Artificial Intelligence: Safeguarding

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes a very useful suggestion, and I will certainly raise that with my ministerial colleague at DSIT. I note that companies—admittedly, they are doing this when under pressure—are looking at introducing, for example, age assurance functionalities to ensure that users get the right experience for their age. But we should not be leaving that to chance, and we should not be leaving that to the fact that this is arising following legal challenge. I certainly look forward to looking into the point the noble Lord makes.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, is there an analogy with drugs here—a potent technology which has great and positive uses in healthcare, but that can also be abused? Therefore, it must be properly regulated. Some uses must not be allowed without prior approval; some should be banned.

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

My noble friend is right that this can be used for good or for ill. Of course, there are other comparisons to draw. My noble friend has not said this, but I want to make sure we keep away from the idea that AI services are escaping regulation. Many AI chatbots are certainly in scope of the Act. I also take the view that AI can actually assist us greatly in supporting those at risk and in improving health. We seek to harness that as we move from analogue to digital, as per our 10-year plan.

Mental Health Bill [HL]

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, at this late hour I do not intend to speak at great length, but I do not want anybody to misinterpret that as in any way diminishing the support for the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley. I believe that this is very important.

It is important for two main reasons. The first is that we all know that the Human Rights Act is under attack on many different fronts for many different reasons. I happen to be—it is perhaps fair to say or apt to describe as—a human rights absolutist: I do not believe that human rights can be picked or that you can pick and choose whose human rights you support. Human rights are universal. You cannot call yourself a human rights supporter unless you are prepared to stand up for the human rights of people you do not like and you do not care for. I suggest that among the people whose human rights are most at risk are those who are stuck away in care homes without anybody paying any attention to them—perhaps without relatives —and about whom, frankly, nobody cares. They are the people who are at the mercy of, particularly, providers who have a commercial interest in maintaining them in the positions where they are rather than seeking to address their care in more fundamental ways. If nothing else, I want us to acknowledge that.

Secondly, I want to pay tribute to all those health professionals and to people such as solicitors who choose to work in this most unglamorous part of the legal system. There is no great financial reward in putting yourself out to stand up for these people, but they do. It is their dedication that has brought this back to the attention of people in this House.

The noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, and I were to a certain extent, as we all have been throughout the passage of the Bill, assuaged by the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, and the very personable way in which she has listened to all of our concerns, but we were not yet convinced that the Government, who are uniquely placed to stick up for the rights of these people, are doing so to the extent that they should. That is why we have taken the time and troubled your Lordships this evening. I hope that all of the provisions of this amendment are taken up by the Government.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of that persecuted minority of activist human rights lawyers. Crucially, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, and my noble friend Lady Keeley, who have done so much wonderful work on this. I also commend the brains trust of mental health professionals and lawyers who sat behind them.

On 24 February, we had a lengthy discussion on this in Committee, and it was one of the best debates in which I have had the privilege of participating in your Lordships’ House, and not just because everybody agreed. But they did. I do not remember a single person speaking against my noble friend’s amendment in Committee. We disagree well in your Lordships’ House, but it says something that not a single person disagreed. In particular, I commend the eloquent speeches on that day by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler- Sloss, and by the noble Earl, Lord Howe, on the Opposition Front Bench.

I have been very excited to hear that my noble friend the Minister has been in such constructive meetings with my noble friend Lady Keeley. Whatever debates there are about contracting out vital public services, nobody on any side of this House wants people to be treated less decently and with fewer human rights because of a service being provided directly by the state or a decent contractor. With that, I look forward expectantly, with hope in my heart, to the response of my noble friend, who is very experienced, decent and wily.

[Earl Howe (Con)]

My Lords, having listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, and her clear and concise explanation of this amendment both today and in Committee, I can do no other than express my full support, yet again, for all she has said. This is indeed an important issue that case law has exposed as needing resolution, and the amendment seems to achieve that aim extremely well. I may have read the runes incorrectly, but I dare to entertain the hope that, if the amendment is not to be accepted as it stands, which of course would be very gratifying, the Government will take the matter forward in the way the noble Baroness has asked.

Mental Health Bill [HL]

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 24th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for my not having been able to speak at Second Reading and for seeking to intervene on one amendment only in such an important Bill. That is the amendment from my noble friend Lady Keeley, supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker. I declare an interest as a council member of Justice, the NGO that will no doubt have sent briefings to many Members of the Committee on this important amendment.

Amendment 149 is a no-brainer, which warrants support and adoption by the Government and welcome from every political tradition represented in your Lordships’ House. It is no surprise to the Committee, I am sure, that I am a supporter of the Human Rights Act and the way in which it has protected vulnerable people and their families, including in mental health facilities. Those are some of the most potent stories about the Human Rights Act over the last near-quarter of a century.

Contracting out services will always be a matter of high politics in a democracy. It is literally the meat and drink of left-right debate over social and economic management. This was amply demonstrated in contributions on an earlier group by the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Fox, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and my noble friend the Minister. However, no one in that debate ever advocates for either public or private provision on the basis that vulnerable people should be less well treated or protected.

It is my contention that everyone in the Committee should support Amendment 149, which would ensure Human Rights Act protection for publicly arranged mental health care, whether delivered by a public or private provider. No social democrat or liberal can approve of public authorities being able to contract out of constitutional protection, and no conservative can approve of public authorities being able to avoid responsibility for negligence or harm to individuals and their families, especially where coercive power is involved. Finally, I am sure that all Members of this Committee believe in equality before the law.

This amendment closes not so much a loophole as a glaring omission in legal protection as exposed by the case law and the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I commend it to the Committee.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, I too support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, and I agree with every word spoken by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti. I am here today because I have an interest to declare, which is that I acted—unsuccessfully—in the case that caused the problem. In YL v Birmingham City Council, I was the unsuccessful counsel for YL, although I take comfort from the fact that of the five members of the Appellate Committee who sat on that case, the two who dissented were Lord Bingham of Cornhill and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale—a formidable combination indeed. The noble and learned Baroness summed up the point in her dissenting speech in the Appellate Committee. She said that it is a function of a public nature for the purposes of the Human Rights Act when it is performed pursuant to statutory arrangements, when it is performed at public expense, and when it is performed in the public interest. It is as simple as that. I agree with her, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, and I very much hope the Minister will accept this amendment.

Covid-19 Inquiry

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare interests as the former shadow Attorney-General who attended cross-party briefings with Ministers and officials in early 2020 and as a member of your Lordships’ Committee inquiring into the operation of statutory inquiries in general.

The work of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, and her team is to be commended for its ambition and delivery so far. The module report currently before your Lordships’ House deals with UK pandemic resilience and preparedness, which, on the evidence before it, the inquiry found significantly wanting. Its findings and recommendations in this respect are clear, compelling and, in my opinion, rather difficult to quibble with—but of course quibbles none the less come. From my own recollection, meetings in January 2020 revealed significant gaps in both preparedness and even nimble thinking. A question I remember posing about the possible need for rationing and temporary requisitioning of vital medicines, equipment and large vacant premises was met more than once with embarrassed silence.

However, this report also foreshadows other modules to follow, all of which must to some extent be interconnected. In the hope that the inquiry team will watch or at least read today’s debate with interest, and with the aim of advocating towards areas of vital detailed inquiry still to be pursued, it is on as yet unexplored areas of pandemic handling that I intend to focus my remarks. I am especially concerned with the modules dealing with vaccines and therapeutics and with the UK’s economic response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Once more, these are distinct discussions but with crucial overlap.

By way of introduction, it has long been my view that the pandemic was both a genuinely global tragedy justifying urgent and continuing international—rather than purely national, let alone, as we have heard, nationalistic—responses and a parable for every inequality and hypocrisy in our own nations and the wider world.

Here at home, health and other vital public service workers and volunteers displayed nothing short of heroism in our communities, risking their own lives—sometimes dressed in bin liners for meagre protection—to help others, even before a full understanding of the virus, let alone the advent of life-saving vaccines. They were akin to the unknown soldiers of the Great War. Some—including from minority ethnic and international communities—literally sacrificed their lives for others. By contrast, we saw some people panic-buying essential goods, corporate profiteering, corrupt firing and rehiring of staff in some service industries, so-called VIP lanes for public procurement, and a government inability or reluctance to tackle fraud in relation to Covid business support loans. That prompted the dramatic resignation of the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, from that Dispatch Box in your Lordships’ House in January 2022.

Ordinary people and small businesses gave up precious liberties, livelihoods and lives during chilling but none the less proportionate lockdowns, yet there was often an asymmetry to lockdown enforcement and support. In the public mind this will perhaps be for ever symbolised by infamous parties at No. 10 and breaches of social distancing implicating not one but two former Prime Ministers, while the elderly died, grieved alone, or were tipped out of hospitals untested, often into unsafe care homes.

However, such inequities became even more distastefully graphic and counterproductive on the international stage, where deaths reached 7 million. Crucially, when critical vaccines arrived, as a result of large-scale public and philanthropic investment, normal rules on intellectual property were not promptly and temporarily waived to allow them to be shared at scale and at genuine production costs with millions of people in the global South. It was as if big pharma refused to share the floor-plan locating emergency exits in a burning building, even though Governments, charities and altruistic scientists had collaborated to build those fire escapes in the first place.

Of course, in a pandemic, even more than in a fire, hoarding lucrative but life-saving knowledge is counter- productive to public health, as the spread of a virus and its mutations anywhere risks new infections and re-infections everywhere. Dead bodies floated down the sacred Ganges river, while subcontracted Indian manufacturers provided vaccines to be sent to the global North. If ever there was a justification for human rights principles to be applied more directly and effectively to international institutions and corporations, it was this.

Many leading voices at the WHO, in the Vatican and in the White House—at least, after President Biden took office—called for an activation of the TRIPS waiver for vaccine patents at the WTO. Gordon Brown was a leading UK proponent of this emergency measure, with so much support in the global South, where vaccination continued to be beyond the reach of too many. Shamefully, the UK Government were one of those who stubbornly blocked the measure in the interests of corporate profit. Some noble Lords opposite elegantly stonewalled on this question month after month as the death toll soared.

By way of context, after 9/11, the US faced a threat of anthrax, after samples were sent to key politicians. The US needed drugs to treat this disease but could not get supplies quickly enough, so it threatened the supplier, Bayer, with a compulsory licence, to allow the US to mass-produce the drug or obtain generic versions to treat people with anthrax. During Covid, Israel issued a compulsory licence to secure supplies of early drugs thought to be active, and Spain also changed laws to allow compulsory licensing.

There are understandable and proportionate precedents. If states believe that they are in a health emergency situation, just as they may demand social distancing and home-working for individuals and small businesses, they may issue compulsory licences in the face of corporate non-co-operation and greed. But how much more effective would it be to do this collectively at the international level, as proposed?

Unsurprisingly, and in response to the Covid-19 experience, there is currently legislation pending in the European Parliament in relation to EU-wide emergency compulsory licensing. Unlike the last Government, our new Government are internationalist in outlook and pro-human rights in their values. Will they learn lessons from the bitter fruit of nationalism, whether in racist public disorder on our streets or the disproportionate loss of life in health crises?

There are currently remarkable new drugs, such as lenacapavir, which prevents HIV infections. There are currently 1.3 million of these new infections in the world every year. The drug is sold in high-income countries for $40,000 per patient per year, despite a potential annual production cost of just $40. Without voluntary or compulsory licensing, this drug will be beyond the reach of millions of people in low and middle-income countries, meaning many unnecessary infections and deaths, with no hope of ending the epidemic. Often the poorest countries get better deals than middle-income ones, which are frequently left out of voluntary licence agreements. Further, the general problem of drug and vaccine inequity is surely a huge issue for pandemic prevention and response, now and in the future.

It is a marvel of human resilience that so many people have adjusted to life after the Covid-19 pandemic as if it were but a bad dream. However, we know that for a great many others its ramifications will be felt for decades to come. In some ways, it is not unlike a world war in the scale of the existential threat that was posed and its human and economic costs. After World War II, statesmen across the political aisle and around the world came together to try to prevent reoccurrence by way of shared values and a machinery for co-operation. May we not do that again?