Viscount Camrose (Con)

I start by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for introducing this group. I will speak particularly to the amendment in my name but before I do so, I want to say how much I agree with the noble Baroness and with the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, that it is a matter of regret that we are not simultaneously looking at an AI Bill. I worry that this Bill has to take a lot of the weight that an AI Bill would otherwise take, but we will come to that in a great deal more detail in later groups. I will address the two amendments in this group in reverse order. Amendment 5 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Markham would remove Clause 13, which makes provision for the Secretary of State or the Treasury to give financial assistance to decision-makers and enforcers—that is, in essence, to act as a financial backstop. While I appreciate the necessity of guaranteeing the stability of enforcers who are public authorities and therefore branches of state, I am concerned that this has been extended to decision-makers. The Bill does not make the identity of a decision-maker clear. Therefore, I wonder who exactly we are protecting here. Unless those individuals or bodies or organisations can be clearly defined, how can we know whether we should extend financial assistance to them? I raised these concerns in Committee and the Minister assured us at that time that smart data schemes should be self-financing through fees and levies as set out in Clauses 11 and 12 and that this provision is therefore a back-up plan. If that is indeed the case and we are assured of the self-funding nature of smart data schemes, then what exactly makes this necessary? Why must the statutory spending authority act as a backstop if we do not believe there is a risk it will be needed? If we do think there is such a risk, can the Minister elaborate on what it is? I turn now to the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, which would require data traders to supply customers with information that has been used by AI to build a profile on them. While transparency and explainability are hugely important, I worry that the mechanism proposed here will be too burdensome. The burden would grow linearly with the scale of the models used. Collating and supplying this information would, I fear, increase the cost of doing business for traders. Given AI’s potential to be an immense asset to business, helping generate billions of pounds for the UK economy—and, by the way, I rather approve of the boosterish tone and think we should strive for a great deal more growth in the economy—we should not seek to make its use more administratively burdensome for business. Furthermore, since the information is AI-generated, it is going to be a guess or an assumption or an inference. Therefore, should we require companies to disclose not just the input data but the intermediate and final outputs? Speaking as a consumer, I am not sure that I personally would welcome this. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s responses.