Baroness Nargund (Lab)

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Patel. I congratulate him on securing this very important debate and on his insightful and excellent introductory speech. The National Health Service is one of Britain’s greatest institutions. After 30 years as a front-line NHS consultant in women’s health, I believe it can be more than a healthcare provider. The NHS holds the richest longitudinal health dataset in the world. It can help to improve outcomes, accelerate innovation, create intellectual property, patents and high-value jobs, and attract global investment. The new Health Data Research Service presents a significant opportunity. Our ambition should go further, to create the high-quality representative datasets needed to develop and validate AI safely. AI can analyse data at a large scale in a way that humans cannot, predicting risk, promoting early detection, accelerating drug discovery and clinical trials, and enabling the much-needed shift from treatment to prevention. However, AI is only as good and equitable as the data it is trained on. We need richer data points—not simply age and sex, but ethnicity, disability, socio-economic deprivation, postcode and wider determinants of health—to identify who is missing out and why, why outcomes differ and how to address them. Diseases do not care about borders, and nor should any medical research. The UK should ensure regulatory interoperability with international standards and lead global research with our data. This is essential in particular for rare diseases and cancers, and for ethnic minority communities who are underrepresented in research. Public trust must be the foundation. Patient consent, privacy, security, transparency and appropriate safeguards must be embedded from the outset. If the challenges my noble friend Lord Patel described are addressed, the NHS patient database can become a powerhouse for health research and AI-driven innovation, and economic growth. Can the Minister say whether the Government will ensure that the Health Data Research Service develops representative datasets for AI research and also pursue international data interoperability, so that Britain can lead in equitable and rare diseases innovation, while driving economic growth? Good patient data can drive good medical research and help deliver good health and good growth together.