LOCKHOUSE

Ethics and governance

Ethics and integrity are the reason the work is worth doing.

They are not constraints Lockhouse works within. They sit at the foundation of everything built here, and they set the standard the platform is engineered to meet.

Every judgement made with Arthur has to stand up afterwards, in court and in public. That obligation shapes the architecture as much as it shapes the governance around it.

The limits, stated

Arthur does not make decisions, and it does not act autonomously. It does not generate investigative conclusions from a language model. It does not score people behind a model no one can inspect.

The officer decides. Arthur shows the working.

Oversight

An independent board, with the standing to say no.

Lockhouse is overseen by an independent Ethics and Integrity Board whose members have between them run Britain's intelligence, counter-terrorism and Home Office teams. Its purpose is challenge rather than endorsement, and it is constituted so that challenge carries weight.

The same people advise on how capability is developed and where it should not go.

Kit Malthouse
Chair. Former Minister of State for Crime and Policing.
Lord Evans of Weardale KCB
Risk and ethical governance. Director General of MI5, 2007–2013.
Mary Calam
Governance and strategy. Former Director General at the Home Office.
Neil Basu QPM
Operational insight. Former Head of UK Counter Terrorism Policing.

Risk

The risks that decide whether a deployment holds.

These recur wherever AI has been introduced into policing. Each is a shared obligation, not a clause to transfer.

01 · Vendor lock-in

Your data and your exit stay yours

Open interfaces, documented schemas and no dependency that makes leaving impractical. A flexible ecosystem is a continuity requirement, not a preference.

02 · Super users

Limits understood by those who explain them

Super users and managers are trained on what the system cannot do, so that understanding reaches every user, and the people who receive the outputs.

03 · Tolerance for error

Agreed before go-live, against a human baseline

Error tolerance is set explicitly for each use, and compared with the existing manual process rather than with perfection.

04 · Data

The constraint on what can be asked

Data answers the question, and also determines which questions can be asked at all. Quality and coverage are assessed before capability is promised.

Standards

Clearance, conduct and commitments.

Staff hold security clearances at classified levels, appropriate to the environments in which Arthur is deployed. Handling conditions travel with the data, and with the people who see it.

Lockhouse is a signatory to the Armed Forces Covenant.

Armed Forces Covenant

Questions of governance are best answered in person, and in detail.

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