Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I want to get on to the digital verification service. First, I declare that I am very interested in digital twins; there are huge advantages in modelling—for instance, the underground and all the various things that can choke traffic. I went to a very interesting event at Connected Places Catapult, where they are modelling all the inferences on traffic and flows, et cetera, to try to work out how you can alleviate it and get emergency services through when everything is choked up. There is huge advantage in being able to model that, and for that we need data sharing and all the other things.

The other thing I got very interested and involved in, with FIDO and Kaimai, is causal AI. As people say, we need to know how it got there: what sources was it relying on when it reached certain things that it put in the reports or decisions made? It is a very important aspect, because the “I” in AI is not really the right word to use. A computer is not innately intelligent. It is like a child; what you put into it and what it learns from that could well be not what you expected it to learn at all. We have to be very careful of believing too much in it, putting too much faith in it and thinking that it will run the future beautifully.

Here is the bit that I am more interested in. I was talking to my noble friend Lady Kidron just before the debate, and she pointed out something to me because of my previous involvement in chairing the British Standard PAS 1296 on age verification, which we did around the Digital Economy Act when we were worried about all the implications and the pornography issues. The trouble now is that the Government seem to think that the only age verification that matters is checking that someone is over 18, so that they can purchase alcohol and knives and view inappropriate pornography, which should not be there for youngsters. But when we wrote it, we were very careful to make sure that there was no age specified. For educational purposes, there is material that you want to go to particular age cohorts and do not want for children at other ages because it is wrong for their stage of development and knowledge. Also, you need to be able to check that older people are not trying to get into children’s social groups; they must be excludable from them. Age verification, whenever it is referred to, should work in any direction and at any age you want it. It should not be so inflexible.

I was sent a briefing by the Association of Document Validation Professionals and the Age Verification Providers Association. I was very much there when all that started off, when I was chairman of EURIM, which became the Digital Policy Alliance. They represent some 50 attribute and identity providers, and they warmly welcome the Bill and the priority that the new Government are giving to returning it to Parliament. I will highlight the sections of the Bill dealing with digital verification services that they feel would merit further discussion during later stages.

In Clause 27, “Introductory”, ideally there would be a clear purpose statement that the Bill makes certified digital ID legally valid as a proof of identity. This has always been a problem. To progress in the digital world, we will need to ensure that digital verification of ID is given equal standing with physical passports and driving licences. These data are technically only tokens to enable you to cross borders or drive a vehicle, but they are frequently used as proof of ID. This can be done digitally, and the benefit of digital ID is that it is much harder to forge and therefore much more reliable. For some reason, we have always had a fear of that in the past.

In Clause 29, on “supplementary codes”, they are very worried that it could add time and cost to developing these if these processes are owned by the Office for Digital Identities and Attributes—OfDIA. There should be a stronger obligation to co-create with the industry, both in preparing the initial rules and in any revisions. The drafting is, apparently, currently ambiguous about any requirements for consultation. I know that that has been a problem in the past. There will be specialist requirements particular to specific sectors and the OfDIA will not necessarily have the required expertise in-house. There are already organisations in place to do things around each of these codes.

In Clause 33, on registration on the digital verification services register, the changes to the previous Bill around registration processes are welcome and, most notably, the Government have recognised in the Bill the need for national security checks. The problem is that there is no independent appeals mechanism if the Secretary of State refuses to register a DVS or removes it from the register, short of judicial review—and that is both time consuming and very expensive. Most would not be able to survive long enough to bring the case to a conclusion, so we need to think of other remedies, such as some form of appeals tribunal.

In Clause 39, on the fees for registration et cetera, the fees are a new tax on the industry and may go beyond raising sufficient funds for the costs of administering the scheme. They welcome fees now being subject to parliamentary scrutiny, but would like to see a statutory limit on raising more than is required to fund DVS governance. There are figures on it which I could give you, but I will not bore you with them right now.

In Clause 50, on trust marks for use by registered persons, there may be a benefit from more direct linking of the requirements relating to marks of conformity to the Trade Marks Act.

In Clause 51, on the powers of a Secretary of State to require information, this wide-ranging power to demand information may inherently override the Data Protection Act. It extinguishes any obligation of confidentiality owed by a conformity assessment body to its clients, such as the contents of an audit report. The net effect could be to open up audit reports to freedom of information requests, because the exemption to an FoI would be that they were confidential, but the Bill appears to override that, and the way the Bill is structured could mean that the Secretary of State can also override a court order imposing confidentiality. I do not think we should allow that.

Clause 52 is about arrangements for third parties to exercise functions. In its current form, the Office for Digital Identities and Attributes is an unusual regulator. It is not independent from the Government and does not share the features of other regulators. It may therefore not be able to participate in the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum, for example, based on the powers relied upon by its members to collaborate with other regulators.

The OfDIA may not be in scope of regulatory duty for most regulators to promote growth. It is unclear whether the new regulatory innovation office will have jurisdiction over the OfDIA. It would be helpful to explore whether a more conventional status as an independent regulator would be preferable.

I think that is enough complication for the moment.

Lithium-ion Battery Safety Bill [HL]

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 6th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, that was a most useful speech because it went into great detail about things that I just had not thought about. It is ridiculous when you cannot use things to make your life easy. As we get older, we are all going to end up using such things, and the amount of checking that goes on everywhere just gets worse.

The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, has introduced a timely, useful and important Bill. I am sure that it needs to cover all lithium-ion batteries as they are all potentially dangerous if they are not manufactured to the right standards and used right. As has been said, the real problem is that standard foam, wet chemical, powder or water extinguishers are ineffective for lithium-ion battery fires. They do not form long-lasting oxygen barriers, they deliver insufficient cooling and they are unable to stop the thermal runaway. You must use specialist fire extinguishers for them, so a provision needs to be added mandating the presence of such extinguishers in flats, houses or places where these batteries live for any period of time or are permanently installed, which is what I want to deal with.

Apart from small scooter batteries, large batteries are going to be used in houses, blocks of flats and places like that to store the excess energy being generated by solar PV at any given moment. I am looking at this issue right now for a house, and it will end up with two or three large lithium-ion batteries. We are dealing with a reputable company, so I am sure the batteries will be to the right standards and everything will be right, but it had never occurred me that we also ought to have the correct fire extinguisher, accessible and near them, just in case. I was thinking of putting the batteries in a nice inaccessible place out of the way, but I now wonder whether that could be a danger as well because you presumably have to have access to these things in order to check them. We need to think about these things. It is the large batteries that are worrying me, as everyone is thinking so hard about e-scooters and so on.

We have got the grid, and I can feed excess electricity into it to a limited extent. However, we are paid very little to do that and what I draw from it when we need it back is really expensive, so it is just not economically sensible. It is much cheaper and more effective for me to install these batteries, but that is not as safe. You should be able to take your electricity out of the grid for a very small marginal cost, having lent it to it for a while. In fact it probably ought to pay you since you have lent it to it for that period, and maybe you should get a small percentage on top of what you put into the grid because it has saved putting up yet another large windmill that is made of steel all the way up with carbon fibre in the rotor blades that cannot be recycled, so is not entirely environmentally friendly.

The other danger is that it is not helping the move to get people to use public transport. I was faced with a large poster on my Thameslink station this morning that said, “You cannot take e-scooters, electric bikes or hoverboards on to the station or the train”, so how do you get to your final destination affordably? Okay, if I come into London there is public transport, but if I go back home at night and I want to get a taxi—if I could get one—from the station at Sandy back home, it will cost £25 to £40. It is just not affordable. Therefore, if I were to do that, I would love to have some form of e-transport—except in midwinter.

Also, you have to be careful if you are flying. If, so that you do not run out of battery just when you are about to show your electronic ticket to the right face, you have a top-up battery pack for your telephone in your hold luggage, that will get scanned by scanners in many airports just to make sure there are not any batteries in your hold luggage. So, you are not allowed to do that. If the airport detects them, it will remove your bag. We had this problem in India. We arrived at an Indian airport to find that one of our bags was not there because of exactly that: the lithium-ion battery in it had been removed, although I cannot remember quite how. Anyway, it was sent to the airport early the next day, but the airport doubled as a military airport and was not open until 11 am, so we spent a lot of time sitting around when we were meant to be off doing other stuff. It wrecked that part of the day of the tour. You need to be very careful of that.

If we had safety standards for lithium batteries that ran across all devices, all batteries and so on, maybe we could do something about that. When the technology moves on, which I am sure it will, the problem will be solved, but maybe in the interim we could do something about it. I do not know what. My key point is about the large batteries in offices but particularly in dwelling places, because you do not have the back-up people to do something about it. I hope the Government will use this debate to usefully inform amendments they might want to put forward to their own Bills, because it has been incredibly knowledgeable, wide-ranging and useful.