My Lords, this has been another interesting debate. Before I address the question of the dashboard, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Young, who has been deploying his considerable stores of intellect and wit as he has politely but determinedly pursued Ministers on the matter of verifying and identity verification. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to him yet again.
I am delighted that Ministers have now agreed to ensure that there will be a public dashboard and that it will be available from launch. I welcome the government amendments in this group, but Amendment 63, in my name and that my noble friend Lady Drake and others, aims to push the Government an extra step further: to put in place an essential safeguard that the MaPS public dashboard must have been in operation for a year, and the Secretary of State have laid a report before Parliament on the operation and effectiveness of the service, before commercial dashboards are authorised by the FCA to enter the market.
I am sorry to hear that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, regards this amendment as inappropriate, and that she somehow seems to think that people were using the Bill as an opportunity to bring in other things. The only reason that we have had to table amendments to place safeguards is because the Government have brought forward proposals without adequate safeguards in the first place. I have certainly never voted while on a garden bench and I have more confidence that my fellow Members of the House of Lords are listening to the arguments and able to make an intelligent judgment. I hope that they will feel able to support us on this amendment, as they did on the last.
I am, however, grateful for the support of the noble Lords, Lord Vaux and Lord Sharkey, the noble Baronesses, Lady Altmann and Lady Janke, and the kind words of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. The case for this amendment has been made overwhelmingly by my noble friend Lady Drake and other speakers, so I will not rehearse it in detail, but I was struck by her summary of the many complexities and challenges still to be dealt with in the dashboard project. These are building the architecture, sorting out the liability model, deciding how to compensate consumers for a detriment, managing data standards and data-sharing risks, identity verification and security, and behavioural responses. Basically, there is a lot yet to be decided, designed, operationalised and tested. The Government’s plan is to do all this with a public dashboard and commercial dashboards running alongside each other from the launch. It is our contention that that simply unnecessarily increases the risk.
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The MaPS dashboard will be provided as a public service, free to use and free of commercial interests. It is surely therefore a much safer place to test all aspects of the dashboard service and governance before opening it up to commercial operations from the start. We believe that it will be better for consumers if, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, it is given space to establish itself before commercial players enter the game.
We know that this market is particularly vulnerable to consumer detriment. We know that bringing together all of a consumer’s data will increase the risk of poor
behaviour by legitimate providers and scammers. We know that there are key issues to be resolved about how data is presented, to ensure that consumers are not manipulated towards decisions that are not in their best interests. When fully built, a dashboard could find and display the personal financial data of some 22 million people. Parliament needs to be confident that the public good and consumer interests are well served in its operation.
This amendment does not prevent commercial dashboards. It simply means that they would not start engaging with consumers until the public dashboard has been running for long enough to give Parliament some necessary assurance before enacting the authorisation of commercial dashboards which the Bill permits. All we are asking for is a year’s grace before commercial firms with, in many cases, an unavoidable conflict of interest are authorised to engage consumers on a new product built on consumer data that the Government have mandated be released. I do not think that that is too much to ask.