Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Debate between Viscount Camrose and Viscount Colville of Culross

Committee stage
Tuesday 10th December 2024 Grand Committee

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 66, 67 and 80 in this group are all tabled in my name. Amendment 66 requires scientific research carried out for commercial purposes to

“be subject to the approval of an independent ethics committee”.

Commercial research is, perhaps counterintuitively, generally subjected to fewer ethical safeguards than research carried out purely for scientific endeavour by educational institutions. Given the current broad definition of scientific research in the Bill—I am sorry to repeat this—which includes research for commercial purposes, and the lower bar for obtaining consent for data reuse should the research be considered scientific, I think it would be fair to require more substantial ethical safeguards on such activities.

We do not want to create a scenario where unscrupulous tech developers use the Bill to harvest significant quantities of personal data under the guise of scientific endeavour to develop their products, without having to obtain consent from data subjects or even without them knowing. An independent ethics committee would be an excellent way to monitor scientific research that would be part of commercial activities, without capping data access for scientific research, which aims more purely to expand the horizon of our knowledge and benefit society. Let us be clear: commercial research makes a huge and critically important contribution to scientific research, but it is also surely fair to subject it to the same safeguards and scrutiny required of non-commercial scientific research.

Amendment 67 would ensure that data controllers cannot gain consent for research purposes that cannot be defined at the time of data collection. As the Bill stands, consent will be considered obtained for the purposes of scientific research if, at the time consent is sought, it is not possible to identify fully the purposes for which the personal data is to be processed. I fully understand that there needs to be some scope to take advantage of research opportunities that are not always foreseeable at the start of studies, particularly multi-year longitudinal studies, but which emerge as such studies continue. I am concerned, however, that the current provisions are a little too broad. In other words: is consent not actually being given at the start of the process for, effectively, any future purpose?

Amendment 80 would prevent the data reuse test being automatically passed if the reuse is for scientific purposes. Again, I have tabled this amendment due to my concerns that research which is part of commercial activities could be artificially classed as scientific, and that other clauses in the Bill would therefore allow too broad a scope for data harvesting. I beg to move.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, it seems very strange indeed that Amendment 66 is in a different group from group 1, which we have already discussed. Of course, I support Amendment 66 from the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, but in response to my suggestion for a similar ethical threshold, the Minister said she was concerned that scientific research would find this to be too bureaucratic a hurdle. She and many of us here sat through debates on the Online Safety Bill, now an Act. I was also on the Communications Committee when it looked at digital regulations and came forward with one of the original reports on this. The dynamic and impetus which drove us to worry about this was the lack of ethics within the tech companies and social media. Why on earth would we want to unleash some of the most powerful companies in the world on reusing people’s data for scientific purposes if we were not going to have an ethical threshold involved in such an Act? It is important that we consider that extremely seriously.