Department for Science, Information and Technology: Abolition

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 21st July 2026 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Clement-Jones]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the abolition of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the merging of its functions with other departments and; the implications of this on the future operation of (1) the AI Safety Institute, (2) the Sovereign AI Fund, (3) the Government Digital Service and (4) UK Research and Innovation.

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)]

My Lords, science and AI are having an increasingly large impact on all areas of government policy and economic growth. We should not see science and technology as an isolated issue. That is why the Prime Minister has announced a bold restructuring, including the elevation of AI to the Office for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. That will provide a more coherent, agile and effective government framework to deliver on our national priorities. A WMS has been tabled today in the name of my noble friend the Lord Privy Seal outlining these changes.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, many of us welcomed the creation of DSIT and the focus that it brought on science and technology, but with the very regrettable resignation of the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, who will be greatly missed, and the understandable concerns expressed by Sir Paul Nurse, the president of the Royal Society, and many university and tech leaders, what assurance do we have that that focus will be retained, particularly in developing UK digital sovereignty? Which single department will own AI safety and regulation?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Lord raises a series of very important issues. First, I put on record my absolute thanks for the work done by my noble friend Lord Vallance, who it has been a pleasure and privilege to work with. Noble Lords will appreciate—there have been many comments in your Lordships’ House today—that there are ongoing appointments in government, so I cannot possibly talk about any further roles and appointments that are being made, including my own. We will deal with those as they emerge.

On the substance of the Question, the noble Lord raises an important point but the Government have decided that having science and AI sit separate and away from the rest of government means that other departments have not treated them in the way they should be. Noble Lords will appreciate that a month has not passed when I have not been asked about the impact of AI on the Cabinet Office, and every member of the Front Bench has been asked how AI is affecting the Government’s work. It is right that we are putting both science and AI at the heart of government, which is why we have the new Office for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet to make sure that it is at the centre, as well as having a new specialist Minister for AI attending Cabinet.

Democratic Institutions: Threats

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire for securing this debate and for his excellent introduction, which was both forensic and alarming. He has certainly elicited a range of views in today’s debate. My view is that we are at a critical point for our democratic institutions, facing threats that have grown exponentially in sophistication and scale, and which successive Governments have been far too slow to address. I am grateful for the opportunity to disagree with the view of the noble Lords, Lord Hannan, Lord Frost and Lord Jackson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that the right to freedom of expression gives some sort of licence to spread disinformation with impunity.

My noble friend reported that the Electoral Commission’s most recent survey found that only 14% of people trust politicians. The National Centre for Social Research reports record low levels of trust in how Britain is governed, with only 12% of the public trusting Governments to put the country’s interests before their party’s. That collapse does not exist in a vacuum. It is being actively engineered, and technology has become the primary instrument of that engineering.

In 2020, Lord Puttnam’s Select Committee described a “pandemic of misinformation” and disinformation that would result in the collapse of public trust. Six years on, the failure of successive Governments to act on the bulk of those 45 recommendations has had predictable consequences. The World Economic Forum now ranks misinformation and disinformation as the second most severe short-term risk facing the world, ahead of extreme weather events and state-based armed conflict.

That pandemic has been supercharged by AI. The Rycroft report, referred to by my noble friend and sadly derided by the noble Lord, Lord Frost, concluded that

“our defences are worryingly weak”

and we are

“already experiencing ‘information warfare’”.

The Rycroft review was triggered by the sentencing of Nathan Gill, a former MEP, for accepting bribes linked to the Russian state. His case is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of the systematic campaign. Transparency International’s research finds that one in 10 political donations already originates from unknown or dubious sources, a vulnerability made worse by the complete absence of any cap on political donations in the UK. His case is one that the strategic defence review characterises as a sub-threshold attack, falling beneath the threshold of war but an act of aggression none the less.

The Alan Turing Institute’s Centre for Emerging Technology and Security has monitored AI disinformation across more than 100 national elections. Domestic political actors created significant portions of misleading AI content. Threat actors embedded features of verified news sources to make fabrication harder to debunk. The tools get cheaper and faster with every cycle. Full Fact Report 2026 identifies the most insidious development: confusion has become the strategy—not one false claim, but sufficient uncertainty that trust in all information breaks down and citizens disengage from the ballot box entirely.

In this environment, the value of the BBC has never been clearer, as my noble friend Lord Wallace and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, have said. It remains one of the most trusted news sources in the world, precisely because it is subject to obligations of impartiality and public accountability that no social media algorithm is required to meet. Contrary to what has been said in the debate today, it can be held to account to deliver on that duty. Undermining it, whether through funding pressure or through interference with board appointments, would hand a significant victory to those seeking to diminish or subvert our democracy. The charter renewal process gives us a direct opportunity to support it.

The Government’s own media Green Paper, published just this week, acknowledges that fewer than half of adults now feel confident judging whether a news source is truthful. It proposes new BBC responsibilities to counter disinformation and requiring platforms to make public service media news content prominent during elections and crises. I welcome both proposals.

The Social Market Foundation’s new report, No News is Bad News, quantifies what we have long feared. Over 4 million people now live in what is called a news desert, with 320 local publications closed since 2009. Areas with no local news have nearly three times the level of misinformation as those with a healthy press. These are not abstract statistics; they describe the conditions in which the next general election will be fought.

Briefly, what do we need? We need statutory cross-sector AI regulation, including mandatory AI watermarking of synthetic content. Voters cannot exercise informed judgment if they cannot distinguish real from fabricated. We need comprehensive electoral reform. Although the Elections Act 2022 introduced digital imprints, we still lack statutory advert libraries, and there are no rules whatever on deepfakes in political campaigning. The Representation of the People Bill must fill those gaps.

We must invest seriously in digital and media literacy. Internet Matters tells us that only half of young people feel confident assessing whether political information online is true. Over 60% simply ignore what politicians say online because they cannot trust what they see. That is not apathy but a rational response to a systematically untrustworthy environment. With the voting age set to fall to 16 and curriculum reforms not reaching classrooms until September 2028, the next general election will arrive before a single child benefits. We need interim support for schools now.

Shoshana Zuboff captured it precisely, and Lord Puttnam’s committee cited her in 2020:

“It’s down to lawmakers to protect democracy in an age of surveillance … That is the work of the next decade”.


That decade is now. The collapse of public trust we are debating is not a mystery but the predictable consequence of allowing technology to run ahead of accountability, and allowing foreign states to exploit that gap with impunity. We must treat our democratic information environment as the critical infrastructure it is and legislate accordingly. The time for voluntary codes and piecemeal adjustments has definitively passed.

Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Friday 5th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as an adviser to DLA Piper on AI policy and regulation. I warmly thank the most reverend Primate for initiating this debate and for her very comprehensive, thought provoking and—in the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley—empathetic introduction.

This really has been a stimulating and thoughtful debate. I never expected it to range from the Pope to Star Trek, but nevertheless, it has been extremely wide ranging. I very much welcome the Church’s continuing involvement in AI policy. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford was a member of the original House of Lords AI Select Committee, which I had the honour of chairing. It was he who proposed the ethical framework of five principles that the committee adopted in its 2018 report. Those principles—that AI should serve the common good, operate with intelligibility and fairness, respect data rights and privacy, be accompanied by universal AI education and never be given the autonomous power to hurt, destroy or deceive human beings—have since found their way, in substance, into the G20 AI principles, the OECD AI principles and a succession of international declarations. The right reverend Prelate planted those seeds in 2018.

As a liberal humanist, I come to these questions from a different angle from the most reverend Primate and the right reverend Prelate. But this debate has demonstrated, as many noble Lords have mentioned, a convergence of values that goes beyond well beyond any single set of beliefs. Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas encyclical, mentioned by so many noble Lords today, deserves attention well beyond the 1.3 billion Catholics it formally addresses. It is an alliance, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth said. What is most compelling is the encyclical’s insistence that no person can be reduced to productivity, cognitive performance or mere data, and that every human being bears a freedom and value no machine can replace or block. I would express that in the language of liberal rights rather than theology, but the substance is identical.

A number of noble Lords—including, I think, most recently the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson—described the benefits of AI. We have also talked about some of the risks, in particular hidden risks such as the threat to resilience and the deskilling of curiosity: “offloading”, as the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, described it. Those risks have been extremely cogently articulated today.

This means that the questions that the most reverend Primate asked in this context are entirely apposite. Just because we can, should we be developing these AI models? What direction do we want to go in, while we still have the choice? The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, in that context raised the very important question of alignment. What kind of AI are we content to see being developed? As she said, technology is not neutral; we have choices.

The noble Lord, Lord Tarassenko, raised the statistics about the extent of the use of AI in society. Ofcom data published last month shows that just over half of UK adults now use generative AI, rising to 79% for 16 to 24 year-olds. Of those users, 12% report using AI as a friend or as someone to talk to. In the words of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, this is the simulation of intimacy. The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, referred to “relational cues”. In the United States, therapy and companionship is already the number one use of generative AI, and that is where we are heading. We heard the warnings from the most reverend Primate, the noble Lords, Lord Rook and Lord Hastings, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and many others.

I readily acknowledge that AI companions can offer a safe space for neurodivergent users to rehearse social interactions. Well-designed AI can encourage care and consideration. The question is whether it is governed in the interests of those who use it, especially the young and vulnerable. Children’s exposure to these AI chatbots demands the strongest safeguards. As the noble Lord, Lord Rook, said, they should not face it alone. The noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, said that we should not be outsourcing childhood.

The encyclical speaks of algorithms blocking access to healthcare, employment and security on the basis of data tainted by prejudice, and of the silence of those who have no voice when such decisions are made. This is exactly the power issue that was raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Helic. It argues explicitly that algorithmic processes must

“not be imposed from above in an opaque and unilateral manner”,

and that communities need transparency, accountability and meaningful avenues for recourse. That is precisely what the Horizon scandal, referred to by my noble friend Lady Teather and the Dutch case raised by the noble Lord, Lord Raval, taught us. It is precisely why mandatory algorithmic impact assessments and clear accountability and transparency principles are moral necessities, not just some sort of regulatory red tape.

As my noble friend Lord McNally and the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, mentioned, AI models scraping creative content without consent, which produces deepfakes and synthetic information, are creating a huge threat to our creative industries, which has 2 million workers and is worth £145 billion per annum to the UK economy. They are also corroding public trust and causing creative and democratic harm, as described by my noble friend and the noble Baronesses, Lady Prashar and Lady Helic.

The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that AI could materially impact 40% of the UK labour force over the next 10 years, with administrative, secretarial sales and customer service roles most exposed. This potentially creates societies susceptible to political as well as economic dislocation and, in the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester, affects the very fabric of society. These issues must urgently be addressed.

Sir Tony Blair is right that AI represents an epochal change. Where we part company is whether the right response is acceptance or governance. The decisions made in the coming years will shape AI’s trajectory for decades, and those decisions require democratic oversight, not deference to whoever controls the infrastructure. There is also the environmental dimension, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Taylor.

Sir Alan Milburn’s interim report was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Fall, the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, and a number of other noble Lords. Published last week, it tells us that young people now make up to close to one in nine workers, with 1.25 million at risk of becoming NEET within five years, at a cost of £125 billion a year to the economy. Six in 10 of those young people have never had a job. Sir Alan describes their experience of recruitment as

“applications disappearing into a void, interviews followed by silence, and recruitment processes that felt designed to deter rather than select”.

This is the algorithmic hiring gatekeeper that the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, mentioned, for jobseekers. We need to reckon with an AI-transformed labour market. Fifty years ago, Ralf Dahrendorf, whose philosophy underpins my values, argued that real freedom is not just freedom from interference; it is freedom to build a life and to have genuine life chances. Sir Alan’s lost generation risks having neither.

Noble Lords have mentioned a National Education Union survey, published in April, which found that two-thirds of secondary teachers believed that pupils’ critical thinking had declined due to AI usage, but these are the crucial skills for the future. As the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Marylebone, and the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, mentioned, judgment is the antithesis of cognitive offloading. Most strikingly, half of all schools have no policy on AI use by staff or students. This is not a technology problem; it is a governance failure.

We have heard about Sir Anthony Seldon’s work relating to human flourishing. The OECD’s Education for Human Flourishing framework is very similar. It argues that:

“In the age of AI, education must strengthen human agency, human meaning and human security”.


It prioritises distinctive human intelligence as the capacity to know and understand others and understand oneself as a learner. We can look to other models—we can look to Finland as one of the answers—to prepare our children for an uncertain world, but we have not yet done so.

Many questions have been asked today on online safety, AI safety, ethical balance and the potential governance of superintelligent systems. I simply ask the Minister: when the values of liberal humanism, the Church of England and the Catholic Church, the public, AI experts, the international institutions and the Government’s own manifesto all point in the same direction, what are the Government waiting for? Why are we not putting in the kind of regulatory framework that so many noble Lords have asked for today?

Decisions in the coming year will shape AI’s trajectory for generations. Regulation and innovation are not in opposition, as a number of noble Lords have said. My noble friend Lord Alderdice used the analogy of the motor vehicle, and that is a perfectly respectable precedent. Whether or not this technology becomes our servant or master, the kind of partnership that the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, called for, the sharing called for by the noble Baroness, Lady Fall, and the serving of humanity described by the noble Baroness, Lady Gill, will be determined not by the technology itself but by whether those of us in positions of responsibility had the courage to act in time. We must not be the rabbits in the headlight mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Cashman; as the most reverend Primate said, we must put people ahead of profit and technology. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Amazon Web Services

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

My Lords, in respect of the noble Viscount’s point about cost, this happened just yesterday so, of course, we are still working it through; it will take us some time to evaluate how much it will cost the economy. I am sure that economists will be kept very busy for some time working out the costs and the impact on productivity.

We are already taking steps to strengthen the resilience of the UK’s digital infrastructure. Through the national cyber strategy and the national resilience framework, we are working with the National Cyber Security Centre to treat major cloud service providers as part of our critical national infrastructure. This includes measures to ensure that they have robust redundancy back-up and incident response capabilities in place. At the same time, we are consulting with industry on enhanced incident reporting and transparency requirements so that the Government can be alerted immediately to any service disruption that could have national impact.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, at the very least, this should be a wake-up call for the Government. It is clear that the Government have been overdependent on two US cloud service providers, which, as the Competition and Markets Authority says, have 70% to 90% of the market, and restrictive practices impede competition. Of course, there is now a sovereign AI unit within DSIT. Will government procurement policy now change to encourage UK cloud service providers, which would then help to deliver sovereign AI? Will the Government also encourage the CMA to act rapidly, given this lack of competition?

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for those points. The Government are aware and are taking cybersecurity seriously. That is why we have published a number of strategies and are working with the National Cyber Security Centre, as I mentioned earlier. The noble Lord also mentioned procurement and the service providers. The three providers I just mentioned—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—probably have something like 60% of the market share. Yes, we have other small, independent providers as well but, at the same time, procurement is dependent on government departments: on how they want to procure their services and from where. The basic point is that, going forward, we have to ensure that it is safe and resilient.

Global IT Outage

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I think we all have huge sympathy for those affected. As the noble Lord rightly says, thousands of people were affected on the day. However, compensation is a matter for the individual operators and subject to consumer rules, which would cover any entitlement to compensation or refunds.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, in the light of recent events, we are clearly talking not just about bad actors. Does the Minister agree that there needs to be a rethink about critical national infrastructure and our dependence on a few overly dominant major tech companies for cloud services and software, which are now effectively essential public utilities? Will the Government reconsider how we are wholesale replacing reliable analogue communications with digital systems without any back-up?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

The noble Lord raises critical issues, a number of which will be covered by the cybersecurity and resilience Bill. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss these issues with him further.