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Lord Clement-Jones is behind the fledgling bill.
He is co-founded and shares the chair of the ‘All party parliamentary group on AI’, is the former chair of the Lords Select Committee on AI, and is the author of the book ‘Living with the algorithm: AI servant or master?’.
According to Clement-Jones, the UK’s public sector is increasingly using AI, with HMRC and the MOJ spending most on the technology.
He said:
Too often in the UK we legislate when the damage has already been done. We need to be proactive, not reactive, when it comes to protecting citizens.
The Post Office/Horizon scandal demonstrates the painful human cost when there aren’t proper checks in place to challenge these automated systems.
Right now, there are no legal obligations on public authorities to be transparent about when and how they use these algorithms.
Under these [the bill’s] proposals, if ‘computer says no’ to a benefit decision, immigration decision, or similar, a citizen would have a right to access the information on why that happened so they might challenge it.
This bill obliges public authorities to publish impact assessments of any automated or AI algorithms they use to make decisions, and to keep a transparency register on automated decision making.
It also obliges the government to provide an independent dispute resolution service for people who want to challenge any decisions made about them.
