Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

John Whittingdale Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Earlier I appeared as a Department for Culture, Media and Sport Minister, and now I appear as a Department for Science, Innovation and Technology Minister. I hate to embarrass Members, but they will get two bouts of me today. I will start with the Government amendments, and then once I have heard the arguments from Members advancing other amendments, I will speak to those later in the debate. If I do not cover subjects in this initial speech, I will get back to them later.

[Sir John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

The right hon. Gentleman is enticing me. I hope he will be nicer to me than the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) was earlier.

[Sir John Whittingdale]

I am sure that the Chair of the Committee and I will always be nice to Minister. I was only going to say that I have experienced the slight schizophrenia he has referred to in holding roles in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and in DCMS at the same time. Although he is appearing as a DSIT Minister this afternoon, can he assure the House that he will not forget his responsibilities as a DCMS Minister for the creative industries?

[Chris Bryant]

I model myself in all things on the right hon. Gentleman, apart from the fact that I left the Tory party many years ago, and it is about time that he came over to the Labour Benches.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Davies (Mid Derbyshire) (Lab)]

I rise to speak to new clauses 4, 16 and 17, but first let me say that this is a very ambitious and weighty piece of legislation. Most of us can agree on sections or huge chunks of it, but there is anxiety in the creative industries and in the media—particularly the local media, which have had a very torrid time over the last few years through Brexit and the pandemic. I thank UK Music, the News Media Association and Directors UK for engaging with me on this issue and the Minister for his generosity in affording time to Back Benchers to discuss it.

AI offers massive opportunities to make public services and businesses more effective and efficient, and this will improve people’s lives. However, there is a fundamental difference between using AI to manage stock in retail or distribution, or for making scientific breakthroughs that will improve people’s health, and the generative AI that is used to produce literature, images or music. The latter affects the creative industries, which have consistently seen faster and more substantial growth than the overall economy. The creative industries’ gross value added grew by over 50% in real terms compared with the overall UK economy, which grew by around a fifth between 2010 and 2022. That is why the Government are right to have identified the creative industries as a central plank of their industrial strategy, and it is right to deliver an economic assessment within 12 months, as outlined in Government new clauses 16 and 17. I welcome all that.

I know it is not the Government’s intention to deal with copyright and licensing as part of the Bill, but because of the anxiety in the sector the issues have become conflated. Scraping is already happening, without transparency, permission or remuneration, in the absence of a current adequate framework. The pace of change in the sector, and the risk of tariffs from across the pond, mean it is imperative that we deal with the threat posed to the creative industries as soon as possible. We are now facing 100% tariffs on UK films going to the USA, which increases that imperative.

I welcome the Government’s commitment to engage with the creative industries and to implement a programme to protect them, following consultation. I would welcome an overview from the Minister in his summing up about progress in that regard. The more we delay, the worse the impact could be on our creative sector. I am also concerned that in the Government’s correct mission to deliver economic growth, they may inadvertently compromise the UK’s robust copyright laws. Instead, we should seek to introduce changes, so that creatives’ work cannot be scraped by big AI firms without providing transparency or remunerating the creatives behind it. Failure to protect copyright is not just bad for the sector as a whole, or the livelihoods of authors, photographers, musicians and others; it is bad for our self-expression, for how robust the sector can be, and for how it can bring communities together and invite us to ask the big questions about the human condition. Allowing creators to be uncredited and undercut, with their work stripped of attribution and their livelihoods diluted in a wave of synthetic imitation, will disrupt the creative market enormously. We are not talking about that enough.

It is tempting to lure the big US AI firms into the UK, giving the economy a sugar rush and attracting billions of pounds-worth of data centres, yet in the same breath we risk significantly draining economic value from our creative industries, which are one of the UK’s most storied pillars of our soft power. None of this is easy. The EU has grappled with creating a framework to deal with this issue for years without finding an equitable solution. I do not envy what the Government must navigate. However, I ask the Minister about the reports that emerged over the weekend, and whether the Government are moving away from an opt-out system for licensing, which creatives say will not work. Will that now be the Government’s position?

Harnessing the benefits of AI—economic, social and innovative—is not diametrically opposed to ensuring that the rights of creatives are protected. We must ensure transparency in AI, as covered in new clause 4, so that tech companies, some of which are in cahoots with some of the more troubling aspects of the US Administration, do not end up with the power to curate an understanding of the world that reflects their own peculiar priorities. Big AI says transparency will effectively reveal its trade secrets, but that need not necessarily be the case, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Samantha Niblett) said. A simple mechanism to alert creators when their content is used is well within the abilities of these sophisticated companies. They just need the Government to prod them to do it.

The Government are working hard. I know that they care passionately about the sector, and the economic and social value it brings. I look forward to hearing how they will now move at pace to address the concerns I have outlined, even if they cannot do so through the Bill.

[Sir John Whittingdale]

The Minister referred, in his opening remarks, to the fact that the Bill has been a long time in its gestation. It is very nearly two years since the first meeting of the Bill Committee, which I attended, to take through what was pretty much an identical Bill. At that time, it was uncontroversial and the Opposition supported it—indeed, I support it today. There are a lot of measures we have not discussed because they are universally accepted, such as the national underground asset register, smart data provisions and the relief on some of the burden of GDPR.

I congratulate Baroness Kidron, who very successfully attached to the Bill amendments to address a different, but vital issue: protection of the creative industries with respect to copyright. Therefore, I support new clauses 2 to 6, which are essentially Baroness Kidron’s amendments that were passed in the House of Lords. The Minister said that it was not the intention to legislate at this time, that the Government want to wait and are consulting, and that they have tabled two amendments. However, one of the measures is to conduct an economic impact assessment, which the Government would always have had to do anyway, and the other is to commission a report into such things as technical standards and transparency. As the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) has pointed out, that will simply delay things even longer, and this is an issue that must be addressed now, because generative AI models are currently scraping and using material.

In our view, the law is clear. The Minister asks why we need new clause 2 if all it says is that people should obey the law, and if we also believe the law is clear. One of the reasons it is so important is that we can enforce the law only if we know that it is being broken. That is why transparency is absolutely vital; it is only with transparency that rights owners can discover the extent to which their content is being used by generative AI, and then know how to take action against it.

I absolutely agree that it is not that the creative industries are against artificial intelligence. Indeed, a lot of creatives are using it; a lot of them are developing licensing models. However, for some, it is an existential question.

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

On the point about transparency, the law is the law—it already exists. However, the law can be enforced, and people can be punished, only if actions that break our current laws come to light. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that this is another reason that new clause 2 is essential?

[Sir John Whittingdale]

I completely agree. The hon. Gentleman has stated the case: in order to enforce the law, we have to know who is breaking it.

There are all sorts of legal actions already under way, but this issue is about the extent to which scraping is going on. I agree with the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on the importance of newspapers and the press. The press face the particular problem of retrieval-augmented generation—a phrase I did not think I would necessarily be introducing—which is the use of live data, rather than historic data; if historic data is used, it often produces the wrong results. The big tech companies therefore rely on retrieval-augmented generation, which means using current live data—that which is the livelihood of the press. It is absolutely essential for publishers that they should know when their material is being used and that they should have the ability to license it or not, as they choose.

[John McDonnell]

The issue the right hon. Gentleman is addressing is the immediacy of the threat within the journalistic sector at the moment. I missed the opening remarks by both Front Benchers because I was in the debate on the personal independence payment, but I am sure my hon. Friend the Minister was as eloquent as ever in advocating for the Government amendments; he is a very persuasive fellow. However, those amendments are merely about publishing a report in 12 months’ time—that is all. There will be parts of the journalistic sector that will no longer exist in 12 months’ time as a result of this legislation.

[Sir John Whittingdale]

I completely agree. I do not doubt the Minister’s sincerity in wanting proper close examination, but this matter is urgent. New clause 2 and the associated measures simply state the law as it currently stands and give rights owners the essential ability to know when their material is being used, so that they can choose whether they wish to license it, and, if they do not, to take action against its use.

There is only one other point I want to raise today, as a number of speeches have been made in this debate that have very eloquently set out the case for each of the new clauses, including by the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins), and indeed by the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage). For the other concern that I want to raise, the Minister will need to put his other hat back on for a moment. Earlier in the day, he was speaking as the Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism about the threat from the possibility of tariffs on the film industry. Obviously, we are concerned about the general question of US tariffs, and there is talk about trying to achieve a trade deal—in the President’s words, a “beautiful trade deal”—which would mean that the UK was protected. However, we are told that one of the prices that could be attached to such a deal could be relieving the burden of regulation on tech companies.

I am afraid that we know how the tech companies define burdensome regulation. In their view, copyright is a burdensome regulation, not a legal obligation or moral right of rightsholders. I hope the Minister will make it clear that we will not sacrifice the rights of creative industries and copyright owners in order to obtain a trade agreement and that, at the same time, we will not dilute other, very important digital legislation, such as the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which I understand is also potentially on the table.

I will not speak any longer, because the case has already been made. I will say only to the Minister that although it is clear that new clauses 2 to 6 command quite a lot of support on both sides of the House, I have no doubt that the Government will defeat them if they choose to do so tonight. However, he will be aware that they were originally made in the House of Lords, and he may find it harder if that House chooses to push the amendments through. I would not like to be back here next year once again trying to put through a data Bill because this one has failed.

[Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)]

I rise to support the Government’s amendments and new clauses, particularly new clause 16, which addresses the relationship between artificial intelligence and copyright and which I strongly welcome. By slightly broadening the scope of the Bill, the amendments demonstrate Ministers’ attention to this pressing detail and reflect some of the comments by colleagues and the creative sector.

The existing legal framework with regard to copyright is not fit for purpose in the face of new and developing AI technologies. Colleagues who have much greater expertise and knowledge than me have contributed to this debate, but I want to offer a reflection and draw attention to the experience of an individual—one of my constituents—as I believe it highlights the real human impact that big tech companies can have in running rampant over copyright laws.

My constituent, Susan, is an author. She has had 32 of her books and, she calculates, more than 1 million published words used by Meta without her consent. The pirating of material has serious human impacts on those in the creative industries. Susan’s life work and source of income was downgraded and devalued almost instantaneously. Her intellectual property was accessed without her permission and used to inform an AI system designed to mimic her work. Susan described that to me and said that she felt violated, as if someone had come into her house and stolen her things, and she is not alone.

I have been contacted by other professionals in the creative industries in my constituency who have also had published material used without their consent by AI. A local author has had their works harnessed through an online library of pirated books, and a local illustrator said that her work was scraped to train an AI model with images and videos taken from websites and social media without her permission. That practice is widespread and plainly wrong, even to a lay observer who is not versed in technical expertise, yet rightsholders are often impotent against big tech companies and their sizeable financial and legal assets.