My Lords, I will be brief because I associate myself with everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, just said. This is where the rubber hits the road from our previous group. If we all believe that it is important to maintain children’s protection, I hope that my noble friend the Minister will be able to accept if not the exact wording of the children-specific amendments in this group then the direction of travel—and I hope that he will commit to coming back and working with us to make sure that we can get wording into the Bill.
I am hugely in favour of research in the private sector as well as in universities and the public sector; we should not close our minds to that at all. We need to be realistic that all the meaningful research in AI is currently happening in the private sector, so I do not want to close that door at all, but I am extremely uncomfortable with a Secretary of State having the ability to amend access to personal data for children in this context. It is entirely sensible to have a defined code of conduct for the use of children’s data in research. We have real evidence that a code of conduct setting out how to protect children’s rights and data in this space works, so I do not understand why it would not be a good idea to do research if we want the research to happen but we want children’s rights to be protected at a much higher level.
It seems to me that this group is self-evidently sensible, in particular Amendments 8, 22, 23 and 145. I put my name to all of them except Amendment 22 but, the more I look at the Bill, the more uncomfortable I get with it; I wish I had put my name to Amendment 22. We have discussed Secretary of State powers in each of the digital Bills that we have looked at and we know about the power that big tech has to lobby. It is not fair on Secretaries of State in future to have this ability to amend—it is extremely dangerous. I express my support for Amendment 22.