Horizon Europe

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I can indeed give the noble Lord that assurance. The money is a direct replacement and will go to research, but our preference remains to associate to Horizon Europe, if possible. With regard to ARIA, the noble Lord can expect some announcements on the chairman and chief executive fairly soon.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

Does the Minister accept that this is not just a question of money? Scientific advance depends on international collaboration, networking, exchange of information and so on. Does he accept the gravity of the present situation? Universities are the seed funding of any solution to the productivity issue that is central to economic recovery. At the moment, however, we are cutting ourselves off from Europe, we are suspicious of China and we are introducing a range of legislation, not least the National Security and Investment Act, that will bring great concern and instability to our universities. What measures are the Government taking to address the gravity of that crisis and to assuage that instability, particularly in our institutions of higher education?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

There were many different questions there. First, I agree with the noble Lord about the importance of international science collaboration. Secondly, we are not cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world. We remain keen to associate to Horizon Europe and co-operate with other scientific nations across the world. Thirdly, I do not agree with his point about the National Security and Investment Act causing problems for universities. The system is working extremely well and applications are being approved smoothly, as he will see if he looks at the recently produced annual report.

National Security and Investment Bill

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 4th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction and remind the House of my interests, as registered. Thus far, the Bill has enjoyed qualified support from all sides of both Houses during its passage through Parliament. However, I confess some concerns about its scope. For instance, I share the concern expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, that essential elements of our critical national infrastructure appear to be inexplicably missing from the coverage of the Bill.

However, today I want to focus on one general point that I believe may prove potentially dangerous for our economic well-being and, ultimately, our national security. I refer to the Secretary of State’s assertion that the Bill strikes the right balance between encouraging inward investment and protecting national security. That remains an assertion since, inevitably, at present it remains untested and unproven. It can and will be affirmed only by successful implementation.

Colleagues from all Benches have offered several amendments intended to ensure a successful outcome of that balance: all thus far have been defeated. I say to the Government that in due course they may find that their victories on this are proved pyrrhic, so I hope that they will be more open-minded to some of these constructive amendments in the course of our following debates. There are some areas where we can agree. We can surely agree that in a networked world it has become clear that a qualifying entity or asset of concern can no longer be defined just by the size of the venture, its market share or its direct involvement in the defence sector. It is right also that the threshold for concern, the “trigger event”, is changed and that consideration extends for a five-year window.

Yet the threshold for change is no easy matter. Colleagues on all Benches are right to raise questions about basic definitions—not least for “national security” —which made filling the scrutiny gap helpful rather than a hindrance to the intended legislative outcomes. We should proceed with care. Now is not the time for the United Kingdom to hamper productivity gains.

Vaccine nationalism has given us a taste of how counterproductive any isolationism can be. Likewise, many of our most severe national security challenges are global. If “build back better” and “levelling up” are to support a “global Britain”—all slogans at the forefront of the Government’s mind—then imposing disproportionate and unaffordable costs on the wellsprings of productivity will be most unwise. Large organisations may absorb these transaction costs, but networks of small and medium-sized enterprises, not to mention start-ups trying to scale up and, above all, the universities from which these arise, will struggle to absorb such transaction costs.

It is not so much the land or tangible assets that are the problem. It is that amorphous third category of qualifying asset—ideas. Those will be the hard cases. If we are wise, we should track the implications of the Bill back to our universities. The evidence over decades is clear. It is not financiers, nor the entrepreneurial state per se that catalyses innovation-driven productivity —it is our universities. You have only to look at the genealogy of our biggest unicorns to see how much they owe to universities, both directly and with ideas created from research, and in enabling start-ups to scale up with highly educated workers. Ultimately, our security rests on a productive economy. Everything flows from that, and that has to be innovation driven.

The Government’s consultation listed 17 sectors, 15 of which covered almost all growth areas in which SMEs, start-ups and universities catalyse the uptake of innovation. Asking them to master the tracking of dual-use, beneficial ownership or agents of influence seeking to take control is a tall order indeed. If our future productivity is not to experience a severe chill, the sector-specific guidance offered by BEIS’s new investment security unit will have to come with much support from competent staff and adequate resourcing to support SMEs and other organisations or networks unable to fully or adequately provide them themselves. It would be wise too, as several noble Lords have mentioned, for the unit to be properly scrutinised.

If these things are not done, the potential for harm may be hard to overestimate, making a nonsense of the assertion that a proper balance between national security and productivity has been struck. In short, we cannot ignore the evolving security risks and the Government are right to address them in this Bill, but we need to be able to handle them in a pragmatic and proportionate way. Otherwise, in the long run, that would be a real threat to our national security.

Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My Lords, the UK has been a long-standing supporter of multilateral efforts to promote fossil fuel subsidy reform. There is some technical disagreement as to exactly what comprises a fossil fuel subsidy. For example, we would not want the £200 winter fuel payment that we make to pensioners to be included as a subsidy. Some debate is still going on about the coverage of this matter.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, on 1 September, the Minister for Trade Policy claimed:

“Having left the EU, the UK has a unique opportunity to design a set of policies to tackle climate change.”


He added that the Government were actively exploring trade policy options to support ambitious action in this direction. What is the nature of this exploration and what contact have we had with any of the parties to the agreement?

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My Lords, as I said earlier, we consider this subject to be very important. At the March 2020 WTO General Council, the Secretary of State for International Trade announced that the environment, including climate, was one of the three key priorities for UK ambition and leadership in its position as an independent member of the WTO.

Intellectual Property Rights: Affordable Drugs

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his point. There are existing mechanisms that facilitate the sharing of intellectual property—for example, the Medicines Patent Pool, which has been so successful with HIV. To follow up on this point, we are committed to identifying whether and how CTAP could add value to the existing infrastructure.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree entirely with the noble Lords, Lord Alton and Lord Berkeley. This devastating pandemic is global in nature. Is the Minister aware that in giving evidence to the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Select Committee, the African Union’s special envoy Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala had a simple message, which was

“to make sure that we have volume and quantity for everyone and that poor countries are not locked out”,

by which she meant locked out on the basis, mainly, of price? In the past, the Government have been prepared to threaten use of Crown licences legislation. Are they prepared to do that to ensure that those in the poorest countries in the world who most need these drugs have the same access as our own citizens will have?

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

The noble Lord makes an excellent point. There are flexibilities in the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement. WTO members can use these to ensure access. We actively encourage less-developed countries to look at this, because by taking advantage of these flexibilities they can bring real benefits to their citizens.

COP 26

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Wednesday 18th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord, then, will have welcomed our announcement today that will generate the tens of thousands of jobs to which he refers. The idea of the campaign, of course, is to try to educate and change behaviour.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Minister not accept that the Prime Minister’s new 10-point plan is not a plan but a wish list of future developments based on undeveloped technology? It is not new, because it is largely recycled commitments and resources. Will he confirm that the actual new, additional amount is £4 billion—not £12 billion—which does not begin to address the scale of the problem and does not bear comparison with our colleagues in France, Germany and elsewhere?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I am not sure that the noble Lord is being entirely fair with his critique of the announcement. Many of the initiatives are based on new and existing technologies. We are building on many of the initiatives that we already have going, for instance the green homes grants system, which is proving so successful and popular and is building on an existing scheme. I think that noble Lords in many parts of the House would accept that we should go further on things such as hydrogen and elsewhere.

Enterprise Act 2002 (Specification of Additional Section 58 Consideration) Order 2020

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, there is obviously a heavy element here of trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted. Indeed, both horses have bolted: the Covid pandemic and the cybersecurity issue. But the problem is that even now the stable door has not yet been closed effectively. The new grounds on which the Secretary of State might intervene in mergers are short-term measures until more fundamental reform is taken forward through the National Security and Investment Bill, as the Minister said. But we do not know what is going to be in that Bill, so it is very difficult to judge these changes. As the SL committee says, the House will be able to scrutinise the issue properly only when the Bill is being considered. Incidentally, the committee also asked the department to give a timetable for the introduction of the Bill without delay. The Minister missed that point, and I am not aware that any such timetable has been provided or published.

Secondly, if the Bill that is to come before us is based on the 2018 White Paper, this raises a number of other issues of concern. Are these proposed measures really temporary or are they permanent? Will the Bill unwind these and other recent changes to jurisdictional thresholds made in 2018? Will the new regime be mandatory or, as the White Paper suggested, based on a voluntary notification system? Will there be a turnover or market share threshold applied? I regret that none of these questions has really been answered today. I would very much like to welcome these measures, but I think that the House has been left in a very unsatisfactory position.

Oil: Changes in Global Markets

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

At the time of the Scottish independence referendum, oil was running at over $100 a barrel. Given the steep fall in the price of oil, what estimates, if any, have the Government made of the present state of the Scottish economy with respect to strengths or fragility?

[Lord Callanan]

The noble Lord makes a powerful point. The independence plans of the SNP have been thrown into disarray by the low oil price—we all know the economic forecasts it made at the time. We are of course in close contact and collaboration with the Scottish Government on all these matters. We will continue to assist and help them in their plans going forward.

Recognition of Professional Qualifications (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

I do not think it will be possible to consult them in the way that the noble Lord suggests. I accept that they are affected. We are making the order—a one-sided order—so that those coming to the UK can benefit from it. Obviously, UK citizens abroad are in a different position, but I hope they will take appropriate advice.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

I am very grateful to the Minister. He mentioned that 12,000 UK citizens were awaiting professional recognition abroad and that 20,000 had thus far had their accreditation accepted in the European Union, as if to imply that that was an inevitable and inexorable acceptance which would continue. Does he accept that for all the 32,000 UK citizens working abroad, according to his estimates, should a reciprocal decision to that taken here be taken by European Union countries—to allow their professional organisations to make the decision—all those 32,000 UK citizens could be subjected to changes in the accreditation system in future, thus threatening the jobs, positions and livelihoods that they hold at present?

[Lord Henley]

I think the noble Lord has misunderstood what I said. Over the past 10 years, according to the EU’s database, 20,000 qualified professionals have had their qualifications recognised in the EU or the EEA. Of those 20,000—it is not a question of adding the two figures together and getting 32,000—12,000 related to qualifications within the scope of this statutory instrument, the implication being that the other 8,000, whether they were farriers from Northern Ireland, doctors or whatever, were not within the scope of this SI; they were within the scope of another. We are talking about 12,000 UK citizens who at some point over the past 10 years have gone to work in the EU. I am advised that the largest proportion of them are teachers, and the same is true of those coming back here. I have given figures for secondary school teachers and primary school teachers. Lawyers and doctors are not within the scope of this SI. I mention also hairdressers, where we can never have reciprocity because, as the noble Lord will be aware when he goes to his barber, we do not regulate hairdressers and barbers, whereas that is the case in Italy, France and no doubt in Luxembourg and other countries. I do not have the precise details of which of the other 27 countries regulate such things.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

I do not know whether my barber is regulated or unregulated but, looking at the outcome of his work, I suspect he is unregulated. I thank the Minister for clarifying his figures, but will he now address the substantial point that the 12,000 who have previously been accredited and are employed in jobs, presumably across the European Union, could in the future, if the EU does the same as the Government are doing, which is to pass the power of accreditation down to the professional organisations on the continent, find themselves without accreditation for their livelihood because the professional associations in Europe may well be tempted into what would be the equivalent of a trade war by protecting the interests of their own members vis-à-vis those who come from the United Kingdom? That is precisely the point that people in this Chamber are worried about.

[Lord Henley]

I am not going to comment on the noble Lord’s barber. However, the position of all 12,000—should they still be there and working, because that was over a period of 10 years—will be perfectly all right and they need not worry.

Artificial Intelligence (Select Committee Report)

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome this report and I want to make a few comments arising in particular from chapter 8, dealing with ethics and responsibility. The field of artificial intelligence sets out to create computer systems that perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence. That is the dictionary definition. They comprise a new generation of machines whose nature is entirely different from those we have been used to. In reaping the benefits of these new systems and ceding control, as our infrastructure comes to depend on them, I believe that we need to mark a watershed in how we think about and treat software.

First, intelligence needs to be clearly understood as distinct from being intelligent or sentient. While AI entities may act in ways that emulate humans, their underlying logic remains a function of their architecture. They are in a very real sense “alien” beings whose actions result from motivations, stimuli and neural circuits that are entirely non-human. Secondly, historically, machines were built to operate deterministically; that is, to perform specific tasks within parameters set by their designers. In building AI we are creating systems whose functioning is largely opaque and whose outputs are non-deterministic; that is, what they do under all circumstances cannot be predicted with certainty. Thirdly, competitive motivations are driving the evolution of ever more sophisticated machine intelligence functions, with greater predictive value and more human-like interfaces that improve our perception of both intelligence and empathy. Devices that respond with human voices and virtual call centre operatives who converse like humans are now commonplace. The ability to appear human-like, to conduct sophisticated, responsive conversations, and even to recognise emotions, allows organisations to project human-like responsibility from what are actually software agents.

Despite human-like appearances and the ability to take actions that are functionally “correct”, they are not doing so out of concern or empathy, nor in the context of a moral, legal or ethical framework, and neither today can they be held legally responsible for their actions. Today in law we make a distinction that a human being may be responsible while a machine or an animal may not be. This creates an asymmetry because when something goes wrong, who takes responsibility for sorting out the problem? It becomes increasingly easy and desirable for every party in the value chain to absolve himself or herself of blame.

As humans, we have law-based obligations as part of our social contract within a civilised society, we have promise-based obligations as part of contracts that we form with others, and we have societal moral principles that are the core of what we regard as ethics, whether derived from rational reason or from religion. Responsible humans are aware of these ethical, moral and legal obligations. We feel empathy towards our fellows and responsibility for our children, employees and society. Those who do not do so are called sociopaths at best and psychopaths in the worst case. Ethics, morality, principles and values are not a function solely of intelligence; they are dynamic, context-dependent social constructs.

Moreover, bias and specification gaming are two important emergent properties of machine learning systems—the latter where they successfully solve a problem but do so via an unintended method, just as humans discover ways to cheat various systems. We must understand that no matter how intelligent a machine is, it may learn to act in ways that we consider biased, unethical or even criminal. For instance, we may anticipate autonomous vehicles evolving unintended bad behaviours resulting from the goals that they have been given. Equally, AI is no less vulnerable than humans to being spoofed or deceived by others, whether intentionally or unintentionally. I will not go into that matter today but it should be alarming when we come to AI-driven autonomous weaponry.

Even in the future, when machine intelligence may exceed human intelligence, we must distinguish between being better at carrying out a set of tasks and human responsibility. Intelligence is not the sole determinant of responsibility, even in human society; we talk about the “age of responsibility”, which distinguishes a minor from an adult and is based on the inability of children to make good decisions, being too immature to understand the consequences of, or consent to, certain behaviour. Representing sophisticated concepts such as “the public good” or “volunteering” in the goal-functions of machines is a far harder and more complex challenge than machine intelligence, yet it is equally important for their correct functioning.

However, the commercial value of displaying empathy means that AI entities will emulate emotion long before they are able to feel it. When a railway announcement says, “We are sorry to announce that your train is late”, the voice is not sorry; the corporation that employs and uses that voice is not sorry either. However, the company sees value in appeasing its customers by offering an apology and an automated announcement is the cheapest way of providing that apparent apology. If it is not capable of experiencing pain and suffering, can it be truly empathetic?

Furthermore, as a machine cannot be punished or incarcerated in any meaningful sense—although it might be rehabilitated through reprogramming—the notion of consequence of actions has little meaning to it. If a machine apologises, serves a prison sentence or is put in solitary confinement, has it been punished? The basis of responsibility built on an understanding of ethics and morality does not exist. It is certainly not the sole by-product of the intelligence level of the machine.

Finally, all those problems are compounded because the software industry today operates in a very different way to others that are critical to modern society, where the notion of audit exists. When we read the annual report of a PLC, it is possible to place some degree of trust in it because the chief financial officer, the accountant and the auditor take professional responsibility for the output. Similarly, an audit chain in the pharmaceutical industry enables regulators to oversee a large, complex and diverse industry. In construction, when a tragedy happens, we are able to trace the building materials used in construction. That process of audit encourages responsibility and the knowledge beforehand of the consequences of actions. But most software today is sold with an explicit disclaimer of fitness for purpose and it is virtually impossible to answer the questions: by whom, against what specification, why and when was this code generated, tested or deployed? In the event of a problem with software, who is responsible? The human owner? The company that supplied the software? The programmer? The chief executive of the company that supplied it? I would therefore argue that machine intelligence needs to be subordinate in responsibility to a human controller and therefore cannot in itself be legally responsible as an adult human, although it might in future have the legal status of a corporation or of a minor—that is, intelligent, but below the age of responsibility.

The GDPR was designed to ensure that passive “data” was linked to responsible human control. Ultimately, we might need a GDPR-equivalent for active machine learning systems to link their function to a human controller to ensure that organisations and individuals have protective and proportionate control processes in place. We might refer to the concept of that clear chain of responsibility, linking an audit of the specifications, code, testing and function to responsible individuals, as “trustable software”. Recent developments, including distributed ledger technology—blockchain to the uninitiated—would permit oversight to be implemented relatively easily.

In an age where software is at the heart of our infrastructure, where these systems are both non-deterministic and fully interconnected, AI needs a responsible human “parent”. Whoever that “parent” might be, it will require a “trustable” process to introduce auditability, accountability and, ultimately, responsibility.