Health Bill

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Austin of Dudley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 279A in my name and comment on the potential impact of the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

My amendment would require the Secretary of State to report annually to Parliament on NHS and social care procurement of medical devices, consumables and services in England, assessing its performance against the objectives in Section 12(1) of the Procurement Act 2023, and would confine the report to those objectives. Noble Lords scrutinised the Act carefully, including the objectives that authorities must have regard to when carrying out procurement: delivering value for money; maximising public benefit; sharing information so that suppliers and others can understand procurement policies and decisions; and acting, and being seen to act, with integrity. Those duties are already established in law. My amendment would provide Parliament with a focused, regular account of how they are being applied in an area of considerable importance to patients and taxpayers.

In the NHS, as we heard earlier, value for money cannot simply mean the lowest purchase price. An MRI scanner that costs less to buy may prove more expensive over its working life through maintenance, breakdowns or additional training requirements. Reliability and clinical effectiveness matter, as do the consequences for patients when equipment is unavailable. An annual report would help Parliament to examine whether those considerations are being weighed properly. The Act does not require each objective to receive equal weight in every procurement, so the report should explain how they have been applied in practice.

Proposed new subsection (2) would keep the report focused on those established objectives; other applicable legal duties would continue to apply. Proposed new subsection (3) would exclude procurement still governed by the previous regulations under the transitional arrangements. The reporting arrangements should be proportionate, drawing wherever possible on information already collected. I hope the Minister can explain how the department intends to account to Parliament for the application of these objectives, and whether the Government would consider the focused annual reporting duty proposed in this amendment.

Amendment 172B raises serious legal and procedural problems. In singling out one company, it raises the question of whether it would make this Bill a hybrid Bill. It also risks breaching the United Kingdom’s obligations under the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement. The Ministerial Code expressly requires Ministers to comply with international law and treaty obligations. Will the Minister explain how this amendment could be implemented consistently with those duties? Your Lordships’ House spent many hours scrutinising the Procurement Act; this was serious work to protect public money, secure good services and ensure that suppliers are treated fairly. This amendment could completely undermine that work.

The amendment singles out one company by name, even though many tech companies provide services to the NHS. It seeks to end its contract at the first opportunity and exclude it from the replacement. It asks us to substitute a subjective political judgment for the outcome of a competition in which bids were assessed against objective published criteria. If its supporters believe that different standards should apply, they should explain what those standards are and apply them consistently; they should not ask Parliament to settle the outcome for one company in advance. What opportunity would the company have to demonstrate that it could meet the requirements? It would have none. However effective its technology and however competitive its price, the amendment would already have decided the answer. That is an extraordinary approach to spending public money. The precedent would extend well beyond this contract. We should be particularly careful about singling out a supplier by a political test that no elected body has defined.

Why should a company spend time and money competing for a public contract if the published rules can be set aside after it has won? The risks are clear: there would be fewer companies willing to bid, weaker competition and higher prices for taxpayers. While politicians argued about which suppliers they approved of, public services would wait longer for the technology they needed. If there is evidence that a supplier threatens national security, there are statutory powers for dealing with that. Serious allegations should be examined against the evidence, through the proper processes. Patients and taxpayers are entitled to ask what they would gain from this proposal. Would it mean shorter waits, safer care or lower costs? What would replacing the system cost? How would services be protected during the change? Where is the evidence that this amendment would deliver better care or better value?

We have already seen the consequences of the dispute over technology procurement. This is a different subject, but the principles still apply. When the Met was facing substantial financial pressures, the commissioner wanted to use technology to reduce administrative work and protect front-line services. He also said that it could help the police catch people who threaten the public

“at a pace that simply isn’t possible without”

the enabling technology. Yet the proposed contract was blocked and the commissioner warned that between 500 and 700 officers and staff posts delivering services to Londoners could be affected, which would make the city and its residents less safe. The mayor’s office said its concerns were about procurement and value for money. Those questions deserve proper examination, of course, but why were Londoners originally told suppliers should

“share the values of our city”?

Procurement requires evidence and a proper assessment of the consequences. It cannot become a test of whether politicians approve of a company’s so-called values. The same principle applies to the NHS. I think this amendment is a political boycott dressed up as procurement policy. It seeks to exclude a company from serving the NHS because of its relationship with Israel—but Israel, as the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, is deeply integrated into the world’s technology and medical industries. Major companies operate there, invest there and work with Israeli institutions. Palantir is one of many tech firms working in Israel. Perhaps its offence is that it is not embarrassed about it. Oracle came second in the bid process for the federated data platform; it has supplied software to the Israeli military. IBM came third; it has contracted to build data centres for the Israeli military. Microsoft has supplied the Israeli military with cloud technology. Nobody complains about Parliament using Microsoft Word and Outlook to conduct our business. If every corporate association is now a test of political purity and individual politicians’ values, there will be much more boycotting to be done in future.

This amendment singles out one company. It offers no consistent standard against which every supplier would be judged. Doing business with Israel should not disqualify a company from serving the NHS. Contracts should be awarded in line with the rules and on the basis of whether they can fulfil the contract, the quality of their work and value for money—open, free and fair competition which increases quality and reduces costs to the taxpayer.

The standards for technology in our health service should be demanding. Suppliers must demonstrate that their systems work, protect patient information and provide value for money. They must show how their technology helps doctors and nurses deliver better patient care. Every supplier should face those tests, because patients should come first. A patient waiting for cancer treatment gains nothing from a political boycott. If technology can help bring an operation forward, we should establish whether it works and can be used safely. Procurement decisions must not be turned into an instrument of somebody else’s foreign policy. If a system can help get someone treated sooner, I want the NHS to be able to use it. There should be fair rules, applied consistently, with patients and taxpayers coming first. Those are the principles that I ask the Minister to uphold.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 53, 171 and 289 in the name of my noble friend Lord Tarassenko, and Amendment 160 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, all of which I added my name to. I have my own amendment on NHS data as a sovereign data asset in a later group, which is remarkably poor organising on my part, but it does give the Minister two shots at saying we are right.

The primary difference between the amendments in this group and those in the later group is that these amendments focus largely on the use of NHS data by companies contracted and procured to provide services to the NHS, rather than primarily on how the benefits from technology trained on NHS data are retained in the UK. However, both sets of amendments cover the key elements and, whichever approach is finally taken, determining who has access to UK health data, and on what terms, is an extremely urgent issue.

During debates on the Data (Use and Access) Bill last year, I tabled an amendment on sovereign data assets, of which the NHS’s data was a key example but not the only one. At the heart of that debate, which I urge officials to look at, was a warning that has become only more urgent. The speed at which the Government are giving access to our data is swifter than the plans they have to protect its financial or societal value. We are nearly two years on and there is still no published strategy or government policy to maintain British control over valuable data assets. We do not have a clear plan for how our data or the systems that host it will be resilient to foreign interference. We do not have a clear strategy for building technological capability within the NHS for its data or ensuring that all the healthcare and economic value that comes from our data will indeed come back to the UK as a benefit.

Amendment 53 offers a road map for the conditions for access to NHS contracts, with a focus on control of data, building sovereign capability for data handling and reducing the dependencies and risks from foreign firms. This is not government data; it is data held in trust for the British public and they are being poorly served.

Amendment 160 looks at how contracts are awarded and ownership of the architecture that supplies services to the NHS. It singles out the way in which free or low-cost services are used to gain access, create dependency and result in vendor lock-in, which a number of noble Lords have already described well.

Amendments 171 and 289 would require the Secretary of State to publish a digital sovereignty strategy for the NHS, including control of systems that host data, control over the data itself, avoiding vendor lock-in and capitalising on our data to build technological capability and commercial value. It is an exhaustive checklist, but it mirrors those issues I laid in the Data (Use and Access) Bill and the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, and in the debate on digital sovereignty in July. It also aligns with multiple recommendations by committees of both Houses, including—I will try to say this very quickly—the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee’s report, Rewiring the State; the Commons BIST Committee’s report, Investing in the UK Economy, the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy’s report on undersea cables; and the Lords Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry into financing and scaling UK science and technology. The Lords committee also has an open inquiry on innovation in the NHS and personalised medicine. How many times do we have to make the same recommendation? This is a flashing warning light.

Self-harm: Young People

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

My noble friend is right: it is crucial that, where they are able to, friends, family and communities assist those at risk and those who are actually self-harming. The recommendation is that people should not hesitate to speak to a GP or access the free listening services that are available through not just the NHS but the Samaritans, for example.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

The publication of the online safety children’s code by Ofcom last week received mixed reviews from many and a howl of fury from both Ian Russell and the Children’s Commissioner. Can the Minister say what the Government make of the fact that the children’s code makes no provision whatsoever for live streaming, nor for deliberately extending its use, both of which increase harm and were identified in the evidence of Ofcom itself?

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I draw the attention of the House to my interests, particularly that of being chair of the 5Rights Foundation.

We know that a person’s trajectory is largely defined by the circumstances of their birth and that prevention and early intervention are more effective than policies driven by headlines and voter frustrations. This should put children at the top of the policy agenda but, while jiggling a baby for the camera is a well-worn meme of the campaigning politician, the fact remains that children have no electoral capital, and this gracious Speech, like those preceding it, reflects their lack of political power.

Nowhere is that truer than in the digital world. Like others, I welcome the online harms Bill but I am concerned by the shifting language that prioritises the burden on business rather than the welfare of children. Almost every aspect of a young person’s life is mediated by devices and services that impact, both beneficially and problematically, on their life chances. Children are more vulnerable to the risks associated with profiling: behavioural advertising, abuses of health and education data, gaming, gambling, bullying, self-harm, anxiety, identity fraud, unwanted contact and unwanted content. We are in the grip of an anti-vax movement that results in children having measles. Children are vulnerable to a system that fails to separate fact from fiction. Even this morning we saw reports that one-third of all searches on Google to buy a teething toy featured potentially dangerous products. As Professor Sonia Livingstone says,

“children are the canaries in the coal mine for threats to all”.

Other noble Lords have asked when we might see a Bill, but I ask the Minister when, in her estimation, parents, teachers and children—to whom successive Secretaries of State have made repeated promises—can reasonably expect the online harms Bill to be law? I also ask whether the teams in DCMS and the Home Office will remain at current strength or be reduced or in any way downgraded until that time? While I very much welcome the commitment to high-speed broadband, can the Minister confirm whether we are to get an online harms Bill before broadband rollout? If we do not, we will exacerbate the problems rather than deliver the desired benefits for children.

I shall briefly address three urgent matters that cannot wait for an online harms Bill. First, the Federal Trade Commission is undertaking a review of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, known as COPPA. For those who do not know, COPPA is responsible for 13 being the de facto age of adulthood online. COPPA leaves children aged 13 to 17 with no specific protections and is so poorly upheld that the sector routinely engages with tens of millions of children aged under 13 on services designed for adults. The review could and should put in place protections for all children aged under 18 wherever they are online, but instead a powerful tech lobby proposes to weaken it further. I would be grateful to know what steps the UK Government are taking to ensure that children in the United Kingdom do not inherit a US law that may undermine the considerable efforts we are making here to improve our own laws.

Secondly, there is the plan of Facebook and others to implement end-to-end encryption, which has been widely condemned as a disaster for the global effort to prevent the spread of child sexual abuse material. Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the problem by characterising privacy as a social good at any cost, while simultaneously highlighting that that cost included “bad people” doing “bad things”, including the global dissemination of child sexual abuse material. Meanwhile, the Home Secretary, alongside her Australian and American counterparts, responded by calling on Facebook to allow lawful access to encrypted services, which resulted in a ferocious backlash about government access to personal data. In reality, existing detection services, such as PhotoDNA, do not challenge user privacy since they identify only known images and do not require a back door. Conflating issues of privacy or security with the protection of child sexual abuse victims makes vulnerable children collateral damage in an information war between commercial entities and Governments. Are the Government willing to mandate that end-to-end encryption be deployed in a manner that allows detection of CSAM, independently and transparently assessed, with no accompanying requirement for a back door to encrypted services?

Finally, last week the Government reaffirmed that they will shortly lay the age-appropriate design code before Parliament. I look forward to that, but ask that we swiftly adopt Article 80(2) of the GDPR, so that civil society can act on behalf of vulnerable groups. We asked for this during the passage of the Data Protection Act and were told it would be reviewed. Perhaps the Minister can provide an update on its status.

Health and Social Care (National Data Guardian) Bill

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 26th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I refer noble Lords to my registered interests, particularly as founder and chair of the 5Rights Foundation. Like the noble Lords who have already spoken, I very much welcome the Bill. Dame Fiona Caldicott’s role is important and if by putting her guidance on a statutory footing we give it more weight, then that can only be a good thing. I want to raise some things that are not covered in the Bill. I have one substantive point about the value of the data that the NHS holds and a couple of questions for the Minister.

The longitudinal data gathered by the NHS since its inception is one of the most valuable health datasets in the world. Within it lie clues to the next generation of drugs and treatments, and entirely new ways of thinking about prevention, treatment and cure. Equally, the gathering of data across health and social care could revolutionise the provision of services. If we knew the impact of meeting, or failing to meet, the social needs in the community on health outcomes, or could accurately predict the social care resources required for certain health conditions, it could help government to provide the right service at the right time to the right people, most probably at less cost.

While using data to improve health and social care outcomes is an exciting prospect, I believe we need to do it in a way that benefits the NHS and the British people. In 2016, the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust allowed DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company owned by Google, to access 1.6 million patient medical records in a trial of its Streams app, which was an alert, diagnosis and detection system for acute kidney injury. Subsequently, the arrangement was found to have been given on an “inappropriate legal basis” that broke data protection laws and revealed swathes of highly personal information without patient consent. The following year, Taunton and Somerset NHS Trust partnered with DeepMind on the very same app. In spite of a freedom of information battle and a data audit done by Linklaters on the instruction of the ICO, we still do not fully understand the financial or IP benefits of this deal to the NHS. But we do know that, earlier this year, DeepMind stated that while it was currently providing its development resources free to the NHS,

“it would determine how much to charge the NHS … later”.

The costs of healthcare have become distorted with drug companies and private providers demanding eye-watering sums from the NHS. I wonder whether this Bill is an opportunity to start redressing the imbalance because, if the national data guardian Bill ensured that the value of the IP that emerges from our health data was properly recognised, that data could, with the consent of the patient, be shared or sold on a basis that that could revolutionise the financing of our struggling health service in the future.

Without a clear mandate, individual trusts with crippling budget deficits may be tempted to commoditise patient data in exchange for cash injections offered by corporations with far deeper pockets. The breakthroughs and advances that patient data makes possible may well then be sold back to the NHS at inflated prices, creating the risk that they will be out of the reach of the very people upon whose data they were built. To understand the value of the data in the NHS, we need only look at the share price of data-rich companies, even those with no revenue. The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is particularly well placed to understand the value of what we hold. I would love to see the Government use this Bill to give the National Data Guardian a duty to develop binding and enforceable guidelines for the sale and exchange of health data for research and development. Those guidelines should fully reflect the sensitivity of the data and the singular value of the NHS dataset.

In addition to this point, I would like further details about the powers of the National Data Guardian. Will the Minister say what duty health providers have to comply with the National Data Guardian’s guidance and to demonstrate how they have done so? As noted by the shadow Minister in the other place:

“Without a requirement for organisations that receive advice to provide evidence of their response in a way that can be easily disseminated, there is no way we can be sure that the Data Guardian will be effective”,


since,

“to ‘have regard’ to advice does not always mean that they take action in respect of that advice”.—[Official Report, Commons, Health and Social Care (National Data Guardian) Bill Committee, 6/6/18; col. 7.]

If, as has been explained, the purpose of putting the National Data Guardian’s role on a statutory footing is to give it weight, which we all welcome, surely a requirement to prove that the guidance has been acted upon is essential.

In looking at the information about the Bill, I found it hard to establish how the National Data Guardian will decide what guidance is needed. A positive obligation to provide the NDG with information about current data-sharing arrangements through report or audit would enable her to identify and anticipate potential issues and to address them in her guidance. Perhaps the Minister will explain why this obligation does not form part of the Bill.

I understand that children’s health data is covered by the Bill but not children’s social care data because that is covered by the Children and Social Work Act 2017. This carve-out raises the question of how family social care data will be considered, especially with regard to decisions made about one family member that can be made only in full sight of the family’s circumstances. I am sympathetic to the Government’s concern about conflicting guidelines, but the absence of guidance for children’s social care may well create greater conflict than a judicious overlap. The Association of Directors of Children’s Services, the Local Government Association and medConfidential are just some of the many organisations which have said that without children’s social care data in scope the National Data Guardian role is “a risk”, “perverse”, “not sensible” and “not a data guardian”.

The challenge we have about data in the 21st century is about its flow between one environment and another. Its value, beneficial and malign, lies in the fact that it can be amalgamated to reveal patterns of information and create new intellectual property. For that reason, it is frustrating to see children’s data being treated on a sector-by-sector basis. Has the Minister given any thought to how the partial coverage of children in this Bill fits with the Government’s other activities in this area, including the age-appropriate design code, potential outcomes from the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and the long-awaited internet safety strategy? Once again, I am afraid, I must put on the record my deep regret that the Government have deliberately chosen to deprioritise children by removing the UK Council for Child Internet Safety’s child focus, which could have served as a single point of expertise to consider children’s needs across all sectors.

I conclude by acknowledging the kindness of the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm, in discussing the scope and purpose of the Bill in the run-up to today’s debate. I hope that I will receive comprehensive answers on all of these points, if not this morning, then certainly before the Bill progresses.