Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend. I shall speak to Amendment 96 in my name. It rehearses an issue that we discussed in Committee on Tuesday, but it is pertinent to this section. Essentially the point at issue is this: we have a Government who have stated that they have no desire to legislate or regulate cross-sector or cross-economy for artificial intelligence and that a domain-specific approach is preferred. I suggest that that is a suboptimal choice, but it is still a legitimate choice. The difficulty is that every time we come to some such domain—this Bill is about aviation—the Bill is silent on AI. I appreciate that there are data protection provisions in other legislation, but that is but one specific element of artificial intelligence. I believe that when one considers the role and functions of the CAA and the positive role it could take when it comes to artificial intelligence, all the people who are subject to the CAA’s powers would greatly benefit from an AI aviation standard to deal with transparency, explainability and bias and to look to the systems that not only the CAA uses, may use or, indeed, it could be said, must use in the very near future and to AI systems that are already in use across the aviation sector. A specific AI aviation standard could bring clarity and coherence across this industry, across the roles and powers that the CAA is responsible for and across actions. It is imperfect because it would be far better to have AI legislation and regulations that could be understood by the public, business and all of us wherever we happen to come across AI, because those flexible, agile regulations would be cross-domain, cross-sector and cross-economy, so they would deliver the clarity, consistency and coherence that you require whether you are an aviator, an investor, an innovator or a citizen. However, that is not the choice the Government have made, so I suggest it would be worth considering an AI aviation standard at least to deal with this domain. The issues go far beyond data protection, which is but one part, albeit an important part, of this, but AI is already impacting in this sector. I look forward to the Minister’s response.