Member

Similarly, the wrongness of the current legal presumption that computer information is reliable is also widely agreed. It was agreed by the previous Lord Chancellor, Alex Chalk, who promised me that he would look at it. It has been the subject of discussion for several years in the MoJ, which asked Paul Marshall to report on it in 2020 and again in 2021. It has also been pointed out by Lord Justice Fraser, now a judge of the Court of Appeal, that the presumption was not correct. Although my own promised ministerial meeting with the MoJ did not materialise before this Committee, I am sure that the current Lord Chancellor would agree that the existing presumption in law is wrong because it is a presumption that anyone with even the most basic knowledge of computers would consider absurd.