Iqbal Mohamed

I welcome the limited protections in the Bill, but I know from experience that many applications for benefits—especially disability benefits and personal independence payments—that are processed through automated systems are refused, and the applicants have to go through a complicated and laborious appeals process in order to overturn those automated decisions. Clause 70 introduces significant changes to the lawful bases for processing personal data. While the aim of those changes is to streamline data processing for legitimate interests, they also present challenges relating to privacy protection, parliamentary oversight, and the potential for misuse. It is essential to balance the facilitation of legitimate data processing with the safeguarding of individual rights and freedoms. Although the Bill is intended to modernise data protection laws, the proposed changes to automated decision-making rights in clause 80 raise significant concerns. The potential erosion of individual protections, increased power imbalances, reduced transparency and the risk of discrimination highlight the need for a more balanced approach that safeguards individual rights while accommodating technological advances. While I welcome the positive elements of the Bill, I urge the Government to ensure that it does not deliver the proposed benefits along with diminished human rights and rights to privacy, increased discrimination and other unintended harms to individuals, the wider public, minorities, artists and creatives, public services, or our country as a whole.