My Lords, I think this is a lightbulb moment—it is inspired, and this suite of amendments fits together really well. I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, that this is a positive aspect. If the Bill contained these four amendments, I might have to alter my opinion of it—how about that for an incentive?
This is an important subject. It is a positive aspect of data rights. We have not got this right yet in this country. We still have great suspicion about sharing and access to personal data. There is almost a conspiracy theory around the use of data, the use of external contractors in the health service and so on, which is extremely unhelpful. If individuals were able to share their data with a trusted hub—a trusted community—that would make all the difference.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, I have come across a number of influences over the years. I think the first time many of us came across the idea of data trusts or data institutions was in the Hall-Pesenti review carried out by Dame Wendy Hall and Jérôme Pesenti in 2017. They made a strong recommendation to the Government that they should start thinking about how to operationalise data trusts. Subsequently, organisations such as the Open Data Institute did some valuable research into how data trusts and data institutions could be used in a variety of ways, including in local government. Then the Ada Lovelace Institute did some very good work on the possible legal basis for data trusts and data institutions. Professor Irene Ng was heavily engaged in setting up what was called the “hub of all things”. I was not quite convinced by how it was going to work legally in terms of data sharing and so on, but in a sense we have now got to that point. I give all credit to the academic whom the noble Baroness mentioned. If he has helped us to get to this point, that is helpful. It is not that complicated, but we need full government backing for the ICO and the instruments that the noble Baroness put in her amendments, including regulatory oversight, because it will not be enough simply to have codes that apply. We have to have regulatory oversight.
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For many of us, this could be the way to crack the public trust issue. It could be the way that the ordinary person deals with the asymmetry between their position as holders of personal data and the power of big tech, with social media trawling their data in the way that Shoshana Zuboff wrote about in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It helps with that asymmetry, which we talked about in our debates on the digital markets Bill and which is so obviously the case here.
It is also the case with data capture, which is often extremely untransparent. There was a case in the paper the other day in which somebody had made a data subject access request and received 20,000 pages from Meta. They spent several weeks trying to work out exactly what it was because it was not in a user-friendly form. A data community aggregating the rights of data
subjects could really help to crack exactly that sort of thing: it could debate and discuss this with social media companies and others that hold data in order, in a sense, to create protocols meaning that this data is used, categorised and downloaded in subject access requests in a much more user-friendly and transparent way.
There is a lot to like here. The noble Baroness has done the Government’s job for them; the drafting seems terrific to me. I am sure that the Minister will talk about the amendments being technically flawed and so on and so forth—that is bound to happen—but I think that they are pretty good and very much hope that he will give them a fair wind. I know that he will be personally enthusiastic about this.