Electronic Trade Documents Bill [HL]

Viscount Waverley Excerpts

Second reading committee
Monday 7th November 2022 Grand Committee

[Viscount Waverley (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister intimated that this is a milestone, innovative Bill, so with the leave of the Committee I intend to follow that theme and be equally innovative.

One of the essential ingredients to make progress with the global trading community is to combine innovation, build efficiency and create sustainability and to do so by joining the dots—putting the jigsaw into place, if you will. Currently there are different excellent components that could usefully be harnessed into a unified approach, rather than being taken in isolation. Over the past months, I have been reflecting on a possible global trade blueprint and will take the extended opportunity afforded today to put into context three ingredients that could dovetail with the Electronic Trade Documents Bill, which would be a key component. However, none is dependent on any other.

The first lends itself well, as the Commonwealth is fertile ground given the commonality of common law and language, which is the bedrock of this Electronic Trade Documents Bill. It is a free trade agreement template initially targeting Commonwealth member states, excluding the two that are members of the EU as they are responsible to internal protocols, that can be adjusted by country to address any specific anomalies. I was originally approached some time back by a well-meaning US interest to stitch together a US/Commonwealth agreement, including the UK, of course, that would unlock the UK/US circumstance, given that the bilateral free trade agreement is moribund. This Commonwealth approach would consist of making a template of what is expected to be covered in a trade agreement with language options built in. To fast forward to the week before last, I was delighted to learn at first hand that our very own noble Lord, Lord Hannan, who is not in his place, is also running with this ball with his Institute for Free Trade, in a most welcome development.

The second is a dedicated, big-data analytics platform to encompass advanced data analytics and modelling for foreign trade data relating to supply chains in order to consolidate multiple datasets already used by the International Trade Council. These datasets, with additional overlays into a single database, could be used for analysis of markets and supply chains, forecasting and predicting market behaviour. This would enable corporates to validate their supply chains, understand market pricing, monitor competitors and forecast the market and would allow Governments seeking to assist their exporters to find new markets, identify priority investment FDI targets and model future market demand, growth, customers and suppliers. A UK entity is in the making to transition this data for global consumption.

Thirdly, and this brings me full cycle to the Electronic Trade Documents Bill, the magic is that it is all the more beneficial for being an enabler process, free for the world to join up to—just follow the provisions. If the answer to today’s ails is in the timing, this initiative hits the spot with the legal enactment necessary to a more competitive world to the benefit of all. Passing this law would be a victory for global trade and for the United Nations, as the legislative work is led through the UN Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records—MLETR. By allowing electronic documents and physical documents to be used in parallel, the transition to paperless trade can be made an evolutionary process where the adoption of electronic trade documents will take place when different stakeholders in trade and trade finance are ready to take the step to paperless trade.

Radical change in removing paper-based trading documents will make for a faster, lower-cost, more resilient and more liquid world of trading, leading towards transparent digital supply chain management. It will be especially good for small businesses. While all problems cannot be solved at once, recognising a practical step-by-step approach to solve one would be an excellent beginning.

The Bill is core to the success of improving logistical flow that will address the impediment to the speed of payments, and the current need to move paper to discharge goods and receive payments, bringing more opportunities as we align with the MLETR and benefit from digital trade corridors and individual country compliance, to which I have referred. This will allow for documents that carry value and promises to be drawn up and signed in digital form, provided that the system or document fulfils the listed requirements of the Bill.

A number of trade documents with which domestic and cross-border trade would become significantly more efficient and affordable for all are listed, but small and medium-sized entities would benefit the most. This will create significant opportunities for smaller importers and exporters globally, one reason being that the law of England and Wales is often used when parties have difficulties agreeing on the jurisdiction in which to settle disputes.

Therefore, the Bill brings benefits not only for the United Kingdom but for importers, exporters, carriers, brokers and bankers internationally. It should be recognised that the Bill is a stepping-stone towards enabling the modernisation of domestic and international trade, but more needs to be done to reduce friction in trade and trade finance.

Four questions come to mind which illustrate this and I would be grateful for the Government’s view. Are they satisfied that: international digital identities are sufficiently harmonised; international digital signatory laws are harmonised; international freight tracking systems with a lack of interoperability are a hurdle that needs to be overcome; and legal entity identifiers are accepted universally?

Significant work is being done and progress is being made in these areas by industry organisations but this needs to be supported by Governments to pave the way for international harmonisation and adoption. It will be a balancing act to create international standards in such a way that creates legal certainty on the one hand without hampering further adoption of new technologies or innovation on the other.

The United Nations Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records is a very well-designed framework, balancing the need for commercial certainty, relying on current and internationally well-harmonised substantive laws, with allowing for electronic trade documents, providing that the provisions in the MLETR are met.

The Bill will play a pivotal role when other countries revise their bills of exchange acts and other trade-related legislation when promoting alignment to the MLETR. I anticipate that this will become a global trend, with law changes already taking place in North America, South America, the Middle East, Asia and Europe.

The Bill does not change the function of the instruments listed in the Bill. All the safety mechanisms these instruments have and cater for remain intact. Allowing them to be in electronic format means that they will become more efficient and significantly safer. I underline, however, that the Bill does not address the quality of signatures or how to establish identities, other than to say that they need to be “reliable”. The European Union has a list of trusted digital signature sites and for trade it is important that different parties can use simple verification processes to trust the documents coming from another party, but it is up to the contracting parties to define the method to ensure reliability.

What is reliable today, however, will differ tomorrow as new technology evolves. Legislation that is principles-based rather than technically prescriptive is more favourable. The adoption of the EU regulation for eID and other electronic trust services has been slow in cross-border trade, the main reason being that these have not been readily available and easily accessible as technical solutions. The result has been paper-based trade rather than electronic. Although not perfect, in some cases a lower standard is the stepping-stone for adoption, especially in cross-border dealings, provided that the parties have agreed on where to settle disputes.

The Bill does not resolve the development and standardisation of eID and signature technologies, however, which must continue to evolve. We will also see new payment and settlement solutions, possibly decentralised, as we realise that large players such as MasterCard and Visa will come to have a large degree of global systemic risks associated.

The Bill will help to encourage the development of solutions that will address deficiencies. To take some examples to illustrate progress, Trace:Original, a product of Enigio of Sweden, is producing the means by which electronic documents that will be trade finance-enabled yet functionally equivalent to a paper document, which will render documents paperless using existing processes and international practices, provided that this Electronic Trade Documents Bill passes. I am informed that Lloyds Bank is showcasing the technology available and that the efficiency gains are significant for all concerned. There is also noteworthy development with Contained’s BlueRing platform as a technology solution advancing the process.

It is essential that there be a key role for the Commonwealth Secretariat in informing and encouraging Governments. We should also look at a mix of the Institute of Export and International Trade—with which I am also discussing the role of secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Trade and Investment, which I co-chair—with additional support from the International Chamber of Commerce, as an architect of this Bill, together with a secondee of HMRC of this electronic trade initiative. A trade advisory to Governments, International Economics, might also be well suited to act as a global co-ordinator.

These are early days, with much to do and no time to lose. This enabling Bill is, however, the beginning of an exciting journey that ticks the boxes and I commend it accordingly.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am very glad to have the opportunity to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley. He is, as he mentioned, co-chair of the all-party group for trade and export promotion, of which I am a member—

[Viscount Waverley (CB)]

Vice-chair.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

Indeed—I am a vice-chair. I thought the noble Viscount made some interesting points, and I very much join him in welcoming the Bill.

Sometimes, we are wont to criticise Bills that are in the form of a framework but, in this instance, there is an understandable structure here from the Law Commission. In the adoption of electronic trade documents, it encountered the legal constraint of the possession of electronic trade documents as a common-law principle and, rather than try to codify and put into statute everything relating to the common law in this respect, it said, “Let us at least try to equate electronic trade documents to paper documents in statute.” This will allow us to see how some of the courts’ decisions over time enable those established principles in relation to paper documents to be extended into electronic trade documents, which would be very helpful.

We are, therefore, dealing with a Bill that is technology neutral. I know that my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond knows far more about the technology of these things than I do; I hope he will agree that a technology-neutral Bill is a good structure for us to work with.

I want to talk about a number of other things. I am a member of the International Agreements Committee of your Lordships’ House and we have had the opportunity to look at some of the agreements that we are now entering into; for example, on digital trade with Singapore and the free trade agreements that we have entered into with Australia and New Zealand, as well as the prospect of entering the CPTPP agreement, which, in the context of regional, international and plurilateral agreements, is probably the most advanced in its promotion of digital trade. There is no point having such agreements that open these opportunities for digital trade if we do not put the literal building blocks of digital trade in place.

Last October, the G7 group of Trade Ministers agreed digital trade principles. I think the United Kingdom was instrumental in enabling that to be brought together; it is therefore terrific that we are implementing it rapidly in our legislation. As the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, said, I hope other countries will take similar steps to put their jurisdictions into a similar framework. I hope we will look toward the framework of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, the Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records, to which the noble Viscount referred. The more that jurisdictions across the globe can structure their legislation domestically on an international template of that kind, the better.

We have a particular responsibility because, for so many of these international trade documents, in so far as they have a legal base, they have it in English law. I am advised that 80% of bills of lading, if they were challenged, would be challenged in an English court. We really need to make sure that our law is a leader in this respect. I hope we will find that during our work on this Bill.

I entirely applaud the Bill’s overall structure and intentions. My noble friend the Minister very well and happily set out all the substantial benefits that can accrue from this, in trade, economic and environmental terms. I very much look forward to our achieving those. However, there are issues we need to discuss, notwithstanding this being a Law Commission Bill; by its nature, we need to examine it—it is our job as a revising Chamber to look at it very carefully and ask all the questions, not least so that the other place can be confident that it can pass it happily and quickly.

I will refer to a range of issues. Underlying this is the fact that, if we are not trying to structure the legislation around the concept of the possession of electronic trade documents, we are none the less trying to adopt what is referred to as exclusive control in the singularity of electronic trade documents. It is difficult. The explanatory notes to the model law in UNCITRAL captured it rather well at paragraph 82, which says that

“a paper document, as a physical object, is by nature unique and, furthermore, centuries of use of paper in business transactions have provided sufficient information to commercial operators for an assessment of the risks associated with the use of that medium, while practices relating to the use of electronic transferable records are not yet equally well established.”

We need to be sure that we understand where the risks emerge. There are potential benefits associated with the use of electronic documents, as my noble friend will doubtless explain, including those in security and reliability, but there are also risks.

I hope the House will establish a Public Bill Committee to examine this Bill so, before I stop, I will raise a number of issues. I do not ask my noble friend to reply to them in this debate; they are more appropriate for the committee, but I thought it would not hurt to flag them up, simply because in my preparation for today I encountered a number of issues that I thought would be interesting to discuss.

First, there is a reference in Article 13 of the model law under UNCITRAL to time. Provisions relating to the indication of time and place are found in many trade documents; there may well be mechanisms through which we can make the time of documents electronically secure, but not necessarily in the same way as we do with paper documents. This concept of “reliability” will have to be extended to time on documents as well as to other factors. Since Article 12 of the model law is transposed almost literally into this Bill, for example, I wondered why we have not transposed one or two other aspects of it in the same way.

Secondly, on the question of acting jointly, when one is dealing with paper documents, one knows who has possession of them. In the context of electronic documents, not least because of some of the technological aspects, such as the number of people who have access to a private key, we may deal with people who have to act jointly in circumstances that would not be evident for paper documents. We need to understand the safeguards associated with the intentions of people acting jointly, because the Bill rests upon that understanding and how it will be achieved.

Thirdly, there is a whole process in Clause 4 by which documents can be transferred from paper to electronic or electronic to paper forms. The Bill is clear that this has to be in circumstances made evident in the respective documents. However, if I recall the Explanatory Notes correctly, it is clear that, while that should be the case, if it is not, it does not automatically follow that the electronic trade document concerned is not valid. It may still meet the criteria to be a valid document for these purposes. I would like to explore in Committee how that is the case and what happens in circumstances where documents are transferred from one form to another, not least because there is greater risk of duplication in such a case.

Clause 1(2) lists examples of documents. This is not the same as the list in the model law. I know that this is not exhaustive—it is indicative—but I do not understand why, in paragraph 38 of the explanatory notes to the UNCITRAL model law, for example, there is a reference to

“bills of exchange; cheques; promissory notes; consignment notes; bills of lading; warehouse receipts; insurance certificates; and air waybills.”

This is not the same as the list in the Bill. Why is it different and what are the justifications for those differences?

A question we need to follow up and explore further in the debate is the intention of the Law Commission. It says it is going to come on to the interaction between these changes and private international law, but we need to think particularly about the transitional issues—I hope they are only transitional—associated with our jurisdiction creating valid electronic trade documents when other jurisdictions do not. How do we deal with those connections? From our point of view, similar to the discussion on a single trade window, we want interoperability. We want our borders to be frictionless and other borders to be frictionless. That means they need to be aligned in various ways, including in those jurisdictions.

I want to make two final points. First, I want to explore what the voluntary industry standards are for the purposes of the reliability standard. Secondly, in paragraph 36 of the Explanatory Notes to the Bill, there is an expectation that documents are original, but there can of course be multiple original documents. There can be multiple paper documents that are treated as original. The explanatory notes for the model law make it clear that this is something that electronic trade documents do more readily. We have to understand that these documents are not necessarily singular and how to deal with them when they are not, but are multiples that are original.

I hope that gives your Lordships a sense of the discussions we might have in Committee. I very much share what I hope is the collective view of the House: I support this Bill and want to see it make good progress quickly.

Professional and Amateur Sport: Government Support

Viscount Waverley Excerpts

Thursday 1st October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government are very keen to support all sports, for the reasons that we have already summarised, in terms of both their specific sporting contribution and their wider community contribution. Clearly rugby plays an important part and is very central in particular communities. We are going through this in detail with each of the governing bodies, looking at the needs of their specific sports, and will respond as quickly and as effectively as we can.

[Viscount Waverley (CB) [V]]

My Lords, great uncertainty exists for both professional and amateur equestrian athletes, who travel extensively to competitions with large horse-boxes around the continent. Are they exempt from needing an operator’s licence, which hauliers certainly need, or are these riders considered hauliers, which clearly they are not? What provisions are being made at Dover to cater for this form of transport?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Viscount asks a very detailed question. If I may, I will respond in writing.

Olympic and Paralympic Games 2021

Viscount Waverley Excerpts

Tuesday 28th April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran]

The noble Lord makes a very good point, which I will raise with my honourable friend. Obviously, all decisions that are taken on the resumption of training or participation will be entirely consistent with public health guidelines, but the interests of Paralympians are incredibly important within this.

[Viscount Waverley (CB)]

My Lords, competitive sport can bind the nation together. However, does government recognise that the essential training and preparation before an event go hand in hand with the event itself? While the equestrian sport, for example, features high up in past medal tables, and is strong in terms of gender and disability equality, will government reflect that, along with other similar sports, it attracts significantly less funding support at the expense of more media-exposed sports such as track and field?

[Baroness Barran]

The noble Lord is right about training and preparation. We recognise the unique challenges in equestrian sports with regard to maintaining grounds and keeping horses fit for competition. However, we are working with UK Sport to ensure that the right funding and support is there so that we can have a speedy return of all sports.

Electronic Communications (Universal Service) (Broadband) Order 2018

Viscount Waverley Excerpts

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I had not originally intended to intervene on this important matter but the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, is to be commended on raising it. I speak as someone who lives and works in a rural part of West Sussex and has business tenants in the same location. It is not that it is that rural: I am two miles from the expanding village of Southwater, with its 10,000 residents. It rejoices in having a data centre for the Royal & Sun Alliance insurance company, which doubtless has its own dedicated connection with the outside world. We are five miles from the town of Horsham and about 18 miles from London’s second airport.

All this is in an acknowledged growth area and commercial hub known as the Gatwick Diamond, an area where successive Governments have expected growth to take place. Yet despite constant badgering of both BT and Openreach, my statistics for my sub 4-megabit service are, on a good day, probably comparable with the ones quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Foster. I relate to what he said. It often downloads at less than 2 megabits and is seemingly incapable of upgrade. This is about not the final mile but provider inertia, and the half mile downstream of the green cabinet before the line gets any juice. What is in between is understood to be a dated piece of twisted pair cable, which ought to have been dug up and replaced about 25 years ago. Sadly, the mobile signal is also poor in that area and, at the moment, I have not succeeded in establishing a line of sight to enable me to get a 4G signal.

This matters because I cannot at present allow my equipment access simultaneously to Microsoft 365 and Dropbox; the thing simply will not function. Sometimes I have to bring my Dropbox material up to London on a memory stick and upload it here. In fact my little 4G mobile dongle, which I travel around with, will when in signal enable me to do it far more effectively than that other paragon of communication efficiency, a Southern Rail train. The aspirations of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, would be heaven indeed because things such as internet banking would be revolutionised. Online returns to VAT, PAYE and income tax portals would be made viable because those things all rely on sufficiently fast communications for them to create a proper handshake and get a connection.

Before we get bogged down in the technicalities of up or down speeds, I would like to mention a word which has been implied but not mentioned before by other noble Lords: capacity. I know about capacity because, at certain times of day, I cannot get any internet access at all. I may as well go away and make a cup of coffee and a sandwich while it tries to do an initial start-up. Some while ago one of my office tenants left, specifically because for their small graphic design company the broadband speed was so utterly woeful that a member of staff had to take the material home with them to Worthing and send it from there. There are real problems with this because in West Sussex there are a very large number of microbusinesses operating from home. There are tens of thousands of home-workers in West Sussex alone, according to the information that I have been given by the county council.

Since the separation of BT and Openreach, seemingly the two do not talk to each other—at least, not very effectively—and I wonder quite what gives there. I know this because my wife is very often the one who is at home, trying to get some answers out of BT. Is the tenant’s application for a faster service being processed? Might we get one as well, and why do the neighbours 200 yards down the road have one? When she asks, “Who do I go to?”, BT’s reply is, “We don’t really deal with that side of the thing—that’s Openreach, because we deal only with the cabling”. Can we cut through exactly who provides what and get end-to-end configuration supplier to user? Were this a rail franchise, I think it highly likely that it would long since have been stripped of its operating licence.

What is the problem? Where is the Government’s willingness to impose this USO that we have talked about for a very long time? I would like to think that we will get somewhere with this order, but I remain unconvinced because all the things that have been done in the past have simply been ignored. There are people like me and others up and down the country who are fed up with this whole system. As has been mentioned by other noble Lords, you seem to be able to get a much better signal elsewhere. In my case, it was in the middle of the Peloponnese, somewhere in Greece, where I could get a 4G signal and have a conversation with my daughter who had some problem. That is going back a few years now, yet in a reasonably affluent and well-heeled part of West Sussex, you cannot do it.

Can we have a complete outlawing of “up to” speeds? That term is a smokescreen of the first order. All it does is allow providers to conceal poor performance. Will the Minister turn his mind to these things and say what will happen about giving this measure proper teeth so that we can start seeing some real results, not at some time two or three years hence, but in the next two, three, four months? The Government issue permits and licences and are responsible for governance here, but even if they were not, there is reason to intervene where there is market failure and there has been market failure here. There seems to have been a concentration on people streaming videos—or whatever it is they want to do—from Netflix and other providers, yet businesses cannot get the sort of download speeds they need for their day-to-day, normal-working-hours operations. I hope the Minister will be able to give us some positive news on that.

[Viscount Waverley (CB)]

My Lords, I have heard the despairing contributions this afternoon. How on earth is the UK going to become “global Britain”, which is the aspiration post Brexit?

[Lord Mendelsohn (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Stevenson for moving this Regret Motion and giving us an opportunity to debate the order. I also thank him for an outstanding speech setting the right context for this, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for an excellent speech that placed in context the consequences for small businesses. I share the frustrations of previous speakers—the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and the noble Earls, Lord Cathcart and Lord Lytton—about these speeds. I share it although I do not suffer from any of the difficult consequences, as they do.

I live in north London. We have three suppliers into the house. We have all sorts of cabling across the house, with boosters and all sorts of signals, but I have never achieved the stated packages from any of the services. We have problems of latency, contention and all those matters. In fact, my business has a dedicated phone line, which has boosters and other cabling to try to make sure that the signal is not lost, and we are fairly close to BT Tower itself—but our service is barely better than the much cheaper super broadband. It is frequently a problem that the claimed capacities are never fully achieved. That is something that we have to be very wary of, even when we establish a universal service obligation.

I turn my attention to the universal service obligation in this particular order. I want to make the simple point that the order does not achieve its objectives, and I would like the Minister to address that problem. When the Act was passed and the level at which the USO would be introduced was set, it was based on a series of assumptions none of which I believe to be true. I do not believe any more that it achieves the purposes of equity by trying to sort out the digital divide and deal with the problems of rural communities, and nor do I believe that it achieves any of the stated benefits of economic growth.

Some rather good documents on economic growth were produced by DCMS, and I thank it for the work that it did on that. In parenthesis, I acknowledge that the digital team at DCMS has steadily improved, and I suspect that if the same team had been around during the passage of the Bill last time we would not have been stuck with this level of USO. The economic growth benefits are said to be £257 million a year, which relates to:

“Local enterprise growth … Enterprise productivity growth … Increased teleworker productivity … Increased participation of carers and the disabled”.

Brexit: Digital Single Market

Viscount Waverley Excerpts

Tuesday 8th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I am not absolutely clear whether that will still be possible. I do not think it is the highest on our list of priorities. However, I will certainly take it back to my department and get my noble friend a clear and concise answer.

[Viscount Waverley (CB)]

My Lords, by chance I called on a UK tech association last week and the message I received was that the industry is in the doldrums—that is my word. I think the inference was that it is depressed—that since whenever this exercise started, there has been a depression in the industry generally. Does the Minister wish to say how we can reinject a sense of optimism into the sector, to give the heads of these trade associations the view that we are, indeed, heading in the right direction?

Brexit: Audio-visual Services

Viscount Waverley Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, we agree that migration and key skills in the creative industries generally, and the audio-visual sector as well, are crucial. We have made that point very clear to the Home Office. We are liaising with the Migration Advisory Committee to make sure that we have up-to-date information. We have made it aware that in the audio-visual sector 5.7% of the workforce come from the EU. However, interestingly, the immigration system appears to be working for the audio-visual sector, because more than that—6.7%—come from outside the EU.

[Viscount Waverley (CB)]

Would the Minister use the case in reverse and encourage Mezzo, probably the best music channel in the whole world, which is beamed only into Europe, to be available in the United Kingdom?

Social Media: News

Viscount Waverley Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Waverley (CB)]

My Lords, the manipulation of social media and control over differing value sets present regulatory and ethical challenges in today’s world. Manipulation can undermine political and social life, shaping Governments and governance, colouring decision-making and economic espionage. Thirty countries are said to use online tactics to manipulate outcomes, yet Governments currently have limited or no control over this environment. Identifying perpetrators with certainty is difficult. So what is to be done, and by whom, moving forward?

The short answer is that the social media platforms could and should step up to the plate and publish their own analyses. Distinguishing one threat group from another is possible when sufficient information, analytical know-how and technology tools combine. Cyber intruders leave digital footprints with links that enable computer forensic analysts to separate one intrusion from another. Major platforms, most particularly Twitter and Facebook, retain the vital data to pinpoint state-sponsored accounts operating on their platforms—but they are not willing to share it. They say that their own systems work internally to find and shut down bot and misinformation accounts. But, whenever they delete an account or when the account holder deletes it, the information is lost, with trolls simply making new accounts and reviving the process.

Foreign influence does necessitate formulating a plan to counter interference. Should the Government reject calls for censorship and regulation, trigger a process to enshrine protection and penalties into domestic legislation and so rein in, control and protect through the rule of law?

What realistically could be done? We could devise support programmes of fact checking, verification and digital forensic initiatives capable of exposing falsehoods and false claims of authority that underpin fake and propaganda pieces, and ensure platforms crack down on automated amplification networks that impersonate humans—botnets. Social media networks could develop and administer algorithms for identifying and removing fake news by marshalling the same engines that spread fake news in the first place. They should identify repeat disinformation offenders and have them demoted, if not taken offline.

Government should also invest in media literacy and education programmes. Emotional targeting is the central tactic of disinformation. People have to be taught how to recognise it. When it is used as a direct tool of the state, we must expose it, not ban or censor it. We must work with the social platforms and civil society groups, not against them, to close such loopholes as anonymous accounts and the use of hyperpartisan rhetoric. Platforms should make verification necessary and easier. Traditional media must also responsibly verify the social media accounts they cite.

HMG can lead internationally by devising and promoting a new global treaty to nail this issue, and here at home by creating an independent commissioner with oversight, accountable to Parliament. Self-regulation is to be supported but scrutinised. There will always be loopholes, but signals from the major platforms are encouraging and consequently should be applauded. Co-operation, not complacency, must win the day.

Data Ethics Commission

Viscount Waverley Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I think it has been discussed in many multinational organisations—including the EU, I completely agree. One point of the data protection Bill is to try to get equivalence in data flow across borders after Brexit, but the point that the noble Lord makes is right: it is not always easy but we have to lead the way to show that an ethical regime is the way forward.

[Viscount Waverley (CB)]

My Lords, are all non-classified reports or reports back compiled by officials—for example, reports back on trade missions around the world—in the public domain?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I do not know the answer to that, but I am sure that not every report is in the public domain.