Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Wednesday 14th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

As I am sure my hon. Friend is aware, the US system of fair use is different from the UK’s—ours goes back to 1709, with the first of our copyright Acts, and it has been very solid. When we introduced this Bill, I said that this country should be proud of the fact that a succession of different generations have ensured that rights holders can protect their copyright. Interestingly, one of Charles Dickens’ big battles was being able to protect his copyright not only in the UK but in the United States of America, where he felt he had fewer protections. It is for us to develop our own copyright law in our own country, and I say to my hon. Friend that the law as it is will not change one jot as a result of what we are intending to do in the Bill.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

rose—

[Pete Wishart (Perth and Kinross-shire) (SNP)]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

I probably ought to give way first to the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, and then to the hon. Gentleman.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

Yesterday the Minister appeared before our Select Committee and said, “The best kind of AI is the kind of AI that is built on premium content, and you can’t get premium content without paying for premium content.” Now, as well as being concerned about the overuse of the expression “premium content” in that sentence, I am also concerned about the fact that, as we speak, there are copyright works out there being scraped underhandedly by AI developers, some of whom are feigning licensing negotiations with the very rights holders whose works they are scraping. Surely now is the time to require developers to tell us what copyright works are being used to train their models and what their web-scraping bots are up to. Surely he agrees that Lords amendment 49 is a very good way to move this forward to see what works are being used to train AI models.

[Chris Bryant]

The first thing to say to the right hon. Lady is that I completely stand by everything I said to the Select Committee yesterday. I do believe that the best form of AI will be intelligent artificial intelligence. And just like any pipe, what comes out of it depends on what goes into it. If we have high-quality data going into AI, then it will produce high-quality data at the other end. I have spoken to quite a lot of publishing houses in the UK, including Taylor & Francis in particular—

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

I completely agree with everything my hon. Friend said, and I can give that guarantee. Interestingly, when we started this process after the general election, the first consultation meetings that the Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Feryal Clark), and I had were with the creative industries in one room and the AI companies in another. Perhaps it would have been better to mix them up in the way my hon. Friend has suggested, and that is precisely the job of work that I want to get on with.

We are determined that wherever we can, we will take creative industries with us, and we will be transparent about the work that we do. I want to lay to rest the idea that there are two Departments at war with one another. That simply is not the case. The two Departments are trying to work together to achieve good outcomes for everybody.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

The Minister is being unbelievably generous in taking interventions, but before he moves on, I wanted to say that it is really important to have those involved in AI and in the creative industries in the same room at the same time. He must not forget that the reason the creative industries are in such a state of panic and despair about this is because a hare was set running a few months ago by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, when it published an AI strategy that said that the copyright opt-out was a way to grow the AI industry. The Government then published their consultation, in which they indicated that the opt-out was their preferred mechanism, despite the fact that the document also mentioned prioritising transparency. I understand that, but the Minister must understand that panic has set in. Words matter; what we say matters. He needs to do everything that he can to bring this issue to a close.

[Chris Bryant]

As the hon. Lady knows, I am sympathetic to the direction of travel that she is trying to take me in. Some people will think that I am splitting hairs, and that is not my intention, but I have been keen to avoid the term “opt-out”. As I said, we have brought forward a package of measures. They were reliant on our being able to deliver greater control, through technical measures, for the creative industries and others who had rights to protect. That is why we referred to “rights reservation”, rather than “opt-out”. I take her point, and I am sure that we will be debating it for some considerable time. She is a Select Committee Chair, as is my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West (Chi Onwurah). I should have said earlier that when I was Chair of the Committee of Privileges, we produced a report, which has yet to be implemented or even discussed in the House, about how we could ensure that witnesses appeared before Parliament when Select Committee Chairs wanted them to.

If it is all right with the rest of the House, I will move on to further subjects. The issues around scientific research—I can never work out where the emphasis lies when I say the word “research”—are embodied in Lords amendment 43B. Some people have suggested that the Bill will somehow create a wild west for research, but that is simply not true. The Bill does not change the threshold for what constitutes scientific research; we are sticking with what has been and is a fair, clear and proportionate measure, using the “reasonableness test” that is common in other legislation and well known by the courts.

As Lord Vallance said in the House of Lords earlier this week, this amendment would go against the good work done by the previous Government on avoiding unnecessary red tape for researchers. We have a world-class research sector in the UK. We want to empower it, not tie it up in red tape. We believe that documents such as the Frascati manual, which are useful and interesting in other settings, are not designed to contain legally binding requirements, so the amendment is misplaced.

If the amendment were carried forward, researchers would need to be able to demonstrate their work’s creativity to a legal standard. If someone’s work is aimed at testing or reproducing another researcher’s results, is it truly creative? That is a legitimate question, but it takes on a whole new meaning, and brings a whole new layer of bureaucracy, when enforced to a new legal standard, as the Bill insists, backed up by the potential for huge regulatory fines.

Similar issues arise in relation to requirements for research to be “systematic” and “ethical”. Those words are not necessarily well known in the courts when it comes to this legislation. As Lord Winston argued powerfully on Monday, if the amendment had been law 50 years ago, we may never have had in vitro fertilisation and the benefits spinning off from that, including valuable cancer research. Those are the issues caused by putting such a test in a legally binding setting that it was never designed for.

Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Tuesday 3rd June 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Data Protection and Telecoms (Chris Bryant)]

I beg to move, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 49F.

I am tempted to start with a quote from “Macbeth”—

“When shall we three meet again?”—

because I notice there is a similar cast to our previous debates, but let me start by dispelling some misconceptions. We are not, contrary to what some have stated, changing UK copyright laws to the detriment of the creative industries. If the Government’s Bill is adopted, not a single word of copyright law will have changed in the United Kingdom. It will be as robust as it ever was. In fact, we have said repeatedly that creators should share in the value of this new technology, and we support artificial intelligence developers paying for the content that they use. We want to see more licensing of and proper remuneration for UK content.

We are not undermining copyright owners’ control over their work. We have said from the beginning that we want intellectual property owners to have more control over the use of their works. Some said in the House of Lords yesterday that we have not listened to them or to the creative industries, but that is simply not true. We have heard loud and clear the message from the creative industries and from others. That is why we put reporting commitments on the face of the Bill at a previous round, and we have committed to adding two further reporting requirements on approaches to models trained overseas and on enforcement. We have committed to delivering reports and impact assessments within nine rather than 12 months, and the Bill will require the Secretary of State to make a progress statement to Parliament about the impact assessment and reports within six months of Royal Assent.

It is also why the Secretary of State, who is sitting by me now, stated clearly that although we went into the consultation with a preferred option, we have heard the reaction to that. We want to consider the consultation responses in full, and—to quote him precisely—

“When we went into the consultation, I believed that opting out could have offered an opportunity to bring both sides together, but I now accept that that is not the case.”—[Official Report, 22 May 2025; Vol. 767, c. 1233.]

As I have said, the Government have listened at every stage.

As I have explained to the House previously, the Bill was never intended to be about artificial intelligence, intellectual property and copyright. What we have is a Bill that will harness data for economic growth, improve public services and support modern digital government. We want to get the legislation on the statute book as fast as we possibly can.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Chris Bryant]

Of course, it would be a delight.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

If only I believed the Minister. I pick up the frustration in his tone, and I appreciate that this must be exhausting for him, because this is the fourth time that the Government have been defeated on this issue in the other place. I understand that he just wants to get this piece of legislation done, but this time it only requires the Government to come forward with a plan to implement transparency before it is too late. He says that our copyright law is robust and that he is not seeking to undermine it—it is robust, but it is being ignored. How long will it take before the Government hold the AI companies to account for what is effectively the biggest copyright heist in history? How long will it take before the Government clamp down on what is basically the whitewashing of the behaviour of big tech? Who is really pulling the strings here?

[Chris Bryant]

Well, nobody is pulling my strings. I do not know what that final reference was to. I pay tribute to the hon. Lady and the Select Committee, who have done important work in this field. Some of what we have committed to in previous rounds of ping-pong in this House has sprung directly from what her Select Committee asked us to do. We will continue to listen to that. As she knows, we have always said, right from the beginning, that a key aspect of any package we bring forward would be something around transparency.

I will come on to the precise matters in the new clause before us, and I hope that might explain why we are urging the House to reject the amendment today. It is a delight to hear from the hon. Lady, and she need not doubt me.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

I have spoken to Ministers in Northern Ireland, and they have already laid that legislative consent motion. My understanding is that that process will be fully done in time for Royal Assent, so he need not worry. We have sorted that one out, too.

I promised the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage), that I was about to come on to the precise details of the amendment, so I will address that. First, as Baroness Jones of Whitchurch, my noble colleague, said in the Lords yesterday,

“the Government’s report on the use of copyright work in the development of AI systems will address two additional areas, specifically highlighted by the noble Baroness’s original amendment”—

the one that we are now considering—

“how to deal with models trained overseas; and how rules should be enforced and by whom.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 2 June 2025; Vol. 846, c. 481.]

We will do subsection (1) of the new clause as part of our report and economic impact assessment. In other words, we have already committed to do half of what is in the amendment, and I would therefore argue that that half is unnecessary.

The second part of the new clause is problematic, and I think it would be problematic for any Government. It requires the Government to produce a draft Bill on copyright and AI according to a specific timetable. It lays out elements that that Bill must include and determines how it should be considered by this House. I cannot think of any Bill in our history that has included such a clause, for very good reason. A central plank of parliamentary sovereignty is that no Parliament can bind its successor. That does not just mean from one Parliament to another; it means that one Session of Parliament cannot bind a future Session. However, the Kidron amendment says that, for instance, the draft Bill

“must make provision for enforcement”.

What happens if it does not do so, or if the measures it includes for enforcement are not sufficient in some people’s minds? Where would that be adjudicated? How would it be decided?

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

Will the Minister give way?

[Chris Bryant]

I will just finish this point, if the hon. Lady will allow me. In addition, we are still working through a huge number of consultation responses. To prescribe a draft Bill in detail at this point would completely undermine that process and the policy work that is taking place. I would argue that not only is that bad policymaking, but it would completely disregard the input that so many respondents to the consultation have exhausted so much effort in providing.

[Chris Bryant]

I will give way first to the hon. Member for Gosport, and then to the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Sir Julian Smith).

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

I think the Minister for giving way, but I think he is dancing on the head of a pin. The fact is that all legislation somehow binds those who are coming down the track, and others have spoken on many occasions about the urgency of bringing forward measures to provide transparency about what of people’s intellectual property is being scraped right now. I cannot understand why the Government are taking this position. This amendment is not asking for much; it is just asking for the Government to have a plan to sort this out in short order.

[Chris Bryant]

Of course, I understand the demand for us to act as swiftly as we possibly can, and that is our intention. One could argue that introducing a draft Bill, which would then be considered in various different places and presumably would be followed by a Bill, would delay things rather than speed them up. In addition—this is a really important constitutional point—as I said earlier, I am not aware of a single Bill in the past that has required a future Bill to be produced and specified things that must be in it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

“As soon as possible”, I am afraid. I know that there are lots of parliamentary terms for these matters, such as “imminently” and “soon” and so on. The difficulty is that there are plenty of other priorities for legislation at the same time. I am not the Leader of the House, so I fear that I cannot give a guarantee about a timeline, but we have given some guarantees about when the Secretary of State will report back to the House—within six months of Royal Assent, and I hope that that is within six months of “soon”—and we have given guarantees about our other reports back, which will be within nine months, shortened from 12 months.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

I will give way to the hon. Lady, and then I will try to crack on.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

I thank the Minister for giving way again: he is being very generous. He has spoken about trying to bring the AI sector together with the creative industries. The last Government tried that in response to the text and data mining exception. They formed an AI working group, which, as the Minister knows, fell into abeyance because the AI companies did not engage. Does he think that that could be a problem this time, and has he heard any signals from the big tech companies that they would be more forthcoming with their engagement in response to this attempt?

[Chris Bryant]

We will make sure that they engage. In a strange way, I think that the campaign that has been led by the hon. Lady and others, in the House of Lords and elsewhere, will help to make people engage in what will not necessarily be an easy process, but one that I think could deliver a win-win for us in the UK and could potentially enable us to lead for other countries in the world. Every indication that we have had thus far suggests that everyone wants to sit in the room together, and, of course, we will have to provide significant leadership in those meetings to be able to drive them forward. As I said on the last occasion when I was talking about these matters at the Dispatch Box, I should like to be able to get on with that as soon as possible, but we have a duty to get the Bill out of the way first.

Let me now say a few words about ping-pong. As Members will know, this is in large measure the same Bill that was presented, twice, by the previous Government. The second Bill fell at the general election, but both major parties committed themselves to reintroducing it, in a broadly similar form, in the new Parliament. None of the parties intended to introduce any matters relating to copyright into the Bill when they discussed it in the run-up to, and during, the general election.

I warmly commend those who are fighting the corner of the creative industries—of course I do; I am the creative industries Minister—but there comes a point at which the Lords is barring the Commons from fulfilling a pledge made by both major parties. We shall now be entering the fourth round of ping-pong. Few Bills in our history have gone this many rounds. In the cases of the Prevention of Terrorism Bill of 2004-05 and the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill 2006-07, at issue was what the Government had put in rather than what it had not included. Neither of those Bills had been openly advocated by both main parties at a general election. By tradition, the House of Lords does not interfere with Bills to which Governments have committed themselves at the time of a general election. Everyone agrees that this Bill is a valuable piece of legislation, and for that reason I urge their lordships to let it pass into law.

Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Tuesday 10th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I feel told off, Madam Deputy Speaker, but thank you very much. I have been told off for talking too long, for talking too short, for going too fast and for going too slow.

My point is that we are already committed to creating two working groups that will look at transparency and at technical solutions to the problems that we face. Both of them will have members of the creative industries and members of tech and AI companies engaged in them. In addition, we want to have a separate group of Members of this House and the other House who are engaged with and have an interest in the subject to help us to develop these policy areas. I think it is best to keep those separate, and that is the plan. As we know, the Secretary of State has already written to the Chairs of the relevant Select Committees, but I hope that what I have just said is helpful.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

indicated assent.

[Chris Bryant]

I see that I am getting a slight nod from the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee about the prospect of our meeting to sort out a way forward on that.

I will say a few words about ping-pong. Some peers have suggested that different rules apply because the Bill started in the Lords. That is simply not true. Double insistence would kill the Bill wherever the Bill had started, and I take people at their word when they say that they do not want to kill the Bill. It has important measures that will enable digital verification services, the national underground asset register and smart data schemes to grow the economy; that will save NHS time; that will make vital amendments to our policing laws; and that will support the completion of the EU’s adequacy review. Its provisions have the support of all parties in both Houses, which is why I urge this House to accept our amendments in lieu and urge the Lords not to insist on their amendment but to agree with us.

It is worth pointing out that if their lordships do persist, they are not just delaying and imperilling a Bill that all parties agree is an important and necessary piece of legislation; they are imperilling something of much greater significance and importance economically: our data adequacy with the European Union. The successful renewal of our EU adequacy decisions is predicated on us having settled law as soon as possible, and we will not have that until the Bill gains Royal Assent. I cannot overemphasise how important this is, and I am absolutely mystified as to why the Liberal Democrats—of all parties—would want to imperil that.

I am equally mystified by the position of the Conservative party. They tabled amendments in the Commons Committee and Report stages that are almost exactly mirrored by what we have already added to the Bill and are adding today. I very much hope therefore that the Conservative party will agree to our motion. It is not as if it disagrees with any of the measures in the Bill.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness Kidron, who said in the Lords,

“I want to make it absolutely clear that, whatever transpires today, I will accept the choice the Government make.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 4 June 2025; Vol. 846, c. 755.]

It was a point she reiterated later in the debate when she said,

“if we”

—that is, the Lords—

“choose to vote on this and successfully pass it, I will accept anything that the Commons does… I will not stand in front of your Lordships again and press our case.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 4 June 2025; Vol. 846, c. 773.]

The noble Baroness is right. In the end, only one House is elected; only one House constitutes the Government of the day; and, especially where a Bill was adumbrated in a general election as this one was, the unelected House treads carefully. That is all the more important when the governing party has barely a fifth of the members of the other House. We have listened to the other House and taken action. There may be disagreements about the measures we have taken, but it would be wrong to say that we have not listened. It is time for the Houses to agree that the Bill must go forward.

I will say one final word about creativity. We live in an exceptional age. When our parents were young, they were lucky if their family had a television or a record player. They might occasionally go to a gig, concert or play. If they did have a television, they had a choice of just two or three channels. By contrast, today we are surrounded by human creativity in a way that no other generation was. Technology has brought us multiple channels where we can pick and choose whatever we want, whenever we want to see it. We watch more drama than ever. We can listen to our own choice of music on the train, on the bus or in the car. We can play games online with friends on the other side of the world. More books are published than ever. We can read or listen to them. Almost twice as many people went to the theatre last year as went to a premier league match. There are many challenges, all of which we need to address, including that of the interaction of AI with human creativity, but creativity is a quintessence of our humanity. It requires human-to-human connection, and I do not think for a single instant that that will change.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pete Wishart]

I am not going to let the hon. Gentleman get away with that. The last Government did not do anything on this issue, basically because they did not understand what was going on, and the little they did understand about some of the threats from AI, they did not care. As he asked the Labour Benches to do yesterday, the hon. Gentleman should apologise for the last Government’s inaction over the past few years because a lot of this is down to them.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

Will the hon. Member give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Spencer]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. As I said, this is clearly a tricky area to legislate—I have said that at the Dispatch Box and in Committee many times—but what is not helping is the uncertainty that has been created throughout the debate, whether it is the position of copyright law, preferred third options or the status of opt-out, which is how we got into this pickle in the first place.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

There seems to be mass amnesia breaking out across the Chamber because the last Government did do something on this: they set up a working group between AI companies and the creative industries.

[The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Peter Kyle)]

They cancelled it.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

No, the AI companies walked away. We are almost at risk of recreating history by this Government wanting to set up exactly the same working group and thinking that by doing the same thing again, the outcome will somehow be different.

[Dr Spencer]

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee, who is also trying to break us out of the groundhog day that we seem to have found ourselves in.

The Lords amendment does not fetter the Government’s policy options, nor does it prescribe how proportionate transparency should be achieved. It simply puts a line in the sand for the Government to act on this hugely important issue.

To return to the AI and the Gruffalo,

So on went the story through the deep dark wood

To be loved by its readers, as a good book should.

Yet the AI pondered, as it wanted it now.

“I’ll simply just scrape it”, the AI did avow.

When he was musing, he stumbled across

The author reclining on a patch of green moss.

They had glasses and notebooks and ideas galore.

They had printed five books, but were working on more.

Their eyes came to meet—they were in for a fight.

Both wanted the story, but who was right?

The answer is both, if reasonably sought

For content, not stolen, but licensed or bought.

Be clear what you’re taking, be transparent and true,

And recognise the content and its real value.

Then there’s no monster nor bad guy, just an allegorical rhyme

And a plea to listen and take action in time.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

First, I thank the Secretary of State for sending our Committee a letter on Friday evening setting out the Government’s intentions for AI and copyright. Reflecting what the Chair of the Liaison Committee, the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), said, both the nature of the letter and the method with which it was received were almost symbolic of how this whole process has been conducted from beginning to end. It was fairly haphazard and chaotic, and it was not entirely clear what the Secretary of State or the Minister intend to happen next, but I am grateful to the Minister for his offer to have a chat to talk us through it.

Specifically, the Secretary of State and the Minister set out their amendments to the Bill and a plan to set up this parliamentary working group, and we would like to know a lot more about that. I understand exactly what the Government are trying to do: they are trying to placate peers and bring the Data (Use and Access) Bill to a conclusion, as the Minister says. The problem is that they are still not engaging with the fundamental existential issue, which is the concerns expressed by people across the creative industries.

The Government’s amendment would expedite the economic impact assessment of the options in the AI copyright consultation. The Culture, Media and Sport Committee and the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee jointly wrote about that in February. Another amendment would expand the scope of the report to include training outside the UK and enforcement, which obviously should have happened from the start. The amendments are all welcome, but they miss the point of the creative industries’ concern that their work and intellectual property are being exploited wholesale, without permission, without payment and without practical means of recourse and redress.

I note that the Minister told the House on 14 May:

“I do not think that what is on the amendment paper today would deliver anything now.”—[Official Report, 14 May 2025; Vol. 767, c. 417.]

The Government giving themselves nine months rather than 12 to conclude what we already know—that their favoured consultation option is completely unworkable—is much less likely to deliver quickly the kind of transparency and enforcement for creators than the amendments proposed in the other place.

The Secretary of State’s letter also mentions that the Government intend to set up a parliamentary working group to ensure that

“Parliament has a voice directly into DSIT throughout this process”.

The big fear is that this working group will simply be a channel through which the Government will report back on their own engagement with AI developers and rights holders. The Government instead need to be listening to the concerns of Parliament and industry stakeholders. Maybe then they will realise that this stakeholder engagement exercise between rights holders and AI developers has been tried before, as I said earlier, including in the last Parliament. It was scrutinised at the time by the Committee I chair, and each time things have got nowhere. Talks have collapsed because the status quo suits rogue developers acting in bad faith. They think they have nothing to lose by looting the work and value of our creators and our rights holders.

If the Government press on with this working group, we will of course engage and do what we can to support, but let us call it what it is: a distraction technique to divert attention away from the fact that the Government have got themselves into a terrible pickle over this legislation. They started a consultation on AI and copyright when they already had stated a preferred outcome, and they have been cloth-eared to the legitimate concerns of the world-leading creative industries for month after month. They have been virtually dragged kicking and screaming to this position now, where they bring forward a couple of tiny amendments. They have been gaslighting Members of all parties and at both ends of this building who have attempted to draw attention to the situation. They have been somehow pitting our world-leading creative industries against AI, almost presenting them as luddites who are allergic to innovation and technology, when actually these are some of the most groundbreaking and innovative sectors out there. They are using AI every single day to produce world-beating pieces of creative content. The very nature of how the Government have conducted this legislation pits our creative industries against AI, and that is deeply unfair.

It is all not good enough. This is simply a thinly veiled attempt to kick the can down the road—and if kicking the can down the road were an Olympic sport, the Minister would have to add “sport” to his portfolio. If he thinks that any of us are fooled by this, or that it will quieten those who want to stand up for our world-leading creative industries and against the existential threat that they face, he has another think coming.

[Several hon. Members rose—]