My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate, and to commend the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for a very clear introduction to three amendments. The Green group is very happy to support all of them. I apologise to the Committee that was I absent for the last two days of Committee. Once I was stuck in the Chamber and the other day I was unavoidably away, so I apologise for missing some of my own amendments, but I really wanted to speak on these amendments. I will start with Amendment 79. We have just heard a very useful argument for it and I will briefly add to it.
Inclusive by design is talking about going beyond accessibility and beyond saying, “We have this thing. What do we do now to make it accessible?”. This starts from the very beginning and takes us back to the social model of disability. Our society and our products are designed to be non-inclusive. That is what we are doing now and that is wrong in terms of allowing so many people to fully participate in our society. It is also always important to make the argument that it is better for all of us, not just those who may have a disability, now or in the future, if products are made to be easy to access so that you are able to do things. There is wrestling with opening a jar or that terrible rigid plastic packaging on toothbrushes and other things that many people struggle with. If you made those things inclusive by design, they would be better for all of us.
Following the technological arguments already made, I thought back to when I helped an elderly man attempt to access his banking. It was certainly not accessible to him and, as a friend, I knew his password and everything else because I had to. The machine he had to press was about the size of a matchbox; the keys were on it and I struggled to press them. There was two-factor authentication, and I could not understand the text message or work out which numbers in the text message you were supposed to put in, and I have been using technology for many decades. This is so important and could be a real advance.
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On the other amendments in this group, the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, said he expected that I would appreciate Amendment 52, and I very much do. It rather reflects, but approaches the matter in a different way from, my Amendment 28, which the Committee debated earlier. It reflects a meeting I hosted this morning with SOAS ICOP entitled “The price of a product: who really pays?”. The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, referred to fuzzy supply chains and the lack of transparency in the supply chains of so many ordinary products that all of us are forced to consume every day. Yet hidden behind that fuzziness are human rights abuses, environmental destruction and an enormous amount of misery. We occasionally find out about that when a group of journalists do a great deal of work and go to great effort to write an exposé of a particular product. However, we actually need to say that this has to be taken out of all our supply chains. This amendment to a Bill about product regulation is potentially taking us in that direction.
I note that the world is going ahead with this. In the EU, the corporate sustainability due diligence directive is coming in. There is a proposed UN treaty on business
and human rights. This morning, I heard from the Corporate Justice Coalition, which is calling for a failure-to-prevent provision in our supply chains, mirroring something the Government already did in the Bribery Act 2010—a failure-to-prevent-bribery provision. Companies should have a responsibility to prevent abuses in their supply chains. Of course, they will be able to show that only if they have the kind of transparency that the noble Lord’s amendment calls for.
Finally, I shall briefly comment on Amendment 53. I commend the noble Lord in using the words “large language models”; they are not artificial intelligence. The amendment stresses that these are being rushed in with great environmental impact, as the noble Lord said. They are potentially reshaping our entire physical world as well as our virtual world. It is really important that we have regulation on how that reshaping happens.