Bob Stewart
Main Page: Bob Stewart (Independent - Beckenham)(10 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for London South East or wherever it is. [Interruption.] Sorry, I mean the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Jim Dowd). We Londoners rightly feel that the centre of the universe is here, but we need to make some allowances for Members from Manchester, Withington and elsewhere.
I recently discovered that I have something in common with the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge; we both have German mothers. I must confess that my mother spent the first 15 years of her life living under socialism, courtesy of the Gestapo and then the Stasi, which is why she inculcated some solidly right of centre and Conservative views in my mind. I am not sure what went wrong with the hon. Gentleman’s upbringing. However, I very much agreed with what he and other contributors have had to say today. We must emphasise the underlying importance of intellectual property both to the UK economy and my own central London constituency.
The people of these islands have a long and proud history of innovation. Much of what we take for granted in the modern world came about as a result of various aspects of British ingenuity. However, in an increasingly globalised world, much more must be done to protect the IP that is developed in the UK, so that we can attract the world’s brightest to invest here or to develop their ideas here.
The high-tech sector is naturally a sizeable generator of intellectual property. I welcome the fact that the Bill seeks to reduce the need for costly litigation and provide greater certainty for investors in new designs and technologies. I believe that such reforms send out a clear signal that the UK is open for business and they will play an important role in helping the UK to succeed in these highly competitive international markets.
Over the past five years or so, on the fringe of the City of London, which I represent, Tech City, commonly referred to as Silicon roundabout, has emerged almost from nothing and has quickly flourished into a renowned European IT hub. In my view, that is precisely the type of location where much of the £16 billion of intellectual capital produced annually in the UK originates. We all pay lip service to boosting traditional manufacturing, but it is in the IT and IP fields that we face great international competition. The Government’s strategy to maintain a distinctive reputation and a great competitive advantage over the export of IP is, I believe, vital to future economic growth.
In Soho, Covent Garden and the west end as a whole, in my constituency, we find the spiritual home of our globally competitive creative sector, which includes film, music, television, theatre and, of course, the animation industries. Those creative industries are one of the great white hopes for economic growth. I spearheaded a five-year parliamentary campaign to secure a tax credit for the animation industry and I was delighted when it came to fruition in last year’s Budget. I am afraid it still has a few teething problems in relation to the European Commission, but slowly but surely we are getting there.
I hope that the tax credit will help to keep animation jobs on these shores, but the real golden egg, as we all know, is the retention in this country of the IP rights. Money is generated annually worldwide by unimaginably successful animation franchises such as Thomas the Tank Engine, Wallace and Gromit and Peppa Pig—as I have two young children, I am now rather more used to that, as I am sure you are well aware, Madam Deputy Speaker. They all have a huge amount of secondary branded products. Let me give some perspective. The Thomas the Tank Engine brand alone tots up worldwide sales in excess of £1 billion each and every year, with his tales broadcast to more than 1 billion households in 185 countries each and every day.
It is important that we allow no room for complacency about the west’s domination, as we see it, of the knowledge economy. Within the next 20 years, I suspect that the IP rights that have underpinned the west’s competitive advantage—whether in licensing, copyright, design or patents—will be due for a radical philosophical shake-up. An ever more assertive China will argue that traditional IP structures are no more than an attempt by Europe to impose its own form of protectionism to suit its particular demographic. We cannot assume that the dominance of our values in determining global trade will remain unchecked.
To that end, the aspects of the Bill that are aimed at improving the operation of the IP system internationally are most welcome. The recognition of foreign copyright claims in the UK and enabling the Intellectual Property Office to share information on unpublished patents with other patent offices should, in principle at least, make it easier for UK companies’ IP rights to be respected internationally. However, clause 13 introduces a new criminal offence of deliberate infringement of a registered design, but, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) rightly pointed out, the vast majority of the UK’s 350,000 designers rely on unregistered design rights. There should be consideration of whether the criminal sanctions could and should be extended to include them as well.
Only about 4,000 designs are registered each year with the IPO. That pales into relative insignificance when compared with the 18,000 to 25,000 unregistered designs placed on the ACID design database last year, especially as the organisation has only 11,000 members. Given the vast amounts of capital invested in developing brands and the economic benefits that creates, I agree with the hon. Member for Hartlepool that it seems advisable to at least consider in Committee whether criminal sanctions for the infringement of copyright online should match the level of sanctions for the infringement of physical goods. As our lives increasingly shift online, the discrepancy between the maximum penalties for online copyright theft, with a maximum of two years’ imprisonment, and physical copyright theft, with a maximum of 10 years, seems in need of updating. The Minister made it clear that he recognises that the situation is fast moving. The Bill itself will no doubt be largely redundant within a few years, so we need to be aware of those changes.
In my work as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, I am increasingly aware that malicious cyber-activity such as the ongoing and daily attempts to steal British-owned IP—whether that involves patents, ideas and designs—is carried out primarily to gain competitive commercial advantage. Such efforts, I fear, are commonplace and are getting more common as time goes by. Much more will need to be done to tackle cyber-security internationally.
On a more parochial and local basis, in 2009, I worked with a group of local entrepreneurs and recommended the development of a start-up business incubator, now called the innovation warehouse, to the economic development office of the City of London corporation. I am pleased to say that that proposal was strongly supported financially and generally by the corporation. It is now based on the northern edge of the City, in Smithfield market. It opened in May 2011, and it provides 88 desks, counts more than 50 small businesses as tenants and provides a range of business-related mentoring and other events each month.
The dynamic office and incubation space developed at Smithfield market not only provides much-needed resources for small and growing businesses, but houses a large number of high-growth potential start-ups that have gone on to secure significant investment. I am sure that one of the Bill’s longer-term effects is that we will see such innovation not just in the gilded parts of the City of London, but in all the suburbs and, indeed, in many other UK cities. The scheme has rightly received praise from central Government and has become a destination of choice for UK Trade & Investment tours of Tech City. It is in my view precisely the sort of initiative that needs to be encouraged if the UK is to continue to aspire to be a world leader in IP, as the 21st century develops.
The Government could do a little more to encourage the development of IP in the UK. At a City round-table meeting on IP a year or so ago, I met a former engineer and investment banker who now helps technology start-ups. He had worked as a part-time chief financial officer for a tech spin-out from one of Britain’s top research universities. In the end, although it was backed by a quasi-governmental venture capital fund, the technology was sold prematurely to a large French company, as it had proved impossible to eke out the limited VC funding to expand the fledgling enterprise. Had it not been for the complexity of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs rules and an equity gap in first-stage venture capital, he believed that the UK Treasury would by now have been enjoying the rewards of fresh job and corporation tax receipts.
New tech businesses are typically nucleated when a piece of IP is picked up by a small team of high-calibre executives who practically apply and market that technology. Seed funding of £50,000 to £250,000 is typically not too difficult to come by, but founders’ resources, or those of business angels, can be tapped and new Government mechanisms, such as the seed enterprise investment scheme, incentivise investment in the early stages. However, the next part of the corporate journey—to obtain between £l million and £5 million in more conventional first-stage venture capital—represents the big stumbling block to expansion.
The structural shortage of such funding in the UK is exacerbated by the fact that, before these start-ups begin generating revenue, a large share of funds goes towards paying executives’ salaries. Therefore, the taxman gets much of the VC money through employer and employee national insurance and pay-as-you-earn tax. That is, of course, particularly ironic because, in many instances, a quasi-public source has helped to generate the VC funds in the first place.
To work through this problem, many start-ups eke out their VC money by instead rewarding executives with sweat equity. Since many such participants are perhaps established people in the 45-to-60 age bracket, they tend to have an existing financial cushion that leaves them able to work for free in the short term in return for those shares. However, HMRC rules currently insist that such shares are valued and treated as taxable salary. To pay the tax charge associated with the granting of shares for which there is no liquid market and which might turn out to be worthless in the end, executives must raid their savings. In short, when a start-up fails, as is often the case, executives have paid from their own resources for the privilege of working for free. That common problem is part and parcel of the whole intellectual property package that we are looking at today.
Partial work-rounds are in place based on approved share option schemes, but they are complex and hard for many SMEs properly to understand and administer. The Government could do a little more to solve the conundrum. As other Members have said, it is often difficult to say precisely where the responsibility for intellectual property lies. I am therefore taking the opportunity of this debate to say that, although perhaps other Ministers have a part to play as well, we need to try to find a way to ensure that such share rewards are not crystallised during the tax year in which they are awarded. The tax could be levied instead when the shares are withdrawn from escrow.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
I am not sure, but would not the answer be to allocate shares, rather than to give them? If shares are allocated, people do not have to pay tax on them, yet they are their shares when they want to cash them in.
Mark Field
I am sure that my hon. Friend has a little more knowledge of that. I think that some specific problems apply to small start-ups in the venture capital world and, as I have said, for individuals who, for tax purposes, would not want an allocation, other than at a particular time when it was known that the venture would work through.
I do not want to be overly negative, because I think that the Bill is an important piece of legislation. It reflects the commitment that the Government, rightly, have made in this area. We can be proud of our place in the global league tables for intellectual property rights, but we have no cause for complacency. We are perhaps ahead of the game, or cheek by jowl with Germany and the Netherlands, which I think—without being complacent —is a good place to be.
I am fairly supportive of what the Government are trying to do, which is to make the IP landscape easier to navigate for businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, many of which will be looking to expand globally and make an impact for the future. It is of underlying importance that the Bill will make better off UK businesses that wish to protect their products and technologies through patents and design rights. The Government must continue to focus their attention on doing more to encourage investment and to secure IP rights if Britain is to remain a global player in what I am sure will be, in decades to come, an extremely competitive international market.
Pete Wishart
The hon. Gentleman is spot on. So much more could be done through educational initiatives. I have seen some important work being done. I have visited schools and seen schoolchildren trade marking their work with the little copyright symbol. They were starting to appreciate that what they produce, even if it is just a drawing, has an intrinsic intellectual value. If we can get across the message that intellectual property is as important as a property right, and if we can encourage that culture, we will be making great strides forward.
It has been reported in recent weeks that the creative sector has grown by 8.6% in recent years, compared with growth of only 0.7% in the general economy. It is the UK’s fastest growing sector and is worth around £71 billion a year. As the Culture Secretary has said, so much of our cultural and creative endeavour rests on important intellectual property rights, which is absolutely spot on. It is the creative industries that are growing us out of recession. Imagine growing our economy on the back of the creativity, talent and imagination of the people of this country. What a fantastic way to grow our economy. That is why it is so important that we get the intellectual framework right.
We have not done too much that is wrong over the past 10 years. The UK remains a leader. We are in the top three countries in practically every cultural discipline, whether music, film, television, publishing or whatever. We must be doing something right. It also comes naturally to people in these isles; we are just naturally creative. That is reflected in the great output we have seen over hundreds of years, in our contribution to invention, talent and creativity. We get something right and we are able to protect it, so we have to be very careful as we progress with intellectual property rights. We tamper with that at our peril. We have to be careful about how we progress.
The genesis of the Bill was in November 2010, when the Prime Minister made his great “Googlesburg” address. I remember coming home one evening and being unable to believe what I was seeing on the television: a UK Prime Minister talking about intellectual property. It was the first time I had seen a UK Prime Minister take an interest in intellectual property, which was great. I was also interested in what he was saying, because I wondered what on earth he was going on about. His basic premise seemed to be that we would never see a Google emerge in the UK because of our restrictive intellectual property laws and copyright framework. He did not say whether it would be a good thing to have a UK Google. The clear thing he said was that we would not be able to create a Google in the UK, and he also said something about our IP rules being restrictive and that they needed to be fixed.
I do not know who was advising the Prime Minister at the time, but it was certainly not the hon. Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley), who is now his adviser, because I know that the hon. Gentleman would never advise him to say such nonsense about the need for a Google to emerge in the UK—he would have advised him to say something much more sensible and measured. Was there perhaps somebody close to Google working at No. 10? Was somebody in a personal relationship with somebody working at No. 10 and advising the Prime Minister? I will leave that question hanging. Thank goodness the hon. Member for Hove is now advising him much more sensibly on such matters. [Interruption.] I see the Whip, the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), nodding her head. I will return to Google later, because there are lots of important things to be said about that. We have to understand what that has all been underpinned by and the impact and damage that type of process is having.
The Prime Minister then dispatched Ian Hargreaves to solve the Google conundrum. Ian Hargreaves rightly dumped all the Google nonsense as soon as he could. He went to the United States to see if he could introduce the American system of fair use into UK law. When he was prohibited from doing so because of very sensible European legislation, he moved on to the substance of his review by looking at IP’s economic contribution. He came up with 10 recommendations—some good, some bad, some indifferent and some repetitive—that the Government were minded to accept.
Since then, throughout the Hargreaves process, we have been in the business of legislating for those 10 recommendations. Some have required primary legislation, such as the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, and some have required secondary legislation. We are yet to see the statutory instruments, because the Hargreaves process has not concluded. We have this Bill and the SIs are coming forward. One thing that I would like the Minister to tell us—he can intervene now or answer when he responds—is what on earth is happening with the SIs for the rest of the copyright exceptions. He will probably say that they are still with parliamentary counsel and that they are not yet ready to be presented. Well, he had better get a move on, because he only has until March to do it.
I would like to hear about the process for introducing the SIs and what we should expect. I strongly suggest—several Members have said this several times to various Ministers—that we have separate SIs for each of the copyright exceptions. As a matter of principle, it is right and proper that we should be able to assess each of the exceptions individually. It would be unacceptable to bundle them together on a “take it or leave it” basis, particularly the new exceptions, and there are some really important ones, such as parody, copying and all the other ones—I cannot remember what they are, but the Minister knows what I mean. We have to ensure that we see them separately and debate them properly when they come through.
We are getting close to the end of the Hargreaves process. Has it been good? Yes, some of it has been all right. The digital copyright exchange is fantastic—a great little innovation. That part of the process has worked. However, there is a lot of nonsense—stuff that we did not need. In fact, great unhappiness has been caused among many people who represent our creative industries, because when they came to the Government stating their strong concerns about some aspects of Hargreaves they were arrogantly dismissed as though they—the people who have built the success of the industry—did not understand the environment they were working in and the Government or Hargreaves knew it better. There was a great deal of dissatisfaction among people who felt out of sorts with the way the Government went about this business. I hope that if we have a process such as this in future we will be able to look at things much more circumspectly and take everybody with us as we go forward.
I want to make a few remarks about how the Bill has been handled. It is an absolute disgrace that the House of Lords looked at this matter first: it should have been elected Members in this House. Given the value of the role that IP plays in industry and business, we should have considered it first, and if the House of Lords then wanted to look at it and suggest amendments and things we should reconsider, that would have been absolutely fine. Something as important as intellectual property and its contribution to the economy should have been handled first by directly elected Members rather than the House of Lords, talented and well respected as some of its Members may be. It should have been our right and our responsibility.
The Minister responsible for IP is an unelected Lord himself. The hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Jim Dowd) was spot on in his comments. The Minister is anonymous. Not even the Prime Minister could remember his name, so what chance have the rest of us got? It is great that the Minister for Universities and Science is here—who better to have dealing with a Bill on intellectual property than a Minister with a multiplicity of brains?—but the real IP Minister should be taking this Bill forward and held accountable through the questioning of this House’s directly elected Members.
That unelected Lord is a Minister in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which is responsible for the Intellectual Property Office despite the fact that the IPO deals with matters looked after by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. All the disciplines that the IPO manages and supports are covered by the DCMS, but the IPO is covered by BIS. Is anything as ridiculous as that? Surely we should be trying to bring this together, as suggested by the all-party intellectual property group. I see some of my fellow officers here; the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge is its secretary. DCMS would be the perfect fit for the IPO in ensuring that it could work beside all the industries it is there to support. I hope we can resolve this issue.
The all-party group also suggested that we should have an IP champion. If this is going to work cross-departmentally, we need somebody out there banging the drum for IP-supported business and industry. That is the great forgotten in all this. There are people here who are passionate about IP and recognise its value and importance, but the place should be mobbed—full to the gunwales. This is about billions of pounds and we have to get it right. The problem is that we have an anonymous Minister in a Department that does not serve the industry. We must get this fixed. We should make the hon. Member for Hove our IP champion—an IP tsar who is out there getting things sorted out. He was right to mention the IP tsar in the United States, who is doing a fantastic job. When the all-party group met her, we were all very impressed with the power and clout she has on Capitol Hill to get things done. That is what we need in this country—somebody who will work cross-departmentally to get things resolved and make sure that we are able to take this key matter forward.
On the Bill itself, I do not want to be repetitive—[Interruption.] Come on, let me get this properly into context. We have heard all about the sorts of things that the Bill does. It is great that it covers registered design rights—the great forgotten IP right. It is fantastic that ACID has at last got its way and that this will now be covered by criminal infringement provisions, but it is totally wrong that unregistered designs are not covered too. In the House of Lords there was a big debate about this on clause 13. There has also been a debate within the industry whereby a consensus has developed that if we are to pursue the idea of registered design rights, unregistered design rights must be included. The vast majority of people who work in the design industry are in small or micro-businesses with probably fewer than four people working for them, and they cannot spend so much time making sure that things are registered. We must get this resolved.
Bob Stewart
I have listened carefully to the arguments about unregistered designs, and I wonder how this matter can be policed. How will that be possible when no one has actually said “This is my design” and someone has agreed with them? That is really worrying.
Pete Wishart
ACID has built up a database of unregistered designs, and tens of thousands of people have registered with it. If that can be achieved by a small organisation such as ACID, which runs so efficiently and effectively with Dids Macdonald and her very small staff, surely the UK Government can do likewise, and that is what we are asking them to do. It is absolutely right to make sure that our design industry is properly looked after in this regard. I welcome any progress on patents and designs, but we need decisive leadership, not another piecemeal Bill that does the absolute minimum that is required.
I did not expect to be raising a constitutional point in relation to these issues, but the unified European patent court could seriously affect Scotland’s ability to judge and make rulings on patent issues within Scotland. As the Minister knows, under the new European regime every member state is allowed four divisional courts. We know there is going to be one in London, because the Government have said so, but we do not know where the other three will be—if there are three; they have not said how many they have chosen to have. One of them has to be in Scotland. We cannot have our economy suffering because our inventors and creators in small businesses have to leave their jurisdiction to secure justice and satisfaction elsewhere in the UK or further abroad. After centuries of looking after these issues, this ability must be available to the Scottish judiciary. The Minister has probably seen the letters from the Law Society of Scotland and the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, who are very worried that we could be diminishing or getting rid of not just decades but centuries of experience in dealing with patents according to Scots law. We must make sure that the Court of Session in Edinburgh becomes one of the divisional courts of the new unified court.
Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley) (LD)
I do not want to delay the House long because I have just a few comments, mainly about business growth created by the design industry across the country. The design industry alone is worth £33.5 billion, but we could put many billions on top of that given the manufacturing that takes place from designs that are developed in this country. It is vital to protect that industry from those who try to copy and fraudulently get involved in it.
There is a company in my constituency that one would not think was a massive designer of equipment for the film industry. In fact, however, AMS Neve designs the music mixing systems that are used by all the main pop groups and pop singers across the world, and it was the main designer of the music mixing systems for the film “The King’s Speech”. For that, the owner, Mark Crabtree, got a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award. It is extremely unusual for somebody working in manufacturing to get such an award. It was developed, designed and manufactured in my constituency. It is so high-tech that he has a problem protecting his designs.
The games industry and the fashion industry are other major industries for which it is vital that we protect design. Many industries are desperate to steal our major designs. Burnley college has an amazing design department. The people there design clothes of the future, particularly for the Asian market. They need their designs to be protected, which will happen under the Bill.
It is important that we protect those industries because 350,000 people work in them. We cannot put such industries at risk. They are high-tech, and are in the main developed by graduates and students of our universities. The Bill needs to be developed to ensure that they are protected against fraudsters and other people around the world who would be delighted to get into those industries. We are No. 1 in intellectual property.
Bob Stewart
It crosses my mind that it must be extremely difficult to protect our industries when countries —I am perhaps thinking of one very large country in Asia—believe it is in their interests to steal designs for things such as games and do not seem to give a damn about intellectual property.
Gordon Birtwistle
I agree with the hon. Gentleman. When I was in engineering, we did a staggering amount of work for a local company that made wallpaper machinery. The company lost the majority of the manufacture of the kit but managed to hang on to the high-tech part of it. The country to which my hon. Friend is alluding could not develop the high-tech part, but it could do the basic engineering—the steelwork and building the machines. Fortunately, that equipment is secured in the UK, because that country has not yet developed the skills to develop the high-tech part—changing the machine for the different colours used in the manufacture of wallpaper. The situation is the same in the carpet industry. That country can make the machines easily, but it cannot develop the technology to produce the carpet patterns.
I am delighted with the Bill and am pleased that the majority of hon. Members agree with it—there seems to be no opposition to it at all. I hope that, in Committee, any problems with clauses 13 and 21 are resolved so that we have a good, solid, secure Bill in the House on Third Reading. I hope that we can put the legislation on the statute book to protect the industries of the future and the jobs of the people working in them.