Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my interests, particularly in chairing the board of Century-Tech, an AI edtech company— I will have to talk to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, about that. I am a director of Educate Ventures Research, which is also an AI-in-education business, and Goodnotes, an AI note-taking app. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I agreed with most of what she said, and I look forward to working with her on the passage of the Bill.

I guess we are hoping it is third time lucky with a data Bill. I am sure we will hear from all speakers that there is a sense that this is an improved Bill on the previous two attempts. It is a particular joy to see that terrible stuff around DWP data not appearing in this Bill. There is plenty that I welcome in terms of the improvements. Like most speakers, I imagine, I mostly want to talk about what might need further debate and what might be missing, rather than just congratulating my noble friend the Minister on the improvements she and her colleagues have been able to make.

I anticipate that this will not be the only Bill we have on data and AI. It would be really helpful for this Government to rediscover the joys of a White Paper. If we had a document that set out the whole story and the vision, so that we could more easily place this Bill in context, that would be really helpful. This could include where we are with the Matt Clifford action plan, and a very clear aim of data adequacy with the EU regime. I wonder whether, among all the people the Minister said she had been able to talk to about this Bill, she had also spoken to the EU to make sure we are moving in the right direction with adequacy, which has to be resolved by the summer.

Clearly, this is a Bill about data. The Minister said that data is the DNA of modern life. It has achieved a new prominence with the rollout of generative AI, which has captured everyone’s imagination—or entered their nightmares, depending on how you think about it. The Communications and Digital Committee, which I am privileged to serve on, has been thinking about that in respect of the future of news, which we will publish a report on shortly, and of scaling our businesses here in the UK. It is clear that the core ingredients you need are computing power, talent, finance and, of course, data, in order successfully to grow AI businesses here.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, that we have a unique asset in our public sector datasets that the US does not have to anything like the same extent—in particular in health, but also in culture and education. It is really important that the Government have a regime, established by this legislation and any other legislation we may or may not know about, to protect and deploy that data to the public benefit and not just the private benefit, be it in large language models or other foundational models of whatever size.

It is then also important to ask, whose data is it? In my capacity as chair of a board of an AI company, I am struck by the fact that our current financial regulation does not allow us to list our data as an asset on our balance sheet. I wonder when we might be able to move in that direction, because it is clearly of some significance to these sorts of businesses. But it is also true that the data I share as a citizen, and have given consent to, should be my data. I should have the opportunity to get it back quite easily and to decide who to share it with, and it should empower me as a citizen. I should be able to hold my own data, and I definitely should not have to pay twice for it: I should not have to pay once through my taxes and then a second time by having to pay for a product that has been generated by the data that I paid for the first time. So I am also attracted to what the noble Baroness said about data as a sovereign asset.

In the same way that both Front-Bench speakers were excited about the national underground asset register, I am equally excited about the smart data provisions in the Bill, particularly in respect of the National Health Service. Unfortunately, my family have been intensive users of the National Health Service over the past year or so, and the extent to which the various elements of our NHS do not talk to each other in terms of data is a tragedy that costs lives and that we urgently need to resolve. If, as a result of this Bill, we can take the glorious way in which I can share my banking data with various platforms in order to benefit myself, and do the same with health data, that would be a really good win for us as a nation. Can the Minister reassure me that the same could be true for education? The opportunity to build digital credentials in education by using the same sort of technology that we use in open banking would also excite me.

I ask the Minister also to think about and deliver on a review of Tell Us Once, which, when I was a Minister in the DWP a long time ago, I was very happy to work on. By using Tell Us Once, on the bereavement of a relative, for example, you have to tell only one part of the public sector and that information then cascades across. That relieves you of an awful lot of difficult admin at a time of bereavement. We need a review to see how this is working and whether we can improve it, and to look at a universal service priority register for people going through bereavement in order to prioritise services that need to pass the message on.

I am concerned that we should have cross-sector open data standards and alignment with international interoperability standards. There is a danger in the Bill that the data-sharing provisions are protected within sectors, and I wonder whether we need some kind of authority to drive that.

It is important to clarify that the phrase used in the first part of the Bill, a

“person of a specified description”,

can include government departments and public bodies so that, for example, we can use those powers for smart data and net-zero initiatives. Incidentally, how will the Government ensure that the supply chains of transformers, processors, computing power and energy are in place to support AI development? How will we publish the environmental impact of that energy use for AI?

There is a lot more I could say, but time marches on. I could talk about digital verification services, direct marketing and a data consent regime, but those are all things to explore in Committee. However, there are two other things that I would briefly like to say before winding up. First, I have spoken before in this House about the number of people who are hired, managed and fired by AI automated decision-making. I fear that, under the Bill as drafted, those people may get a general explanation of how the automated decision-making algorithms are working, when in those circumstances they need a much more personalised explanation of why they have been impacted in this way. What is it about you, your socioeconomic status and the profile that has caused the decision to go the way it has?

Secondly, I am very interested in the role of the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum in preventing abuse and finding regulatory gaps. I wonder whether, after the perennial calls in this Chamber when debating Bills such as this for a permanent Committee of both Houses to monitor digital regulation, the new Government have a view on that. I know that that is a matter for the usual channels and not Ministers, but it is a really important thing for this House to move on. I am fairly bored with making the case over the past two or three years.

In summary, this is a good Bill but it is a long Bill, and there is lots to do. I wish the Minister good luck with it.