Subscription Contracts: Right to Cancel

Debate between Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay and Lord Leong

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

Every consumer has a right to do that under current consumer protections. They have a cooling-off period of 14 days to cancel that subscription if it is a distance subscription. Under the new Act, if the subscription is taken up or renewed in person, the cooling-off period is extended to 14 days, so consumers will have the right to cancel or stay within the subscription.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, the problem has been well set out by my noble friend Lord Moynihan and repeated admirably by the Minister. It is a problem that was identified when this Act was going through your Lordships’ House. At the time, my noble friend Lord Offord of Garvel committed to closing this loophole through secondary legislation. Of course, the election interceded, but that is now a year and a half ago. As we have heard, this is a pressing issue for organisations that are beset by cuts to the DCMS budget, the rising impact of national insurance contributions and much more. Will the Minister commit to working urgently to make sure that this loophole is not open in a way that will affect so many arts, cultural and heritage organisations that are loved across the country?

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for that. I assure him that my officials and I are working to ensure that we get this right. The new subscription regime will ensure that in particular situations, including after the contract automatically renews on to a 12-month term, consumers have a 14-day window in which to cancel. Should any changes be needed in secondary legislation that we publish, they will not commence until autumn 2026, so there is plenty of time for charities and heritage organisations to put their houses in order before this regime kicks in.

Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay and Lord Leong

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Monday 2nd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, this is my first time speaking on this Bill, so the Government Chief Whip will be pleased to know that I am not able to repeat comments I have previously made. I have followed the debates on it closely and followed, with great admiration, the campaign led by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, not just in this Chamber but far beyond it.

This has never been a question of party politics. Indeed, it is striking that the initiative here has been led from the Cross Benches and the Back Benches in both Houses, as the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, just pointed out. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has led the charge. She has put her case clearly and been extremely reasonable and patient in the face of answers even more frustrating than those I used to give her when I was at the government Dispatch Box. More than that, she has been proactive in seeking solutions. The morning after her victory in the last round of ping-pong, she was up early to welcome to your Lordships’ House academics, policymakers and practitioners from not just the creative industries but the AI sector as part of the University of Oxford’s consultation on copyright and AI, as she mentioned in her opening remarks.

The Government keep making this sound like it is a binary choice between two competing sectors. It is not. As my noble friend Lord Vaizey just reminded us, responsible innovators from the AI sector know how vital design and creativity are to all parts of our economy, as well as to our society. They do not want to base their businesses on the theft of others’ intellectual property, paternity rights, maternity rights, pension rights and so much more, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said. It was announced last week that Taylor Swift had succeeded in buying back the rights to her first six albums, after many years of legal wrangling, for a nine-figure sum. It would be a cruel irony for her to have expended all that time and money only for her brilliant work to be stolen and fed into a large language model with no transparency and no accountability.

The creative industries have spoken with one voice on this—something that is rather unique—but well they might, for this is existential to them. That is why it is so disappointing that the Government have not responded to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and the many noble Lords who have joined her in the Division Lobbies in the previous rounds of ping-pong to express their concerns about this issue. They have not engaged on the point of substance behind her amendments but have relied on arguments of process. There is nothing in the noble Baroness’s latest amendment in lieu—her third attempt to offer a solution to the Government—that engages the financial privilege of another place.

I hope we will hear more from the Minister on the substance of the argument and on the substance of this new amendment, rather than an attempt to run down the clock or to hide behind process. I hope we might yet, even at this late stage, get a glimmer of the compromise that the noble Lords, Lord Cashman and Lord Brennan of Canton, and others have hoped for. There is a long-standing convention that your Lordships’ House respects the will of the elected one, of course. But it would not be a constitutional crisis, as the Minister put it in the closing words of her opening remarks, for noble Lords to continue to express their concerns about this Bill, because that convention relies on the Government engaging faithfully and relying not just on points of process but on points of substance.

At a time when the Government are seeking to weaken the scrutiny functions of your Lordships’ House by removing almost 90 Members—all but three of whom are from outwith their own Benches—they need to treat your Lordships’ House with a bit more respect if they want those conventions to be adhered to. I pay tribute to the tenacity of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Leong) (Lab)]

My Lords, as my noble friend the Chief Whip said at the start of this debate, we are now into the third round of ping-pong on this Bill. These issues have been extensively debated across Committee, Report and ping-pong. A cross-section of Back-Benchers has spoken, and now I invite Front-Benchers to speak.