Free Webinar – Artificial Intelligence and Automated Decision Making in Public Bodies: What are the Implications for Housing Cases?

Monday 13 May 2024, 1-2pm

Webinar, Online

This webinar was brought to you by the Garden Court Chambers Housing and Public Law Teams.

Date:Monday 13 May 2024
Time:1:00pm-2:00pm
Venue:Online
Cost:Free
Areas of Law:Administrative and Public Law, Civil Liberties and Human Rights, Housing Law

Share This Page

Email This Page

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

In the publication Poverty Panopticon, Big Brother Watch identified the growing development of a “digital” welfare state with greater data collection, processing and algorithmic decision making.  This may introduce bias which may further disadvantage some of the UK’s already most disadvantaged people.

The report identified the growing use of algorithms by housing providers in their decision making. For example, approximately 1 in 3 local authorities and more than 1 in 3 housing associations run predictive analytics to assess whether social housing occupants will keep up with their rent payments. Some local authorities use predictive systems to model who is at risk of homelessness and others that model children at risk of harm and others to identify general financial vulnerability. Central Government is investing in systems of assessing fraud and data gathering from bank accounts of benefit recipients.

At present, the Government is promoting the use of AI and automated decision making as part of a national strategy and it is increasingly likely cash strapped public bodies will seek to use these systems in provision of services including housing services. This is despite many scandals and problems, both in the UK and elsewhere in the world concerning the use of poorly tested automated decision making in social welfare provision for example, Robodebt in Australia and SyRI in the Netherlands. The Data Protection and Digital Information Bill has watered down current GDPR protections.

This webinar is designed to introduce housing lawyers and caseworkers to the use of automated decision making and how to challenge individual decisions and the use of automated systems.

The speakers introduced how AI and automated decision making may likely develop in housing and welfare cases. We will examine how these systems work, the human rights and ethical implications, the fairness and regulatory framework required and consequences for lawful decision making. We will discuss the Dutch SyRI judgment and profiling in general with its implications for the UK, the use of FOI/DSAR in litigation and accessing the Digital Freedom Fund as part any pre-litigation strategy.

This webinar gave participants a clear introductory understanding of the systems, how they work, the risks they pose, and the legislative and regulatory framework under which they are supposed to operate.

Speakers

Tim Baldwin, Garden Court Chambers 
Tim Baldwin is ranked in Chambers UK for Social Housing and is identified as a leading junior in the Legal 500 for Social Housing; Court of Protection and Community Care; and Civil Liberties and Human Rights. He specialises in all aspects of social housing, including possession, disrepair and housing standards, homelessness, and social housing allocation. He largely handles housing cases in the High Court or Appellate courts or in complex specialist proceedings in the County Court. Tim’s practice is also linked to mental health, mental capacity and disability discrimination work, and cases in the Court of Protection. He is also joint co-chair of the Housing Law Practitioners Association.

Louise Hooper, Garden Court Chambers
Louise is a human rights barrister at Garden Court Chambers. She authored a chapter on AI and Human Rights in ‘The Law of Artificial Intelligence’, Hervey and Lavy, 2nd Ed, 2023 (forthcoming).  She is an expert to the Council of Europe Committee of Experts on Artificial Intelligence, Equality and Discrimination (GEC/ADI-AI). She has worked with the Digital Futures Commission and 5Rights in the UK and UNICEF in the Balkans on child data and digital rights in education. She was an independent gender advisor to ITFLOWS, an EU funded consortium developing migration prediction technology. She has also worked as an advisor assisting tech start-ups implement human rights risk assessments.

Dr Susie Alegre, Garden Court Chambers 
Susie is a senior public international lawyer and a recognised international expert in human rights, technology and AI. Currently a Member of the Commission for Control of Interpol’s Files, she has advised organisations like the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. Susie’s book, Freedom to Think (Atlantic Books, 2022), was listed as one of the Technology Books of the Year 2022 in the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph, and was shortlisted for a Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland Prize 2023. Susie’s forthcoming book, Human Rights, Robot Wrongs (Atlantic Books, 2022) released 2 May 2024.

We are top ranked by independent legal directories and consistently win awards.

+ View more awards