Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Government's publication A pro-innovation approach to AI regulation, published on 29 March 2023, how much and what proportion of the budget of each regulator in their Department was spent on regulation of artificial intelligence in the latest period for which information is available; how many staff in each regulator worked (a) wholly and (b) partly on those issues in the latest period for which information is available; and whether those regulators plan to increase resources for their work on artificial intelligence.

Through the NHS AI Lab programme, the Department has provided £11,774,263.82 of funding to regulatory and evaluator organisations to streamline regulation to make it easier for the health and care system to deploy safe AI technologies as well as improving the route for AI vendors into the system, including funding for:

- A regulatory taskforce of four people from the main regulators overseeing how AI products in health and are regulated;

- The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Health Regulation Authority (HRA) and Care Quality Commission to create an AI and Digital regulations service;

- The HRA to streamline data driven research to simplify the approach to accessing research consent and increasing awareness of where such consent is needed amongst researchers and innovators;

- The MHRA to explore the potential of synthetic data for the training and the validation of AI;

- The MHRA to enhance the ‘post-market surveillance’ of healthcare products, by transforming the Yellow Card system; and

- The MHRA for the AI Rigour project to develop a suite of guidance to help standard practices for the development of AI-driven technologies that will increase the safety and robustness of AI models.

As part of the AI regulation White Paper consultation, we are engaging closely with regulators across the wider landscape and their sponsoring government departments to understand the organisational capacity they need to regulate AI effectively.