Speeches by Glen.

“That is why I am asking.”

“Of course, there is a risk that politicians like us pass laws that create lots of reporting mechanisms to reassure ourselves that we have done things in the public interest. Much of that reporting activity is expensive to financial institutions and actually superfluous—you recognise that as part of the issue that the C…”

“I am sorry, Chair. It feels as if the Government have done what any Government would responsibly have done, which is to say, “Look, we have a concentration of three cloud providers for 75% of our hosting.” Your explanation of what you are worried about rather demonstrates that, because how do we reassure ourselves that…”

“I would just observe that, as someone who was a Minister in the Treasury for several years, I am reticent to say that just because a Minister—any Minister—declares in good faith that something is going to happen, the state and all its apparatus is necessarily capable of delivering it. I would respectfully urge you to c…”

“I will pick up on something that the Committee looked at last week with respect to the capacity around AI. When I was in the Treasury, we designated the cloud as critical infrastructure. We saw an AWS outage this week.”

“Basically, you are saying that your previous experience shows you complacencies, gaps and an understanding of what is missing from models that can be used in the same way and applied to some of the phenomena that exist today.”

“Could I just build on that? I do recognise the relevance of your experience then, but one issue will have been, perhaps, the lack of rules around transparency and the way the market was familiar with what was underneath. It is generally said that there is not a complete repeat, but what lessons can practically be appli…”

“I acknowledge the Minister’s commitment to get to justice on this issue, and I recognise the frustration that she expresses, because I was responsible for the infected blood compensation scheme, which involved meeting a diverse group of 40 different charities and representative bodies that did not agree with one anothe…”

“It is a good line for all politicians to take, but in reality, if you are a large corporate, a stack of services is provided by one of those firms, and you are embedded in and have a long-term contractual relationship, the notion that somehow you are going to easily move to something else that has resilience is surely …”

“Just to clarify, I think that Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud combined have about 60% to 65% of the cloud market. Notwithstanding what you have just said, given those market dynamics how realistic is it that we will ever be in a position of having a meaningful, home-grown alternative, given the em…”

“Can you be as specific as possible on when and what that will be, Mr Geale?”

“Can I just dig a bit further into that? I think your CEO, Nikhil Rathi, spoke last year about the issues around hyper-personalisation and tailoring products. How can the consumer, and we as a Committee and others, transparently evaluate your scrutiny of what is happening in this space? It is like proving a counterfactu…”

“I understand exactly what you are saying: you can have more data, so you can be more informed, and therefore avoid some of the biases that come from glib, easy assumptions about postcodes. On the flipside of that, how do you avoid a situation where firms do not go down that route, and do not use the best of what is ava…”

“I will turn to Ms Rusu and ask about the issue that you were beginning to talk about around your prior experience with credit—perhaps we could broaden this to insurance, as well. If you are a firm, you obviously want to make a profit; if you want to make a profit, you want to identify clients that you can make a profit…”

“Can I build on something Mr Grady was talking about around the consumer duty and the FCA’s expectations of what that requires firms to do? To clarify, in terms of the transparency and explicability of their decisions on consumer outcomes, there have been no enforcement actions against firms on the basis of not meeting …”

“That is very important for people to understand, because this is often asked as a measure of whether you have done anything, but of course you are having a dialogue all the time to nudge people into the right places. Is that the right way of looking at it?”

“I do not want to put ridiculous hypothetical situations, but clearly the amount of data that is being interrogated and the sophisticated building up of new propositions based on almost compounded use of AI is very complicated and can lead to new products being offered to consumers. The Chair talked about the problem of…”

“But understanding how 70% of our landmass works is probably quite an important part of that.”

“But isn’t the real problem here that the dysfunctionality of interventions that are not aligned? The incentives for environmental stewardship, food production and inheritance tax are all answered on different timeframes. I am concerned about, to Helen Miller, the issue of actually having a universal standard treatment …”

“But we know that farmers do not have high returns similar to other asset classes. Doing it when they had no expectation that it was going to happen—my colleague has dealt with the planning effect and how that might be mitigated—is very different to others. Of course, people will have to make do with whatever they have …”