Superintelligent AI

Baroness Neville-Jones Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, on what he just said. I entirely agree with his premise that there is real danger ahead of us if we do not take care and we do not understand what we are dealing with.

This is one of those occasions when we have to maintain control. Control is the key issue, and policies that do not lead to control or enable us to keep control will lead to something that could very well be regarded as a disaster. It is not often that we face choices so stark and so difficult, and where on the one hand there is an immense benefit to be gained and on the other a catastrophe for humanity. That is the situation that we are in, so we have to take this issue very seriously.

The question that the noble Lord posed was: do we therefore go for a moratorium? That would be highly desirable, but I do not think that it will be possible in the short term. Frankly, while President Trump is in the White House, the US is not going to regulate the development of AI, nor will it help others do that; in fact, it is much more likely that it will stand in the way. I am therefore pessimistic about getting an international dialogue going on the basis of a moratorium, and I think, as the noble Lord just said, that we have to act on our own recognisance.

What should we seek to do? We have in the UK some of the institutions that we need to be able to take a lead. The UK is ahead of the game in some respects, not just in that we are number three in our investment but because we have made institutional moves which are of great advantage. We also already have in existence the ASI Security Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, which should not be forgotten, because it is also quite able and well placed to play a role. I would like them to take a lead in consultation—which I hope the Government are going to put in place and get on with—but also take an institutional lead in starting the dialogue in this country. They are in some respects, as bodies separate from government, well placed to get a basis on which what they do will then be taken as being at face value, valuable and independent, which will carry more weight in subsequent work.

However, a lot of that will be directed at the research community; not all of it, but much of it will concern them. The research community, while they should not be expected to reveal to the world where they have got to, should be in dialogue with government. They need to be required to tell government where they are and what they are doing on the research front.

There is also the user market, which is different; that is, companies which are employing AI for some purpose. It is more likely to be a purpose which is much more narrowly defined, for the improvement of a product or to engage and improve their own research. That is a different kettle of fish, but it is not one that should simply be allowed to go on, given the nature of AI, the problems to which it can give rise and the unexpected things that can happen using an AI programme. There has been an instance where an AI programme has escaped autonomously on to the internet. There are real risks. Therefore, corporate governance should be brought into play, and it should happen soon. Companies should be obliged to report both what they are doing and its uses, and it should be subject to the normal processes of audit.

Companies in this country have not on the whole fared all that brilliantly when it has come to their grasp and their willingness to understand and palliate the dangers of cyber security. Take that as an example, and by it, I mean we need to be tough about getting on with ensuring that companies take proper responsibility.

We need to anticipate our difficulties—

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Blake of Leeds) (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind Members that the advisory time is four minutes. The last debate ran short of time. We need to make sure that the Minister has ample time to respond. I hope everyone will respect that.

[Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)]

My message is that we should organise before we have to engage in expensive recovery.

Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Baroness Neville-Jones Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd December 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, this is a fairly disparate group of amendments. I am speaking to Amendments 8, 9, 10, 24, 30, 31 and 32. In the first instance, Amendments 8, 9, 10 and 30 relate to the question that I asked at Second Reading: where is the ambition to use the Bill to encourage data sharing to support net zero?

The clean heat market mechanism, designed to create a market incentive to grow the number of heat pumps installed in existing premises each year, is set to be introduced after being delayed a year due to backlash from the boiler industry. If government departments and partners had access to sales data of heating appliances, there would be a more transparent and open process for setting effective and realistic targets.

I have been briefed by Ambient, a not-for-profit organisation in this field. It says that low visibility of high power-consuming assets makes it challenging to maintain grid stability in a clean-power world. Low visibility and influence over future installations of high power-consuming assets make it difficult to plan for grid updates. Inability to shift peak electricity demand leads to higher capacity requirements with associated time and cost implications. Giving the Government and associated bodies access to utility-flexible tariff data would enable the Government and utilities to work together to increase availability and uptake of tariffs, leading to lower peak electricity demand requirements.

Knowing which homes have the oldest and least efficient boilers, and giving public sector and partners access to the Gas Safe Register and CORGI data on boiler age at household level, would mean that they could identify and target households and regions, ensuring that available funds go to those most in need. Lack of clarity on future clean heating demand makes it challenging for the industry to scale and create jobs, and to assess workforce needs for growing electricity demand. Better demand forecasting through access to sales data on low-carbon heating appliances would signal when and where electrification was creating need for workforce expansion in grid management and upgrade, as well as identify regional demand for installers and technicians.

The provisions of Part 1 of the Bill contain powers for the Secretary of State to require the sharing of business data to customers and other people of specified description. It does not indicate, however, that persons of specified description could include actors such as government departments, public bodies such as NISO and GB Energy, and Ministers. An expanded list of suggested recipients could overcome this issue, as stated in Amendment 9 in my name. It makes no provision for the format of information sharing—hence, my Amendments 8 and 10.

In summary, my questions to the Minister are therefore on: whether it has been considered how the primary legislation outlined in the Bill could be exercised to accelerate progress towards clean power by 2030; whether climate missions such as clean power by 2030 or achieving net zero are purposes “of a public nature” in relation to the outline provisions for public bodies; and whether specifying the format of shared business data would enable more efficient and collaborative use of data for research and planning purposes.

Coming on to Amendments 24, 31 and 32, the Bill expands the potential use of smart data to additional public and private sector entities, but it lacks safeguards for sensitive information regularly used in court. It makes specific provision for legal privilege earlier in the Bill, but this is not extended in provisions relating to smart data. I very much hope that the Government will commit to consult with legal professions before extending smart data to courts.

Many of us support open banking, but open banking is being used, as designed, by landlords to keep watching tenant bank accounts for months after approving their tenancy. Open banking was set up to enhance inter- operability between finance providers, with the most obvious example being the recent new ability of the iPhone wallet app to display balances and recent transactions from various bank accounts.

Open banking approval normally lasts six months. While individual landlords may not choose this access, if given a free choice, the service industry providing the tenant-checking service to landlords is strongly incentivised to maximise such access, otherwise their competitors have a selling point. If open banking is to be added to the statute book, the Bill should mandate that the default time be reduced to no more than 24 hours in the first instance, and reconfirmed much more often. For most one-off approval processes, these access times may be as short as minutes and the regulations should account for that.

Coming on to Amendment 31, consumers have mixed feelings about the potential benefits to them of smart data schemes, as shown in polling such as that carried out a couple of years ago by Deltapoll with the CDEI, now the Responsible Technology Adoption Unit, as regards the perceived potential risks versus the benefits. Approximately one-quarter of respondents in each case were unsure about this trade-off. Perhaps unsurprisingly, individuals who said that they trusted banks and financial institutions or telecommunications providers were more likely to support open finance and open communications, and customers who had previous experience of switching services more frequently reported believing that the benefits of smart data outweighed the risks.

Is it therefore the Government’s expectation that people should be compelled to use these services? Open banking and imitators can do a great deal of good but can also give easy access to highly sensitive data for long periods. The new clause introduced by Amendment 31 would make it the same criminal offence to compel unnecessary access under these new provisions as it already is to compel data provision via subject access requests under the existing Data Protection Act.

Amendment 32 is a probing amendment as to the Government’s intentions regarding these new smart data provisions. In the Minister’s letter of 27 November, she said:

“The Government is working closely to identify areas where smart data schemes might be able to bring benefits. We want to build on the lessons learned from open banking and establish smart data schemes in other markets for goods and services.”


I very much hope that the Minister will be able to give us a little taste of what she thinks these powers are going to be used for, and in what sectors the Government believe that business can take advantage of these provisions.

[Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 7 introduced by my noble friend Lord Arbuthnot, for the reasons that he gave. The amendment was designed to have the effect of increasing the reliability and handling of information inside any system. If, as I would certainly support, we want to see information and data in digital form circulated more readily, more freely and more often, it is very important that people should trust the system within which it happens. That is where the need to assure the cybersecurity of the system becomes very important and is a companion note to this Bill.