AI Regulation Bill

Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Holmes for bringing this debate. The fact that so many of us wish to speak today shows that this really needs to be properly debated as a society, not just in a series of two-minute soundbites.

I think we all agree that good regulation and economic growth are not a trade-off—they go hand in hand. In order to get good regulation, you have to go through quite detailed and thoughtful work. My question—I have asked the Minister this before in a Question—is: why are the Government not initiating a commission along the lines of the Warnock committee that looked at human embryology and fertilisation in the 1980s?

This single hour shows that there are really important moral, social and economic issues about AI that we need to think through. With the greatest of respect to my noble friend beside me, I genuinely do not think that individual regulators on their own can sort that out. We have to have a proper societal debate about this, and we have the democratic tools to do it. That is not a hurried piece of emergency legislation; it is a proper commission, a Green Paper and a White Paper. It is about building the societal trust that we need for this ground-breaking regulation.

I urge the Government to think carefully, because at the moment we are doing nothing, and that is really dangerous. Nothing takes us to the same place that we are in with social media, which is a huge amount of harm done, no action and then calls to ban the technology. Banning the technology is a really bad idea; regulating it well is where we should be going.