Until the end of December 2024, Labour created a quango weekly, ordering more than 60 reviews and consultations. It’s a dramatic big-bang theory for unlocking growth. Get the industry captains in alongside the learned emeritus and pump them for information, create dramatic short sprints of tasks, and see what new thinking spills out. Smart data, open data, generative AI, and data centers are the 5-card trick. Data is the new oil, tapped and tagged for the new UK.
Identity is a troublesome topic in the new utopia for law firms and lenders alike, how do you know who you are onboarding against the backdrop of economic crime, terrorism, and money laundering? Passport and driving license checks are standard fare but would a Zoom or Teams call as well be sufficient to visually ID, or does AI and deepfake pose a problem?
The visual checking of a person in the smart data age will be of concern to the risk and compliance team in your organization. They will have had detailed discussions and be watching the outcome of government bills with great interest and somewhat stronger worry lines. Why? Because the UK is first rate at gold plating legislation, as a nation our policy and lawmakers do not settle for the solution – they must be kaizen, which is a problem.
Kaizen (改善) comes from two Japanese words: Kai (improvement) and Zen (good), which translates to “continuous improvement”.
The UK Government is “kai” and not “zen”. They make a change but not always for the better and they are incredibly slow at repealing gold-plated legislation, which is why your sofa is killing you, softly.
The EU banned additional flame retardants in furniture due to toxicity and being carcinogenic. The UK swapped the substances, kept the legislation, and replaced it with something equally toxic. It’s a tricky one for any MP, health or safety, and the new AI universe for risk and compliance teams. All face the same quandaries, preventing fraud, terrorist funding, economic crime, and keeping the business on the right side of the regulators, safe from hefty fines and the wrong kind of 15-minute fame, while simultaneously providing a client experience they will rate five star on social media.
Any Government likes sounding positive and the current message is growth, which is why the House of Lords, the questioning quizzical ying to the speedy announcement of House of Commons policy yang is a safety net of sorts. The Data (Use and Access) Bill drafted to unlock the power of data (for growth) passed back through the Commons on February 5th but not without some much-needed amendments courtesy of the Lords protecting the creative industries copyright. It still heralds a huge transformation in data connectivity, digital signatures and verifying facts about individuals.
It does pose the question of MPs making choices, sometimes things do not go hand in hand, and should unintended consequences present themselves later down the road, was it growth at all cost? Businesses will know first, of course, especially the financial and legal sectors, not the policymakers, and the immediate job growth will begin with risk, compliance, data protection, and information security teams which is a red tape burden on operational costs, even more so if your team only consists of you. If you are a lone practitioner and wondering how to cope with the next wave of regulation, The Human Reproductive Cloning Act 2001 was repealed and replaced by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 in the UK which doesn’t rule out cloning as an option.