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Trade Bill

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan. I support her Amendment 43 and share her concerns about big pharma, although I would go further and suggest that the profit motive should have no place in healthcare. Chiefly, I will offer three brief paragraphs in support of the cross-party Amendment 11, so ably introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton.

Looking at the excellent UNISON briefing on this amendment, I was taken back, as was the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, to the Committee debate on the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill, in which we were discussing the place of artificial intelligence and big data in care and, of course, the dreaded algorithms. Clearly, this will be a fast-growing area of care, needing careful monitoring and democratic oversight, which is what this amendment seeks to achieve. What is decided by Parliament must not be undermined or overturned by free trade agreements. As the medicines Bill debate highlighted, these are big issues and there are huge issues around discrimination and potential misuse—accidental or otherwise—of the data, the algorithms and the whole approach.

I wish briefly to point noble Lords to the case of Henrietta Lacks in the US, including the treatment of her cells, the treatment of her data and the destruction of her privacy. It is an experience that surely should be studied as we face the loss of the protection of GDPR, as there remains uncertainty about the plans for WTO e-commerce rules and as there is grave concern about the way in which the UK-Japan agreement undermines UK domestic digital and AI regulation in healthcare services.