Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Kidron and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Committee stage
Tuesday 10th December 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 59, 62, 63 and 65 in the name of my noble friend Lord Colville, and Amendment 64 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, to which I added my name. I am also very much in sympathy with the other amendments in this group more broadly.

My noble friend Lord Colville set out how he is seeking to understand what the Government intend by “scientific research” and to make sure that the Bill does not offer a loophole so big that any commercial company can avoid data protections of UK citizens in the name of science.

At Second Reading, I read out a dictionary definition of science:

“The systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained”—


i.e. everything. I also ask the Minister if the following scenarios could reasonably be considered scientific. Is updating or improving a new tracking app for fitness, or a bot for an airline, scientific? Is the behavioural science of testing children’s response to persuasive design strategies in order to extend the stickiness of commercial products scientific? These are practical scenarios, and I would be grateful for an answer in order to understand what is in and out of the scope of the Bill.

When I raised Clause 67 at a briefing meeting, it was said that it was, as my noble friend Lord Colville suggested, just housekeeping. The law firm Taylor Wessing suggests that what can

“‘reasonably be described as scientific’ is arguably very wide and fairly vague, so it will be interesting to see how this is interpreted, but the assumption is that it is intended to be a very broad definition”.

Each of the 14 law firm blogs and briefings that I read over the weekend described it variously as loosening, expanding or broadening. Not one suggested that it was a tightening and not one said that it was a no-change change. As we have heard, the European Data Protection Supervisor published an opinion stating that

“scientific research is understood to apply where … the research is carried out with the aim of growing society’s collective knowledge and wellbeing, as opposed to serving primarily one or several private interests”.

When the Minister responds, perhaps she could say whether the particular scenarios I have set out fall within the definition of scientific and why the Government have failed to reflect the critical clarification of the European Data Protection Supervisor in transferring the recital into the Bill.

I turn briefly to Amendment 64, which would limit the use of children’s personal data for the purposes of research and education by making it subject to a public interest requirement and opt-in from the child or a parent. I will speak in our debate on a later grouping to amendments that would enshrine children’s right to higher protection and propose a comprehensive code of practice on the use of children’s data in education, which is an issue of increasing scandal and concern. For now, it would be good to understand whether the Government agree that education is an area of research where a public interest requirement is necessary and appropriate and that children’s data should always be used to support their right to learn, rather than to commoditise them.

During debate on the DPDI Bill, a code of practice on children’s data and scientific research was proposed; the Minister added her name to it. It is by accident rather than by design that I have failed to lay it here, but I will listen carefully to the Minister’s reply to see whether children need additional protections from scientific research as the Government now define it.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I have in subsequent groups a number of amendments that touch on many of the issues that are raised here, so I will not detain the Committee by going through them at this stage and repeating them later. However, I feel that, although the Government have had the best intentions in bringing forward a set of proposals in this area that were to update and to bring together rather conflicting and difficult pieces of legislation that have been left because of the Brexit arrangements, they have managed to open up a gap between where we want to be and where we will be if the Bill goes forward in its present form. I say that in relation to AI, which is a subject requiring a lot more attention and a lot more detail than we have before us. I doubt very much whether the Government will have the appetite for dealing with that in time for this Bill, but I hope that at the very least—it would be a minor concession at this stage—they will commit at the Dispatch Box to seeking to resolve these issues in the legislation within a very short period because, as we have heard from the arguments made today, it is desperately needed.

More importantly, if, by bringing together documentation that is thought to represent the current situation, either inadvertently or otherwise, the Government have managed to open up a loophole that will devalue the way in which we currently treat personal data—I will come on to this when I get to my groups in relation to the NHS in particular—that would be a grievous situation. I hope that, going forward, the points that have been made here can be accommodated in a statement that will resolve them, because they need to be resolved.

Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Kidron and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd December 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. I perhaps did not say it at the beginning of my remarks on this section, but I fully support the Government’s efforts to create a trust framework. I think I started with criticism rather than with the fact that this is really important. Trust is in the name and if we cannot trust it, it is not going to be a trust framework. It is important to anticipate and address the likelihood that some will seek to abuse it. If there are not sufficient consequences for abusing it, I do not understand quite how we can have the level of trust needed for this to have wide adoption.

I particularly want to say that good systems cannot rely on good people. We know that and we see it. We are going to discuss it later in Committee, but good systems need checks and balances. In relation to this set of amendments, we need a disincentive for bad actors to mislead or give false information to government or the public. I am not going to rehearse each amendment that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, explained so brilliantly. The briefing on the trust framework is a very important one for us all. The amount of support there is for the idea, and the number of questions about what it means and how it will work, mean that we will come back to this if we do not have a full enough explanation of the disincentives for a bad actor.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments and applaud the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for his temerity and for offering a variety of choices, making it even more difficult for my noble friend to resist it.

It has puzzled me for some time why the Government do not wish to see a firm line being taken about digital theft. Identity theft in any form must be the most heinous of crimes, particularly in today’s world. This question came up yesterday in an informal meeting about a Private Member’s Bill due up next Friday on the vexed question of the sharing of intimate images and how the Government are going to respond to it. We were sad to discover that there was no support among the Ministry of Justice officials who discussed the Bill with its promoter for seeing it progress any further.

At the heart of that Bill is the same question about what happens when one’s identity is taken and one’s whole career and personality are destroyed by those who take one’s private information and distort it in such a way that those who see it regard it as being a different person or in some way involved in activities that the original person would never have been involved in. Yet we hear that the whole basis on which this digital network has been built up is a voluntary one, and the logic of that is that it would not be necessary to have the sort of amendments that are before us now.

I urge the Government to think very hard about this. There must be a break point here. Maybe the meeting that has been promised will help us, but there is a fundamental point about whether in the digital world we can rely on the same protections that we have in the real world—and, if not, why not?

Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Kidron and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

With respect, it is the narrow question that a number of us have raised. Training the new AI systems is entirely dependent on them being fed vast amounts of material which they can absorb, process and reshape in order to answer questions that are asked of them. That information is to all intents and purposes somebody else’s property. What will happen to resolve the barrier? At the moment, they are not paying for it but just taking it—scraping it.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

Perhaps I may come in too. Specifically, how does the data protection framework change it? We have had the ICO suggesting that the current framework works perfectly well and that it is the responsibility of the scrapers to let the IP holders know, while the IP holders have not a clue that it is being scraped. It is already scraped and there is no mechanism. I think we are a little confused about what the plan is.