Digital Regulation: Communications and Digital Committee Report

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Thursday 21st July 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this debate and to welcome this report. As my noble friend Lady Stowell knows, I am always here for her, which is why I am here today. I notice lurking in the shadows another former member of our committee who took part in this report, the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara. We wait to see whether he will make a contribution. We note that he has shaved and had a haircut, and that bodes well for some important contribution later in this debate—that did not go down so well, but it was meant in affection.

It has been a pleasure to serve on this committee for the past couple of years. I can say this because I am not responsible for the direction of travel of the committee’s reports, but it seems the committee has a history of leaning into policy and helping to move things along, not least, for example, in calling for the Digital Markets Unit to be set up—which is still a work in progress, but one that is much needed.

It goes without saying—it is a trite thing to say—that everything is now digital, so trying to bring some coherence into how one regulates a world of digital is extremely important. The advent of the Digital Regulatory Cooperation Forum—my noble friend Lady Stowell is quite right that it is a mouthful whether one uses its full title or its acronym—is a welcome development. Anyone who has ever worked with government knows the extraordinary frustration at the way that Whitehall is currently configured, with departments working in silos and with the only co-ordinating mechanism appearing to be the Cabinet or the Cabinet Office. It is extremely difficult to get joined-up government, and it is equally difficult to get joined-up regulation, so anything that moves the dial in that respect has to be welcomed. I often think that perhaps one day we could use technology to abolish all government departments and at last have government by task, where we can mix and match the right people to achieve the right outcomes for our country—but I digress.

The point about the Digital Regulatory Cooperation Forum is that it is here, and this report is a welcome intervention in the beginning of this process to ask how it can be improved and made better. That is the spirit with which this report should be read. It is in no way a criticism of anything, but simply looking at the existing situation and thinking how it could be improved and built upon. In that respect, I hope the Government and indeed the regulators will regard it as something they can keep referring to when they think about the next steps.

The first and most obvious point, given that there are four regulators involved in the DRCF, is how many more regulators should be involved. Given what I said earlier about digital being everything, the list is almost endless, but the report details six or seven other regulators that could have a role in the DRCF. That made me think a bit about the progress of the European Economic Community and later the European Union. At what point does one reach optimal membership? I started to speculate that perhaps in 25 years’ time we might have the head of the Information Commissioner’s Office demanding a referendum so that it could leave the Digital Regulatory Cooperation Forum—but, again, I digress. It is certainly something that the forum has to keep in mind: which additional regulators could and should be members?

The other important point the report makes is that there are additional stakeholders who are not necessarily formal non-departmental public bodies or quangos but which still have huge degree of expertise that they can bring to the debate about digital regulation. One of those cited, for example, is the Internet Watch Foundation, which I used to work with closely and which I think is technically a charity. That is a classic example of something that is not a government body but which nevertheless contains an enormous amount of expertise and takes action in the important area of child sexual abuse.

Given that the DRCF has been established, it again goes without saying that accountability and transparency, which the report touches on, are extremely important. It is important that we know what is the DRCF’s remit, the issues that it is looking at, and its plans for this year and years to come. Again, it is important, given what I said earlier about stakeholders, that even if they do not have a formal role, people can input into the work plan, if you like, of the DRCF and the regulators that sit on it.

It is also important, as the report says, that we have a rigorous process in the DRCF. Its greatest opportunity is to look at conflicts of regulation to try to work out where one regulator’s remit begins and another’s ends—I was going to say “turf wars” but that would be an inappropriate term. For example, I remember bringing together Ofcom and the ICO to discuss the important issue of nuisance calls, which affects the day-to-day lives of many people. Bringing those two regulators into a room to work together provided a much more impactful response to that. However, it is important that one regulator does not go off on a particular campaign without having at least had some engagement with other regulators, who may have locus and expertise to bring to bear, and it is important that those conflicts are resolved.

One of the other interesting aspects of the report is how one constitutes the DRCF formally. It now has a well-respected chief executive who comes from industry but it does not have a board, and the report recommends an independent non-executive chair and a number of other non-executives. I note that your Lordships’ House has provided Ofcom with a fantastic chair, and no doubt it will be able to provide the DRCF with a superb, independent, non-executive chair in the months and years to come—a process, of course, like the previous one, that will be completely free from political interference and which will simply seek out the best candidate.

It is also important that the DRCF provides an opportunity for regulators to share information. When I had a briefing from the DRCF before we even started our report, one of the things that I was struck by, which is a lesson that I have taken elsewhere with other organisations I worked with, was the idea of joint hiring, which struck me as a brilliant albeit obvious opportunity—although obvious only once it has been explained—in the world of technology. Hiring people who know about and can work with technology, who can therefore command pretty high salaries from technology companies, is very difficult for regulators, who are quite rightly constrained by public sector pay restraint. However, the opportunity to hire highly talented people who can work across those regulators is obvious. With that naturally flow other ways of co-operating, such as joint regulation and joint powers explicitly set out. However, as the report makes clear, that needs to be set out potentially in legislation.

Finally, the report is quite right to focus in its opening paragraphs on the opportunity for this forum to be an organisation that does horizon scanning—that looks at what is coming down the line. I noticed that the Government, for example, published yesterday their plans to support artificial intelligence in the years to come—I think I only noticed it on a tweet; I must sign up for the DCMS emails. Those kinds of reports coming out of DCMS are extremely valuable and important. However, it struck me that, with the DRCF in place, here is a perfect opportunity to involve the regulators on the ground floor, as it were, when DCMS is doing this kind of work, looking at particular sectors of technology. Getting regulation right is just as important as getting right government financial support, fiscal support, skills or whatever. A great regulatory climate is just as important when we are leaning into technology.

As my noble friend Lady Stowell outlined in her excellent speech, it is quite right as well that there be a parliamentary Joint Committee to scrutinise the work. It could bring together the heads of the various Select Committees that have a place in talking about digital regulation, so that they can meet regularly, scrutinise what is going on and compare their knowledge and information.

This is an incredibly useful report on a pretty niche and narrow issue that fascinates a few of us but not necessarily a general audience. Nevertheless, it is the kind of thing that can really make an extraordinary difference to UK plc—to use that terrible phrase—in creating a forward-looking, dynamic regulatory climate for technology and digital in this country.

My noble friend the Minister will no doubt cover this brief for many years to come. I know that he has been asked to tell us about the progress of the Online Safety Bill, about which I will be extremely interested to hear. I will leave him with one final thought: the DRCF also could be a prompt to the Government to shine a light on the plethora of digital bodies and committees that now exist to supervise technology policy in government. Many of them are excellent individual bodies in themselves, but there appears to be no particular coherence in how they work together. Just as with the regulators, there appears to be no clear road map of where one research or grant-giving body’s remit ends and another one begins. I know that my noble friend never puts his feet up, so I urge him to turn his mind to that work over the Summer Recess, which might save the Government some money and give them much more bang for their buck.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

I shall speak in the gap; I am sorry that I did not get my name down early enough to speak properly. I have one or two quick comments. First, I welcome this useful and excellent report, which will be a useful step forward if something happens about it. I notice that DCMS has responded to it but, actually, regulation involving digital issues runs across all departments, so it almost ought to be a joint response from every single department. That is something that we miss; “divide and rule” in the Executive is very dangerous.

From the summary, I picked out references to

“unnecessary regulatory burdens which could limit the benefits of digital innovation”—

that remains very true—and

“a lack of overarching coordination and oversight of regulatory objectives.”

That is also extremely true, and I have hit it several times. Paragraph 9 states:

“The solution was not to be found in more regulation, but in a different approach to regulation, with a coordinated response across policy areas.”


Therefore, the Government’s response—they are not down as saying that they actually want this to happen—really worries me. I thoroughly agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, when she said that we should set out the principles in what we do sometimes. We cannot control complex systems using rules, as they start conflicting and alter in unpredictable ways; there is a lot of theory around this. We have to realise that we must set out the objectives and principles behind them.

Paragraph 62 is about “power to resolve conflicts”. Someone needs to have that power. I will illustrate that with a real example. Among other interests, I have been involved in the whole thing about age verification for many years, going back to Bills on ID cards and things like that—although that was not so much about age verification. One of the challenges is that the civil servants who know all about it tend to move within a year and a half to two years, so you lose your expertise the whole time. All those who worked on Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act—we had to get them up to speed—have gone. I do not know where; they are probably desperately hiding somewhere else.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

They have gone to the metaverse.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

Exactly—we will never see them again. This is the big problem. I chaired the British Standards Institute’s publicly available specification—PAS—1296 on anonymous age verification; we solved the problem, and it is out there. The sad thing is that this is now being elevated to international standards used by Europe, but I do not know whether we still recognise that it exists. In 2020-21, the French started implementing the protection of children in legislation—I am not up to speed on exactly where they are—so it is actually happening there. But what have we done? We have said that we will stop it in the Online Safety Bill, repealing the part that was going to work in the Digital Economy Act. This is complete lunacy and, in fact, goes against the principle of the supremacy of Parliament—but I will not go into constitutional issues.

Looking forwards, the benefits and potential risks of AI will not be a single-department thing; this will run across all departments, because it involves everyone and everything. A lot of people mean different things when they say “AI”, so this is huge.

Finally, yes, we need some horizon scanning, but we do not want to get bogged down in trying to anticipate futures that may not exist. As someone said, a lot of other people are doing this. If you have knowledgeable people in the committee and in the Lords, they can help to spot where things are coming from and go from there. I welcome this report.