Lord Clement-Jones (LD)

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response and all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, which I thought was perfectly formed and very expert. I was interested in the fact that the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, has a role in the digital centre for government and in what she had to say about what might be desirable going forward, particularly in the areas of skills and procurement. The noble Baroness, Lady Freeman, said much the same, which indicates something to me. By the way, I think the Minister has given new meaning to the word “reservations”. That was the most tactful speech I have heard for a long time. It is a dangerous confidence if the Government really think that the ATRS, combined with the watered-down ADM provisions in the GDPR, are going to be enough. They are going to reap the whirlwind if they are not careful, with public trust being eroded. We have seen what has happened in the NHS: unless you are absolutely on the case on this, you will see 3.3 million people opt out of sharing their data, as in the NHS. This is something live; it erupts without due warning. The examples I gave show a pretty dangerous use of ADM systems. Big Brother Watch has gone into some detail on the particular models that I illustrated. If the Government think that the ATRS is adequate, alongside their watered-down GDPR provisions, then, as I said, they are heading for considerable problems. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, can see, if the Government have reservations about my limited Bill, they will have even more reservations about anything more broad. I do not want to tread on the toes of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, who I am sure will come back with another Bill at some stage, but I am very sympathetic to the need for algorithmic impact assessment, particularly in the workplace, as advocated by the Institute for the Future of Work. We may be inflicting more amendments on the Minister when the time comes in the ADM Bill. This Bill is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, mentioned, based on the Canadian experience. It is based on a Canadian directive that is now well under way and is perfectly practical. The warning of the noble Lord, Lord Tarassenko, about the use of large language models, with their unpredictability and inability to produce the same result, was an object lesson in the need for proper understanding and training within the Civil Service in the future, and for the development of open source-type LLMs on the back of the existing large language models that are out there, to make sure that they are properly trained and tested as a sovereign capacity. It is clear that I am not going to get a great deal further. I am worried that we are going to see a continuation, in the phrase used by my noble friend Lady Hamwee, of the culture of deference: the machine is going to continue saying no and our citizens will continue to be unable to challenge decisions in an effective way. That will lead to further trouble. I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, for his in-principle support. If the Bill is to have a Committee stage, I look forward to debating some of the definitions. In the meantime, I commend the Bill to the House.