The comments made by Chris Philp, the Minister for Technology and the Digital Economy, on 10 February 2022.
The UK is already a world leader in AI. Today we’re investing millions to ensure people from all parts of society can access the opportunities and benefits AI is creating in this country.
We are doubling the number of AI scholarships previously available to underrepresented groups to build a diverse and inclusive workforce fit for the future of tech.
The statement made by Chris Philp, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, in the House of Commons on 8 February 2022.
Protecting children online is a Government priority and the strongest protections in the draft Online Safety Bill are for children.
The Online Safety Bill will establish new statutory duties requiring companies to take robust steps to improve safety online. The duties will cover user-to-user services—those that allow users to upload and share content that may be encountered by others—and search engines. All companies in scope will need to protect their users from illegal content and activity, and companies with services that are likely to be accessed by children will be required to protect children from legal but harmful content. While the Bill is technology neutral, we expect companies to use age verification technologies to prevent children from accessing services that pose the highest risk of harm to them, such as online pornography.
The online safety regime covers many of the most visited pornography sites, social media, video sharing platforms, forums and search engines—thereby capturing many of the sites through which children access pornography. These companies will have to prevent children from accessing pornography or face enforcement action by Ofcom.
The Government recognise the concern, raised by the Joint Committee during pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill and by other child online safety stakeholders, that the Bill needs to go further to protect children from online pornography on services that do not currently fall within its scope.
To strengthen protections for children further, we will make changes to the Bill to incorporate a stand-alone provision requiring providers who publish or place pornographic content on their services to prevent children from accessing that content. This addresses the concerns that have been raised about a gap in scope for non-user-generated pornography, and ensures that all services that would have been captured by part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, and all the user-to-user and search services covered by the Online Safety Bill, will be required to protect children from pornography. This new duty will be enforced by Ofcom with providers being subject to the same enforcement measures as other in-scope services.
The Government are committed to bringing forward the most comprehensive approach possible to protecting children online. We will introduce the Online Safety Bill as soon as parliamentary time allows and will continue to engage with Members of Parliament in both Houses on the protections for children within the Bill.
The statement made by Chris Philp, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, in the House of Commons on 7 February 2022.
I wish to inform the House that the Government will be making a change to the Online Safety Bill, to set out priority offences in primary legislation on the face of the Bill.
This change responds to the calls for greater clarity about the criminal offences in scope of the new regulatory framework, and will increase the pace of implementation of the regulatory regime.
Specifically, this change responds to calls from the Online Safety Bill Joint Committee and the Digital, Culture Media and Sport Committee’s Sub-Committee on Online Harms and Disinformation, which recommended that the most relevant criminal offences should be included in primary legislation. The Petitions Committee further specified a number of offences that it believes should be listed, including hate crime.
We plan to include offences within the following categories on the face of the Bill:
Encouraging or assisting suicide.
Offences relating to sexual images, including revenge and extreme pornography.
Incitement to and threats of violence.
Hate crime.
Public order offences, harassment and stalking.
Drug-related offences.
Weapons and firearms offences.
Fraud and financial crime.
Money laundering.
Exploiting prostitutes for gain.
Organised immigration offences.
Offences relating to terrorism and child sexual abuse and exploitation are already listed in the Bill. The Secretary of State will have the ability to designate additional offences as priority by statutory instrument, which will be subject to parliamentary scrutiny.
Priority offences represent the most serious and prevalent illegal content and activity online. Companies will need to take proactive steps to tackle such content. Companies will need to design and operate their services to be safe by design and prevent users encountering priority illegal content. This could include, for example, having effective systems in place to prevent banned users opening new accounts.
Beyond the priority offences, all services will need to ensure that they have effective systems and processes in place to take down quickly other illegal content once it has been reported or they become aware of its presence.
Listing the priority offences on the face of the Bill, instead of in secondary legislation, is an important step in strengthening this pioneering legislation designed to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online. This will mean that platforms do not need to wait for secondary legislation to start tackling the most serious illegal content.
We will respond fully to all three Committees’ reports in due course alongside introduction of the Bill, and thank them for their recommendations.
The statement made by Chris Philp, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, in the House of Commons on 4 February 2022.
I wish to inform the House that the Government will be accepting the recommended harm-based communications offence, false communications offence and threatening communications offence, as laid out in the Law Commission’s “Modernising Communications Offences” report, published in July 2021.
The offences will be brought into law through the online safety Bill, which we are committed to introducing to Parliament as soon as possible.
These new offences will help ensure that the criminal law is focused on the most harmful behaviour while protecting freedom of expression. The current offences are sufficiently broad in scope that they could constitute a disproportionate interference in the right to freedom of expression. The new offences will protect freedom of expression and, in the case of the harm-based offence by increasing the threshold of harm to serious distress, will ensure that communications that individuals find offensive, such as the expression of a view they do not like or agree with, will not be caught. In addition, the court cannot find someone guilty of the harm-based offence or false communications offence if they have a reasonable excuse. A reasonable excuse would include if the communication was or was intended as a contribution to the public interest.
We have also accepted the Law Commission’s recommendation to include a press exemption within the general harm-based communications offence and the knowingly false communications offence. While we do not expect the new offences will capture communication made by the media, including this press exemption demonstrates the Government’s commitment to upholding media freedom.
The Government will repeal the existing communication offences, including section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and sections 127(1) and (2) of the Communications Act 2003, as recommended by the Law Commission.
Alongside the online safety regulatory framework, the offences will help deliver the Government’s objective of making the UK the safest place to be online.
In addition, as the Prime Minister has indicated, we welcome the recommended offence on cyber-flashing and are carefully considering it.
The report recommends a further three offences. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Ministry of Justice are carefully considering the remaining offences and accompanying recommendations, including the hoax calls offence, an offence for encouraging or assisting self-harm and an offence for epilepsy trolling. We will continue to assess these offences and issue a full response to the Law Commission later this year.
I would like to express my sincere thanks for all the work that the Commission has carried out as part of this review over the past four years.
The statement made by Chris Philp, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, in the House of Commons on 9 November 2021.
I am appearing here this afternoon in place of the Minister for Sport—the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Nigel Huddleston)—who is in Geneva having meetings with football officials.
I will start by being very clear about something on which I know the whole House will agree: there is no place for racism in sport. Indeed, there is no place for racism anywhere in society. It must be confronted, it must be eradicated and it should never be written off as just “banter”.
The Government are extremely concerned by the reports of racism at Yorkshire county cricket club. Quite simply, the situation faced by Azeem Rafiq was unacceptable. It should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, and it should have been dealt with properly during the initial investigation. We have made it clear to the England and Wales Cricket Board that this requires a full, transparent investigation, both of the incidents involving Azeem Rafiq and of the wider cultural issues at Yorkshire county cricket club. The ECB is now investigating the matter fully. It took action against the Yorkshire club on Friday, stripping it of the right to host international matches, and has suspended a player.
There have been a number of resignations from the Yorkshire board—quite rightly—including that of its chairman. Lord Patel of Bradford has taken over as chairman, and has set out the approach that he will be taking to tackle the issue at Yorkshire. Crucially, he has started by apologising to Azeem Rafiq, but we know that that will not undo the pain that Azeem feels. More action is needed, and we have called on Lord Patel and the ECB to investigate fully, to eradicate racism where it exists, and to tackle the culture that can support it. In addition, the ECB is now undertaking a regulatory process. It must take strong action where it is necessary, and that action must be transparent and swift, for the benefit of cricket.
The ECB has also launched the independent commission for equity in cricket to look at wider issues that go beyond Yorkshire. It is chaired by Cindy Butts, a highly respected anti-racism campaigner. She is a board member of the Kick It Out campaign in football and is also, as you know, Mr Speaker, a lay member of your Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. I have great confidence in her independence and her phenomenal track record in this area. This terrible case—the awful case of the abuse that Azeem Rafiq should never have suffered, but did suffer—shows how much more needs to be done to stamp out racism in the game, and I urge anyone who has experienced discrimination in cricket to approach Cindy Butts’s commission and report what they have experienced. I understand that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has requested information about this incident. That is quite right, and I encourage the EHRC in its work.
Sport should be for everyone, and it should not take cases such as this to bring that to life. The Government applaud Azeem Rafiq’s courage in speaking out, and encourage anyone who has been similarly affected to do the same. This must be a watershed moment for cricket. The Government will closely scrutinise the actions taken by the ECB—the Minister for Sport met the board last week to discuss this topic—and by Yorkshire county cricket club in response to these damning allegations. The investigations to which I have referred must be thorough, transparent and public. That is necessary to restore the public’s faith in cricket in Yorkshire and beyond. Parliament is watching, the Government are watching and the country is watching. We expect real action, and the Government stand ready to step in and act if those involved do not put their own house in order.
The comments made by Chris Philp, the Digital Minister, on 11 October 2021.
As Birmingham Tech Week kicks off it’s great to see the digital sector in the West Midlands entering a golden era.
There are high-quality and well-paid job opportunities for those who want to pursue a career in tech and the region is fast-becoming a powerhouse of digital talent.
We are determined to level up the country and we are working around the clock to back digital businesses with pro-innovation policies to boost digital skills and create jobs so everyone can benefit from this dynamic sector.
The comments made by Chris Philp, the Gambling Minister, on 30 September 2021.
We are gathering all the necessary evidence to reset the balance between giving adults the freedom to choose how they gamble safely, with the right protections for those at risk of harm.
We are determined to protect vulnerable people from exploitation by aggressive advertising or unfair practices that entrench problem gambling.
The statement made by Chris Philp, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, in the House of Commons on 22 September 2021.
On 7 June the Government announced that Malcolm Sheehan QC had been appointed to lead an independent review into the regulation of the Football Index gambling product and its operator, BetIndex Ltd. The terms of reference set out that the review was to provide an expert account of the actions taken by the Gambling Commission and other regulatory bodies throughout the period in which BetIndex held a gambling licence, provide recommendations as needed, and to inform the Government’s ongoing review of the 2005 Gambling Act. The independent review has now concluded, and the report has today been published on gov.uk.
I am grateful to Mr Sheehan and his team for their extensive investigation, thorough report and clear recommendations. I am also grateful to the Gambling Commission, Financial Conduct Authority and others for their co-operation with the review and their provision of evidence to support Mr Sheehan’s deliberations.
This independent expert report has been completed in such a way as to avoid prejudicing a number of ongoing processes and investigations into BetIndex Ltd. First, administration proceedings are continuing, looking at the assets and liabilities of the firm and what is owed to customers. It is likely that this process will result in some amounts being reimbursed to creditors. Secondly, the Gambling Commission is completing its separate regulatory investigation into BetIndex on which it will report in due course. Thirdly, the Gambling Commission has referred the company to the Insolvency Service to ask that it consider whether the actions of the directors prior to administration breached insolvency or fraud laws. Any comment on this matter needs to carefully avoid prejudicing any future legal proceedings.
Football Index was a novel and boundary-pushing product, and its business was materially impacted by covid-19 and the suspension of football. While the independent review focused on the actions of regulatory bodies, it did find that BetIndex did not properly notify the Gambling Commission of the nature of the product in its licence application, nor did it inform the regulator of changes to the product after launch as it was required to. This made scrutiny harder.
Nonetheless, the report identifies areas where the Gambling Commission could have been more effective in responding to the challenges raised by the novel product from its licensing to eventual collapse, including in early scrutiny, speed of decision making and action, and escalation of issues when barriers arose. By 2019 it was aware of concerns about the product and launched an investigation, but by that time Football Index had grown to such an extent that large amounts of customer money were already involved. The report helps us understand why certain decisions were made at the time and what we can learn from that.
While BetIndex Ltd was never regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, the report also looked at its role in working with the commission, identifying some areas of improvement including in speed of response to requests from the commission and consistency of messaging on regulatory responsibilities.
It is now essential that we learn the lessons from this case and ensure a similar situation does not happen again. I am pleased that the Gambling Commission is carrying out an action plan to address the issues identified. In the weeks since the draft report was shared the commission has:
Updated the frameworks for risk based regulation so that product novelty is properly considered alongside other factors in determining the level of scrutiny an operator is placed under.
Committed to consulting on tighter rules for the terminology used to describe gambling products, putting beyond doubt that gambling must be clearly described as gambling and not an investment.
Commenced a review of all remote licensees to check for issues relating to boundary pushing products.
Agreed to provide formal advice to the Government on the issue of protecting customer funds as part of the Gambling Act review. This is in addition to their current business plan’s commitment to review the existing three-tiered approach.
The commission and the FCA have also worked together to strengthen their memorandum of understanding in response to Mr Sheehan’s recommendations, including with new escalation routes and commitments on timeliness of responses to ensure regulatory impasses cannot remain unsolved. The FCA has additionally:
Nominated an Executive Director to oversee the relationship with the commission.
Continued to pursue the programme of change as set out in its July Business Plan.
The report has also raised some important questions for the Government’s ongoing review of the Gambling Act 2005 which is already taking a comprehensive and evidence-led look at gambling in this country, including a close examination of the Gambling Commission’s powers and resources. The Gambling Commission is not required to monitor the financial viability of companies on an ongoing basis. However, our Act review will consider whether the commission should require gambling companies to do more to demonstrate their ability to cover liabilities arising from long-term bets, especially if they make up a large proportion of their business. The gambling White Paper which we will publish in due course will answer this question and set out the Government vision for the sector.
A copy of Mr Sheehan’s final report will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses.
The comments made by Chris Philp, the Gambling Minister, on 22 September 2021.
I’m extremely conscious of how devastating the collapse of Football Index has been on its many customers, which is why we moved quickly to launch this independent review.
We have been clear that we must learn lessons to make sure a situation like this does not happen again. I’m encouraged to see the Gambling Commission and the FCA are taking concrete steps on an action plan on how they will better work together.
We will ensure that the findings from this review feed directly into our ongoing Gambling Act Review which is looking at ways we can improve regulation of the gambling industry.
The speech made by Chris Philp, the Minister of State at the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on 22 September 2021.
Good morning and thank you for inviting me to the AI summit.
This is the first event I have spoken at since being appointed as Minister with responsibility for Technology last week. As one of very few MPs or Ministers to have a science background, having studied Physics at Oxford, I have always taken an interest in the intersection between technology and business. In fact, when I was 21 I co-founded a distribution business that we later floated on AIM and, two takeovers later, is now part of Tesco. That business was substantially tech enabled. It used predictive stock ordering to reduce inventory to minimal levels while enabling next day delivery at high fulfilment rates. You would consider what we did then extremely rudimentary, but back in the year 2000 we felt quite pleased with what we did. So anyway, I’m very happy to be here with you today.
I’m especially happy to be here because the UK’s tech industry as a whole is an extraordinary success story. We saw figures earlier this week that in the first half of 2021 1,400 private UK tech firms collectively raised £13.5 billion, by far the highest in Europe – and over double the amount raised in second-placed Germany.
So the UK is in an admirable position, with a rich legacy of spearheading many of the greatest leaps in AI over the decades; we have advanced scholarships at universities and research centres across the country; and, in London, the most vibrant startup scene outside of San Francisco – with companies like Deepmind, Benevolent AI and Improbable pushing the envelope of what’s possible in AI in their respective fields.
The UK saw 20 tech firms reach Unicorn status in the first half of this year, including Tractable and Zego. We have ten privately owned tech firms valued at over $10 billion. And in your field, Exscientia, which uses AI to discover new drugs, raised nearly a quarter of a billion dollars this year. From Alan Turing to Demis Hassabis, the UK has always led.
The Government is completely committed to maintaining and building the UK’s leading tech position, including in AI. The UK is the clear European leader in AI and third globally behind only the USA and China – and I know we can catch them up. So let me say today: we want AI innovators to locate and scale up in the UK. We want you to succeed in the UK. We want the UK to lead the world in this field. It is a critical national priority.
It is critical because AI is a profound technology. It is the future. Your field has the potential to – in fact it will – infuse every aspect of our personal and business lives in ways we cannot currently imagine. As Andrew Ng has argued, AI will fulfil a similar role in the coming century to the one that electricity and then regular computing played in the last century – a meta-enabler which underpins activity in a huge range of fields, including those without initially obvious applicability.
So it’s important for Government to engage with technology, which of course includes AI technologies, because of how inextricably linked they are with each and every one of our lives – something the pandemic has made clear.
And this AI Summit is timely, because as many of you will have seen, and as the Secretary of State trailed on Monday, the Government has launched its ambitious National AI Strategy today.
For the first time, the Government has set out its strategic vision for how we remain a pre-eminent AI nation. Building on the investments we’ve made through the AI Sector Deal and since, and the kinds of successes we’ve seen this week in terms of our startups, we want to ensure the UK remains an AI superpower for years and decades to come.
A number of important steps have already been taken. In the last seven years the Government has invested £2.3 billion supporting AI. This has included a quarter of a billion pounds to develop the use of AI in the NHS, the same amount again for the Centre for Connected and Autonomous vehicles and £100 million to fund 1,000 AI PhDs. The British Business Bank has already invested £372 million in UK AI companies. And this is just the start.
Undoubtedly the investments we’ve made to date have kept us at the forefront of AI – only behind the USA and China – far ahead of the chasing pack of other countries. But we have more to do to keep and build our position.
Many of you who have had a glimpse of the AI Strategy will see how neatly it links up with other Government Strategies.
It wouldn’t have been possible without the independent AI Council, who pivoted their expertise first to helping Government understand the potential for AI to help with the initial crisis during the pandemic, and then to setting out their vision for how AI could help us rebuild our economy. I thank them for their work.
It wouldn’t have been possible without detailed analysis, consultation and collaboration across the whole of Government.
And it wouldn’t have been possible without the help of many of you. In fact, since the publication of the AI Council’s Roadmap, the Office for AI – who led on developing the Strategy – has spoken to literally hundreds of organisations and individuals to capture the collective vision of the ecosystem.
So what’s in the Strategy?
Let me tell you: this is an ambitious and inclusive strategy. It aims to build on our leadership in delivering responsible AI, to point to how we drive growth across every sector while ensuring that the benefits and the opportunities are spread across society.
The Strategy is structured around three pillars:
Investing in and planning for the long term needs of the AI ecosystem to continue our leadership as a science and AI superpower;
Supporting the transition to an AI-enabled economy, capturing the benefits of innovation in the UK, and ensuring AI benefits all sectors and regions;
Ensuring the UK gets the national and international governance of AI technologies right to encourage innovation, investment, and protect the public and our fundamental values.
But just as this Strategy is being published, we want you to know we’re serious about delivering it.
That’s why we commit to delivering from day 1:
We’ll support our future skills and diversity needs through Turing Fellowships, Centres for Doctoral Training and Postgraduate Industrial Masters and Conversion Courses and visa routes – such as the Global Talent visa and the High Potential Individual Route and the Scale-Up route to make sure the brightest and the best can come here easily; Support the National Centre for Computing Education to ensure programmes for children in AI are accessible and reach the widest demographic; Publish a report into the UK’s future computation capacity needs to support AI research, development and commercialisation. Continue to support academic R&D into AI and its commercialisation and work to ensure better access to the big data needed to support AI projects.
We’ll also support the Levelling Up agenda by launching a joint Office for AI & UKRI programme aimed at developing AI in sectors beyond London and the South East; Launch a Defence AI Strategy later this year and the new Defence AI Centre through the Ministry of Defence; Work with teams across government to identify where using AI can provide a catalytic contribution to strategic challenges, and consider how Innovation Missions can include AI capabilities to promote ambitious mission-based cooperation.
And finally we’ll: Pilot an AI Standards Hub to coordinate UK engagement in AI standardisation globally – so UK startups and data scientists can feed into their development; Undertake an analysis of algorithmic transparency with a view to publishing a cross-government standard; and Update guidance on AI ethics and safety in the public sector.
One of the most crucial areas we will work on is setting out our pro-innovation policy position on how we’ll get AI governance and regulation right, within the next few months. So far we’ve been pragmatic in delivering guidance for the public sector, working with the World Economic Forum, Alan Turing Institute, ICO and others, but this work will be a wider vision that gives greater clarity to businesses about how we think AI should benefit society. We will seek to give certainty, support innovation and deployment, reassure the public and set a standard that could be adopted globally. We will seek to keep regulatory intervention to a minimum, generally seeking to use existing structures and to approach the issue with the permissive mindset that we want to make AI innovation easy and straightforward, while avoiding any public harm where there is evidence it exists.
We’ll also be looking at how we continue to support the most advanced research in AI – whether in a university, a startup or large company. We’ll launch a UKRI National AI Research & Innovation Programme to support the transformation of the UK’s capability in AI and better coordinate and join up their activities;
Finally, we’ll examine, together with employers and providers, what skills are needed to enable employees to use AI in a business setting, and work with the Department for Education to explore how skills provision can meet those needs.
The conversations that Government has had with the tech and AI ecosystem haven’t ended, and indeed this Strategy isn’t the end of the conversation on AI, as you have now heard. It’s the beginning of a new conversation. It started with the AI review and Sector Deal, and has continued with the AI Council and all of you as we developed the Strategy.
Now, our strategic vision is set out, and we’ll continue to engage with you as we work hard to implement and deliver it.
To finish: I’ll echo a sentiment I touched on earlier – AI is a truly transformative technology, with the power to not only help us to recover as a country economically, but the potential to dramatically improve lives and livelihoods across the UK, and make us a global leader in tackling the biggest challenges humanity faces. To make us a true AI and science superpower.
And to echo my colleague, the Secretary of State in the foreword of the Strategy, AI is here now. It is improving our lives now. We want to make sure the UK can lead the world in ensuring AI works for people and delivers on its potential. And with this Strategy, I believe we can do that.
Enjoy the AI summit!