Media Literacy (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)]

My Lords, I contribute to this debate with a little temerity. Having only recently joined the Communications and Digital Committee, I was not present to hear any of the evidence or representations received prior to the preparation of what is undoubtedly a very comprehensive report. That being said, I congratulate those who were present and the committee on a very useful contribution to government and wider thinking on what is undoubtedly a major topic of the 21st century. The fact is that the creative industries contributed £124 billion in gross value to our economy in 2023 and supported 2.4 million jobs, while the AI sector itself contributed £11.8 billion to our economy in 2024 and now employs around 86,000 people.

The growing strength of both industries underlies the emphasis placed by the Government in their AI Opportunities Action Plan on resolving the uncertainty around intellectual property and reforming the UK text and data mining regime—TDM—which they have said is

“hindering innovation and undermining our broader ambitions for AI, as well as the growth of our creative industries”.

Their preferred approach is to adopt a commercial exception in the case of TDM, with an opt-out mechanism and associated transparency obligations. This would align the UK’s approach with that of the European Union, although, as the report sets out, it could provide risks in the protection of the creative industries.

What is needed now more than ever is smart regulation that protects creators and rights holders but is also proportionate, practical and supportive of growth. The Government must work further and faster to bring this much-needed certainty for AI and creative industries alike by publishing their approach to future changes to copyright law. They must seek to adopt an approach that strengthens the current gold standard protections afforded to creators and safeguards their livelihoods while providing the guardrails and clarity sought by AI companies to enable them to innovate and harness the potential of AI to drive economic growth.

There is also a wider need for us as legislators to try to find faster and more adaptable ways of keeping up with the speed of innovators and entrepreneurs. It is a difficult challenge, but one that I have been advocating for a long time. While we consider more immediate priorities, we should also seriously look at codifying the many laws and regulations already in place to see where adaptation could fit them to handle the challenges the report identifies and provide the protection and redress that our new technological age demands.

The report is also right to highlight the need for transparency from larger AI developers, which it recommends should be given statutory weight. However, this must not come at the cost of placing disproportionate burdens on smaller businesses that would probably see them relocate abroad and undermine the UK’s potential to become an innovation-friendly environment for AI start-ups. Again, this can be achieved only by those smart regulations I have referred to, which proportionately balance the needs of the creative industries while encouraging investment in emerging technologies.

More fundamental, however, is the need to improve the UK’s capability to build responsibly trained AI systems by investing in sovereign AI. The Government have committed £2 billion towards strengthening the UK’s potential for AI sovereignty through the Sovereign AI Unit, new compute infrastructure and AI growth zones. It is essential that the UK builds domestic models with far greater transparency around training data and development processes rather than relying excessively on opaque overseas systems that are arguably harmful to not only our national interests but our future success in these fields. Not only will this protect those national interests in an increasingly uncertain technological world, but it will unlock growth and encourage future investment in the industry.