Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

Lord Kamall Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 22nd April 2024 Grand Committee

There are also companies that have regularly short-changed the public purs,; for example, by overcharging the NHS for drugs. They, too, are clearly depleting the public purse. UK emergency services were overcharged by £200 million a year for a communications network. No companies faced any surveillance. Energy companies are overcharging, and defence companies have overcharged the Government by millions. Serco and G4S have overcharged the Government for monitoring services. What I am saying is that the bank accounts of any company, individual or organisation receiving public money ought to be given the same monitoring treatment as the Government are proposing for those receiving public money in the form of benefits and pensions.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak in favour of the amendment to which I have added my name, with other noble Lords here today, and also to some of the other amendments in the group. I find it interesting having to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sikka. Quite often we disagree on issues, and we are probably coming at this from different angles, but actually we have come to the same conclusion.

Noble Lords will know of my concerns raised at earlier stages about automated decision-making. We have to ensure that there is always human intervention but, even when there is human intervention, things can go seriously wrong. When I first saw this proposal for mass trawling of bank accounts, I have to say that the first thought that came into my mind was, “This is Big Brother”, so I was not surprised when I received an email and a briefing from Big Brother Watch. I thank Big Brother Watch for its point. I will quickly dip into some of the points made by Big Brother Watch. There are many more points.

People may find it interesting that the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, and I are speaking on this amendment from different angles. Let me be quite clear: I am a classical liberal. Some people call me a libertarian. I believe in a smaller state and government doing less, but there has to be a state to help those who cannot help themselves and people who have fallen on hard times. For some people, that is all they have. They have only the state benefit. There are no local community organisations or civil society organisations to help them, and therefore you have to accept that role for the state.

Those people are quite often the most vulnerable, the least represented and unable to speak up for themselves. I do not want to patronise them, but quite often you find that. When I saw this, I thought, “First of all, this is going to force third-party organisations to trawl”—I use the term advisedly—“customers’ accounts in search of matching accounts”. When we talk about those third-party organisations, we are talking about banks, landlords and a number of other organisations that have some financial relationship with those individuals. Some estimates put it at approximately 40% of the population who could be vulnerable to being trawled.

I am also worried about the precedent that this sets. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, talked about this in a different way. He would perhaps like this power to be extended. I do not want this power at all. I do not want it to be extended to others. I just do not want it at all.

I also worry about what this surveillance power does to the presumption of innocence. Are we just trawling everyone’s accounts in the hope that they will be found guilty? While I do not always agree with the Information Commissioner’s Office, we should note that it does not view these powers as proportionate.

One general concern that a number of noble Lords have is about AI and, in particular, the transparency of datasets and algorithms. We would want to know, even if we do not understand the algorithm itself, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and I discussed in a debate on earlier amendments, what these algorithms are supposed to be doing and what they are looking for in trawling people’s bank accounts.

There are some precedents to this. We see from financial institutions’ suspicious activity reports that they have a very high false hit rate. I have a friend who is a magistrate, who told me that she heard a case about a family who wanted to get back access to their bank account. She felt that they were under suspicion because of their ethnicity or faith, and said to the bank, “You have not made a clear case for why we should freeze this account. This family has suffered because they are not able to access their bank account”. Think about that mistake being repeated over and over with false positives from this data. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, was right to remind us that this is all against the background of the Horizon scandal. Even when people intervene, do they speak up enough to make sure that the victims are heard or does it need an ITV drama to raise these issues?