Technology Rules: The Advent of New Technologies in the Justice System (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

My Lords, I will start by outbidding the noble Lord, Lord Paddick: I too am an early adopter of technologies. In fact, I used to write algorithms and buy black boxes to use in various business contexts in my previous life as an engineer.

I have been reflecting on my various experiences, from my working life and my life as a magistrate, of what we have been talking about today. It is interesting that, as an engineer, I spent probably 15 years of my life doing this sort of technology but, when I eventually became a business owner and a chief executive, I did not use that technology in the business I ran; I was too sceptical of it. I occasionally commissioned work to be done, but it was absolutely not part of the business processes and decisions that I was making when I was the boss of a company.

To go back a bit further, to when I was working as a councillor in south-west London about 30 years ago, we were upgrading CCTV on the council estate where I represented people. It was an interesting exercise, because the councillors and the shopkeepers were in favour of it, but my friends who came from ethnic minorities were against it. There was a huge increase in CCTV technology on the estates I represented. Interestingly, that was also when the use of the hoodie became absolutely ubiquitous. All young people wore hoodies, partly because of the introduction of CCTV.

I have sat as a magistrate for 15 years and been through the whole experience of doing remote hearings in criminal, family and youth jurisdictions. We also use technology in various bits of the process we are considering, such as DNA and drug and alcohol testing. Interestingly, the Probation Service has its own predictive tools—which I do not think are AI based but are nevertheless predictive tools—on the likelihood of offenders to reoffend, and we read about those predictions in its reports and have to take them into account in our sentencing decisions. That has been a routine part of the sentencing exercise, if I can put it like that.

The one bit of technology which has made the biggest difference to my role as a magistrate has been body-worn video cameras. I think the Met Police invested well over £100 million in giving all operational police officers body-worn video cameras, and that has made a specific difference to the way in which we deal with domestic abuse cases. When police officers walk in through that front door and they are filming what they see in front of them, which of course you can then see in court, it makes a huge difference to the likelihood of getting a conviction. As we all know, very often the woman, who is usually the victim, does not want to go ahead and press charges. However, literally, when that front door is opened and a police officer walks in, you get a very different impression—a very realistic one—of the state of play in that house, if I may put it like that. That is one area where I have seen a huge improvement—I believe it is one—in the likelihood of getting convictions in domestic abuse cases.

To return to the debate and the report, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and all the members of the committee. This has been an extremely interesting debate. The officials are clearly very expert, and that is reflected in the debate itself. I was reading the recommendations of the report—I am not sure whether, in my role, I am supposed to say that I agree with them all wholeheartedly, but I do. The challenge put to the Minister to give a more sympathetic response than the official response that we have all read is fair, because the recommendations are born out of a great deal of work. The analogy with the health service and NICE, as my noble friend Lady Primarolo said, is a good one, and one could make other analogies with defence and other things like that, so why not in this context as well? I will be interested to hear the Minister’s answer to that question.

All the contributions to today’s debate have been exceptional. Again, my noble friend Lady Primarolo asked two questions of the Minister, on bringing together all 43 police forces to exchange information and look at the issues which they are facing, and on appointing an expert panel to look at the overall situation.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, also made a very good intervention. Her point about CAID—the identification of child abuse images—was interesting. As she said, that was a Home Office-developed and implemented technology that was done on a national scale, which of course is very different from what we are talking about in the context of this report.

As usual, my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti made an informed and provocative speech, if I may put it like that. As she said, we need to get into the black box—I thought that was the right way of putting it. That is what prompted me to talk about my previous business experience of the scepticism of sometimes buying pieces of kit when you know it is a black box; but when I was in a different position, I chose not to go down that route. As she said, we need a national body to look into those black boxes, because, ultimately, the fairness of the system is the most important thing.

As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, said, ultimately, people need to believe that they are treated fairly, whether it is in a court, when they are charged or when they are in prison. They might not like what is happening to them, but they need to understand it and understand the process by which decisions are made about them. If they cannot do that, they will be far less likely to accept the results of a conviction, a prison sentence or whatever it is. So it is very much in all our interests that the technology is understood, and that people feel that the criminal justice system is treating them fairly.

I will conclude on this point: I have an insider’s look into the way that court hearings are conducted. In the vast majority of cases in one of the jurisdictions I am involved in, it is not legal or technology failures but administrative failures that lead to cases failing. That is a far more human element which has been underinvested in and which leads to a lack of faith in the criminal justice system. While we are talking about technology, we should not take our eye off the much bigger, more practical problem of administering our courts and criminal justice system in a reasonable way.