Yesterday, hot on the heels of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party published its 2024 General election manifesto. We made some predictions about its contents on Monday, based on the National Policy Forum document which the party said was “set to shape the next Labour manifesto”. Yesterday we learnt that Labour is adopting a “safety first” approach in its manifesto (and some would say during the entire election campaign) i.e. “don’t say or do anything which might reduce the twenty point opinion poll lead.”
The Labour manifesto makes no express reference to data protection reform; not surprising, considering the lack of enthusiasm from the public (as well as IG professionals) for the Conservative‘s Data Protection and Digital Information Bill which failed to make it through the “wash up.” They have though pledged to “improve data sharing across services, with a single unique identifier, to better support children and families.”
Labour, like the Conservatives, will introduce measures to support the development of AI:
“We will ensure our industrial strategy supports the development of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) sector, removes planning barriers to new datacentres. And we will create a National Data Library to bring together existing research programmes and help deliver data-driven public services, whilst maintaining strong safeguards and ensuring all of the public benefit.”
There is also a pledge to regulate AI but only in some cases:
“Labour will ensure the safe development and use of AI models by introducing binding regulation on the handful of companies developing the most powerful AI models and by banning the creation of sexually explicit deepfakes.”
But there is no real detail about what AI regulation will look like under Labour.
Perhaps the party will take the lead from the TUC , which produced an AI Bill in April, or the EU AI Act which was recently passed by the European Parliament.
More meat on the bones please Mr Starmer!
Surprisingly, the Labour manifesto makes no reference to Freedom of Information despite the Party arguing for many years that private contractors delivering public services should be subject to FOI. Of course, it may be if they form the next government, Labour will rethink its IG policies and more substantial reforms.
At present, judging by its manifesto, they do not view IG as a vote winner.
This and other data protection developments will be discussed in detail on our forthcoming GDPR Update workshop.
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