My Lords, I rise to speak in favour of Amendments 1 and 5 in this group and with sympathy towards Amendment 4. The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, will remember when I was briefly Minister for Health. We had lots of conversations about health data. One of the things we looked at was a digitised NHS. It was essential if we were to solve many problems of the future and have a world-class NHS, but the problem was that we had to make sure that patients were comfortable with the use of their data and the contexts in which it could be used.
When we were looking to train AI, it was important that we made sure that the data was as anonymous as possible. For example, we looked at things such as synthetic and pseudonymised data. There is another point: having done the analysis and looked at the dataset, if you see an identifiable group of people who may well be at risk, how can you reverse-engineer that data perhaps to notify those patients that they should be contacted for further medical interventions?
I know that that makes it far too complicated; I just wanted to rise briefly to support the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, on this issue, before the new rules come in next week. It is essential that the users, the patients—in other spheres as well—have absolute confidence that their data is theirs and are given the opportunity to give permission or opt out as much as possible.
One of the things that I said when I was briefed as a Health Minister was that we can have the best digital health system in the world, but it is no good if people choose to opt out or do not have confidence. We need to make sure that the Bill gives those patients that confidence where their data is used in other areas. We need to toughen this bit up. That is why I support Amendments 1 and 5 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones.