My Lords, I thank the Minister for that helpful unpacking of the amendments. I hope that the ICO will read her speech because, in essence, it has helpfully brought together a series of glosses on automated decision-making and the rights of the data subject. My amendments tried to bring together those rights specifically on the face of the Bill. The fact that
the Minister had to unpack them from a quite a number of articles and recitals demonstrates just how opaque is the GDPR for many of us, including those of us who have spent many weeks in the salt mines—it is no less opaque than when we started. Her response was extremely helpful. I hope that some sort of explanatory memorandum produced by the ICO might help because many of us around the House are trying to future-proof the Data Protection Bill so that we do not have to keep coming back and invoking Clause 15, Clause 9 and so on—whatever our differences may be about Henry VIII powers. We want to come to some conclusions while the Bill is going through and really understand what the rights of the data subject are in the face of increasing use of algorithms and so on.
There are just a couple of areas in which I should push, in particular the article 29 working group guidance on “meaningful”. None of us really knows what the status of the article 29 working group will be. Will we have a 29 March 2019 working group? Does everything change after that or not? If we are relying on that kind of interpretation, we need to have a pretty clear idea and a pretty good statement from the Government that it will continue after Brexit.
Where I am still unpersuaded and thought the argument was not really as good as it could have been was over my Amendment 41, on recital 71. Children are not adequately drawn into the legislation or protected from automated decision-making—that was the reason for proposing that additional clause.
I will withdraw my amendment, but I will read very carefully what the Minister has had to say. I am sure we will have many more happy hours corresponding in this area, because it will provide grist to the mill for quite a number of observers who are extremely interested in the consequences of artificial intelligence and the data it uses. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.