Digital Understanding

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, in her excellent speech, the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, called herself a “dotcom dinosaur”. I beg to differ. I think she was suggesting that her time had passed and that she was a fading force in the scene. That is simply not true: she is a star. We all value the contributions she has made and continues to make in this area and long may she continue. In particular, her willingness to acknowledge the dark side of the digital world, such as poor employment conditions, cybercrime, cyberbullying, fake news and identity theft—I welcome the fact that that was also picked up by the former Minister—was very refreshing and gave a very good start to this important debate. If digital is now something we are, not something we do, she is right to suggest that we parliamentarians have a duty, as the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, said, to understand this better and to do something about the problems that we perceive.

The theme which has come through most strongly this afternoon is that digitalisation has brought us both good and bad. As the noble Lord, Lord Rees, said, we have got information, convenience and entertainment but we also have sources of crime and loss of privacy. The price we pay for what is often called a “free” service—though it is certainly not that—is that we let companies, the Government and others learn all there is to learn about us. We have no control over who owns the data about us, no idea where they are kept and how they are used but, on the other hand, this flow of personal data leads to products and services that respond more quickly and precisely to our needs and can help give better value and improve productivity. That is why the noble Baroness may be right: as we live more of our lives online there is no doubt that we simply must improve our digital understanding.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and other noble Lords were right to warn us of the category error of confusing digital skills with digital understanding. However, it would be wrong if the Minister does not pick up in his response the problem of the need for basic skills to be properly funded and introduced across the country. The importance of infrastructure was so wonderfully explained by the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy. I was going to deal with some issues to do with technical training and skills, but time has cut into that.

Two points have not had enough attention. The first is the need to make the UK a safe and secure digital economy. Ensuring safety and security is a role for government and it is important that we understand how this happens and what will work. The UK needs to aim to make itself the safest place for people to go online. Young people must be supported to develop digital resilience to navigate the online world safely. As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, there is a huge amount of catching up to do in this area under the Department for Education. There is good practice, but it is not nearly sufficiently well bedded.

The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, talked about data ethics and the noble Lord, Lord Mair, touched on this in relation to the data—which underpin all parts of the UK’s ever-digitising economy—that need to be looked at much more carefully in order to get the most out of this revolution. There is another side to this, which has also been raised. A data-driven economy and its licence to innovate will work only if there is public confidence in which data are used and the ethical decision-making employed in using them. As has been noted, that is something which we will return to when we get on to the data protection Bill.

This has been an extremely good debate; one of the best that I have witnessed and been involved in in your Lordships’ House. It will serve as a taster for the Bill as it comes forward. I hope the Minister will be able to explain where we are on that and when we are likely to see a draft, because it would be quite interesting to see what it contains.

It has been said, and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, was right to remind us, that we still have many issues around some of the points that are coming up here. We need to look at the powers which the Bill may contain to give people the right to ask for material on the net to be deleted; the power it may explicitly give to hold or withhold consent to our data being used; the power to protect our online identity by extending definitions of personal data and our right to contest decisions that are made about us by algorithms—a point that came up in some of the later contributions.

This has been a very interesting debate. I take from it that improved digital understanding will help us to benefit more from the good and make us less of a victim of the bad. At the end of her remarks, the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, suggested—and others have picked up on this—that a digital charter might help with the process of improving digital understanding. As we sit here, around us are the effigies—or perhaps I should say the avatars—of those barons who were involved in the original Magna Carta. They wish us well.