Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness has referred to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, which I chair. It is currently undertaking an inquiry into the use of new technology—I stress new, by which I mean artificial intelligence—and the application of law. I do not wish to pre-empt whatever the committee may recommend. We will certainly look at issues of so-called hard or soft regulation. We will also look at procurement standards, transparency—by which I mean intelligibility both to those who use AI and to those who are the subject of it—and accountability. The list of issues seems to increase with every evidence session. At a recent session, a witness said

“certain things with AI will always be the same. We will always have a data issue, a bias issue and an explainability issue”.

I do not think it appropriate to go into any detail this evening, other than to say, “Watch this space”.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, we support the principle of the amendment the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has tabled. Picking up a theme here, facial recognition technology is an example of where officials are concerned. For example, the guy who is responsible for the regulation of CCTV has very serious concerns that the technology is running ahead of the regulations and that this needs to be addressed. As my noble friend Lady Hamwee said, the use of artificial intelligence is another new and developing area where Parliament should at least consider whether these new technologies need to be subject to debate in Parliament and regulation.

However, I am not sure about the example of drones, which are sort of a replacement for police helicopters. I left the police in 2007; 14 years ago, with something not very imaginatively called “heli-tele”, police helicopters could pick out people’s faces from however many thousand feet they were up in the air and transmit those images to officers on the ground who had television monitors in front of them. It was extremely useful to see where crowds were moving in a fast-moving demonstration situation. Clearly, you can have a lot more drones than you can have helicopters, because they are a lot cheaper and so forth. The increased use of drones may be of concern, but the way in which they are being used is no different from what huge helicopters have been doing for years, whether members of the public were aware of it or not.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, talked about the Mayor of London and water cannon. Again, I think it was Theresa May as Home Secretary who refused to allow their deployment. Unfortunately, if the Mayor of London had actually listened to experts in public order policing, they would have told him that they are more or less useless for the sort of things he was hoping to use them for. I think he felt that water cannon would be useful following the widespread riots across the country. In fact, in that scenario they are completely useless. They are lumbering giants of things that cannot possibly keep up with marauding gangs going round and looting and so forth.

I think my noble friend Lady Hamwee has hit the nail on the head—it is new technology that needs to be considered and regulated, or at least debated in Parliament to see whether it needs to be regulated. To that extent, I support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti.