AI Regulation Bill

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Holmes of Richmond]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the case for a cross-sector AI regulation bill.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to bring this QSD to the Grand Committee for debate. In doing so, I declare my interests as set out in the register, variously as adviser to the Crown Estate, Endava plc and Simmons and Simmons LLP. I thank all noble Lords who have signed up to speak, and I look forward to their quick-fire contributions.

I have been given eight minutes to open this debate, but I can do it in one word: is there a case for a cross-sector AI Bill? Yes. To expand somewhat on that, the Prime Minister has described AI as:

“The defining opportunity of our generation”,


yet the Government are largely taking a wait-and-see, voluntary and so-called domain-specific approach. I am not sure that wait and see is ever an optimal approach to any issue, particularly one as significant as AI. But do not listen to me; let us consider, on its own merits, how the Government’s approach is going. Harms are unaddressed. Young people are not getting shortlisted for jobs, without even knowing that it is AI that is kicking them out of the process; even if they knew, there would be little, if any, redress at this time. Job seekers, benefit claimants, teachers and teenagers are all suffering the harms of AI that are currently unaddressed. Similarly, vast opportunities are being unoptimised for the UK. Wait and see has really led to partial, piecemeal and voluntary action.

Why have the Government taken this approach? Let us take just two of the elements that are offered. The first is that it is too soon to legislate; they will stymie, stifle or stop progress. Not a bit of it—we know exactly what we need to do to put in place the right-sized legislation and regulation. The second is a falsehood that recurs with tedious inevitability: you can either have regulation or innovation, but you cannot have both. We all know bad regulation—there is a deal of it about—but that does not mean for one second that regulation, of itself, is bad. Right-sized and right-touch regulation is good for citizens, creatives, consumers, innovators and investors alike. We know how to do this. Just look back to the telco regulation of some decades ago. Was it stopping an industry? Far from it: it was a key enabler of Great British telco business.

What do we need to do? What anyone needs are clarity, consistency and coherence. This is currently not the case. We have such an opportunity because we have the great good fortune of common law, which is agile, adaptable and ideal for the task at hand. We need to bring forward principles-based, outcomes-focused, inputs-understood legislation. Those principles are trust and transparency; inclusion and innovation; interoperability and international outlook; accountability, assurance and accessibility—and we need to put those principles on a statutory footing.

We need to look to AI responsible officers across business. We need labelling to address the IP challenge, which currently continues to be kicked down the road, with creatives’ work taken—unremunerated, unrespected and unconsented to. Crucially, we need public engagement across this if we are going to enable all the opportunities from AI. We know what to do. We have the legislative capability, knowledge and history of how to do this.

Do not just listen to me. Let us take the great Ada Lovelace Institute, which variously describes the Government’s approach as chronically insufficient and, in a glorious understatement,

“increasingly out of step with public attitudes”.

If the Government want growth and public trust in AI and optimal outcomes across the whole of society, we need to end this wait-and-see, voluntary, partial, piecemeal approach. For economic, social, democratic and psychological reasons, we need a cross-sector, principles-based, outcomes-focused AI regulation Bill now. We need this for citizens, creatives, consumers, innovators and investors all to be enabled and empowered to say full-throatedly together, “Our data, our decisions, our AI futures”—our human-led, inclusive AI futures.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

Our view is that AI is a general-purpose technology with a wide range of applications, and also that regulators understand well the sectors they are regulating. They understand the risks that are present and understand, as many noble Lords have raised in the debate, the specific applications that AI is bringing, the potential risks to consumers and the nature of the competitive landscape—the balance between competition, incumbents and new entrants. That is the reason we are taking the approach to regulate at the point of use and using those regulatory frameworks.

We also already regulate AI in the UK—for example, in the Online Safety Act or under the GDPR—and, in some areas, across sectors. There are some areas in which legislation applies to the application of AI technologies.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

On that question of going domain-specific, what occurs in situations where there is a domain with no competent regulator? Similarly, how do the Government assure clarity, consistency and coherence of approach? As a citizen, you may come across AI—as noble Lords have rightly identified—in defence, education, health, tax and benefits. If you do not some sense of a guiding mind or horizontal direction, how can you possibly deliver consistency and clarity for people wherever they may come across AI?

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

In all regulation, there is obviously a balance between consistency and context-specific, appropriate regulation. It is not always the case that consistency is the most appropriate or first-order principle. It may be that, as we have been discussing, there are many issues: a focus on growth, a focus on consumer protection or, for the energy markets in particular, a motivation towards decarbonisation. That is why the regulator, for whichever market we are talking about, is very well placed to look at how their objectives, as set out in their statutory duties, are best applied in the context of this new technology, which provides different functionalities and the opportunity for new innovation.

That is one reason we have also given these sandboxing powers. We realise that the current set of statutory frameworks was set up assuming that humans would always, for example, be in vehicles or crew vessels. We may need to adapt that in order to take account of the potential new innovations that AI brings, while doing so in a safe and secure way.