Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

Debate between John Whittingdale and Jonathan Davies

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[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.