Date: 2023-04-17
Julia Lopez: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. Data is already the fuel driving the digital age: it powers the everyday apps that we use, public services are being improved by its better use and businesses rely on it to trade, produce goods and deliver services for their customers. But how we choose to use data going forward will become even more important: it will determine whether we can grow an innovative economy with well-paid, high-skill jobs, it will shape our ability to compete globally in developing the technologies of the future and it will increasingly say something about the nature of our democratic society. The great challenge for democracies, as I see it, will be how to use data to empower rather than control citizens, enhancing their privacy and sense of agency without letting authoritarian states--which, in contrast, use data as a tool to monitor and harvest information from citizens--dominate technological advancement and get a competitive advantage over our companies. The UK cannot step aside from the debate by simply rubber-stamping whatever iteration of the GDPR comes out of Brussels. We have in our hands a critical opportunity to take a new path and, in doing so, to lead the global conversation about how we can best use data as a force for good--a conversation in which using data more effectively and maintaining high data protection standards are seen not as contradictory but as mutually reinforcing objectives, because trust in this more effective system will build the confidence to share information. We start today not by kicking off a revolution, turning over the apple cart and causing a compliance headache for UK firms, but by beginning an evolution away from an inflexible one-size-fits-all regime and towards one that is risk-based and focused on innovation, flexibility and the needs of our citizens, scientists, public services and companies. Businesses need data to make better decisions and to reach the right consumers. Researchers need data to discover new treatments. Hospitals need it to deliver more personalised patient care. Our police and security services need data to keep our people safe. Right now, our rules are too vague, too complex and too confusing always to understand. The GDPR is a good standard, but it is not the gold standard. People are struggling to utilise data to innovate, because they are tied up in burdensome activities that are not fundamentally useful in enhancing privacy. A recently published report on compliance found that 81% of European publishers were unknowingly in breach of the GDPR, despite doing what they thought the law required of them. A YouGov poll from this year found that one in five marketing professionals in the UK report knowing absolutely nothing about the GDPR, despite being bound by it. It is not just businesses: the people whose privacy our laws are supposed to protect do not understand it either. Instead, they click away the thicket of cookie pop-ups just so they can see their screen. The Bill will maintain the high standards of data protection that British people rightly expect, but it will also help the people who are most affected by data regulation, because we have co-designed it with those people to ensure that our regulation reflects the way in which real people live their lives and run their businesses.