B

Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 11 June 2025

Debate

Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill

Contribution

It is very reassuring, of course, to hear the Minister, absolutely correctly, insist that individual officers will not choose who to discriminate against. When I supported this, I was not thinking that the officers of the state would necessarily be wandering around with their own prejudices and saying, “nick them” or “investigate them”. I would want to imagine that that would not be the case. What I think we are talking about here—and this is because the use of technology is so profoundly important to what the Government want to do—is the latent biases in the training data. The connections made between data points are notoriously inaccurate and can be arbitrary, so we are seeking some reassurance here, and I will come back on this in another group. In relation to the accuracy and inaccuracy of algorithms, as I said, last year, two-thirds of the claims flagged by the DWP algorithm as high risk were legitimate in the end, so this is not a foolproof method. Consequently, I am not entirely convinced or satisfied that the Minister has quite answered what the concerns were—certainly that I was raising.

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