Distributed Ledger Technologies

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, moving on to distributed ledger technology, which everyone wants to talk about, I agree with my noble friend that it has tremendous potential. The United Kingdom is well set up to be a global leader, as the APPG’s report released on Monday outlined. There is proof of concept going on in several government departments—for example, Defra, DfID, the NHS and, in my own department, the National Archives. The evaluations are not available yet, because this is at an early stage. As for co-ordination, the projects are in various departments. There is an officials group which meets to discuss these. We have participated in two round tables in the last few months and we are considering how best to co-ordinate the efforts across government.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, in the various discussions taking place, to what extent is the Home Office involved in these considerations? In particular, this is because distributed ledger technology could provide a means by which people would be able to verify their identity without the so-called concerns that people used to have about identity cards with a centrally maintained register held by the Government. A DLT-based technology would enable us to hold our own identity details in a way that would be verifiable across the world.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

The noble Lord is absolutely right. That is a very good example of where this distributed technology could be used, and there are other, similar areas. One of the benefits of this technology, and the fact that it is distributed and everyone has the same copy of the database, is that it builds trust in data, and this is an important area across many departments. I do not know specifically what proofs of concept the Home Office is doing at the moment, but I will certainly take that back to my noble friend the Minister. As I said in my previous answer, there is a cross-governmental officials group and we are currently looking at how best to co-ordinate across government.