UK AI and data legislation announced in King's Speech

In a shift away from previous policy, the King of the United Kingdom's Speech of 17 July 2024, set out the new Labour government's plans to "seek to establish the most appropriate legislation to place requirements on those working to develop the most powerful AI models”. The Prime Minister recently said that AI “must be within a regulated framework” but details of what the legislation might cover are thin on the ground. It is not, however, expected to be as comprehensive as the EU's recently published AI Act.

Rumours have persisted that the Conservative government was working on AI legislation which was widely expected to make mandatory the currently voluntary commitments by leading developers of large language models/general purpose AI to submit algorithms to a safety assessment process. There were also suggestions that the UK would consider amending copyright legislation to allow organisations and individuals to opt out of allowing LLMs to scrape their content. If legislation was indeed being prepared before the general election, we may see an AI Bill sooner rather than later even though there was no AI-specific legislation listed in the background briefing notes to the speech.

While the King did not cover it in Parliament, the background briefing notes mentioned other widely expected digital regulatory initiatives including:

Digital Information and Smart Data Bill - this aims to harness the power of data for economic growth. Among other things, it will establish digital verification services, a national underground asset register, and smart data schemes which allow secure sharing of customer data with authorised third party providers. It will also preserve many of the reforms to the ICO's governance structure proposed under the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill (which did not pass before the general election) and will include “targeted reforms to some data laws….where there is currently a lack of clarity”. No specific mention of the GDPR is made.

Cyber Security and Resilience Bill - to protect public services and infrastructure by expanding the remit of existing regulation, putting regulators on a stronger footing and increasing reporting requirements. This is widely expected to bring the current NIS Regulations more in line with the EU's NIS2 Directive.

Product Safety and Metrology Bill- this aims to update product safety law including to help enable the UK to keep pace with technological advances such as AI. Among other things, the Bill will cover the role of online marketplaces in product safety, particularly where non-UK products are placed on the UK market via them.

Measures which look to have survived the change in government of tangential interest include:

• the Tobacco and Vapes Bill
• restrictions on advertising of junk food and high caffeine energy drinks to children.

Online safety was not explicitly covered despite the pre-speech statements by the government which suggested it does plan to take action in this area, although some of the announced legislation (for example the Children's Wellbeing Bill) may eventually touch on it. There was also no mention of gambling reform which was in progress under the previous government, and while planning reforms were announced, there was no detail around the manifesto commitment to build data centres.

Now we look forward to seeing the legislation itself to understand the impact on digital businesses. 

We'll be covering new and changing digital and data regulation at our event, Digital Forum on Thursday 12 September. Click the banner below to visit the event page for more information and to register your place.