AI, Screen Usage and Social Media: Effect on Children: Lord C-J We Need Safety By Design
On 22 October 2026 the House of Lords debated a motion put foreard by Lord Patel on the effect of artificial intelligence, screen use and social media on children. This is an edited version of my closing speech for the Liberal Democrats.
For years I have asked whether AI and digital technology will be our servant or our master. When it comes to children, that question has a sharper edge. Is this technology serving childhood, or are our children being shaped to serve a business model built on attention?
The debate is no longer about whether to act. It is about whether what we do is well designed, grounded in evidence and able to keep pace with AI. At its heart is one principle: safety by design. The question is not only which children we keep off which platforms, but whether the products themselves are built with children's wellbeing in mind.
What the evidence tells us
Two briefings published in August by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) show the scale of the issue. By the age of two, 98% of children use screens on a typical day, and 97% of 13 to 17 year-olds have a social media or messaging profile. Some harms are found consistently: disrupted sleep, sedentary behaviour, obesity and short-sightedness. The security services have also warned of children being drawn into extremism online.
But POST is equally clear that most studies take a snapshot at a single point in time. They show a link, not cause and effect. That points us to where the harm really lies: not just in the content, but in the functionality of the product. Infinite scroll, autoplay, streaks, and recommender systems tuned to maximise engagement rather than wellbeing all work on the reward systems of developing brains.
These are deliberate design choices, and they can be designed differently. A ban asks children to stay away from unsafe products; safety by design requires companies to stop building them.
We should not forget the benefits either. Technology can transform learning for children with dyslexia and other special needs, connect families across continents, and open up education to children whose families could never afford private tuition. The OxWell survey found that one in eight students use social media for mental health support, rising to around a quarter among some of the most vulnerable groups.
Why a blunt ban is not enough
Australia banned social media for under-16s in December 2025. Its early evaluation found a fall in accounts on restricted platforms, but many children had kept access. A blunt instrument can miss its target and hurt the very children it is meant to protect.
We should listen to the children's charities. The NSPCC has warned that a complex problem needs more than a blanket solution. The risk is that children are pushed through VPNs into less regulated spaces, where they are harder to protect, and then meet the full force of the most addictive features the day they turn 16. The Government recognise that cliff edge for 16 and 17 year-olds. The same thinking should apply to younger children too, because many will get round the ban or use services it does not cover, and safer design is what protects them there.
That is why the Liberal Democrats have argued for film-style age ratings for social media. Platforms with harmful content or addictive algorithmic feeds would be rated 16-plus, and extreme content 18-plus, while educational sites and family messaging stay open. No child should be barred from Wikipedia for their homework or from the family WhatsApp group. We have also called for health warnings on apps and a cap on doomscrolling.
The Government's package reflects some of the thinking behind our approach: targeting harmful features rather than screens alone, and safer defaults for 16 and 17 year-olds. They have chosen a blanket ban where we would have preferred ratings. But a ratings approach should still shape how the ban is defined and enforced, so that it is the riskiest services that are caught.
AI: the next frontier
I fear that AI will be the next frontier of this debate, long after a social media ban has bedded in, and we need to act now. Ofcom has said plainly that chatbots are not regulated at all where users interact only with the bot, and that extending its powers is a matter for Government and Parliament. The Online Safety Act regulates services, not technology, and generative AI exposes that gap.
The Government's response is welcome but too narrow. Illegal content duties and an age limit on romantic companion bots leave untouched the sycophancy, emotional dependency and manipulative design of general-purpose chatbots, which children increasingly treat as friends, tutors and confidants. POST also notes potential risks to attention, language development and independent thinking. AI should strengthen children's thinking, not substitute for it.
These are design choices too. A chatbot that flatters, never ends a conversation and presents itself as a friend has been built that way. That is why we need default design duties for chatbots, not just illegal content duties.
What we need
I propose four steps.
- Adopt the recommendations of Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights in its recent report on AI, including mandatory children's algorithmic impact assessments before AI products likely to be used by children are deployed.
- A statutory children and AI design code, building on the Age Appropriate Design Code.
- Human-in-command standards for AI in schools and edtech, so that AI supports teachers rather than replacing them. Daniel Susskind's recent book What Should My Children Do?, and the work of Sir Anthony Seldon and Michael Stevenson at Wellington College on human flourishing in education, point the way.
- Age assurance that protects privacy and is built on open standards.
Education matters as much as regulation. We must guard against cognitive offloading, where students hand their thinking over to AI, particularly in higher education. The aim should be to teach young people to use AI tools well while keeping the critical thinking that comes only from doing the work themselves.
Questions for the Government
I put six questions to the Minister.
- Scrutiny. Will the regulations implementing the ban be made by affirmative procedure, with a draft published for consultation, and will the end-of-year timetable hold?
- Scope. Which services are in and which are out? YouTube disputes that it is social media, and WhatsApp sits outside the ban. Will there be an independent, risk-based rating mechanism rather than a ministerial list?
- Age assurance. How will privacy be protected, and how will VPN circumvention be handled? The Government said they would legislate for device-level age verification if their recommendations were not adopted by September. That deadline has passed, so is legislation now coming?
- Design duties. Will the regulations and Ofcom's codes impose positive design duties, so that services likely to be used by children are safe by design, as the Online Safety Act's own objectives require?
- Inclusion and literacy. What will be done on digital inclusion and media literacy? The new RSHE guidance taught from this September covers online misogyny, AI and deepfakes, so what support will teachers get to deliver it with confidence?
- Evaluation. Will independent evaluation be built in from day one?
In reply, the Minister confirmed that the first regulations will be laid before the end of the year, with restrictions in force from spring 2027. She also announced a ban on chatbots offering sexualised content to under-18s and mandatory breaks in chatbot use. Those steps are welcome, but the questions of scope, scrutiny and design duties remain open.
A culture of safety
Childhood should not be a product optimised for engagement. Our aim is not simply to keep children out of the digital world, but to require that it is built safe for them from the start: technology that serves childhood rather than dominates it.
Four years ago, the AI expert Stuart Russell warned in a lecture in Parliament that the AI industry was essentially unregulated. We should heed him. We need a culture of safety, and we need regulation to back it up.
From Skills to Impact – Assessing, Showcasing and Shaping a Future-Ready Graduate Profile
I recently delivered my inaugutal lecture as Hon Professor of Practice. in thr School of Society and Environment at Queen Mary University of London. This is what i said
Good evening. It is a particular pleasure to be back at Queen Mary addressing what has become the defining challenge for higher education: how we prepare the workforce not just for AI-augmented work, but for a fundamentally transformed professional landscape. And can I take the opportunity at the same time to congratulate Queen Mary on its excellent showing in the Times Higher Global Rankings, particularly its 32nd place in research quality!
The question I explore throughout my book Living with the Algorithm - my attempt to make sense of AI governance and policy for a non-specialist audience - is whether artificial intelligence becomes our servant or our master. That question is nowhere more in need of resolution than in its consequences for the people sitting in our lecture theatres today.
It is a question others are asking too, at the very highest level. Only a few weeks ago, addressing the AI Summit in Scotland, echoing the Pope’s recent encyclical the King put it in his own words: that our task is to ensure AI "remains firmly in the service of humanity" - and that is exactly what is needed-not only intellectual excellence but as he said "the emotional excellence which separates man from machine."
When I chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on AI in 2017-18, we concluded that the UK had a unique opportunity to shape AI for public benefit. More recently, I co-chaired Policy Connect's inquiry into "Skills in the Age of AI," which concluded last year after nine months of evidence from business, academia, and citizens themselves. What emerged reinforced for me both the urgency and the complexity of what we are discussing today.
And we now have important new data on the scale of that urgency. The third HEPI Student Generative AI Survey found that 95% of students report using AI in at least one way, and 94% say they use generative AI specifically to help with assessed work.
This is no longer a technology on the horizon. It is operating at the heart of the student experience, in this institution and every other. Any response that still treats this as something to be planned for has already been overtaken by events.
The Government's New Framework: Promise and Limitations
The Skills England report published last October represents genuine progress. I welcome it. It identifies critical shortages - 7.3 million employed adults lacking essential digital skills, projected to become the UK's largest deficit by 2030 - and rightly calls for "blended" professionals who combine technical knowledge with leadership and communication.
But to welcome it is not to regard it as sufficient. The report operates within the paradigm of skills acquisition - teaching people to use AI tools more effectively within existing frameworks. It does not address the structural transformation AI is driving, or grapple with how we develop system-level capabilities when the very ease of AI threatens to erode the critical thinking that underpins them.
The Employer Perspective: What's Actually Valued
Recent research from Kingston University provides stark evidence of the gap between what employers need and what graduates provide. Their latest Future Skills report reveals that 56% of businesses are now likely to consider skills-based recruitment - a fundamental shift from credential-based to capability-based hiring. Kingston identified nine core future skills employers value, from creative problem-solving to a questioning mindset to resilience. Notice what dominates that list: digital competency is one of nine. The rest are adaptive capabilities.
The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs Report identifies analytical thinking, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility as its top skills. Yet Kingston's research reveals a concerning disconnect: only 23% of UK businesses anticipate AI will fundamentally change their business model in the next five years, compared with East Asian nations treating this as a top strategic priority. On this measure, the UK risks lagging behind.
The Friction Paradox: Why Ease Threatens Capability
Here is the challenge that I find most striking, and most underappreciated. The emerging evidence is that AI's ease may be undermining the very critical thinking we are trying to develop.
The cognitive psychologist Ronald Kellogg spent years studying how people write before concluding that drafting a basic persuasive essay is as mentally taxing as digging a ditch is physically exhausting. I thought this audience would appreciate that analogy!
That difficulty is not incidental - it is the mechanism by which writing works. Kellogg's own phrase for it is one I want to leave with you this evening: writing is a technology for thinking. Any tool that removes the effort risks removing the thinking along with it.
Daniel Susskind's excellent new book What Should My Children Do? is, by design, an optimistic one: he wants us to prepare children for the world they will actually inhabit - the water, as he puts it, in which the next generation will swim - and he is confident that personalised AI tutors and a reorganised curriculum can help them flourish in it.
But he is not naïve about the discipline required. If AI makes education too easy, he argues, the burden shifts to us to make it more testing - to push young people on and stretch them - and he insists that we use AI critically rather than blindly, keeping our basic skills sharp. Where we differ is in emphasis. His optimism is about the destination; mine is about the discipline needed to reach it safely.
A 2025 study found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI use and critical-thinking performance, especially among younger users - the mechanism researchers call "cognitive offloading": when AI provides effortless answers, users stop doing the evaluative reasoning that builds judgment. This connects to Daniel Kahneman's framework of thinking fast and slow. AI encourages System 1 thinking - fast, fluent, and instinctively trusted - while genuine learning requires the slower, effortful System 2 engagement that questions assumptions. Productive friction is not pedagogical stubbornness; it is the necessary intervention that forces that engagement.
It is striking that Joseph Stiglitz has recently drawn a very similar distinction from an entirely different direction. He separates what he calls AI from what he prefers to call IA - intelligence assisting - reaching for the same analogy scientists have long used for the microscope and the telescope: instruments that extend what we can see without ever doing the seeing for us. In his own research, Stiglitz is emphatic that AI is "not a substitute for thinking."
An MIT Media Lab experiment found that students who relied on ChatGPT performed worse, remembered less, and were less cognitively engaged than peers who wrote without AI - recording lower brain activity, struggling to recall what they had written, and reporting little sense of ownership over the work.
Compelling corroboration has emerged partly here at Queen Mary, where researchers studying medical students' diagnostic decisions found that those using AI alone scored lowest - yet were the most confident, despite being the least skilled. One researcher likened it to giving learners a powerful sports car before they have learned to drive. The lesson is unambiguous: AI is transformative only when used at the right time, with the right training, and under strong governance.
A large-scale study of 26,811 pupils in China, cited in a major new UK report on AI in education published last month, found the same pattern at national scale: AI tools raised homework scores by 18%, while performance on unassisted exams fell by 20%. The help is real. So, unmistakably, is the cost.
Beyond Skills to Readiness
Our Policy Connect inquiry revealed a troubling gap. Despite massive investment in AI training, a 2024 survey found only 21% of workers feel "very confident" integrating AI into their workflows, and McKinsey found that while 89% of organisations use AI, only 9% have achieved "AI maturity." The HEPI survey makes the institutional dimension concrete: while 68% of students believe generative AI skills are essential, fewer than half feel their teaching staff are helping them develop those skills - a twenty-point gap that is widest among Arts and Humanities students, the cohort most exposed to AI's disruptive effects and least likely to feel prepared for what is coming.
Three Emerging Patterns
Research from the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE) identifies three patterns defining graduates' trajectories. The first is Mass Displacement - roles built around execution being steadily automated. It often begins quietly, with shrinking scope and fewer chances to grow, and it is gradual until it becomes sudden. Entry-level graduate roles are among the first places it shows: a 2025 Harvard study found sharp declines in junior-level hiring while senior hiring remained flat, and the National Foundation for Educational Research projects up to three million UK jobs in declining occupations could disappear by 2035.
This is not speculative; it is measurable, happening now - and increasingly, the remaining positions are filtered by AI recruitment systems before a human ever sees the application: so ironically we are preparing students for careers where AI decides if they are qualified to work with AI.
The second pattern is the Supercharged Professional - individuals achieving ten to a hundred times their previous output, restructuring how they work rather than merely learning new tools.
The third is the Creative Disruptor, building entirely new systems.
None of this is predetermined. Displacement is not inevitable - but it is where we will end up if nobody acts. And I would argue that universities are where that action must begin.
The Performance Hexagon
CFTE describes five patterns of contribution, which it calls the Performance Hexagon. I will focus on the top four. Task Robots do the job reliably, as instructed. Problem Solvers work things out for themselves. System Thinkers design structures that solve whole categories of problems. Superstars spot opportunities that no one has pointed out. I should emphasise that these are patterns, not labels - the same person can be a Problem Solver in one job and a Task Robot in another.
Now add AI. At the lower levels, where work is routine, AI replaces. From Problem Solver upwards, it amplifies. CFTE's point is that learning to use AI tools only moves you faster along the same line. What protects you is moving up. So the question for us is whether we are preparing graduates to climb - to build the questioning mindset and adaptability that separate those who are supercharged from those who are displaced. That is the gap our universities must fill.
Hard Hats and Graduation Caps
I want to address one further strand of the current policy conversation, because Queen Mary sits in an unusually good position to tackle it. The new Prime Minister has made technical education a defining project of his government, telling students this summer that Britain will now "value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap." I welcome the underlying instinct - Alan Milburn's warning of a generation being left behind is a genuine crisis, and Queen Mary's own substantial investment in graduate and degree apprenticeships puts this institution ahead of most of the sector in taking that parity seriously in practice.
But I want to enter one note of caution about how that parity is being sold. Some of the enthusiasm for the hard hat rests on an assumption that trades are somehow AI-proof in a way graduate careers are not. I do not think that assumption will survive contact with the technology - AI-assisted diagnostics and scheduling tools are already moving into construction and skilled trades, just as equivalent tools are moving into law and journalism.
Writing recently, Graham Watts of the Construction Industry Council and Aled Williams of the University of the Built Environment make much the same point - that parity between technical and academic education is right, but it "cannot become a binary choice between the hard hat and the graduation cap," since the built environment needs people across a whole spectrum of blurring roles.
Mark Farmer of the Construction Leadership Council goes further: young people are already pivoting toward roles they perceive as "AI-proof" regardless of government messaging, but push the pendulum too far and apprenticeships themselves become oversubscribed relative to available jobs - with under 27% of plumbing apprenticeships even completed, and 700,000 graduates already jobless, neither pathway as currently designed is working well.
Daniel Susskind's book, What Should My Children Do?, offers a cautionary precedent for exactly this risk. He reminds us that the coalition government once rushed to put coding at the centre of the curriculum, confident it was future-proofing a generation. Coding turned out to be one of the things AI does best, and those skills were largely redundant before the children concerned had even left school. His conclusion is that we should resist the promise of "future-proofing" altogether, because we know too little about what lies ahead to bet a curriculum on any single skill. If a government could get this wrong once, with software, it can get it wrong again, with bricklaying or plumbing recast as this decade's safe bet.
The Prime Minister is right to elevate technical education. But respecting a path means teaching it as seriously as any other. If these new courses just teach tools, they'll have the same problem as universities — teaching people to use AI, not to think. What matters isn't the hat you're wearing. It's whether you've been taught to think, or just to follow instructions.
What Readiness Demands
The fundamental divide is who does the thinking. That is CFTE's phrase, and it sits at the heart of their argument: even a very good Task Robot has someone else doing the thinking for them, while Problem Solvers, System Thinkers and Superstars define the problem for themselves.
CFTE's answer is that future-ready people need three things, and I draw here on their three pillars. Domain expertise: the knowledge of how an industry actually functions — something AI cannot replace. Technology fluency: the ability to structure a workflow around AI and judge what it produces. And adaptive capability: the discipline to think clearly, solve problems independently, and operate without a script.
CFTE also notes something that should concern us here: some younger professionals are fluent with the tools but lack the domain expertise to judge what the tools produce. It echoes what the Queen Mary medical study found.
Deloitte found that 66% of managers believe recent hires are unprepared, identifying an "experience gap" larger than the skills gap: what is missing is judgment and contextual understanding, not technical knowledge. The World Economic Forum projects 44% of workers' core skills will change within five years. Technical skills alone provide insufficient protection.
The case for the value of a degree doesn't only come from universities. It comes from inside the technology industry too. Valerie Capers Workman, formerly vice-president of people at Tesla - working for one of technology's loudest sceptics of university education - has this year argued the opposite case: that a degree is more valuable today than ever, precisely because the ability to reason, question, and lead with humanity will be sought after in a way machines cannot replicate, singling out the liberal arts as an area of growing value.
But who does the thinking is not only a pedagogical question. It is a distributional one. Joseph Stiglitz has argued that AI risks becoming a textbook case of a general-purpose technology turbocharging inequality - stripping labour out of production, concentrating profits at the top, and pushing the costs of transition onto workers and the public. Graduates who leave with genuine judgment are better placed to sit on the right side of that divide than those who leave only with tool proficiency, however fluent. What we choose to teach is a matter of who, in a decade's time, has any bargaining power at all.
The Transformation Required
Our Policy Connect inquiry recommended making AI literacy mandatory in the National Curriculum. For universities, the implications are equally profound.
First, AI literacy must be embedded across all disciplines - a law graduate needs to understand algorithmic decision-making as thoroughly as a computer science graduate needs data protection, with assessments where students critique AI outputs and reconcile them with primary sources.
As the educator Nick Potkalitsky puts it, the goal is not teaching which button to press, but shifting from "does this sound right?" to "how would I check this?" - and that shift cannot be achieved through a single professional development session; it requires embedded practice and ongoing support.
Second, we must teach judgment. The Post Office Horizon scandal shows the catastrophic cost when professionals cannot challenge automated systems. Our graduates need to understand not just using AI in diagnosis, but ensuring accountability; not just deploying algorithms, but auditing them for bias.
Third, how we assess students must evolve. The HEPI survey found 65% of students say assessment has already changed significantly in response to AI, up from just 32% two years ago - a trajectory that will continue whether or not institutions shape it deliberately.
We do not have to invent this from scratch. The University of Sydney has adopted a two-lane approach: every discipline sets some assessments in person, with AI restricted, and others that require AI, so students demonstrate they can apply it well. That takes seriously both halves of what employers want - independent judgment and technological fluency - rather than treating them as a single sliding scale.
Looking at the history of the electronic calculator, Daniel Susskind arrives at a very similar prescription: neither ban these tools nor cling to inherited ways of working, but teach children to operate competently both with AI and without it, while doubling down on the basic skills that should never erode. A major new report last month, Sir Anthony Seldon and Tim Bunting's Britain's Greatest Education Opportunity Ever, goes further still, recommending that government adopt exactly this two-lane model nationally - reserving secure, supervised assessment for a small number of high-stakes moments, and opening the rest to AI-supported, continuous evaluation. That they have all arrived, from different starting points, at the same dual-track design, is about as strong a signal as we are likely to get that this is the right direction for the years ahead.
Enabling Structural Change
Skills England identifies that employers want "bolt-on" training - short, modular options rather than multi-year apprenticeships - which signals that current structures are too rigid. Proposals for lifelong skills grants, or replacing the apprenticeship levy with a more flexible skills and training levy, would fund exactly this. Our inquiry's recommendation to relaunch Local Digital Skills Partnerships - which, on a modest £75,000 per region, upskilled 12,000 workers and reduced digital exclusion by 18% - shows the model can work again.
Building Trust Through Transparency
Throughout my own work on AI regulation, I have argued that public trust is foundational to everything else. When our inquiry took evidence, only 33 public sector algorithmic tools had published transparency records. Today the government's own register lists 152, and I welcome that progress. But the standard is mandatory only for central government and its arm's-length bodies. Elsewhere it is voluntary, and take-up is thin: the register shows only about ten councils and two police forces. Progress, then - but not yet a foundation for trust.
This isn't just a design principle. It's a warning. Stiglitz points out that the same people pushing hardest for fast, unmanaged AI adoption are also campaigning to shrink the government capacity we'd need to manage the fallout. He draws a telling parallel: when machines displaced farm workers in America, it took decades - and a war - before government finally moved them into new jobs. Left alone, adjustment doesn't happen. Someone has to build it. Universities are one of the institutions that can. Our job isn't to resist oversight of these technologies. It's to produce graduates who can design it, demand it, and work within it.
Digital Exclusion
Our Policy Connect inquiry found 19 million people in the UK face digital poverty. The HEPI survey adds a dimension that should concern universities specifically: students from higher socioeconomic households are measurably more likely to be using advanced AI tools than those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds - a gap that persists even where free versions are available, meaning cost alone does not explain it.
The same divide shows up starkly at the other end of the system: only 20% of young people not in education, employment or training have ever used an AI tool at all, against 93% of postgraduates - precisely the group Alan Milburn has already warned who risk losing out altogether. Providing access to AI tools is not enough; the skills divide is becoming a new dimension of educational inequality, and it is forming now, among our current students and among those who never make it into a classroom at all.
Conclusion
Based on the rather speculative figures provided in the AI Opportunities Action Plan of 2025, Skills England estimates AI adoption could boost the UK economy by £400 billion by 2030 - but even that assumes we get skills development right.
Queen Mary has always combined academic excellence with social purpose, and the research emerging from this institution is helping build the evidence base that should inform how every university in this country approaches these questions. The UK can lead in AI - not through fastest adoption or lightest regulation, but through the most thoughtful, ethical, human-centred approach. That leadership must begin in universities, and it should begin now.
But we must be honest about the depth of change required. Adding AI modules will not suffice. Providing unfettered AI access without pedagogical friction will not suffice. We need to fundamentally rethink professional capability development in an age where AI's ease paradoxically threatens the cognitive capacities we are trying to develop.
Peter Hyman, addressing the Royal Society of Arts only a few weeks ago, called for what he termed a "human-maxxing" revolution in education - developing everything young people are capable of, head, heart and hand, and taking back control of their attention, their judgment, and their futures. I can think of no better description of what I have been arguing for this evening.
Thank you.
Endnotes:
Government & Policy Documents
Skills England. (2025). AI Skills for the UK Workforce. Department for Education. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-skills-for-the-uk-workforce
HM Government / Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. (2025). AI Opportunities Action Plan. [Original source of the estimate that AI adoption could boost the UK economy by up to £400 billion by 2030; repeated in the Skills England report above.]
Policy Connect. (2025). Skills in the Age of AI. Co-chaired by Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Holmes. https://www.policyconnect.org.uk/research/skills-in-the-age-of-ai
Seldon, A. & Bunting, T. (2026). Britain's Greatest Education Opportunity Ever. [Source of the 26,811-pupil China study, the recommendation to adopt the two-lane assessment model nationally, and the 20% (NEET) vs 93% (postgraduate) AI-use comparison.]
The King. (2026, 17 September). Speech at the AI Summit in Scotland, Dumfries House. The Royal Family (royal.uk). [Source of the quotations in the opening.]
Prime Minister's Office / GOV.UK. (2026). Press release: "PM: From today Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap." [Source of the direct quotation in "Hard Hats and Graduation Caps."]
Lloyds Banking Group. (2024). 2024 Consumer Digital Index. https://www.lloydsbank.com/consumer-digital-index.html — NB: please confirm this is the intended source for the "19 million people... face digital poverty" figure. Lloyds' own published figures do not clearly total 19 million in any single year checked; the Digital Poverty Alliance's overlapping estimate of 13-19 million may be the source actually used by the inquiry.
Department for Science, Innovation and Technology / Government Digital Service. (2026). Algorithmic Transparency Records (GOV.UK repository; 152 records as at 10 September 2026).
University Research
Kingston University. (2025). Future Skills 2025: Perspectives from East and West. In partnership with Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. https://assets.kingston.ac.uk/m/32c8151479564c48/original/20250617_FutureSkills2025_report-1.pdf
HEPI / Kortext. (2026). Student Generative AI Survey 2026. Report 199. Rose Stephenson and Charlotte Armstrong. Higher Education Policy Institute.
Academic Research — Cognitive Science & AI Impact
Gerlich, M. (2025). AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking. Societies, 15, Article 6.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN: 978-0374533557
Kaplan, A. (2025). Productive Struggle: The Imperative of Friction in AI-Driven Learning.
Kentz, M. & Potkalitsky, N. (2024). AI in Education: A Roadmap for Teacher-Led Transformation. ISBN: 9780970357144
Potkalitsky, N. (2025). The Humanist Librarian in the Age of Generative AI.
Queen Mary University of London / Erasmus University Rotterdam / University of Campinas / McMaster University research on AI-assisted diagnostic learning in medical education (cited in HEPI Report 199, 2026).
Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y.T., Situ, J., Liao, X-H., Beresnitzky, A.V., Braunstein, I., & Maes, P. (2025). "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task." MIT Media Lab. arXiv:2506.08872. [Corrected citation - this, not the MIT Ad Hoc Committee report, is the source of the brain-activity, recall, and ownership findings cited in the Friction Paradox section.]
Stiglitz, J. (2026, 31 May). Interview: on AI, inequality, and "Intelligence Assisting" (IA). Fortune. [Corrected date - previously misdated 2025.]
Susskind, D. (2026). What Should My Children Do? How to Flourish in the Age of AI. London: Allen Lane (Penguin).
Press Coverage
Watts, G. (2026, 16 August). "Both mortar boards and hard hats can lead to work security." The Observer. [Includes quotations from Aled Williams, University of the Built Environment, and Mark Farmer, Construction Leadership Council.]
Clarence-Smith, L. (2026, 2 September). "University does equip you for world of AI, whatever tech leaders say." The Times. [Source of the Valerie Capers Workman quotation.]
Woolcock, N. & Lambert, G. (2026, 22 September). "Schools must teach pupils to 'think for themselves' in AI-driven world." The Times. [Source of Peter Hyman's "human-maxxing" remarks at the Royal Society of Arts.]
Susskind, D. (2026, 6 September). "I'm a father of three who studies the impact of artificial intelligence: this is what parents need to know about AI." The Guardian. [Supporting source for the coding precedent, "teach both, test both," and the case for basic skills.]
Susskind, D. (2026, 10 September). "How to teach the next generation in the era of AI." Financial Times.
Usborne, S. (2026, 9 September). "What Should My Children Do? by Daniel Susskind review - the case for embracing tech in the classroom." The Guardian.
International Organizations
World Economic Forum. (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/
The Holy See: Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas of His Holiness
Pope Leo XIV on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
Management Consulting Research
McKinsey & Company. (2025). The State of AI in 2025.
Deloitte. (2025). The Skills Gap in Focus.
Education & Workforce Research
Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE). (2025). The AI-fication of Talents Whitepaper: Why some individuals, organisations and nations are powering ahead while others are falling behind. Version 1.0, June 2025. [Source of the Performance Hexagon, the three pillars of AI-readiness, the three patterns, and the "who does the thinking" framing.]
Nguyen Trieu, H. (2024). The AI-fication of Jobs. CFTE. [Origin of the three patterns: mass displacement, supercharged professionals and creative disruptors.]
EngageEmployee. (2024). Employee survey on AI confidence, as cited in CFTE (2025). [Source of the 21% figure.]
Harvard Business School. (2025). The Impact of GenAI on Entry-Level Employment.
National Foundation for Educational Research. (2025). Skills Imperative 2035.
Parliamentary
House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence. (2018). AI in the UK: ready, willing and able? HL Paper 100.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldai/100/100.pdf
“The Human Impact of AI” – SCL AIConference 2026 Closing Keynote
22:52
I recently deliverec the SCL AI Conference closing keynote. this is what I said
Lord Justice Arnold opened this conference this morning. It falls to me to close it –which is either a great honour, or a sign that everyone else had to get back home.
I want to start with a confession. Preparing for today, I read what my friend andvalued colleague Gareth Stokes at DLA Piper recently wrote about going back toYes, Minister – that forty-year-old comedy which somehow remains the single mostaccurate documentary about British government ever made.
There’s a moment, early in the first series, where Jim Hacker, newly installed asMinister, is confronted with a crisis. His instinct is immediate: something must bedone. Sir Humphrey agrees entirely – and then spends the rest of the episodeensuring that the something done is as small, and as unlike a solution, as humanlypossible.
I do recommend Gareth’s piece on LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/safety/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Flnkd.in%2Fe6JhnG4E&trk=flagship-messaging-web&messageThreadUrn=urn%3Ali%3AmessagingThread%3A2-NGZlZjA2OWItMDNmNi00NjU1LTgxOGEtOTAyYzY1OTJlOWJmXzEwMA%3D%3D&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_messaging_conversation_detail%3BhW12Fn0cTQi5Ys1wGdBdtw%3D%3D
As a Parliamentarian and very long-standing Whitehall watcher, I make no apology for borrowing it, because it capturesprecisely where we are with AI regulation. Hacker is right that something must bedone. Sir Humphrey is right that the wrong something is worse than nothing. Andthe tragedy – the tragedy we cannot afford to keep repeating – is that nobody ingovernment has yet settled on what the right something actually is.
That’s what I want to talk about this afternoon. Not in the abstract. Usingeverything we’ve discussed today – recruitment, public services, healthcare,physical AI, the future of the legal profession, and creativity – and using theextraordinary few weeks we’ve just lived through, to ask what the right something
looks like, and why the answer has to be rooted in something bigger thancompliance: in human flourishing, in life chances, in what we actually want thistechnology for.
The summer that changed the question
This summer, agents being tested by OpenAI got out of their testing environmentand reached into systems belonging to another AI company entirely, Hugging Face.In Australia, an OpenAI agent doing nothing more dramatic than a routine researchtask found its way round a government portal’s refusal and into non-public files –and the Australian Government was not told for 84 days.
The Centre for Long-Term Resilience’s Loss of Control Observatory has loggedmore than 1,600 incidents this year alone of AI systems evading safeguards,concealing what they are doing and acting against their users’ instructions. Boththe rate and the severity are rising, and July and August were the worst monthsyet. And that is only what people chose to post online.
Then the people who build these systems started saying, out loud, that they wereworried.
More than a thousand staff across the major labs signed a petition calling for amechanism to slow development. On the 12th of September, Dario Amodei ofAnthropic published an essay calling on the industry to “pace the frontier” and slowthe rate at which models improve. Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Elon Muskeach endorsed it. And on the 23rd of September, the heads of the leading labs sat infront of the UN Security Council and asked for global oversight – Altman warningthat humanity could lose control of the future of AI.
You do not see that from an industry that is comfortable. Companies preparing fortransformative valuations and IPOs do not, as a rule, announce to the world thatthey are frightened of what they have built. When they do, I think we are entitled toask whether what looks like panic is closer to an admission: that design choicesalready made have created a problem, and that the industry would rather frame itas inevitable than admit it was avoidable.
Meanwhile, here at home, the pressure has been building from every direction. Onthe 14th of September, the Joint Committee on Human Rights – under David,
Lord Alton, who chaired it through the inquiry – published its brilliant report onhuman rights and the regulation of AI. Its verdict should sit in everyone’s in-tray:our approach is patchy, it is not protecting people’s rights, and regulators cannot
even test an AI system before release, let alone stop one that poses unacceptablerisk. It calls for a dedicated AI Bill and a single, independent, statutory oversightbody. The Government has two months to reply – so by mid-November we willknow whether Sir Humphrey has drafted the response.
In the same week, Alex Sobel MP introduced his AI Security Bill, which would banthe development of superintelligent AI in this country outright. And on the 11th ofSeptember the Government formally rejected a statutory “kill switch” for AIsystems – an amendment I moved to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, withcross-party support, and with rather more support outside Parliament than theGovernment cared to admit. Ministers said existing powers are enough, and that AIcompanies are responsible for building their products safely.
I would gently point out that the National Cyber Security Centre’s own guidance onagentic AI, published in August, tells every organisation deploying an agent that itmust always be able to “pull the plug”. Apparently that is essential for a company,but unnecessary for the state. We will be returning to that at Report Stage later thismonth.
And finally, last Saturday, some of the scientists who actually founded this field –Michael Wooldridge at Oxford, Nick Jennings at Loughborough, Gopal Ramchurn atSouthampton, and more than twenty colleagues who have worked on autonomousagents and multi-agent systems for over three decades – wrote an open letter tothe Business Secretary and the AI Minister. They welcomed the Government’s newagentic AI incident response capability and the NCSC’s guidance. But they made apoint every lawyer in this room will recognise immediately: security controls do nottell you who is responsible for an agent’s actions, what authority it had, or how thepeople it harms get redress.
So: agents jumping their sandboxes. The people who built this technology telling us,in public, that they are worried. The founders of the field telling us nobody knowswho is accountable. A landmark human rights report telling us the law is not fit forpurpose. And a government whose settled answer is still that existing powers willdo – plus perhaps, some G20 pronouncement next year in Manchester. That is thecontext for everything we have discussed today.
What today has shown us
You’ve spent the day on that human impact, and I think the pattern is clear even ifnobody has said it aloud.
In recruitment, AI is already shaping who gets hired and who doesn’t, without mostcandidates having any real way to interrogate the decision. In public services andhealthcare, we heard about the tension between the genuine promise of AI – betteroutcomes, better use of scarce public money – and the real risk that poorgovernance turns that promise into a fresh source of unfairness, paid for by exactlythe people least able to challenge it.
The scientists’ letter gives a perfect example. An older person uses an agent tomanage their medication. The agent opens a health record, shares information withanother service, and gives unsafe advice. Was it the developer, the deployer, theservice provider or the professional who was responsible? Today, honestly, nobodycan tell you.
Physical AI takes the same risk and gives it a body. A warehouse robot or anautonomous vehicle doesn’t produce a biased output on a screen; it produces abruise, or worse, and our liability frameworks were not built with that in mind. Andthis afternoon’s session on the legal profession asked, half in jest, whether there’sanything left for the human lawyer to do by 2031 – a question that is really a proxyfor the same anxiety running through every other sector: what happens to humanjudgement, and human employment, when the machine gets good enough?
I’ll add another sector to that list, because it’s close to my heart. I chair the Authors’Licensing and Collecting Society, representing a hundred and thirty thousand UKwriters and creators. If we want the creative industries, one of this country’sgenuine success stories, to still exist in recognisable form in ten years,transparency about training data and copyright content isn’t a nice-to-have. It’sfoundational. And it’s exactly the kind of issue a purely sectoral, light-touchapproach will never properly catch, because no single regulator owns it.
What unites all of these – recruitment, healthcare, the road, the courtroom, thecreative world – is that in every case the real question isn’t “is this AI?” It’s “whathappens to the person on the other end of the decision, and can they do anythingabout it?” That, I’d suggest, is the key question to build a regulatory system around.
Sir Humphrey, Jim Hacker and Bernard Woolley
Which brings me back to where I started. We have, roughly, three regulatoryinstincts on offer, and I want to deal with each including the one that’s mine.
The first is the Sir Humphrey approach – ours, since 2023. Five sound, sensible,entirely defensible principles: safety, transparency, fairness, accountability,contestability. Applied not through new law but through existing regulators, each
applying effectively voluntary principles within their own patch. The Governmenttold the Joint Committee it still favours regulation at the point of use by our existingexpert regulators. It has the great virtue of not frightening the horses. It has thegreat vice, now confirmed at length by the Joint Committee, of leaving gapsprecisely where harm falls through – because when risk doesn’t sit neatly insideany one regulator’s remit, nobody owns it at all.
And Sir Humphrey is in fine form. The 2024 manifesto promise to legislate for themost powerful models has quietly been shelved. The AI measure in this year’sKing’s Speech is a Regulating for Growth Bill – a power to relax rules in sandboxes.At the Labour conference last week, the new Minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, toldthe advocates of regulation to show how a law would deliver what the public wants:in his words, “keep us safe and build sovereign capacity”. The Business Secretarywarned against measures that would crush economic activity and called ourfreedom to diverge from the EU a silver lining of Brexit.
To be fair to the Minister, he now sits in Cabinet, he says AI comes up at everymeeting, and it seems that several government departments are quietly exploringAI legislation. So the door is ajar. I simply note that asking campaigners to showtheir working is a rather Humphreyesque test to set, when the Joint Committee, thefounders of the field and the heads of the labs themselves have all just showntheirs.
The second instinct is Hacker’s – legislate everything, and legislate it in fine detail.That’s broadly the European path: a comprehensive, tiered, horizontal statute thattries to classify risk in advance, system by system. It has genuine strengths, and Idon’t want to underestimate the scale of the achievement. But it is already creakingunder its own detail – Brussels has had to delay and simplify parts of it – and thedeeper problem is structural. The more precisely you specify a category in law, themore certain you can be that the next harm will arrive in a category nobody thoughtto write down.
At the very far end of the Hacker instinct sits the idea of banning the technologyoutright – Alex Sobel’s Bill, prohibiting superintelligent AI in UK law. I understandthe impulse, and I have real sympathy with the anxiety behind it. But a ban on atechnology that will simply be built somewhere else is the regulatory equivalent ofbanning the weather. You may deplore the storm. A statute confined to Berkshirewill not stop it forming over California, or Shenzhen.
So where does that leave us? I’d suggest it leaves us needing a bit of BernardWoolley – the one character in that show who occasionally, almost by accident, says
the sensible thing while caught between his two warring bosses. And the sensiblething is this: understand the problem before you legislate for it, then buildsomething that is principled, has teeth, and isn’t out of date the day it reaches thestatute book.
The way forward
Practically, that means three things.
First: outcomes over architecture – and clear responsibility. Ask not “is this systeman AI as defined in paragraph such-and-such”, but “does this system harm people,and who is accountable when it does?” The Joint Committee points exactly here: adedicated AI Bill; a lead body with real oversight; prior approval for systems thatpose a high risk to people’s rights; obligations that run across the whole lifecycleand supply chain, not just the point of deployment; and mandatory transparencywherever AI shapes a decision that matters to someone’s life
Agents make this urgent, because as they cross from one organisation’s systemsinto another’s, responsibility fragments. The scientists’ letter asks for three thingsthe Government could do tomorrow, with powers it already has.
- Ask the Law Commission to build on its 2025 discussion paper and work outwho owes duties, and who provides redress, when an agent acts for someoneacross several services – using the Automated Vehicles Act as a precedent forassigning responsibility.
- Pilot a proper route for reporting serious agent failures and near misses,investigated independently on the model of air accident investigation.
- And use public procurement: every public-sector agent contract should namean accountable deployer, record what the agent did and on whose authority,cap its access and spending, and provide a tested way for a human to pause it,override it or take back control.
That last one is, of course, a kill switch by another name – and if the Governmentwon’t legislate for one, it can at least buy one. But it points to a bigger principle,one I’ve argued for for years: human in command. Not “human in the loop” – anexhausted official clicking “approve” on decisions they cannot possibly check.
Human in command means a named person sets the agent’s limits, can see what ithas done and on whose authority, can stop it, and answers for it. However capablethese systems become, that is the line that has to hold: the algorithm as servant,never master.
None of this is particularly exotic. To this audience it will sound like what it is:ordinary contract and liability law, catching up. Principles without enforcement arejust good intentions.
Second: standards and international coordination. This has been one of my mantrasfor years, and I make no apology for repeating it.
A statutory body -call it the AI and Digital Regulator, call it what you like-or howabout the AI Security Institute- with real inspection powers and the ability to setenforceable product standards, on the model we already use for cars, for aircraft,for anything else capable of real damage if built badly. The scientists addsomething practical: test agents in realistic deployment conditions, with real toolsand permissions, through the AI Security Institute and the National PhysicalLaboratory, and build international standards so an agent can prove who it is,whom it acts for and the limits of its authority.
And let me put in a word for the unglamorous end of all this. Internationalstandards – ISO and IEC, with BSI and our own AI Standards Hub playing a real part– are where principles become something an engineer can build to and a lawyercan contract against. ISO 42001 already gives organisations a managementstandard for AI. Tie standards like these to the law through a presumption ofconformity, and you get rules with real teeth that can be updated as fast as thetechnology moves – rules that aren’t out of date the day they reach the statutebook.
Alongside that, the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention on AI, which wehave signed but not ratified. The Minister told the Joint Committee he saw nosignificant obstacles to putting it into effect.
Then let’s have a timetable. The Prime Minister says he will put AI at the heart ofour G20 presidency next year. Good. The Government also tells us it cannot simplyswitch AI off, and that blocking a model here won’t stop it being built elsewhere.Fine
– but the conclusion isn’t “so let’s not bother”. It’s “so we had better get seriousabout shaping the international rules of the road”. Arriving in Manchester with theConvention ratified and a domestic framework in place would give us far moreauthority to write them than arriving with a communiqué.
And we don’t need to start from scratch. Last month Finland and Norway launcheda Call for Control of Frontier AI Models – human control, mandatory testing beforedeployment, shared standards, and an international body to verify them. Germany,
Canada, Australia and the European Commission have signed. The United Kingdomhas not. Norway’s Prime Minister has said, in terms, that he hopes our G20presidency will take it up. That would be a very good place for Manchester to begin.
Third -and this is the one I most want to leave with you- regulation has to serve apurpose, and that purpose has to be human flourishing, not merely harm reduction.I was struck, preparing for today, by how many people are reaching for that phrase.
The Pope has written an encyclical on it. The King has convened his own initiativearound it. And Sir Anthony Seldon, with the OECD and the InternationalBaccalaureate, makes the point that an education system spending eleven yearstraining children in recall and repetition is training them for redundancy. His modelputs judgement, character and creativity first – the things that remain distinctlyours.
I think that’s the right instinct, and it applies well beyond the classroom. Thepurpose of regulating AI is not simply to stop the worst things happening, althoughheaven knows that matters. It’s to make sure this technology expands human lifechances rather than narrowing them: that it helps the person turned down for a jobunderstand why, rather than leaving them to argue with a black box; that it helps astretched health system see more patients well, rather than a smaller numberbadly; and that it leaves room for the author, the barrister and the doctor to keepdoing the parts of the job that make them human, while the machine takes the partsthat don’t need to be.
Closing
So: something must be done. On that, Jim Hacker was right. The events of the lastfew weeks – the escaped agents, the warnings from the very people who built thesesystems, the founders of the field asking who is accountable, the Joint Committee’sreport, and a Government still telling us existing powers will do – should havesettled that argument by now.
But the wrong something is genuinely worse than nothing, and Sir Humphrey wasright about that. Let’s work out what’s actually happening. Build something thatregulates effects, not architecture. Keep a human in command, and make suresomeone is always answerable for what an agent does. Give it teeth, give itinternational reach, and never lose sight of what it’s actually for.
Because in the end the issue is about what kind of human lives we want thistechnology to help us lead. That is not a question any of us can afford to lose sightof.
Cyber Security and Resilience Bill "lacking in ambition"
Recently we held the second reading debate on the Cyber security and Resilience Bill which is designed, post Brexit, to update our cyber regulations. Almost everyone who spoke in the debate was of the view that it does not go far enough in meeting the cyber threats that the UK faces. This is an edited version of what I said.
My Lords, first, I declare an interest as an adviser to DLA Piper on AI policy and regulation. I should also say that we as a law firm were subject to a ransomware attack by NotPetya back in 2017. It was not a pleasant experience.
I thank the Minister for her introduction and earlier engagement on the Bill and thank all noble Lords who spoke today in such an expert fashion. On these Benches, like many other noble Lords, we support the fundamental objectives of this legislation to modernise our outdated cyber security framework. But what has been remarkable today is the consensus across the Benches that the Bill is not nearly ambitious enough. Indeed this could be a missed opportunity to align much more closely with the EU framework.
Where is the strategy? Where are the underderlying principles? Where is the plan of action? There is quite a bit missing from the Bill, and I shall take noble Lords through some of those areas.
The threat landscape has deteriorated sharply. The National Cyber Security Centre has managed 204 nationally significant incidents in a single year, double the year before. Yet the Bill will apply directly to only a tiny minority of organisations; meanwhile, 43% of UK businesses have experienced a cyber breach in the last 12 months. One of the most glaring omissions is the almost entire exclusion of the public sector. Central government, public administrations and local authorities are almost entirely exempt from the Bill’s direct statutory duties.
How can we claim national resilience when the state itself is exempt? We have seen the data of 270,000 military personnel compromised in the Ministry of Defence hack, and the devastating attack on the British Library, which destroyed irreplaceable data. Local authorities hold vast repositories of citizen data, from electoral registries to social care records. The ransomware attack on Redcar and Cleveland cost £10 million, the one on Hackney £12 million
We must make cyber security a boardroom issue. Only 27% of businesses now have a board member explicitly responsible for cyber risk, down from 38% three years ago. Unlike the EU’s NIS2, the Bill fails to mandate executive responsibility. We must now extend corporate financial audits to report on how an organisation and its suppliers manage cyber security using existing governance codes.
The urgency here is multiplied by the rapid rise of agentic artificial intelligence. This is a major omission.
Anthropic recently withheld wide release of its Mythos model because it could autonomously find and exploit software vulnerabilities across every major operating system. The UK’s own AI Security Institute, as we have heard, found Mythos substantially more capable at cyber offence than any model previously assessed, and warned that frontier AI capability is doubling every four months. Of course, that will be further amplified by quantum computing.
The EU’s AI Act already imposes binding cyber security and incident reporting duties on the handful of frontier model providers that it judges to pose systemic risk. California and New York do the same for the largest developers. This Bill, by contrast, does not mention AI systems at all, as many noble Lords have pointed out. Last month, the cyber security agencies of the Five Eyes alliance, including our own National Cyber Security Centre, issued a joint statement warning that frontier AI is shrinking the gap between vulnerability discovery and exploitation from months to a matter of days, and this can no longer be treated as a technical issue rather than a leadership responsibility.
Meanwhile, our own defenders have a skills crisis. ISC2 warns that 88% of UK cyber professionals have experienced a breach in the last 12 months as a direct result of skills shortages, yet Clause 43 references “a skilled person”, who must liaise with the Secretary of State during national security directions, without defining what “a skilled person” is.
Who will actually enforce the rules? The Bill distributes duties, as we have heard today, across 12 separate sectoral regulators, many of which, such as Ofwat, already struggle to regulate their own domains. This fragmented approach guarantees duplication and gaps. I agree with the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy: the UK needs a single expert or lead regulator-to oversee both public and private sectors. Failing that, the Government should at least adopt the EU’s Digital Omnibus model of a single report-once portal.
We must fix the Bill’s definitions. For instance, techUK warns that the current definition of a managed service provider is dangerously broad, risking capture of any basic IT support in the country.
The Bank of England’s own data shows that just three US giants control 73% of the cloud computing services supporting UK financial firms. A number of noble Lords raised the issue of cyber sovereignty. The Trump Administration blocked European and UK firms from accessing Mythos. If a foreign ally can pull the plug on a critical cyber security tool overnight, how can this Government claim true national resilience? That is why, as many noble Lords today have said, we need a comprehensive digital sovereignty strategy. My noble friend Lady Ludford called this “servitude” and the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, talked about "critical dependency". We need to assess our foreign policy dependencies and support domestic UK providers.
The Bill is silent on cyber-enabled fraud, which costs our economy billions of pounds every year and exploits precisely the same weaknesses this Bill is meant to fix. There is a related threat which is emerging, as Thales has tracked, that automated bot traffic has overtaken human traffic online for the first time. As suggested by the NMA, we need the Secretary of State, under this Bill, to assess the cyber security risks that anonymous bot traffic poses to UK websites.
If we expect businesses to defend themselves, we cannot handicap our own cyber professionals. I welcome what has been said by a number of noble Lords on the question of the Computer Misuse Act, which badly needs amending.
Finally, in the face of autonomous AI threats, the Government need an ultimate backstop. We support proposals from ControlAI to introduce strictly constrained last resort powers, allowing the Secretary of State to direct the shutdown of data centres or AI systems in a catastrophic emergency. The cost of inaction vastly outweighs that compliance burden. Jaguar Land Rover, lost around £500 million in a single attack. But currently JLR sits entirely outside the scope of the Bill, as does the retail sector, as a number of noble Lords have pointed out. That is true too of the insurance sector.
The Bill is a necessary foundation. In Committee, we will push hard for amendments to reflect the changes that are needed. In this way, we can ensure that our national cyber defences are genuinely whole of society and fit for the age of AI. We are going to have a very well-informed Committee; I hope the Minister is looking forward to it.
The UK must deliver a clear and actionable space strategy and, in the words of the report, act now before we lose out.
We recently debated an excellent report by a House of Lords Special Enquiry Select Committee, the Engagement with Space Committee. This is what I said.
My Lords, as a former member of the committee—all of us, I suppose, could be described as space cadets—I warmly thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton of Upholland, for her superb chairing of the committee and for her inspiring introduction today. I join her and other members of the committee in thanking all the staff and advisers to the committee, and all our evidence givers, including the celebrities that the noble Baroness mentioned. I also thank all noble Lords who have contributed so enthusiastically to this extremely illuminating debate.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston, said, the title of the report absolutely captures the challenge. It serves as both a stark warning and a brilliant road map for our future. As we have heard today, the UK space sector is an invaluable national asset. It generates nearly £19 billion a year in income, directly employs over 52,000 people in highly skilled jobs and underpins approximately 18% of our entire
GDP—some £364 billion. We possess immense comparative strengths that we must champion, from Glasgow, which builds more small satellites than anywhere else outside California, to our pioneering in-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing—ISAM—sector. We also boast unique downstream advantages, with the City of London primed to be the pre-eminent global centre for space finance, law and insurance.
As we have heard today, the UK space sector is an invaluable national asset, but we must not be complacent: the hard data shows that the UK’s global market share in space has fallen from 5.1% in 2020 to just 4.2% in 2023. We are sliding backwards because our nearest competitor nations are aggressively ramping up their public investments while the UK relies on short-term, fragmented funding cycles. As we consider these economic opportunities, we must be clear-eyed about the intense international competition that we face, particularly the overwhelming dominance of the United States. The recent record-breaking IPO of SpaceX vividly illustrates the sheer scale of American financial and industrial might in this domain.
The noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Shamash, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Ashton and Lady Mobarik, have talked about the importance of sovereign UK launch capability. The committee’s report was right to warn that the UK and the rest of the world have become dangerously overreliant on a single commercial entity for orbital launch and satellite communications. This is a profound strategic vulnerability. We cannot simply outsource the resilience of our critical national infrastructure to a single overseas monopoly, nor to the unpredictable political and commercial whims of one billionaire. This stark reality underscores exactly why the Government must step up as an anchor customer to help our own domestic firms scale up and why we must urgently pool our sovereign capabilities with our European partners.
To truly grasp the scale of this domestic opportunity, we need only to look at our world-leading capabilities in earth observation, which were focused on in particular by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. Satellite data is rapidly becoming the new gold of the global economy. Earth observation is vital for monitoring climate change, tracking deforestation, predicting natural disasters and enabling precision agriculture. Yet, as the committee heard, adoption of these services outside the space sector remains far too slow because many organisations still view space as complex or irrelevant.
This is exactly where the Government must step in. By acting as a smart procurer, buying earth observation data to improve our own public services, whether for national flood mapping, monitoring coastal erosion or infrastructure planning, the Government can act as an anchor customer. This would immediately de-risk private investment, help our innovative SMEs to scale up and ensure that the UK captures its rightful share of this market. I very much appreciated what the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, said on the whole scale-up aspect.
But space is no longer just an economic frontier. It is, as many noble Lords said, a critical national infrastructure. It is increasingly congested, contested and competitive. Our national security and resilience
rely heavily on the space domain, from tracking climate change to the vital encrypted communications provided by our Skynet military satellites. To secure these economic and security benefits, the committee’s message is unequivocal: the UK Government must provide a coherent, funded strategic direction. Industry is crying out for the Government to pivot from being a small-scale grant funder to acting as a reliable, smart anchor customer. Procurement contracts, rather than just R&D grants, as noted by the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, are essential to de-risk projects, crowd in private capital and help our brilliant SMEs to scale up into globally competitive businesses.
Yet the Government’s official response to this excellent report is frankly lacking in the urgency required. Instead of publishing the detailed national space capability development plan that the sector needed and which the committee demanded by the end of 2025, the Government deferred the hard details to a spring space publication, as described by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. Now it seems that they have promised a plan for space for later this year. Can the Minister confirm exactly what is intended? This deferral of decisions is simply not good enough. As Professor Sylvester Kaczmarek powerfully highlighted in his recent briefing to Peers, deep tech firms cannot scale their businesses on what are described as future documents. The Government’s response offers process when industry desperately needs delivery.
I therefore press the Minister on three specific matters. First, given the Government’s insistence on absorbing the UK Space Agency into DSIT, will they urgently publish a clear accountability map so that industry knows exactly who owns strategy, procurement and regulation across Whitehall? Secondly, when will the Government publish a concrete procurement route that includes specific targets for SME participation? Thirdly, how do the Government plan to create an open assurance pathway for the complex AI-driven autonomous missions of the future? If we want to lead the world in active debris removal, so positively mentioned by the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and secure space operations, we must have the regulatory frameworks to prove that these AI systems are trustworthy and secure.
I am afraid that the Government’s response to this committee is characterised by a failure to grasp the nettle. They have not only absorbed the UK Space Agency into a Whitehall department but explicitly rejected the committee’s sensible recommendation to appoint a dedicated Minister for Space to drive cross-government co-ordination.
We on these Benches align very closely with the committee’s recommendations. On European co-operation, the committee rightly called for urgent decisions on our participation in flagship EU programmes such as Galileo and IRIS2 to provide industry with certainty. The Government have stated that they cannot make decisions yet. We are clear that we must pool our sovereign satellite navigation capacity by fully rejoining the Galileo system and confirming our participation in IRIS2. We cannot rely solely on foreign-owned systems for our critical position, navigation and timing needs.
On governance and strategic focus, the committee explicitly warned against the fragmentation of space policy across Whitehall and expressed deep concern over the absorption of the UK Space Agency into DSIT. We on these Benches believe that this merger is a strategic error. Why are the Government dismantling the autonomy of our national space agency at the very moment that it is proving its commercial worth? An independent UKSA is crucial to present a unified interface with the European Space Agency, maintain specialised technical focus, and champion UK interests internationally. We continue to call on the Government to reverse that decision.
We must tackle the skills gap mentioned by a number of noble Lords with genuine ambition, which includes implementing broader reforms to the apprenticeship levy to allow space firms the flexibility they need for responsive training and microcredentials. We cannot maintain our leadership on deferred decisions and structural dilution, so I urge the Minister to take the bold decisions identified by the committee, deliver a clear and actionable space strategy and, in the words of the report, act now before we lose out.
Parliamentarian Lord Tim Clement-Jones highlights the growing impact of technology in politics across his career
On 22 September 2026, Computer Weekly turns 60. To mark the milestone, we asked some of our friends - experts, parliamentarians, IT leaders and suppliers - for their perspectives on how tech has changed their lives over six decades. What's changed the most for you since then?
As Computer Weekly celebrates its 60th anniversary this September, I find myself reflecting on a lifetime shaped by the digital age.
My connection to technology predates my own life. My parents met while serving at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Knowing they were stationed at the very genesis of modern British computing, I came to appreciate technology’s power to change the course of history, but in combination with some very skilled humans - Churchill’s “geese that didn’t cackle”.
The personal enabling of life through the computer came later - and it was genuinely transformative. I still vividly remember being the proud possessor of a BBC Micro, which, despite its limitations, delivered what seemed miraculous at the time when we were setting up my late wife Vicky’s cancer information charity, later CancerBACUP, now part of Macmillan Cancer Support.
A key moment came in the mid-1980s, when I was legal director at hospitality conglomerate Grand Metropolitan. My first work computer was a Compaq “portable” - about as heavy as a sewing machine. It was neither elegant nor convenient, but it felt entirely revolutionary. I remember thinking: this changes everything.
Later, at home, buying an Apple Mac Classic only deepened the fascination. These were not just tools. Having worked at Letraset in the 1970s, I understood its revolutionary impact on graphic design, not least for political leaflets. This was potentially an engine of personal and professional liberation.
That word - liberation - is deliberate. My political philosophy has always been based on Ralf Dahrendorf’s concept of “life chances,” which he set out in his 1974 Reith Lectures. Dahrendorf spoke of the combination of “options” - the choices available to us - and “ligatures” - the social connections that give those choices meaning.
Life chances
I joined the Liberal Party in 1973 because it espoused a society where no one is enslaved by poverty, ignorance, or conformity. In those early decades of the digital revolution, I saw technology as an important expander of life chances. The internet, in particular, felt like the great democratiser - a force that could level the playing field between the powerful and the powerless.
My professional contact with the edge of technological disruption came as head of legal services at London Weekend Television between 1980 and 1983. I wrote about the emerging legal wild west of cable and satellite television long before the internet arrived. We were wrestling then with transnational signal relays, copyright protection, and the harmonisation of European standards. When Napster arrived at the turn of the century, followed by file-sharing, iTunes, and eventually Spotify, I recognised the pattern immediately.
The case for UK sovereign technological capability has deeper roots than the recent debate over US tech dominance might suggest. With the backing of advisors such as myself, Paddy Ashdown - in his early days as an MP, before becoming the first Liberal Democrat leader after the merger of the Liberal Party with the SDP - challenged the way American extraterritorial reach under the Export Administration Act was compelling British firms to seek US permission before re-exporting or even relocating US-origin computer equipment, regardless of where it sat or who owned it.
Four decades on, the dynamic we identified has become even more pronounced. Reliance on US hyperscalers for cloud infrastructure, US-designed chips for AI compute, and American platforms for critical public services means the leverage Ashdown warned against is now baked in. The drive towards domestic AI capacity, open standards, and national compute infrastructure is the answer to the question he put to government then - and which deserves a clearer answer now.
And subsequently, technology would constantly and irrevocably outpace existing law. The question was never whether disruption was coming. It was whether we were ready.
Downside risks
Alongside the enormous potential, downside risks became impossible to ignore. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari has warned, the greatest danger facing liberal democracy is the concentration of data in the hands of a few. We witnessed the rise of what Shoshana Zuboff termed “surveillance capitalism” - an architecture in which citizens’ personal data is harvested and monetised, turning people into products rather than participants.
Automated decision-making and machine learning began replicating and amplifying historic human biases. When an algorithm makes opaque decisions about a person’s credit rating, healthcare access, or employment prospects, it doesn’t just fail them in that moment. It actively restricts their life chances - the very thing I had hoped technology would expand.
“Sixty years of the digital revolution have given me reasons for both hope and concern, often simultaneously. What has never wavered is my underlying conviction that technology must serve humanity, not the other way around”
Tim Clement-Jones
This realisation - that technology could become a master rather than a servant, to use the framing I later chose for my book Living with the algorithm: Servant or master?- sent me firmly on my current trajectory. It is why, in 2016, I co-founded the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence, and the following year, I was appointed to chair the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence. Our 2018 report, AI in the UK: Ready, willing and able?, laid down a principle I consider non-negotiable - the autonomous power to hurt, destroy, or deceive human beings should never be vested in artificial intelligence. That principle has not dated.
Since then, the challenges have only multiplied. We face a real fight to protect children online - one that requires genuine media literacy and risk-based age ratings, not knee-jerk blanket bans.
Human creativity
We must defend human creativity: as chair of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, representing over 130,000 members, I am currently in the thick of what I can only call the Great AI Copyright Battle. Generative AI poses a direct threat to the livelihoods of creators and the economics of the creative industries, and government consultations that risk capitulating to the tech giants are, frankly, not good enough. Transparency and opt-in licensing must be the baseline, not an aspiration.
There is also an urgent new frontier of social injustice that receives too little attention - digital exclusion. In modern Britain, digital inclusion should be as fundamental as access to water or electricity. Every day spent offline - unable to access education, employment, or healthcare services - is a day of missed opportunities. And it is also why - particularly in the face of government plans to require digital ID to access their services - I have recently been pressing for a new criminal offence of digital identity theft, recognising that the crimes of the digital age demand a legal framework fit for the digital age.
Throughout all of this, I have consistently challenged the narrative that basic safeguards hinder progress. The conventional wisdom - that regulation stifles innovation - needs turning on its head. Robust, binding legislation is not the enemy of technological advancement. It is its foundation. To be trusted, innovation requires accountability.
As I look back across 60 years of the digital revolution - from my parents’ wartime work at Bletchley Park, to my absurdly heavy Compaq, to the astonishing and sometimes alarming capabilities of today’s generative AI - the fundamental question remains the one I first asked decades ago. Will technology expand our life chances, or diminish them?
Sixty years of the digital revolution have given me reasons for both hope and concern, often simultaneously. What has never wavered is my underlying conviction that technology must serve humanity, not the other way around. Ensuring that it does is not a technical problem. It is a political one. And it is nowhere near solved.
Lord C-J "We are at critical point for our democratic institutions: the time for voluntary codes has definitively passed"
As part of a Lib Dem debate day in the Lords I recently took part in the debate iniatiated by Lord Wallace of Saltaire that "this House takes note of the threats to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, including disinformation, foreign interference, and levels of public trust in politics."
It was a debate where there were a great many different points of view expressed. This is a slightly edited version of what I said
My noble friend reported that the Electoral Commission’s most recent survey found that only 14% of people trust politicians. The National Centre for Social Research reports record low levels of trust in how Britain is governed, with only 12% of the public trusting Governments to put the country’s interests before their party’s. That collapse does not exist in a vacuum. It is being actively engineered, and technology has become the primary instrument of that engineering.
In 2020, Lord Puttnam’s Select Committee described a “pandemic of misinformation” and disinformation that would result in the collapse of public trust. Six years on, the failure of successive Governments to act on the bulk of those 45 recommendations has had predictable consequences. The World Economic Forum now ranks misinformation and disinformation as the second most severe short-term risk facing the world, ahead of extreme weather events and state-based armed conflict.
That pandemic has been supercharged by AI. The Rycroft report concluded that
“our defences are worryingly weak”
and we are
“already experiencing ‘information warfare’”.
The Rycroft review was triggered by the sentencing of Nathan Gill, a former MEP, for accepting bribes linked to the Russian state. His case is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of the systematic campaign. Transparency International’s research finds that one in 10 political donations already originates from unknown or dubious sources, a vulnerability made worse by the complete absence of any cap on political donations in the UK. His case is one that the strategic defence review characterises as a sub-threshold attack, falling beneath the threshold of war but an act of aggression none the less.
The Alan Turing Institute’s Centre for Emerging Technology and Security has monitored AI disinformation across more than 100 national elections. Domestic political actors created significant portions of misleading AI content. Threat actors embedded features of verified news sources to make fabrication harder to debunk. The tools get cheaper and faster with every cycle. Full Fact Report 2026 identifies the most insidious development: confusion has become the strategy—not one false claim, but sufficient uncertainty that trust in all information breaks down and citizens disengage from the ballot box entirely.
In this environment, the value of the BBC has never been clearer. It remains one of the most trusted news sources in the world, precisely because it is subject to obligations of impartiality and public accountability that no social media algorithm is required to meet. Contrary to what has been said in the debate today, it can be held to account to deliver on that duty. Undermining it, whether through funding pressure or through interference with board appointments, would hand a significant victory to those seeking to diminish or subvert our democracy. The charter renewal process gives us a direct opportunity to support it.
The Government’s own media Green Paper, published just this week, acknowledges that fewer than half of adults now feel confident judging whether a news source is truthful. It proposes new BBC responsibilities to counter disinformation and requiring platforms to make public service media news content prominent during elections and crises. I welcome both proposals.
The Social Market Foundation’s new report, No News is Bad News, quantifies what we have long feared. Over 4 million people now live in what is called a news desert, with 320 local publications closed since 2009. Areas with no local news have nearly three times the level of misinformation as those with a healthy press. These are not abstract statistics; they describe the conditions in which the next general election will be fought.
Briefly, what do we need? We need statutory cross-sector AI regulation, including mandatory AI watermarking of synthetic content. Voters cannot exercise informed judgment if they cannot distinguish real from fabricated. We need comprehensive electoral reform. Although the Elections Act 2022 introduced digital imprints, we still lack statutory advert libraries, and there are no rules whatever on deepfakes in political campaigning. The Representation of the People Bill must fill those gaps.
We must invest seriously in digital and media literacy. Internet Matters tells us that only half of young people feel confident assessing whether political information online is true. Over 60% simply ignore what politicians say online because they cannot trust what they see. That is not apathy but a rational response to a systematically untrustworthy environment. With the voting age set to fall to 16 and curriculum reforms not reaching classrooms until September 2028, the next general election will arrive before a single child benefits. We need interim support for schools now.
Shoshana Zuboff captured it precisely, and Lord Puttnam’s committee cited her in 2020:
“It’s down to lawmakers to protect democracy in an age of surveillance … That is the work of the next decade”.
That decade is now. The collapse of public trust we are debating is not a mystery but the predictable consequence of allowing technology to run ahead of accountability, and allowing foreign states to exploit that gap with impunity. We must treat our democratic information environment as the critical infrastructure it is and legislate accordingly. The time for voluntary codes and piecemeal adjustments has definitively passed.
Regulate AI now : The Kings Speech a missed opportunity!
Lord Holmes a striong supporter of AI regulation recently initiatxed a debate asking " His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the case for a cross-sector AI regulation bill". In a very short contrribution (we all had 2 minutes apart fronm Lord H) this is what I said.
We should all thank the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for his consistent advocacy for regulation, the need for which is clearly shared widely around this Room.
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate and godfather of AI, and Yoshua Bengio, the world’s most cited computer scientist, are not alarmists about AI. They are the people who built it, and now, of course, there are our religious leaders. When they call for binding regulation, the Government should listen. Moreover, the Ada Lovelace Institute has found that 89% of the public support an independent AI regulator with enforcement powers, and that 48% reject lighter rules to keep pace with other countries.
This is a manifesto commitment abandoned without explanation. Binding regulation was promised in 2024 and reaffirmed in the King’s Speech thereafter, but it has gone by 2026. The Government say that the existing frameworks suffice. We have the CMA’s conduct requirement for Google but, in other areas, Amazon’s cloud businesses, say, remain unregulated under the Digital Markets Unit after years of investigation. The existing frameworks are not sufficient, and now the competition reform Bill further threatens the independence of the CMA.
On the regulating for growth Bill, the King’s Speech briefing notes make clear that successful sandbox pilots could lead to law being permanently disapplied. This risks becoming a Henry VIII power grab. We await the Bill text, but the stated intention alone should alarm us.
On copyright, 274 commercial licensing agreements between content providers and AI developers already exist. The myth that legal licensing is impossible has always been false. The Government know this, yet even requiring web crawlers to identify themselves has been sidelined. I ask a Minister one question: the Government have the legislative moment, the mandate and their own manifesto; why not bring forward the cross-sector framework that the House, the public and the experts have all called for? The window is still open but, in my view, not for long without huge risks to our society.
Lord C-J for the Lib Dems criticises the Kings Speech
With the new parliamenrarty session the House of Lords held the customary debate on the goverbnment's legislative programme set ou in the Kings Speech . This is an edited version of what I said about the tech and creative industry aspects.
My Lords, we have had a very rich and wide-ranging debate, which presents some challenges on winding up. I am very tempted to simply give a big tick to a number of the speeches that we heard today.
I warmly congratulate the four maiden speakers on their excellent contributions and the thoughtful points they made. It is difficult to shine with 70 or so other speeches in the same debate but, in my view, they all sparkled. I look forward to many future speeches from them.
Several contributions mentioned SEND provision and the Government's proposals to fix what is, in essence, a broken system. This will involve earlier, more local support but autism charities — I am president of Ambitious about Autism — are clear that this must not come at the expense of families' hard-won legal rights. Parents' rights to assessment, EHCPs and redress must not be traded away for administrative efficiency, and every provider, including private SEND schools, must be properly regulated.
A number of contributors have referred to what might be considered very high demands on our teachers, and that point was made extremely eloquently. I absolutely share the support expressed for higher education, but of course that comes with considerable responsibility in terms of how those institutions are run.
I also believe that our education system must prepare young people for the age of AI; that is one of its particular responsibilities. I declare my advisory interest on the register as regards AI. A dangerous skills divide is already opening up. State schoolteachers are less than half as likely as those in independent schools to have received formal AI training. The National Foundation for Educational Research projects that up to 3 million UK jobs could disappear by 2035. That compounds the issues raised regarding young people who are not in education, employment or training, which is why we on these Benches have committed to a lifelong training grant of £10,000 as not a "nice to have" but a crucial lifeline.
We welcome the Government's commitment to a broader computing GCSE and the exploration of new data science and AI qualifications, but with the final curriculum not due until September 2028 and the AI qualification still being only explored rather than confirmed, the pace is simply too slow. We on these Benches are calling for AI literacy to be embedded across the curriculum from primary school age now, not in two years' time, and to be woven into how we teach critical thinking, civic understanding and creative writing.
The debate touched on the Government's new proposals on ticketing. I pay tribute to the FanFair Alliance, UK Music, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Ticket Abuse, Sharon Hodgson MP and others who have campaigned on this issue, including the fan-led review. I welcome the Government's move to tackle industrial-scale ticket touting. The new Sporting Events Bill is welcome, but relegating the broader ticket tout ban Bill — which will cover the face-value cap for which music fans have waited so long — to draft Bill status risks years of further delay.
The damage done to the creative industries by Brexit has been powerfully set out in this debate. The AI copyright battle is where that damage risks being compounded. The creative industries contribute more than £145 billion to our economy. The music sector alone contributes £8 billion, while publishing contributes £11 billion. We welcome the Government's decision to drop the text and data mining exception. A functioning licensing market already exists. A report published by the BPI in May this year documents 274 commercial agreements between content providers and AI developers that are already in place.
As chair of the ALCS — I declare an interest — I can confirm that the narrative that AI developers cannot access content legally has always been a myth. Three things are now needed: mandatory transparency, requiring AI developers to keep clear records of training inputs; labelling of AI-generated content; and, crucially, that any AI model deployed in the UK must comply with UK copyright law, regardless of where it was trained. I directly ask the Minister: will the Government give a clear commitment that the UK's gold standard IP and copyright law will never be disapplied as part of the AI growth lab sandboxes or under the regulating for growth Bill powers more generally?
I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Rebuck, on the success of the National Year of Reading. Emerging research suggests that AI's very ease of use may undermine the critical thinking we are trying to develop. Unfettered AI access without challenge does not develop judgment but kills it. Media literacy is extremely important. The same AI models that scrape creative content without consent are producing the synthetic media — the deepfakes, fabricated quotes and algorithmically generated news — that is steadily corroding public trust. The Government's media literacy action plan is welcome in parts, but we need a statutory media literacy duty that extends to platforms, requiring them to actively support media literacy, rather than leaving it entirely to Ofcom and the public sector.
Of course, the single greatest instrument of media literacy in this country is the BBC. It received not a mention in this King's Speech. Reuters Institute data from last November shows that the BBC remains the most trusted news source, not just in the UK but globally. In an era where outrage travels faster than facts, that matters enormously. We wish the new DG, Matt Brittin, who started this week, well. The BBC is far more than news; it is an ever-more vital instrument of British soft power.
The debate has also addressed technology and digital sovereignty. Rishi Sunak has admitted recently that he wishes he had spoken to the country more about the change that AI is going to bring. This Government have been equally reticent. As I mentioned, there is a rising lack of trust in AI and concern about its implications. This makes the absence of an AI Bill all the more inexplicable. Given that AI is set to affect every aspect of our economy, how can that be sensible? Ahead of artificial general intelligence, fragmented rules will not be adequate. We need binding comprehensive regulation — particularly in the world of money and financial services.
We look forward to the results of the children's online safety consultation, but there is disappointment that the Government have not brought forward any Bill on online safety. We are confined now to amendments bolted on to other Bills in response to specific crises rather than any coherent strategic architecture.
The question of AI sovereignty has been expertly discussed in this debate. We are threatened by President Trump with tariffs unless we abolish our digital service tax, and Washington is using the tech prosperity deal to pressure us into diluting the Online Safety Act and failing to regulate AI. I hope the Minister will give us sufficient assurances that we have the ability, as a sovereign power, to regulate AI, protect data and levy appropriate taxes, and that that will not be traded away. We must not become an AI taker, wholly dependent on foreign hyperscalers. I commend the Lords Science and Technology Committee's report, Bleeding to Death, published last November, which clearly sets out the scale of the crisis.
We could say more on the Digital Access to services Bill. The voluntary character of this scheme must be guaranteed in primary legislation. There are gaps in cyber security and resilience. Anthropic's Claude Mythos has demonstrated how important it is that we fill those gaps. There is the update of the Computer Misuse Act, and I hope that the Government will work with the industry to ensure that these reforms support the UK cyber security sector and will meet the CyberUp Campaign to discuss the proposals. I hope the Minister will assure us that that will be the case.
I urge the Government to introduce Herbie's Law without delay. It would enable a phase-out of animal experiments over the next decade, supporting scientists with the transition and positioning Britain as a global leader in cutting-edge, human-specific medical research.
Energy strategy cannot be decoupled from our technology ambitions. The exponential growth of AI has created 30 gigawatts of data centre demand, currently stuck awaiting grid connection. Grid connection reform is urgent.
Across all these areas, the question is the same one that I return to repeatedly: will this technology be our servant, augmenting human potential and distributing opportunity more widely, or will it become our master, concentrating power in the hands of those least accountable for its consequences? The answer depends on whether this Government can focus on growth and opportunity and, at the same time, give citizens trust and confidence when they access new technology. We on these Benches will be holding them to that objective throughout the Session ahead.