Speeches by Blake.

“The reason that is matters is how it flows through the spending review, but also how it flows into local government spending. It is a huge brake on local government spending, which is then driving the overall demand for local government spending. Do you agree?”

“You are thinking about it—that’s great. That is a good first step.”

“Professor Andreeva, what do you think is holding back other companies from adopting these systems?”

“Sorry, but I just wanted to follow up. If there is an acceptance that there is a significant risk, what is standing in the way of your proposals around counterfactual explanation statements being some kind of requirement in order to add to the transparency of these models?”

“Google, IBM, Accenture and Microsoft have adopted these systems.”

“So what is holding back other organisations from adopting them?”

“Professor Lawrence, where do you see the main gaps of atomic humans at the moment?”

“Yes. I am pretty sure we are the strength, but where do we need more of us in order to mitigate some of the risks Professor Wachter has been talking about?”

“I want to pick up on the themes of accountability, empowerment and the transparency of models, and the markets and the trading aspect we started off with. The Governor of the Bank of England has talked about not knowing what is happening inside AI models. We know from the artificial intelligence in UK financial service…”

“On consumer and on trading?”

“If we had better statistical monitoring techniques, do you think would we be able to read the black box models more effectively ourselves?”

“DWP and housing benefit would be annually managed expenditure, but local authority spend on temporary accommodation is part of the spending review consideration.”

“On your point about annually managed expenditure compared to the day-to-day spending, local authorities spend on temporary accommodation through their own budgets, so would that be covered within the spending review?”

“What are they?”

“From an Institute for Government perspective, in the rebalancing of spending away from the subsidy of housing benefit to a capital subsidy and genuinely affordable homes, is the spending review going in the right direction? What are the mechanisms that would need to change within Government to move that spend from reve…”

“But that has not been published yet; it is eagerly awaited.”

“Dr Tetlow, on the balance between capital and resource spending, London local authorities spend £4 million a day on temporary accommodation. We have a commitment in the spending review to spend £39 billion over 10 years on affordable housing. To what extent do you think the investment in affordable housing will be able…”

“On your point about the opportunity costs and how borrowing creates debt—you have to think really carefully about whether that is the right thing to be investing in—to what extent do you think there are risks to delivering on some of this capital investment, and what are they?”

“Thanks. That was my hunch, but I wanted to explore whether you had done any of the figures. I also want to ask about capital and resource spending. One of the big stories of the spending review is a really significant approach to capital versus resource spending. On balance, Ms Miller, do you think the capital spending…”

“My point is that local authorities are already allocating funding that will essentially be backfilled by the announcement. Have you been able to do any calculations about the impact of that? I appreciate that it would be on quite a granular level, and you might even have to do it manually, but I am interested to know w…”