AI and Creative Technologies (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Evans of Guisborough Excerpts

Friday 13th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to deliver my maiden speech this morning, and it is a particular pleasure and privilege to follow immediately the contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I have sat here in recent weeks and watched her make her points repeatedly, and they lose none of their strength for repetition. I hope that the Government are listening and that we will see some movement from them.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Massey on delivering his maiden speech. There was a great deal of knowledge and detail there, and I am sure that he will make a good contribution to the House in future, as indeed I hope I will.

As it is my maiden speech, I would like to thank Black Rod, the Clerk of the Parliaments, the Garter King of Arms and the House staff who helped me through my introduction ceremony back in February. It is an experience I will remember for the rest of my life. My guests loved it and I can tell your Lordships that when you wear ermine, nobody can see you tremble.

I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Stowell of Beeston on bringing this report before the House today. We have known each other for over a decade, and the report is presented with all the care and attention to detail that I would have expected from her.

I continue to be grateful to the doorkeepers and the security staff here. I do not think a day passes without me consulting them on some questions, and they deal with them courteously and knowledgeably all the time. They always go out of their way to provide help. I have made it my business to wander the Palace, opening doors to find out what is behind them. On one occasion a couple of months ago, I encountered a security guard in the Committee Corridor upstairs. Instead of admonishing me for what I was doing, he offered me a quiz about the House and the location of various things here. I am disappointed to say that I scored one out of five, but it was one more than I would have scored back in January, and I hope that if I had that quiz now I would do considerably better.

Two Peers—two of my noble friends—gave up their time to introduce me and, although they are not here, I thank them now. My noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington has made a remarkable contribution to improving the representation of women in Parliament. I met her in 2005, when she founded the organisation Women2Win, which is dedicated to bringing more Conservative women into Parliament. I have given her some help with it over the years and I am very proud to have played a modest part in its great success.

I first met my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough even earlier: back in 1990, when we were both contesting the London elections for different London councils. That was a tough year, but I am pleased to say that we both won our seats, and we have been exchanging notes and advice ever since, so it was a pleasure to be introduced by him in February.

That was not my campaigning debut, I have to admit. Back in 1981, I contested an election for the council of my sixth-form college. It was a relatively easy introduction, as there were six places on the council and only seven of us standing for election. However, I contrived to come seventh and was the only person to leave the count with nothing at the end of the process. The guy who won, in addition to having 100 votes more than any of us, also had a campaign slogan: “Vote for Rips and He’ll Kiss Your Lips”. He obviously understood the old saw that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. He also understood that, sometimes, you make election promises without having any intention of keeping them at all.

I also thank my noble friend Lord Younger, my mentor. Any errors I make are my fault and not his; he has been very helpful for the last three months. I thank my Whip, my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott, who has been hugely helpful; I think I have missed only one vote so far, so I hope I have been helpful back.

I also thank the Lib Dem Peer, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, for outing my origins in his speech earlier. I was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, in a suburb called Balderstone. It had been suggested by helpful people that I take the title Lord Balderstone, which, I suppose, would at least make me memorable. However, I have chosen to take Guisborough because that is the town where I grew up, went to school—and did not get to be a member of the sixth-form council. If it helps the noble Lord, Lord McNally, to feel better about it, Guisborough is not necessarily in Yorkshire. It has been, over the years, in Teesside and in county Cleveland, but I could see the boundary of Yorkshire from my window—a bit like Sarah Palin—and I hope that that is enough to qualify me.

My mother was a teacher. She inspired so many people when in that job and made a great difference. My father worked hard for local government; he worked in the environment department and in housing. For a while, he was the abattoir inspector. Fortunately, we did not have “Take Your Children to Work Day” at that time, although it might have been a character-building experience.

In 1987, I arrived in London to work. I worked for Royal Mail for 10 years, but it did not feel like enough for me. In fact, when I was in my car one day, I heard a politician on the radio speaking to a conference and people were applauding him; I believe it was my noble friend Lord Heseltine. I thought, “I could do that”, which was possibly a bit precocious at the age of 24. I volunteered for political service and served three terms at Waltham Forest Council, where I had the pleasure of working with the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Silvertown, who I see here today. We were on opposite sides, and, occasionally, we had differences of opinion, but I had differences of opinion with quite a lot of people at that time.

One of the people I argued with was the council’s solicitor. He said to me one day, “I think you’d make a very good lawyer”. On the basis of this entirely unsupported statement with no evidence, I left my job and went back to full-time education. I was called to the Bar as a member of the Middle Temple in November 1997.

Something else happened in 1997 that was ground-breaking: the Blair Government arrived and created the Greater London Authority. Some of your Lordships may remember that the Government of London Act was the largest piece of legislation to go through here since the Government of India Act, and Members of this House all worked very hard on it. I spent four terms at the Greater London Authority, and over the years it has been a cornucopia of talent for Westminster to draw upon. I always see former members of the assembly here. I note the presence today of former members of our administration at City Hall: my noble friends Lord Ranger and Lord Moylan. Indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, made some contributions to our deliberations as well.

I am supposed to say something about the report before us today, so I point out that the growth of new technology is a key driver for the success of London and the wider UK. That is why it is vital that we respond to the challenges and opportunities in ways that maximise the benefits we can reap. Artificial intelligence, as the report correctly says, is a technology, not a sector. It has the capacity to affect every aspect of our lives. It has real potential to revolutionise the delivery of public services.

However, regulation needs to recognise the risks and the opportunities too. We love, as lawmakers, to design detail into regulation, but, after speaking to people such as the App Association and smaller providers of IT services, I argue that we should try to avoid regulating for products and regulate for outcomes instead. I recall from my time at City Hall a debate after Uber arrived in London. We found ourselves in the High Court trying to argue that a taxi meter and a mobile phone were the same thing, because that was the way the legislation was phrased. We should try not to do that, because the way things are moving now, we can get outflanked very quickly by the movement of technology. That is a problem we face throughout government in so many different ways.

It has been a wonderful journey to get off the train at King’s Cross in 1987 and, 40 years later, find myself standing here delivering this speech. Yet there is nothing unusual in that journey. I promise the House that every day—today, yesterday, tomorrow—people will be getting off the trains at London’s stations and off the planes at Heathrow, coming to our city with small suitcases and big ideas, and we want to continue to encourage that. They come here because London is a city of opportunities; it is a city of dreams. Technology is going to be at the core of the city’s success in future. We have a responsibility to promote technology and to build the economy for London, because a prosperous London will support a prosperous Britain. I commend the committee’s report to the House.