Chris Bryant

I am going to call the 25th amendment—or whatever we have—and say that I will write to the hon. Lady on that. We are getting a bit more technical than I am able to answer precisely, but my bottom line is that if somebody is applying to rent a property, the landlord should not have to know both sex at birth and gender. That is an inappropriate invasion of people’s privacy. I should add that the hon. Lady also referred to people being able to change in changing rooms, and I completely agree with her points about women being able to change in protected spaces. It just seems to me we need to use a great deal of common sense in this area. The Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West (Chi Onwurah), referred to the national data library and open standards and open source. Again, I will have to write to her. As she will know, this area is moving fast in relation to legislative and IT ideas, so we will want to work with people, including her Select Committee, to make sure we reach the right set of decisions. Turning to the hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted, I made a mistake earlier and have to apologise to her. When referring to automated decision making, I talked about meaningful human involvement. That was indeed in the original Bill introduced by the right hon. Member for Maldon, but I think it is a vital addition to the current framework, which is why it is important. I am pleased that our new Government have gone further by committing to require the Information Commissioner’s Office to do a code of practice on automated decision making and AI to make sure this really works in the interests of everybody. That will support the safe adoption and deployment of the technology. The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) quite rightly raised the case of his constituent Ellen Roome, which we have discussed previously. Unfortunately, I was unable to speak in the debate he took part in, because I was speaking in the main Chamber at the time. I can tell him that coroners will be able to use a data protection process under the Bill and we hope that will be sufficient, but I am quite happy to discuss whether we can go further. I have discussed with several Members the question of whether families should have access to their children’s social media accounts. There are obvious dangers in that because of safeguarding issues that might arise, but I think he understands that as well.