Baroness Kidron (CB)

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 114 to which I have added my name. It is a very simple amendment that prevents controllers circumventing the duties for automated decision-making by adding trivial human elements to avoid the designation. So, as such, it is a very straightforward—and, I would have thought, uncontroversial—amendment. I really hope that the Government will find something in all our amendments to accept, and perhaps that is one such thing. I am struck that previous speeches have referred to questions that I raised last week: what is the Bill for, who is it for and why is not dealing with a host of overlapping issues that cannot really be extrapolated one from another? In general, a bit like the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, I am very much with the spirit of all these amendments. They reflect the view of the Committee and the huge feeling of civil society—and many lawyers—that this sort of attack on Article 22 by Clause 80 downgrades UK data rights at a time when we do not understand the Government’s future plans and hear very little about protections. We hear about the excitements of AI, which I feel bound to say that we all share, but not at the expense of individuals. I raise one last point in this group. I had hoped that the Minister would have indicated the Government’s openness to Amendment 88 last week, which proposed an overarching duty on controllers and processors to provide children with heightened protections. That seemed to me the most straightforward mechanism for ensuring that current standards were maintained and then threaded through new situations and technologies as they emerged. I put those two overarching amendments down on the understanding that Labour, when in opposition, was very much for this approach to children. We may need to bring back specific amendments, as we did throughout the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, including Amendment 46 to that Bill, which sought to ensure “that significant decisions that impact children cannot be made using automated processes unless they are in a child’s best interest”. If the Minister does not support an overarching provision, can she indicate whether the Government would be more open to clause-specific carve-outs to protect children and uphold their rights?