Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

Alison Hume Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Commons Chamber

It was recently revealed that nearly 200,000 YouTube videos, including material created by globally recognised British musicians, news channels and artists, had been scraped into a dataset used to train AI models. Content from over 40,000 creatives has been found in that dataset, yet consent was not sought from a single impacted creator to use their copyrighted works. This is not a unique case. I asked 200 creatives about their experiences with AI and copyright. I heard repeatedly of negative experiences, including one individual who had 600 images taken to train AI models without their knowledge. It is clear that AI offers a fantastic opportunity for our economy. However, it must supplement and grow industries, rather than replace them wholesale.

[Alison Hume (Scarborough and Whitby) (Lab)]

I am delighted to be called to speak on Report of the Data (Use and Access) Bill. I draw Members’ attention to my membership of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. Before I entered this place, I worked as a freelance screenwriter, creating dramas for adults and children. I might add that children are the hardest audience to please—it used to be that we had five minutes to hook them, but now it is more like five seconds. Speed is the subject of my contribution today.

I warmly welcome the Minister’s engagement on how best to protect our peerless creative industries. In that spirit, I am pleased to see new clauses 16 and 17 and the commitment to addressing the fundamental issue of transparency. At the moment, AI companies do not have to tell anyone what they are stealing from the internet, from whom they are stealing and why they are stealing it. Although I appreciate the Government’s position that they want more time, I worry that in the gap between this Bill becoming law and a new Bill that addresses transparency and copyright coming forward, everything that can be scraped will be scraped. Twelve months is a long time, and plenty of time for AI companies to continue crawling over original copyrighted material without a care in the world. For some parts of the creative industries, 12 months will be 12 months too long. Necessity is the mother of invention, and without a legal instruction for AI companies to reveal what they are using free of charge, there is surely no incentive for the AI industry to come up with the solutions to make it simple for original creators and collecting societies to assert their rights.

New clauses 2 to 6 include calls for the operators of web crawlers and AI models to legally disclose what they are doing right now. Although I understand why the Government may not support the new clauses, will the Minister at least commit to placing a clear power to regulate in the Bill? The creative industries are nervous, spooked by the previously stated preference for an opt-out model, and such a move would calm nerves and indicate that the Government understand the pace at which the situation is developing and recognise the need for action.

Recently, here in Westminster, Björn from ABBA spoke in favour of clear transparency. Perhaps the saddest ABBA song is “The Winner Takes It All”, inspired by break-ups in the band between the As and the Bs. We must ensure that this is not a divorce of two industries that leads to the creative partner being left with the equivalent of the coffee table and the dog. The tech industry needs us more than we need it, so it should be honest, tell us what it is doing behind our backs and pay up. When all is said and done, this Government need to send a message now that we have the backs of our creative industries and that legal protections are our absolute priority.

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I rise to speak to new clause 15, but I also want to associate myself with the many right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken up for our creative industries. Our most talented and creative minds have not been getting fair representation from the Government up to now, and this has been a very interesting, well informed and, hopefully, influential debate today. New clause 15 is about privacy, safety and providing a dedicated complaints procedure for individuals including victims of modern slavery, domestic abuse, gender-based violence and for others at risk of serious harm if their personal data is mishandled.

This is not a theoretical question. Last November, The Independent reported on Lola, a domestic abuse victim whose home address was leaked to her ex-partner by a company that obtains restraining orders. She said that she was left fearing for her life. As the Open Rights Group has laid out in its briefing, the Information Commissioner’s Office is not functioning as it should be in cases such as this. I have many examples—including how Charnwood district council sent details of the new address of an abused woman directly to her abuser at her former address, so that her abuser knew where she lived—yet people placed at risk in this way currently have no means of challenging the Information Commissioner’s Office if it fails to take the right action, which happens too often. New clause 15 simply proposes dedicated procedures to support vulnerable people making complaints and a right to appeal to the Information Tribunal, a route currently available to large tech firms but not to the people harmed by their practices. I hope that Ministers will take these proposals up.

On other amendments, I fully back the Liberal Democrats on new clauses 2 to 6, which I am signed up to. I personally will abstain from voting on the Liberal Democrats’ new clause 1 and on the Conservatives’ new clause 19. This is because, although I am minded to increase the age of digital consent from 13, given the wider implications of harmful content and data that can be collected and used to do harm, my discussions locally with parents and young people in Brighton Pavilion have led me to want to properly include both groups in any decision on what that new age should be, given that it would cut people off from social media. We must have rapid and real processes of deliberation on this issue as soon as possible that are not just consultative but collaborative.

Finally, new clause 21 is of serious concern to my constituents, and I agree with them and TransActual that it would constitute a gross violation of privacy rights by creating a mass outing of trans people. Subsection (1)(d) of this new clause even goes so far as to seek to revert historical changes made to someone’s gender marker. I urge the Government to reject this and to act further to protect trans rights more broadly.