Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I will put this amendment in the context of the discussion on the previous group. The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, and the Minister have been telling us regularly that this is all about people who do not engage. As the noble Lord said, he has seen people with a stack of envelopes behind the cheese board or whatever, but I have met many disabled people, particularly because of the demonstrations I have been on, for whom the arrival of the postman every day is a point of fear. People are absolutely terrified and are used to never receiving good news from the DWP. We have to acknowledge the context in which people are not engaging; it may be more than their mental health can take. We have to look at all these amendments in that context. I warn noble Lords with subsequent amendments that I do not expect this group to take long, because we have already canvassed these issues extensively in terms of the use of algorithms and whether there is a human in the loop—to borrow terminology from another area of technology. Amendment 124A moves towards overpayments recovered from an individual. No final decision shall be considered valid or acted upon unless there is—the terminology here is important— “meaningful and documented human oversight”, and a human decision-maker has reviewed, understood and taken responsibility for the final determination. In some ways, this picks up the points made earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, about there having to be a responsible person in the DWP who can be held to account. Under proposed new subsection (b), the recipient must have been “provided with an individual explanation of the relevant decision in their case, including a clear explanation of how an automated system has impacted the decision”. People need to know that there is this machine in the loop, so they at least understand what is happening to them, have a chance to make representations and are told how they can appeal if they want to appeal. We have canvassed these issues extensively. The amendment particularly addresses the situation that we saw in Australia with the enormous Robodebt scandal, with money being taken off people by a totally automated system. Many people knew that there were issues at the time and the Government in Australia kept being warned that this was going to be a problem. It was an unmitigated disaster, for which apologies had to be made, heads rolled and so on. This amendment is a sensible way in which to protect benefit recipients, as well as the Government from getting themselves tangled into things that they really do not want to get tangled in. Finally, I suspect the Minister may say, “Well, this is going to happen anyway” but, if that is the case, why not put it into the Bill? I beg to move.