Lord Clement-Jones (LD)

My Lords, I also welcome this plan, perhaps with rather less baggage than the Conservative Benches. The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State invoked Babbage, Lovelace, Turing, the pioneering age of steam and even the white heat of the technological revolution, but at its core there is an important set of proposals with great potential. However, it is a wish list rather than a plan at present. I particularly welcome the language in the plan around regulation, particularly where it refers to regulation assisting innovation, which is a change of tone. However, the plan and Statement raise many questions. In particular, how will the Government ensure that AI development mitigates risks beyond just safety to ensure responsible AI development and adoption, especially given the fact that a great deal of UK development will involve open-source applications? On the question of the introduction of AI into the public sector, the Government are enormously enthusiastic. But, given their public sector digital transformation agenda, why are the Government watering down citizens’ rights in automated decision-making in the Data (Use and Access) Bill? We welcome the recognition of the need to get the economic benefits for the UK from public sector data which may be used to develop AI models. What can the Minister tell us at this stage about what the national data library will look like? It is not clear that the Government yet know whether it will involve primary or secondary legislation or whatever. The plan and response also talk about “sovereign compute”, but what about sovereign cloud capability? The police cannot even find a supplier that guarantees its records will be stored in the UK. While the focus on UK training is welcome, we must go beyond high-level skills. Not only are the tech companies calling out for technical skills, but AI is also shaping workplaces, services and lives. Will the Digital Inclusion Action Committee, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, have a role in advising on this? Do the changes to funding and delivery expected for skills boot camps contribute to all of this? On the question of energy requirements for the new data centres, will the new AI energy council be tasked with ensuring that they will have their own renewable energy sources? How will their location be decided, alongside that of the new AI growth centres? The plan cannot be game-changing without public investment. It is about delivery, too, especially by the new sovereign data office; it cannot all be done with private sector investment. Where is the public money coming from, and over what timescale? An investment plan for compute is apparently to be married to the spending review; how does a 10-year timescale fit with this? I am very pleased that a clear role is identified for the Alan Turing Institute, but it is not yet clear what level of financial support it will get, alongside university research, exacompute capacity, and the British Business Bank in the spin-out/start-up pipeline support. What will the funding for the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult and the design and manufacturing ecosystem consist of? The major negative in the plan for many of us, as the Minister already knows, is the failure to understand that our creative industries need to be able to derive benefits from their material used for training large language models. The plan ominously recommended reforming, “the UK text and data mining regime so that it is at least as competitive as the EU”, and the Government have stacked the cards in the consultation over this. We on these Benches and the creative industries will be fighting tooth and nail any new text and data mining exemption requiring opt-out.