Brain Injuries in Football

Damian Collins Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered brain injuries in football.

The fact that so many Members are present to seek to intervene or speak in this short debate shows the great interest in the topic. The subject of brain injuries in football and concussion, and brain injuries in sport as a whole, has received considerable attention in recent months, but it is an issue we have been familiar with for many years. My wife’s grandfather, George Richardson, who played professional football for Sheffield United and Hull City, died from a brain haemorrhage in 1968 aged just 56. It was widely believed in the family that it was a consequence of heading heavy footballs when playing as a striker in the football league in his youth.

In 1966, famous for the England World cup win, there was also the end of the first domestic season in which injury substitutions were allowed in English football. A report that I read in the Liverpool Echo from that year recorded that 772 injury substitutions had been made, of which more than 10% were made as a consequence of concussion or head injury. The vast majority were for leg injuries—understandable for football—but even then quite a high number of players were taken off for concussion. We can imagine the high bar there would have been at the time, given that understanding of the consequences of concussion and long-term health impacts were not as well understood.

Staying with 1966, five members of England’s World cup-winning team have subsequently died as a consequence of dementia or brain-related conditions. Recently, other well-known England and Scotland footballers, such as Jeff Astle, Gordon McQueen and Joe Kinnear, have also died from brain-related injuries. However, no longer is this just a matter of tragic stories being brought into the public domain of great loss and sympathy for the families concerned; it is now a matter of increasing scientific study, especially in Scotland, with the 2019 field study conducted by Doctor Willie Stewart of the cases of more than 7,000 former Scottish professional footballers, looking at their cause of death against a study of the general population involving 23,000 people.

[Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. He makes an important point about that field study in Scotland. At the time some people dismissed it, because it was only one study, but what has changed in the intervening years is that there have been studies in other European countries. I would argue that the evidence is now overwhelming. It is not just the high-profile cases that he talked about; thousands of footballers are caught up in this and are in financial difficulty. What we really need, given this understanding, based on the scientific evidence, is to have this type of injury classed as an industrial injury by the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council.

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[Damian Collins]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an incredibly important point.

I will dwell briefly on the main statistical outputs of that field study, because it is the best baseline that we have in the UK. The figures are stark. The study discovered that former footballers have a fivefold increase in Alzheimer’s disease, a fourfold increase in motor neurone disease and a twofold increase in Parkinson’s disease against the base level for the general population.

Further medical studies have identified, too, the medical condition of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, which is linked to head trauma—head injury. It can be caused by a severe blow to the head, but also within the course of playing football. It causes a release within the brain that is made worse by repetitive injury. That is why the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) has a point about classifying this as a form of industrial injury caused by the circumstances of playing football. It can have prolonged and lasting effects. Players who have received concussion injuries on several occasions may be more likely to have severe trauma later on, even if it is recognised at the time.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this subject forward. It has taken some time and I commend him for his zeal in making it happen. There have been advances and helpful discussions with the Irish Football Association. Does the hon. Member agree that the lessons learned have meant that changes must be made, including the pilot scheme that was introduced by the IFA in 2020 to allow substitutions for suspected concussion with no disadvantage to the teams? That means that players do not feel that they have to shake it off and can be medically wise. There are some things that can be done. For every debate that we bring forward, it is important to highlight the issues, but it is also important to highlight the possible solutions.

[Damian Collins]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that concussion substitution would be a sensible measure. In Scotland, I believe there is a campaign for rugby called, “If in doubt, sit them out”, which recognises the danger of concussion injuries and allows a pause in play. Often the incentive within professional sport is to keep people playing as long as possible, and often the players want that themselves. However, there must be proper safety standards so that the right decision is made and the incident does not lead to lasting injury and trauma.

In the United States of America, the recognition of CTE as an injury caused by playing professional sport, particularly American football, is well recognised. The National Football League is providing hundreds of millions of dollars of support for players who are diagnosed as having CTE. There is recognition of the link between head injury and playing sport, and people are properly supported and compensated.

There are two challenges that we have to look at. First, how can we prevent unnecessary and lasting injury as a consequence of head and brain injuries in football and other sports? Secondly, how do we support people who, late in life, are suffering as a consequence of the injuries they sustained during their playing career? The question of compensation is one that families in particular have raised. While a £1 million fund has been created by the Premier League, administered by the Professional Football Association, the concern is that there is no guarantee beyond the first year of its operation, which we are still in, that the fund will continue—although we hope that it will. It needs to have proper resources and to be properly accessible to families.

I spoke recently to John Stiles, the son of former England footballer Nobby Stiles, who made it clear to me that in his father’s case, his care costs per year were over £100,000, and yet the cap for funding from the current fund is £60,000 a year. That would not have been enough. In that case, Nobby Stiles decided to sell his medals, including his World cup-winning medal, which helped pay for his retirement and his costs. However, not everyone is in that position. Many other footballers and their families can be in a position where they are required to sell the family home, although they were told that would not be the case when the fund was created. Some former players and their families have had to sell their homes.

[Duncan Baker (North Norfolk) (Con)]

Last week I raised on the Floor of the House the point about funding, because Chris Sutton, the former Celtic, Chelsea, Blackburn Rovers and—more importantly, being in Norfolk—Norwich City legend, is my constituent. Currently, support is in place from the PFA and the Premier League’s brain health fund, which has already paid out thousands to help families. That is positive, but a proper registered charity would be the way forward to ensure that the funding is in place. Does my hon. Friend think the Minister could help with putting the proper vehicle in place?

[Damian Collins]

I am sure that the Minister has heard the point my hon. Friend makes. I think the Minister’s convening power could be extremely helpful in this case. There needs to be a properly resourced fund that football pays into. There is enough money in football to provide compensation for players who clearly need it.

The cap on the fund means that it will not cover some care costs; it would not have done so in the case of Nobby Stiles, had it existed at that time. However, there have been other deaths of former players recently, such as Chris Nicholl, a former player for Aston Villa and Southampton, who died without his family receiving a penny of funding. Similarly, John McNamee, a former Newcastle player, died as a consequence of CTE and his family had to sell the family home to cover care costs. Real concerns are being raised by the families that, limited though these funds are, they are not universally accessible, and there is no guarantee they will exist in the future.

[Sir Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. The points that have been made about the brain health fund are incredibly important. Does my hon. Friend agree that in addition to the Premier League and the Professional Footballers Association, the Football Association and the English Football League also have a part to play, and that it is by all partners and Government coming together that we can deliver much more for players today and into the future?

[Damian Collins]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend. There has been criticism from the families about the fund. It was created voluntarily by them, but the EFL and the FA are not part of it, and they need to be. All the groups that represent professional football need to come together and provide that support fund.

I agree with the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) that we should look at classifying these as industrial injuries, but football does not need to wait for that classification; more could be done now to put those support elements in place. This is where I look to the Minister. I know that the issue has been raised with him before, and he has taken a keen interest in it. I believe the Government can play a role in bringing the parties together. There should be a recognition of the link. I know that the Department is supporting more research and convening a forum to decide where the areas of priority research should be. That will help us to understand how we can safeguard young sports players today and safeguard against brain injuries in the future.

More must be done now to recognise the existing link and accept a responsibility. There is a danger sometimes that people are concerned about legal liabilities; but we have known about this link for a while. In March 2024, Dan Roan of the BBC published a report showing that FA board minutes from 1983 recognised the concern about head and brain injuries and the causal link between those injuries and playing football, so let’s not pretend that this link was not known. Something needs to be done now.

Does the Minister think he can play a role bringing the FA and the English Football League together with the Premier League and the PFA to agree a package of financial support to make the available fund sustainable, to look at lifting the cap above £60,000 a year and to guarantee that no family will ever have to sell their home to pay for the care costs of a former footballer? Will football accept its responsibility to care for these heroes of the past, who incurred their injuries while providing entertainment and joy for millions of people and who have enriched other people who have made money out of the game?

Yesterday, on Second Reading of the Football Governance Bill, I raised the case for player welfare to be part of the remit of the regulator. I do not think the regulator’s job should be to write rules for football; it should be there to ensure that competition organisers and clubs adhere to the standards that have been set by the competitions with regard to athlete and player welfare. That would be consistent with the corporate governance responsibilities that the regulator sets. In terms of funding support for players’ care costs in later life, that could be another opportunity where the fines collected by the regulator could support both grassroots sport and legacy injuries related to football, particularly brain injuries. The fund could be used helpfully in that way. I do think there is enough money in football that primarily the professional football organisations themselves should set that standard.

Finally, as has been mentioned, the question of the rules that govern concussion and brain and head injuries in sport today is really important. I do not want to see things like heading the ball removed from football. It is a physical game and is enjoyed as such, but players should be aware of the risks they are running. There should be safety standards, such as concussion substitutions during matches or training, and ensuring that people sit out when they have had a head injury and are given a proper amount of time to recover. There should also be consideration as to whether unnecessary repetitive exercises in training that include heading the ball are really necessary if they cause damage. These things need to be properly understood. In some cases, more research may be needed. We should look at this on an ongoing basis.

As a starting point, let us recognise the link that exists and the genuine need of support that some former players and their families have now. Football already respects the fact that the connection does exist, but we need a proper agreement to resource this and make sure that the support is there and the fund continues. I ask the Minister, as the Football Governance Bill passes through the House, to consider the role that the regulator can play in ensuring that the welfare and safety standards we should expect from clubs and competition organisers are actually followed through.

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[Stuart Andrew]

It was certainly a pleasure to respond to that debate, and I made a commitment to write to the Department, which I did. I was due to meet the Minister for Disabled People yesterday, but I had to spend all day in the Chamber for the Second Reading of the Football Governance Bill. That meeting will be rearranged, and I will be sure to raise the right hon. Gentleman’s request. I will come on to his point about industrial injuries shortly.

The safety, wellbeing and welfare of everyone who takes part in sport is paramount. I also know how important football clubs and players are to all our local communities. The recent examples of dementia-related deaths of former footballers are of great concern to Members across the House and to me as the Minister for sport. It is important to acknowledge that the vast majority of people play sport safely, but head injuries in sport do occur.

Player safety must be a major focus for sport, as we recently highlighted in our Government sport strategy, “Get Active”. More work is still needed to ensure that robust measures are in place to reduce that risk and improve the diagnosis and management of sport-related head injuries at all levels of sport. That should apply during not just matches but training, and there should be provision for both professional and amateur players, as hon. Members have mentioned.

The national governing bodies are rightly responsible for the regulation of their sport and for ensuring that appropriate measures are in place to protect participants from serious injuries. I am pleased to say that positive progress has been made across different sports in recent years. For example, home nation football associations have changed their guidelines to prevent under-11s from heading footballs during training in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the FA is co-funding research with the Professional Footballers’ Association to build the evidence base relating to brain injuries in football. It is not just national governing bodies contributing to improvements in player safety; players’ associations such as the PFA also play a valuable role in supporting professional players and providing short and long-term support to those affected by sporting injuries.

[Damian Collins]

The Minister mentions that further work is being done by the FA, but is there any doubt in his mind or the Government’s about the link between brain injury and sporting injury?

[Stuart Andrew]

I will come on in a minute to research and to some of the things I want to take from the debate.

Hon. Members have mentioned the brain health team and the range of support for former players and their families, which of course includes assistance with claiming state support and benefits. I have discussed the work on player welfare with the PFA’s chief executive, including the football brain health fund for players affected by dementia, which was established last year with the aim of providing financial support for players. An initial amount of £1 million has been made available to provide discretionary financial support, as assessed by an independent panel, to improve quality of life.

I welcome the creation of the fund, the first of its kind in English football. I hope that it will provide support to those former players who need it most. The PFA has confirmed that further investment will be forthcoming, but I will seek further reassurances for that fund. I acknowledge that there is some scepticism from former footballers who have contacted me to express doubts about the fund’s effectiveness.

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[Stuart Andrew]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. I have had letters from former footballers expressing concern about the fund, and I wrote just yesterday to the PFA to seek assurances that the fund is working. I recognise that there is wider work to be done, and I will be more than happy to convene a meeting or roundtable with all the interested bodies and reflect the comments that right hon. and hon. Members have made today. I will, of course, include FIFA.

[Damian Collins]

I am very glad to hear that. At that roundtable or a subsequent one, will the Minister also meet the families who are raising concerns about the practical operation of the funds and the difficulty of accessing them?

[Stuart Andrew]

I would be more than happy to do so. In fact, I suggest that it is probably sensible to do so before we do the roundtable, so that I can reflect what I hear from the families.

There has been some discussion of the industrial injuries disablement benefit. The Department for Work and Pensions provides specific support for that benefit and the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council is the independent scientific body that will make recommendations. I know that many Members feel strongly that the council should explore professional footballers’ access to the benefit. My understanding is that the council is currently considering any connection between neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia and the possible effects of repeated head injuries sustained during a career as a professional sportsperson. It needs to give further consideration to the evidence before it can make a decision and will publish its findings when the investigation is complete. It would be premature for me to speculate on how that will progress, but I will definitely raise the matter with the disability Minister.

[Stuart Andrew]

I will try to reflect the right hon. Gentleman’s comments as accurately as possible at my meeting with the disability Minister.

It is important to highlight that the Government are leading work on brain injuries in sport, and specifically on concussion. As part of that, my Department has worked with interested parties to develop the first ever single set of shared concussion guidelines for grassroots sports across the UK. The guidelines, which were published last April, were developed by a panel of UK and international experts in the field of sport-related concussion. They build on the world-leading work in Scotland that hon. Members have mentioned.

We are grateful for the support of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish colleagues in expanding the remit of the new guidelines to cover the whole UK and their full use for everyone involved in grassroots sport, from school age upwards: participants, coaches, volunteers and parents, as well as those working in education settings and healthcare professions. Through the guidelines, we want to encourage more people to enjoy the benefits of being active and playing sport. We hope that they will be a useful tool in reducing the risks associated with concussion. At all levels of sport, if someone is suspected of having concussion on the field of play, the overarching message, as my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe said, is “If in doubt, sit them out.”

Evidence-based research is an important component of ensuring that sport is made as safe as possible. My Department has therefore established a research forum to look at concussion in sport. That group brings together key academic experts with experience in traumatic brain injury, neurology and concussion to identify the priority research questions around sports concussion that still need to be addressed for the sporting sector. It is now formulating a report to identify the priority research questions, which is expected to be completed this year. Alongside that, our Department has established an advisory panel with the aim of identifying tech innovations that can help with concussion in sport.

Separately, the Department of Health and Social Care is formulating the Government’s new strategy on acquired brain injury, including dementia. Our Department is feeding into that process to ensure that those who play sport are represented in the gathering of evidence. We remain committed to working with the sector to make sport safe and enjoyable for everyone, including through technological solutions and the prevention of concussion.

[Damian Collins]

I thank the Minister for giving way one last time. Alongside the establishment of new guidelines based on research, which everyone welcomes, is the question of enforceability. There is a sad history in sport of anti-doping regulations and other welfare standards not being enforced properly because there is no external validation. Policies are often executed within team and club environments by the coaches and the medical staff who report to them, with no external supervision. Having an external actor to check that the right things are being done will be important to making the new guidelines effective.

[Stuart Andrew]

I heard my hon. Friend’s comments very clearly yesterday. The regulator we have established for football has a very tight scope—we needed to do that—but my hon. Friend raises some interesting points that I will take away and consider. I will certainly make the point, when we convene the roundtable with all the interested parties, that further work is needed in this area. Much good work is going on across Government, but I recognise that we need to do more.

I understand the strength of feeling about the issue and its effects on those who suffer from this terrible illness and on their families. We will continue to work with the sports sector, including the football authorities, to ensure that player safety is prioritised so that everyone can take part in sport safely. I thank my hon. Friend again for securing this debate, and I thank everyone present for their thoughtful contributions and their interest in the area. Once I have had the roundtable, I will be happy to update hon. Members on the outcomes of the discussion.

Question put and agreed to.

Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Damian Collins Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 17th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

My hon. Friend got through part 1 a bit quicker than I thought he would—I have a question relating to part 1. Clause 38 creates a final offer mechanism for dispute resolution. The news media industry has been waiting for this legislation for a long time but it is not expressly referenced in the Bill. Can he confirm that the news industry and other industries could benefit from this final offer mechanism?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I wish him the best of luck in the election this afternoon. It is for a very important Committee that will scrutinise this legislation. The final offer mechanism is innovative and represents a positive way forward, in that it will bring parties to the table and they will both have to make sensible offers relating to how they see a fair resolution. This will avoid them putting unrealistic claims on the table, and it could well help the news industry and many other sectors.

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[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

I rise, as other Members have done, in support of the Bill. It is a very important piece of legislation that has been long discussed and much looked forward to. It is now safely on the Floor of the House and we wish it a safe passage as it goes through Parliament. The debate we are having is not dissimilar to debates being held in Parliaments around the world. In the United States Congress, there are very lively debates about what it calls anti-trust legislation in the tech sector. The European Union, as has been discussed, has already created its Digital Markets Act. In Australia, there has been a lot of concern about competition within digital markets and a lot of work to improve it.

I agree with other Members who have spoken so far that competition is often the best guarantee of higher standards for the consumer, lower prices and a more vibrant market economy. The reason we are concerned with regards to digital markets is that, in many of those strategic markets, there is evidence of a lack of competition—a lack of choice—that is restricting routes to business and will increase prices for customers. In his opening speech, the Minister rightly pointed to the market impact studies that the Competition and Markets Authority has done, looking at app stores and the mobile advertising market, which show a consumer detriment of over £6 billion. Those are just two market studies that the CMA has done and it is not surprising that that should be the case.

The app store market is important because most people, including most people in this Chamber, have a smart device that runs on one of two operating systems. There are two app stores, and most of what happens on those devices—not exclusively, but most of it—is not interoperable. There have already been investigations showing inconsistent pricing in the commission taken by those operating systems from app developers who sell through their devices. In a market such as that, it is not surprising that there might be constraints or evidence of overcharging, because there is simply nowhere else to go—there is no choice. When the ad tech market is dominated by two companies, Google and Meta, it is not surprising that there may be higher pricing in that market; there is certainly a great lack of transparency. Even some of the world’s biggest advertisers, such as Procter & Gamble, have raised concerns about this issue, but none of the advertisers themselves has enough market power within that market to challenge those incumbents.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we should fully support what my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) has suggested as a model for competition? Competition itself does require to be amended.

[Damian Collins]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his question, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) made an excellent opening speech from the Back Benches. My concern is that in digital markets we have an imperfect market. We are at a point in time where the strategic nature of digital markets has developed to such an extent that people cannot not use these systems to reach their customers. For a business looking to sell online, yes, the world is its customer base, but it is using a relatively small number of tools to try to reach those customers, and those tools are controlled by a relatively small number of people. App-based businesses are selling through one of two operating systems. Someone buying ads is doing so largely from one of two companies that dominate the global market. If people are looking for cloud storage, they are probably buying it from Amazon or Google.

Booksellers are a good example. Many book publishers will say that, when they come to their contract renewal with a company such as Amazon, they can be offered very unfavourable terms, but such is the volume of their business that they put through that one retailer that, while in theory they could go elsewhere, in practice they cannot. No shareholder would understand why a business would just walk away from that particular market. In such situations, it is right that the regulator should have the power to say, “Are companies abusing their strategic market status? Is that leading to higher prices for consumers? Is that leading to unfair competition?”

Companies have been quick already to threaten denial of access to the market to people who challenge their status. The Australians have already created their news media bargaining code for the news industry, where the big Facebook-owned and Google-owned platforms have to pay compensation to the media industry for the distribution of its articles for free across their networks. That is now negotiated—there is a negotiation mechanism to make sure it happens. In response, Facebook threatened to withdraw news from the market. During a series of bushfires in Australia, Facebook cancelled all news distribution on its platforms. Such was the popular reaction, it withdrew and has now done these deals, but they would not have been done without the requirement for final agreement and independent arbitration. A book retailer cannot not do a deal with Amazon.

In terms of big app developers, there was a company called Vine. Many Members may be old enough to remember that app. Vine was a popular short-form video app, largely built on the back of the Facebook operating system and the Facebook Graph API. Facebook decided arbitrarily that Vine was requiring too much Facebook user data, and therefore might be a threat to Facebook itself, so it claimed Vine was in breach of its data policies and just kicked it off the platform. It did that for competitive reasons. In these digital markets, we see companies following an aggressive strategy. Where they see competitors, they look either to acquire them or to deny them access to the market and close them down. This is not unlike the debate that was had more than a century ago, particularly in America around the railways.

There was the big test case that President Theodore Roosevelt had against JP Morgan over his railway monopoly. We can imagine lobbyists for Morgan saying, “We may have a monopoly in the rail market, but the price is quite cheap. People do not spend very long on the trains, and you can always walk or use a horse and cart. It doesn’t really matter that we have this monopoly, because people can choose to travel in other ways.” Of course, Morgan’s railway monopoly gave him massive powers of self-preferencing when it came to moving coal and steel around and denying others access to the market. It gave him massive market power and the monopoly was broken up for that reason.

We should be concerned that, if we allow the major tech platforms to control access to the market and people’s ability to trade, that will lead to a constrained market and higher prices. The tech sector is looking to develop more all-encompassing systems, such as the metaverse for Meta, where people will have a VR experience where they can buy and sell and do everything, and we see smart devices now playing an increasingly central part in almost every service that we access. The amount we are charged to access those services and the ability to access that market are extremely important for having competitive markets in the future. That is why I think these elements are important.

In finishing, I will talk a bit about the news industry. We see how these new marketplaces are changing the distribution of traditional products so much that their business model may completely collapse. The collapse of regional journalism is because of the massive disruption of the localised ad market. It has taken advertising out of those products. It is not just transferred online; it is transferred to completely different methods of distribution.

Now, that is market economics. That is changing consumer behaviour and businesses must adapt to that. If a news publisher is being told, “Your product can be distributed for free through our systems,” but you get more ad money in the long run if you do not. The distributor collects the advertising revenue and the data, and the publisher benefits little. If the product is being used to attract users to the platform, but the platform monetises it and the publisher does not, that is an unfair and unbalanced level of competition that could have significant detriment in other areas. If journalism is hollowed out because it cannot access the market fairly for its products and services, journalism will die, and democracy and society will be the loser as a consequence.

We want competition to flourish. We want competition to be the best guarantee of high standards and lower prices, but we must recognise that digital markets involve a series of markets in which companies are not really competing against each other, because they create controlled monopolies or business environments with very limited access to competition. If we allow that to continue unchecked, it will be to the detriment of us all in the long run. That is why I welcome the Bill.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Artificial Intelligence and the Labour Market

Damian Collins Excerpts

Wednesday 26th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship this afternoon, Dame Maria, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley), both on securing this very important debate and on his excellent speech.

Artificial intelligence is an enabling technology. It is driving the digital age, but it is based on a series of points of data that are gathered by computer systems and processed in order to make decisions. It still requires a huge amount of human intervention in determining what data will be drawn on and therefore what decisions should be made. Consequently, there has to be a level of human responsibility, as well.

We can see already from the development of AI that it is not just question of computer systems learning from existing patterns of behaviour; they are also effectively thinking for themselves. The development of AI in chess is a good example of that. Not only are AI systems learning to make the moves that a human would make, always selecting the perfect combination and, therefore, being much more successful. When given the command to win the game, AI systems have also developed ways of playing that are unique, that the human mind has not thought of or popularised, and that are yet more efficient at winning. That is very interesting for those interested in chess. Perhaps not everyone is interested in chess, but that shows the power of AI to make autonomous decisions, based on data and information it is given. Humans invented the game of chess, but AI can learn to play it in ways not thought of by humans.

The application of AI in the defence space is even more scary, as touched on by the hon. Member for Birkenhead. AI-enabled weapons systems can be aggressive, make decisions quickly and behave in unpredictable ways. The human strategist is not able to keep pace with them and we would require AI-driven defence systems to protect ourselves from them. It would be alarming to live in a world where aggressive technology driven by AI can be combatted only by AI, with no human intervention in the process. It is scary to think of a security situation, like the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s, where the strategies are pursued solely by AI. Therefore, we will have to think as we do in other areas of warfare, where we have bans on certain types of chemical weapons. There are certain systems that are considered so potentially devastating that they will not be used—there are moratoriums on their use and deployment. When thinking about AI in the defence space, we may well have to consider what security to build into it as well. We also need to think about the responsibility of companies that develop AI systems just for their commercial interests. What responsibility lies on them for the systems that they have created?

The hon. Gentleman was right to say that this is like an industrial revolution. With industrial revolutions comes great change. People’s ways of living and working can be disrupted, and they are replaced by something new. We cannot yet say with certainty what that something new could be. There are concerns, which I will come to in a moment, about the regulation of AI. There could be amazing opportunities, too. One can imagine working or classroom environments where children could visit historical events. I asked someone who works in education development how long it could take before children studying the second world war could put on a headset, sit in a virtual House of Commons and watch Winston Churchill deliver one of his famous speeches, as if they were actually sitting there. We are talking about that sort of technology being possible within the next decade.

The applications for learning are immense. Astronauts who practise going to the international space station do so from metaverse-style, AI-driven virtual spaces, where they can train. At the same time as we think about the good things that it can do, we should also consider the fact that very bad spaces could be created. In our debates on the Online Safety Bill, we have been concerned about abusive online behaviour. What if such abusive behaviour took place in a video chatroom, a virtual space, that looks just as real as this room? Who would be responsible for that?

It is beholden on the companies that develop these new technologies and systems to have responsibility for the output of those systems. The onus should be on the companies to demonstrate that what they are developing is safe. That is why my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer was right to set out in the Budget statement last year that the Government would fund a new AI sandbox. We have seen AI sandboxes developed in the EU. In Washington state in the United States, AI sandboxes are used to research new facial recognition technologies, which is particularly sensitive. The onus should be on the developer. The role of the regulator should be to say, “There are certain guidelines you work within, and certain things we might consider unsafe or unethical. You develop your technologies and new systems and put them through a sandbox trial. You make it easy for the regulator to ask about the data you are drawing from, the decisions the system you have put in place is making, the outcomes it is creating and whether they are safe.”

We have already seen that learned behaviour through data can create unfair biases in systems. There was a case where Amazon used AI to sift through CVs for recruitment. The AI learned that it was largely men hired for the roles, and therefore discarded the CVs of women applying for the position because it assumed they would not be qualified. We should be concerned about biases built into data systems being exacerbated by AI.

Some people talk about AI as if it is a future technology—something coming—but it exists today. Every one of us experiences or interacts with AI in some way. The most obvious way for a lot of people is through the use of apps. The business model of social media apps is driven by recommendation, which is an AI-driven system. The system—Facebook, TikTok, Instagram or whatever it is—is data profiling the user and recommending content to keep them engaged, based on data, and it is AI driving those recommendation tools.

We have to be concerned about whether those systems create unfair practices and behaviours in the workplace. That is why the hon. Member for Birkenhead is right to raise this issue. If a gig economy worker—a taxi driver or a delivery courier—is paid only when they are in receipt of jobs on the app, does the app create a false incentive for them to be available for work all the time? Do they have to commit to being available to the app for most of the day, because if they do not it drives the work to people who have high recommendation scores because they are always available? Do people who cannot make themselves available all the time find that the amount they can earn is much less, if they do not get paid for waiting time when they use such apps? If that becomes the principal way in which a lot of tasks are driven, AI systems, which are built to be efficient and make it easy for people to access the labour market, could create biases that favour some workers over others. People with other jobs or family commitment, in particular, might not be able to make themselves available.

We should consider not just the way the technology works but the rights that citizens and workers have if their job is based on using those apps. The employer—the app developer—should treat the people who work for them as employees, rather than as just freelance agency workers who happen to be available at any particular time of the day. They have some sort of working relationship that should be honoured and respected.

The basic principle that we should apply when we think about the future of AI and its enormous potential to create growth and new jobs, and build fantastic new businesses, is that the rights that people enjoy today—their rights as citizens and employees—should be translated into the future world of technology. A worker should not lose their working rights simply because their relationship with their employer or their customer is through an app, and because that experience is shaped by the collection and processing of data. Ultimately, someone is doing that processing, and someone has created that system in order to make money from it. The people doing that need to be responsible for the technology they have created.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship this afternoon, Dame Maria, and to take part in this particularly timely debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) on securing it.

I begin by declaring a rather tenuous interest—a constituency interest of sorts—regarding the computing pioneer Alan Turing. The Turing family held the baronetcy of Foveran, which is a parish in my constituency between the north of Aberdeen and Ellon. Although there is no evidence that Alan Turing ever actually visited, it is a connection that the area clings to as fastly as it can.

Alan Turing, of course, developed what we now know as the Turing test—a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. One of the developments to come closest to that in recent times is, of course, ChatGPT, which several speakers have mentioned already. It is a natural-language processing tool driven by AI technology, which has the ability to generate text and interact with humans.

The hon. Member for Birkenhead was a bit braver than I was; I only toyed with the idea of using ChatGPT to produce some of my speech today. However, I was put off somewhat by a very good friend of mine, with an IT background, using the ChatGPT interface to produce a biography of me. He then shared it with his friendship group on Facebook.

I think it is fair to say that it shows up clearly that if ChatGPT does not know the answer to something, it will fill the gap by making up something that it thinks will sound plausible. In that sense, it is maybe no different from your average Cabinet Minister. However, that does mean that, in subject areas where the data on which it is drawing is rather scant, things can get quite interesting and inventive.

[Damian Collins]

The hon. Gentleman makes an incredibly important point. When AI systems such as that are asked questions that they do not know, rather than responding, “I don’t know,” they just make something up. A human is therefore required to understand whether what they are being showed is correct. The hon. Gentleman knows his own biography better than ChatGPT does, but someone else may not.

[Richard Thomson]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. He has perhaps read ahead towards the conclusion of my speech, but it is an interesting dichotomy. Obviously, I know my biography best, but there are people out there, not in the AI world—Wikipedia editors, for example—who think that they know my biography better than I do in some respects.

However, to give the example, the biography generated by AI said that I had been a director at the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, and, prior to that, I had been a senior manager at the National Trust for Scotland. I had also apparently served in the Royal Air Force. None of that is true, but, on one level, it does make me want to meet this other Richard Thomson who exists out there. He has clearly had a far more interesting life than I have had to date.

Although that level of misinformation is relatively benign, it does show the dangers that can be presented by the manipulation of the information space, and I think that the increasing use and application of AI raises some significant and challenging ethical questions.

Any computing system is based on the premise of input, process and output. Therefore, great confidence is needed when it comes to the quality of information that goes in—on which the outputs are based—as well as the algorithms used to extrapolate from that information to create the output, the purpose for which the output is then used, the impact it goes on to have, and, indeed, the level of human oversight at the end.

In March, Goldman Sachs published a report indicating that AI could replace up to 300 million full-time equivalent jobs and a quarter of all the work tasks in the US and Europe. It found that some 46% of administrative tasks and even 44% in the legal professions could be automated. GPT-4 recently managed to pass the US Bar exam, which is perhaps less a sign of machine intelligence than of the fact that the US Bar exam is not a fantastic test of AI capabilities—although I am sure it is a fantastic test of lawyers in the States.

Our fear of disruptive technologies is age-old. Although it is true to say that generally what we have seen from that disruption is the creation of new jobs and the ability to allow new technologies to take on more laborious and repetitive tasks, it is still extremely disruptive. Some 60% of workers are currently in occupations that did not exist in 1940, but there is still a real danger, as there has been with other technologies, that AI depresses wages and displaces people faster than any new jobs can be created. That ought to be of real concern to us.

In terms of ethical considerations, there are large questions to be asked about the provenance of datasets and the output to which they can lead. As The Guardian reported recently:

“The…datasets used to train the latest generation of these AI systems, like those behind ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, are likely to contain billions of images scraped from the internet, millions of pirated ebooks”

as well as all sorts of content created by others, who do not get reward for its use; the entire proceedings of 16 years of the European Parliament; or even the entirety of the proceedings that have ever taken place, and been recorded and digitised, in this place. The datasets can be drawn from a range of sources and they do not necessarily lead to balanced outputs.

ChatGPT has been banned from operating in Italy after the data protection regulator there expressed concerns that there was no legal basis to justify the collection and mass storage of the personal data needed to train GPT AI. Earlier this month, the Canadian privacy commissioner followed, with an investigation into OpenAI in response to a complaint that alleged that the collection, use and disclosure of personal information was happening without consent.

This technology brings huge ethical issues not just in the workplace but right across society, but questions need to be asked particularly when it comes to the workplace. For example, does it entrench existing inequalities? Does it create new inequalities? Does it treat people fairly? Does it respect the individual and their privacy? Is it used in a way that makes people more productive by helping them to be better at their jobs and work smarter, rather than simply forcing them—notionally, at least—to work harder? How can we be assured that at the end of it, a sentient, qualified, empowered person has proper oversight of the use to which the AI processes are being put? Finally, how can it be regulated as it needs to be—beneficially, in the interests of all?

The hon. Member for Birkenhead spoke about and distributed the TUC document “Dignity at work and the AI revolution”, which, from the short amount of time I have had to scrutinise it, looks like an excellent publication. There is certainly nothing in its recommendations that anyone should not be able to endorse when the time comes.

I conclude on a general point: as processes get smarter, we collectively need to make sure that, as a species, we do not consequentially get dumber. Advances in artificial intelligence and information processing do not take away the need for people to be able to process, understand, analyse and critically evaluate information for themselves.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I have not actually posed that question, but perhaps I could later.

This is an important debate, and it is important that we look at the issue strategically. The Government and the Labour party probably have different approaches: the Labour party’s natural position on this kind of stuff is to regulate everything as much as possible, whereas we believe that free markets have had a tremendous effect on people’s lives right across the planet. Whether we look at education, tackling poverty or child mortality, many of the benefits in our society over the last 100 years have been delivered through the free market.

Our natural inclination is to support innovation but to be careful about its introduction and to look to mitigate any of its damaging effects, and that is what is set out in the national AI strategy. As we have seen, it has AI potential to become one of the most significant innovations in history—a technology like the steam engine, electricity or the internet. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) said exactly that: this is like a new industrial revolution, and I think it is a very exciting opportunity for the future. However, we also have key concerns, which have been highlighted by hon. Members today. Although the Government believe in the growth potential of these technologies, we also want to be clear that growth cannot come at the expense of the rights and protections of working people.

Only now, as the technology rapidly improves, are most of us beginning to understand the transformative potential of AI. However, the technology is already delivering fantastic social and economic benefits for real people. The UK’s tech sector is home to a third of Europe’s AI companies, and the UK AI sector is worth more than £15.6 billion. The UK is third in the world for AI investment, behind the US and China, and attracts twice as much venture capital investment as France and Germany combined. As impressive as they are, those statistics should be put into the context of the sector’s growth potential. Recent research predicts that the use of AI by UK businesses will more than double in the next 20 years, with more than 1.3 million UK businesses using AI by 2040.

The Government have been supporting the ethical adoption of AI technologies, with more than £2.5 billion of investment since 2015. We recently announced £100 million for the Foundation Models Taskforce to help build and adopt the next generation of safe AI, £110 million for our AI tech missions fund and £900 million to establish new supercomputer capabilities. These exascale computers were mentioned in the Budget by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor. These developments have incredible potential to bring forward new forms of clean energy, and indeed new materials that can deliver that clean energy, and to accelerate things such as medical treatment. There are exciting opportunities ahead.

If we want to become an AI superpower, it is crucial that we do all we can to create the right environment to harness the benefits of AI and remain at the forefront of technological developments. Our approach, laid out in the AI White Paper, is designed to be flexible. We are ensuring that we have a proportionate, pro-innovation regulatory regime for AI in the UK, which will build on the existing expertise of our world-leading sectoral regulators.

Our regulatory regime will function by articulating five key principles, which are absolutely key to this debate and tackle many of the points that have been made by hon. Members across the Chamber. Regulators should follow these five principles when regulating AI in their sectors: safety, security and robustness; transparency and explainability; fairness; accountability and governance; and contestability and redress. That feeds into the important points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell), who held this ministerial position immediately prior to myself, about deception, scams and fraud. We can all see the potential for that, of course.

Clearly, right across the piece, we have regulators with responsibility in those five areas. Those regulators are there to regulate bona fide companies, which should do the right thing, although we have to make sure that they do. For instance, if somebody held a database with inappropriate data on it, the Information Commissioner’s Office could easily look at that, and it has significant financial penalties at its disposal, such as 4% of global turnover or a £17 million fine. My hon. Friend the Member for Watford made a plea for a Turing clause, which I am, of course, very happy to look at. I think he was referring to organisations that might not be bona fide, and might actually be looking to undertake nefarious activities in this area. I do not think we can regulate those people very effectively, because they are not going to comply with anybody’s regulations. The only way to deal with those people is to find them, catch them, prosecute them and lock them up.

[Damian Collins]

The Minister talks about safety, but does he agree that that has to be safety by design, and not just having response mechanisms built into the system so that a victim can appeal? I know he has looked at fraud a lot in the past, and there is a presumption that all will be done to combat fraud at its known source, rather than just providing redress to victims.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

That is absolutely right. We will not deal with everything in the world of AI in this respect, but there needs to be overarching responsibility for preventing fraud. That is something we have committed to bringing forward in another legislative vehicle—the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, which is passing through Parliament now—but I agree with my hon. Friend that there should be a responsibility on organisations to prevent fraud and not simply deal with the after-effects.

Our proposed framework is aligned with and supplemented by a variety of tools for trustworthy AI, such as assurance techniques, voluntary guidance and technical standards. The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation published its AI assurance road map in December 2021, and the AI Standards Hub—a world-leading collaboration led by the Alan Turing Institute with the National Physical Laboratory and the British Standards Institution—launched last October. The hub is intended to provide a co-ordinated contribution to standards development on issues such as transparency, security and uncertainty, with a view to helping organisations to demonstrate that AI is used safely and responsibly.

We are taking action to ensure that households, public services and businesses can trust this technology. Unless we build public trust, we will miss out on many of the benefits on offer. The reality is that AI, as with other general-purpose technologies, has the potential to be a net creator of jobs. I fully understand the points raised by the hon. Member for Birkenhead—of course, we do not want to see swathes of people put out of work because of this technology. I hasten to add that that has never been the case with other technologies. There have been many concerns over the ages about how new technologies will affect jobs, but they tend to create other jobs in different sectors. The World Economic Forum estimates that robotics, automation and artificial intelligence will displace 85 million jobs globally by 2025, but create 97 million new jobs in different sectors, which I will discuss in a second. I think the hon. Member for Birkenhead asked in his speech whether I would be willing to meet him to discuss these points; I am always very happy to do that, if we can convene at another time.

The hon. Member also raised the point about how AI in the workplace has the potential to liberate the workforce from monotonous tasks such as inputting data or scanning through documents for a single piece of information. I will address the bigger concerns he has around that, but in the public sector it would leave teachers with more time to teach, clinicians with more time to spend with patients and police officers with more time on the beat, rather than being behind a desk.

As was raised in a salient point by my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe, AI also has tremendous potential in defence and national security. That is absolutely critical. It was interesting that leading people in the world of technology, led by Elon Musk, recently wrote a letter asking for a six-month pause while we look at how we can properly moderate the impacts of AI. I am not sure that that is a good idea, because I am not sure China and Russia would play that game. It is important that we stay ahead of the curve, for exactly the reasons pointed out by my hon. Friend.

[Damian Collins]

The Minister is exactly right. That initiative also suggests that AI is not yet here but, actually, the issues we have discussed today exist already. We can look at them already; we do not need a six-month pause to do that.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

That is absolutely right. There is an opportunity but also a potential threat. It is important that we continue to invest, and it is great that the UK is ahead of the game in its investment, behind only the US and China, which are obviously much bigger economies.

The key thing is that we take action on skills, skilling up our workforce in the UK to take advantage of the potential of AI. Clearly, a good computing education is at the heart of that. We have overhauled the outdated information and communications technology curriculum and replaced it with computing, and invested £84 million in the National Centre for Computing Education to inspire the next generation of computer scientists. Our national skills fund offers to do just that, with free level 3 qualifications for adults and skills bootcamps in digital courses, including coding, AI and cyber-security, available across England.

On that point, as well as the opportunities in AI, we need to look at the new opportunities in the new economy. Some jobs will be displaced, so we need to ensure that we are skilling up our workforce for other opportunities in our new economy, be it data science or green jobs with the green jobs taskforce. Recently, in Hull, there were 3,000 new jobs in the wind turbine sector with a starting salary of £32,000, which illustrates the potential for green jobs in our economy. So although jobs might be displaced, others, hopefully better-paid jobs will replace them. We want a higher-wage, higher-skilled economy.

The Government are also supporting 16 centres for doctoral training, backed by an initial £100 million, delivering 1,000 PhDs. We expanded that programme with a further £117 million at the recent launch of the Government’s science and technology framework. Last year, we invested an additional £17 million in AI and data science postgraduate conversion courses and scholarships to increase the diversity of the tech workforce, on top of the £13 million that has been invested in the programme since 2019-20. We also invested £46 million to support the Turing AI fellowships to attract the best and brightest AI talent to work in the UK.

The point about protections for workers’ rights was raised by many Members in the debate, not least the hon. Members for Gordon (Richard Thomson) and for Birkenhead; the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders); and my hon. Friends the Members for Folkestone and Hythe and for Watford. It is important to see the Government’s position on workers’ rights here. We are bolstering workers’ rights, raising the national living wage, with the highest increase on record—a near 10% increase—and six private Members’ Bills that increase workers’ rights, including on flexible working and other issues. There is also the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Bill, which is the favourite Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Watford, who was its sponsor prior to becoming the Minister.

On the concerns many raised about workplace monitoring, we are committed to protecting workers. A number of laws are already in place that apply to the use of AI and data-driven technology in the workplace, including in decision making, which was raised by the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston. The Equality Act 2010 already requires employers and service providers not to discriminate against employees, job applicants and customers. That includes discrimination through actions taken as a result of an algorithm or a similar artificial intelligence mechanism. Tackling discrimination in AI is a major strand of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s three-year strategy. Existing data protection legislation protects workers where personal data is involved, and that is one aspect of existing regulation on the development of AI systems and other technologies.

Reforms as part of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill will cast article 22 of the UK GDPR as a right to specific safeguards, rather than as a general prohibition on solely automated decision making. These rights ensure that data subjects are informed about, and can seek human review of, significant decisions that are taken about them solely through automated means, which was a point raised by the shadow Minister. Employment law also offers protections. The Employment Rights Act 1996 provides that employees with two years of continuous service are protected from unfair dismissal, which would encompass circumstances where employees’ article 8 and UK GDPR rights have been breached in the algorithm decision-making process that led to the dismissal.

Of course, all good employers—by their very nature—should use human judgment. The best way we can help employers in any workplace is to have a strong jobs market where employers have to compete for employees. That is the kind of market we have delivered in this economy, despite some of the difficulties that surround it.

I once again thank the hon. Member for Birkenhead for tabling this timely and important debate. To be clear again, we have a strong ambition for the UK to become a science and technology superpower, and AI is a key part of that. However, the Government recognise the concerns around these technologies and appreciate that, as with all new technologies, trust has to be built. We will continue to build our understanding of how the employment rights framework operates in an era of increasing AI use. AI has the potential to make an incredibly positive contribution to creating a high-wage, high-skill and high-productivity economy. I very much look forward to seeing the further benefits as matters progress.