My Lords, I associate myself with the comments that my noble friend Lord Kamall just made. I have nothing to add on those amendments, as he eloquently set out why they are so important.
In the spirit of transparency, my intervention enables me to point out, were there any doubt, who I am as opposed to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, who was not here earlier but who I was mistaken for. Obviously, we are not graced with the presence of my noble friend Lord Maude, but I am sure that we all know what he looks like as well.
I will speak to two amendments. The first is Amendment 144, to which I have added my name. As usual, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has said almost everything that can be said on this but I want to amplify two things. I have yet to meet a politician who does not get excited about the two-letter acronym that is AI. The favoured statement is that it is as big a change in the world as the discovery of electricity or the invention of the wheel. If it is that big—pretty much everyone in the world who has looked at it probably thinks it is—we need properly to think about the pluses and the minuses of the applications of AI for children.
The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, set out really clearly why children are different. I do not want to repeat that, but children are different and need different protections; this has been established in the physical world for a very long time. With this new technology that is so much bigger than the advent of electricity and the creation of the first automated factories, it is self-evident that we need to set out how to protect children in that world. The question then is: do we need a separate code of practice on children and AI? Or, as the noble Baroness set out, is this an opportunity for my noble friend the Minister to confirm that we should write into this Bill, with clarity, an updated age-appropriate design code that recognises the existence of AI and all that it could bring? I am indifferent on those two options but I feel strongly that, as we have now said on multiple groups, we cannot just rely on the wording in a previous Act, which this Bill aims to update, without recognising that, at the same time, we need to update what an age-appropriate design code looks like in the age of AI.
The second amendment that I speak to is Amendment 252, on the open address file. I will not bore noble Lords with my endless stories about the use of the address file during Covid, but I lived through and experienced the challenges of this. I highlight an important phrase in the amendment. Proposed new subsection (1) says:
“The Secretary of State must regularly publish a list of UK addresses as open data to an approved data standard”.
One reason why it is a problem for this address data to be held by an independent private company is that the quality of the data is not good enough. That is a real problem if you are trying to deliver a national service, whether in the public sector or the private sector. If the data quality is not good enough, it leaves us substantially poorer as a country. This is a fundamental asset for the country and a fundamental building block of our geolocation data, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, set out. Anybody who has tried to build a service that delivers things to human beings in the physical world knows that errors in the database can cause huge problems. It might not feel like a huge problem if it concerns your latest Amazon delivery but, if it concerns the urgent dispatch of an ambulance, it is life and death. Maintaining the accuracy of the data and holding it close as a national asset is therefore hugely important, which is why I lend my support to this amendment.