone who is young should not be held against them for ever, especially once they have entered a more reflective and responsible area in their lives. We have a Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, which allows people to put their past behind them after a certain period and gives them a fresh start. We should do the same for all these people who have poorly presented pronouncements in the past which are perceived painfully.

China: Supply Chains

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Wednesday 1st July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel]

At the moment, we are consulting on various areas where it might be possible to launch a free trade zone, but I am not aware that Five Eyes membership will be a qualification for that. UK engagement with the belt and road initiative is focused on practical steps and collaboration to help ensure that infrastructure investments are delivered in line with recognised standards in four key areas: transparency; environmental impact, including carbon emissions; social standards; and debt sustainability. Such standards lead to good projects, which benefit all parties. With their world-leading experience, British companies have an important role to play in contributing to that effort.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB) [V]]

Does the Minister agree that not much electronic equipment is manufactured in the UK so we will always be strategically dependent on foreign companies? Is not the important thing to ensure interoperability and spread the risk across suppliers in different countries, and to realise that we cannot rely on any country when it comes to security and spying? What we need is end-to-end encryption that works. Should we not also support UK companies to build equipment in the new, innovative 5G space?

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel]

It is certainly a great priority for us to do that. It falls into the general area where it is very important to secure diversity of supplies for the United Kingdom. The pandemic has taught us many lessons about the importance of diversity of supplies. The noble Earl can rest assured that we are observing and watching this very carefully, including developing with our allies alternative sources of supplies to give us much greater diversity in these matters.

Post Office: Horizon Accounting System

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

First, I offer my congratulations to my noble friend on his 50 years of exemplary service, as indeed I do to the Lord Speaker. I can only agree with my noble friend. We need to get to the bottom of this quickly. We need to get on with it, and the best way of doing that is through an independent review.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB) [V]]

Why has this taken five years since these miscarriages of justice were revealed to Parliament in an Adjournment debate in the Commons? What happened to the later independent report by Second Sight, which was due to be published in March 2015? Horizon was already in trouble with developments at ICL, and was nearly scrapped in the mid-1990s on the merger with Fujitsu. Perhaps it is a pity that it was not.

[Lord Callanan]

Of course, the Horizon court case occupied a lot of time and effort in both government and the Post Office, and it provided an extensive and, indeed, damning indictment of what went on at the time. However, we think that there is more to be done and that an independent review is the best way of proceeding with that.

Artificial Intelligence (Select Committee Report)

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and the committee on a great report, which is crammed full of good advice, especially about the need for investment in our universities, where they teach thorough thinking, and in our innovative SMEs, where we can possibly unleash the full potential of the UK in this area. I declare a small interest in that I am about to join an ethical oversight group for the Proton Partners data vault, which will contain oncological data.

The first thing that struck me about the report was what it said about lifelong retraining. I can see exactly why this is necessary. I remember reading a report some time ago about people’s capacity to handle change as they grow older. Unfortunately, a lot of people find that very difficult. Certainly a lot of my friends do, and they regard me as rather odd because I have lived in the cyber world and am very happy to embrace change and enjoy it. However, I have discovered that a lot of people like to settle down within the boundaries of what they know, so I do not know how that will be handled. Will the human mind and its ability to handle change alter? I think we should study that.

The second thing that amused me in the report were the great figures on how many jobs we are going to lose. So far, I have noticed that every time there has been a technological improvement, the number of jobs has increased—they never seem to disappear; they just change. I remember that when bookkeeping software came out, it was said that accountants would be redundant. I will not go on with other examples as there is no point.

The third thing that I noticed in the report was the reference to anonymisation; that comes down to a lot of things that people want. They want their privacy and are terrified either of big companies knowing too much about them and using their data for financial gain or of the Government drawing inappropriate conclusions about whether to restrict people’s ability to move around due to their patterns of behaviour. That may be a mistake. But the trouble is that, theoretically, we may be able to anonymise data, but, if certain things are anonymised properly, they are no longer useful. Epidemiological research is particularly like that. It is very often necessary to know where a subject is located to look for clustering effects in the data. To go right back to the first example, that is how they tracked down cholera to a particular street in London. The utility of the data can be destroyed.

That brings me to ethics, which is really what I wanted to mention. With true anonymisation, if you discover that a subject in a study could be saved if only you could identify them, should you save them? Or, in the greater cause of keeping the data for epidemiological study, should you make sure that everything is anonymous and accept that they will die? That brings me to the ethical bit. I was very interested in the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Reid, who, much better than I could, went down the road of thinking about the challenge of the AI system. It is, as he said, an alien thought process. It does not have empathy or a conscience built into it. It is therefore, by definition, sociopathic. That is a challenge. How do you get that into a computer? It does not think like us. Our little computers—our brains—are analogue computers that work on reactions and in shades of grey. They are not, at heart, logical. However much you give that computer fuzzy logic, it comes down to ones and noughts firing at the bottom. I have heard discussions between various neuroscientists about whether it is possible to programme empathy, but that does not matter. We do not have that at the moment.

It will be interesting when the computer that lacks empathy comes up with some conclusions. Let us fire at it the huge problem of NHS funding. One big problem is the unsustainable cost of end-of-life care. The Government are trying to dream up all sorts of wonderful taxes and so forth. Some research a long time ago by a Dutch university found that smokers spend seven times more in taxes during their lifetimes than they cost when they start dying of cancer. They also die earlier, so there would be less end-of-life care to fund. The AI computer will think logically. It will realise that there has been a huge rise in obesity. In fact, obesity-related cancers have now overtaken smoking-related cancers. I predicted the rise in obesity when people were stopped from smoking because smoking is an appetite suppressant. Therefore, if we can get more people smoking, we will reduce the obesity and end-of-life funding problems and we could probably drop taxes because there will be a net gain in the profits from people who smoke. And they would enjoy themselves, particularly bipolar people—smoking is great for them because it calms them down when they are hyper and, if they are a bit down and getting sleepy in a car, they can puff on a cigarette and not fall asleep, avoiding many accidents on the road. I can see just how the computer would recommend that.

Is that a sociopathic view? Does it lack empathy or is it logically what we should be doing? I leave that to noble Lords. I make absolutely no judgment. I am just trying to suggest what could happen. That is the problem because lots of these decisions will involve ethics—decisions that are going to cause harm. We have to work out what is the least-worst thing. How will we deal with the transfer of liability? I will run out of time if I go into too many things, but there will be biases in the system: the bias of the person who designed the way the computer thinks and analyses problems, or the bias—this is in the report—of the data supplied to it, which could build up the wrong impression.

These machines are probably intelligent enough effectively to start gaming the system themselves. That is dangerous. The more control that we hand over to make our lives easier, the more likely we are to find the machines gaming. The report on malicious intent, which my noble friend Lord Rees referred to, is very interesting and I highly recommend it. It was produced by a collaboration of about half a dozen universities and it can be found on the internet.

Much has been said about people and the big data issue. I was very involved, and still am, with the internet of things and I was the chair of the BSI group which produced PAS 212 on interoperability standards. The whole point is to get the data out there so that one can do useful things with it. This is not about people’s data but about the consequences for them of the misuse of such data. An example would be trying to enhance traffic flows and so on. It may be that the computer, to control the overall picture, could send someone out on a journey that is not in their best interests. They may be in a crisis because their wife is about to have a baby and needs to get to hospital quickly. There are issues around this area which come down to liability.

The root of it all is the real problem that complex systems are not deterministic. While you can get the same pattern twice, you do not get the same outcome every time. That is the problem with having rules-based systems to deal with these things. AI systems can start to get around that, but you cannot be sure of what they are going to do. It has always amused me that everyone is predicting a wonderful artificial intelligence-driven idyllic future where everything is easy. I think that it will probably get bogged down in the legal system quite quickly, or other issues such as safety may arise. By the time the HSE gets its teeth into this, I will be very interested to see what happens.

I think back to the late 1970s when ethernet came on to the scene. There were many predictions about the paperless office that would arrive in a few years’ time. A wonderful cynic said that that was about as likely as the paperless loo. All I can say is that the loo has won.

Businesses: Start-ups

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

The noble Lord asked quite a number of questions and I will restrict my answers to two. He is right to express concern about productivity. This is something that we will want to address, and I hope that he will be ready for the Statement on the industrial strategy that I hope will come out later this month. He also expressed concern about companies progressing from small to medium and medium to large. That is why we made an announcement in last year’s Autumn Statement about patient capital and why we announced a review into it. We are waiting to respond to that in due course.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

Given the last question, will the Minister look at a lighter touch, particularly in employment law? A lot of this is very onerous for small businesses and, if certain things happen, they can easily get bankrupted. Small businesses need a lot more flexibility in the laws as they apply to them. Until you employ a lot of people, you cannot handle some of the provisions around employment law, and I think that the Government should look at that closely.

[Lord Henley]

The noble Earl is right to express concerns about the regulation that faces business, particularly small businesses. We obviously want to reduce the regulatory burdens on businesses wherever possible and wherever it is right to do so, and we will certainly continue the work that we have done in this field.

Employment: Remuneration

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I thank my noble friend for his interesting and provocative remark.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

Is there not also a deeper problem, which is that many of these remuneration packages of senior executives are geared towards profit targets in various ways? The quickest and easiest way of doing this is to axe the visionary research and development programmes in order to increase the bottom line temporarily to get their rewards. As a result, some of our larger companies are suffering from, I would say, a lack of vision, expansion and innovation.