Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this short but informative debate. I seem to be getting a bit of a track record. I thought my previous record was managing to get an amendment signed by both the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes. I might even have surpassed that with this one. I am not sure quite what that says. I am partially reassured by what the Minister has said, and obviously I am sure that she and her team will follow the safeguards that she has talked about. But those safeguards are not in statutes. For example, she talked about decisions being taken only by humans in relation to putting out information requests. That is not the case. The code of conduct refers only to decisions that will affect benefits, not the information request side of things, and it is only in the code of conduct, which can be changed at will. I am uncomfortable here. We are talking, particularly with the eligibility verification process, about very large amounts of data, potentially on 9.9 million people. Who knows how many will flag up eligibility indicators? But without a shadow of doubt, the department will be using some form of algorithmic or AI tool to decide which of those are the ones the department wants to concentrate on. If that is the case, that is where the bias can creep in. If bias creeps into the algorithm or the machine learning tool and comes up to a person, it is easy to say “computer said yes” or “computer said no” and not to question the data coming to you. I am not totally comfortable that there really are the safeguards at the moment. We are going to come to the human interaction at a later stage of the debate, so I will not go further into that. To be honest, I suspect that the Netherlands, Sweden and Australia probably had similar safeguards. They did not work. I cannot say for certain, but most departments believe that they are doing the right thing and that the safeguards are working. But they did not in those cases, and real problems were caused to vulnerable people. I will withdraw the amendment but this is something that we will definitely come back to. Just in passing, I also welcome the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, to the right side of the fence with us. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.