Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for this important debate. I will come at impartiality from a slightly different angle, because technology is changing what we mean by an impartial state. There used to be a reasonably clear idea of where policy stopped and delivery began. Ministers made decisions; the Civil Service implemented them. Technology is making that distinction much less clear, because the design of a digital system is itself a policy choice. For example, let us quickly take fraud. When you build a system to identify suspicious claims, someone has to decide what looks suspicious. If technology helps determine access to a public service, somebody decides what information is important, who is important and who is not. Those choices may be buried inside software but they can have a profound effect on an individual life. One of the lessons we learned when we were building GOV.UK was that you could not just take an existing process and put it online. You had to rethink services around the user. I would argue that services have improved enormously, but technology and policy are now more closely linked than ever. AI takes this much further. Systems can assess information and recommend what happens next. The Government should use these tools—our public services desperately need better technology—but we need to be alert to what is happening. A biased decision no longer requires a biased person. The problem might sit in the data or in software bought from a supplier. It might be an assumption that nobody has noticed. It might be built into a system, and it can be repeated across thousands of cases. Impartiality in a world of increasing digitisation and transformation cannot be left just to the technologists. More than 20,000 civil servants took part in the Government’s generative AI trial last year, and there is now training aimed specifically at the senior Civil Service. These are good initiatives. The harder question is whether understanding AI becomes part of the ordinary professional competence of being a civil servant and how the parallel skills of scrutiny and critical thinking are developed. You do not need to be able to build a model; you need to know how and when to question one. How will working in an increasingly AI-first world become part of the everyday expectations of civil servants rather than a training course that people complete? Finally, I turn to the Government Digital Service. Last month, when DSIT was abolished, GDS was moved into an expanded DCMS. Like many Members of this House, I believe that that is completely the wrong home for it and that the decision has consequences for the capacity of the Civil Service to act impartially across government. GDS is not simply an IT function; it builds the services through which millions of people experience the state. It is the front end of policy. The choices made in designing those services—such as who is eligible, what evidence is required, how decisions are explained and when a person can reach a human—all determine how policy works in practice. These questions are not merely technical. In my opinion, the only home that makes sense is the Cabinet Office. When digital systems shape how citizens experience the state, those who build them must be near the centre of power.