Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)

My Lords, I support these amendments in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Clement-Jones. It is a pleasure to follow the second ex-Health Minister this afternoon. In many ways, the arguments are just the same for health data as they are for all data. It is just that, understandably, it is at the sharpest end of this debate. Probably the most important point for everybody to realise, although it is espoused so often, is that there is no such thing as NHS data. It is a collection of the data of every citizen in this country, and it matters. Public trust matters significantly for all data but for health data in particular, because it goes so close to our identity—our very being. Yet we know how to do public trust in this country. We know how to engage and have had significant success in public engagement decades ago. What we could do now with human-led technology-supported public engagement could be on such a positive and transformational scale. But, so far, there has been so little on this front. Let us not talk of NHS data; let us always come back to the fundamental principle encapsulated in this group of amendments and across so many of our discussions on the Bill. Does the Minister agree that it is about not NHS data but our data—our decisions—and, through that, if we get it right, our human-led digital futures?