Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

Jonathan Davies Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

No, I have not—my hon. Friend has not missed anything. Obviously, we want to respond as soon as possible, but we have 11,500 consultation responses to consider.

Some issues have hardly been referred to in the public debate on this matter. One issue that Equity is understandably pursuing, and that we referred to in the consultation, is about personality rights, which exist in some states in the United States of America. That is quite complicated to legislate for, which is one of the reasons we have consulted on it.

We have also consulted on the question—again, nobody has referred to this in the public debate—of whether a work that is generated by AI has any copyright attached to it. If so, who owns that copyright? It is slightly moot in British law. One could argue that British copyright law has always presumed that copyright applies only where a work is the expression of an individual, so it does not apply to AI-generated material, but there are other elements. Section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988 says that machine-generated material can have copyright attached to it, which is one of the other issues that we want to address.

As I said earlier, one of the issues to which nobody has yet come up with an answer is how we will provide proper enforcement of whatever transparency requirements we propose. I am conscious that in discussions I have had with our European counterparts, including my Spanish counterpart and members of the European Commission, there has been some concern about precisely what they will do by virtue of transparency. This issue is made more complicated by the advent of DeepSeek—for a whole series of different reasons, which I am happy to explain at some other point—but we need to end up with a transparency system that is both effective and proportionate. Simply dumping a list of millions and millions of URLs that have been visited on the internet is neither effective nor proportionate, so we will have to come up with something.

[Jonathan Davies (Mid Derbyshire) (Lab)]

Does the Minister envisage that any model of enforcement around transparency will be compulsory and not a voluntary system?

[Chris Bryant]

By its nature, enforcement would have to be compulsory, but we are running ahead of ourselves, because nobody has actually come up with a system that has an enforcement mechanism. Who would do it? What body would do it? How would that body be resourced? That is one of the things that we need to look into, and it is one of the elements of the consultation.

I will move on to another subject: the issue of purported intimate images. Government amendment 34 deals with the creation of intimate images or deepfakes. Earlier in the Bill’s passage, my colleague Lord Ponsonby added a new offence of creating purported intimate images without consent or reasonable belief in consent, and I am sure all hon. Members agree that this is a really important addition. In Committee, we introduced the offence of requesting the creation of purported images without consent or reasonable belief in consent, as hon. Members who were on the Public Bill Committee with me will know. It seems axiomatic that the courts should have the power to deprive offenders of the image and anything containing it that relates or is connected to the offence. This is already the case for the creating offence, which was introduced in the House of Lords. Government amendment 34 amends the sentencing code to achieve that for the requesting offence. It ensures that the existing regime of court powers to deprive offenders of property also applies to images and devices containing the image that relate to the requesting offence.

We have tabled a series of amendments to clauses 56 to 59 to reflect our discussions with the devolved Governments on the national underground asset register. The amendments will require that the Secretary of State to obtain the consent of Welsh Ministers and the Department for Infrastructure in Northern Ireland, rather than merely consult them, before making regulations in relation to the provisions. Co-operation with the devolved Governments has been consistent and constructive throughout the Bill’s passage. We have secured legislative consent from Scotland, and the Senedd in Wales voted in favour of granting the Bill legislative consent only yesterday. We regret that for procedural reasons, the process with Northern Ireland has not yet reached the stage of legislative consent. We are, however, working constructively with the Department of Finance to ensure that we can make progress as quickly as possible. We continue to work closely with the Northern Ireland Executive to secure legislative consent, and to ensure that citizens and businesses of Northern Ireland feel the full benefits of the Bill.

Before I finish, I turn to our amendments to help ensure that smart data schemes can function optimally, and that part 1 of the Bill is as clear as possible. Amendments to fee charging under clauses 11 and 15 follow extensive stakeholder engagement, and will maximise the commercial viability of smart data systems by enabling regulations to make tailored provision on fee charging within each smart data scheme. For example, amendments 19 to 21 enable the fees charged to exceed expenses where appropriate. This is necessary to fulfil the commitment in the national payments vision to establish a long-term regulatory framework for open banking. Outside smart data, Government amendment 35

“adds references to investigating crime to existing references in the Data Protection Act 2018 to detecting or preventing crime”,

which will bring these references into line with other parts of the legislation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Max Wilkinson]

I thank the Minister for his intervention. He is absolutely right. There are clear issues of process here. There are differential approaches across the country—different coroners taking different approaches and different police forces taking different approaches. The words of Ministers have weight and I hope that coroners and police forces are taking note of what needs to happen in the future so that there are proper investigations into the deaths of children who may have suffered misadventure as a result of social media.

On related matters, new clause 1 would gain the support of parents like Ellen up and down this country. We need to move further and faster on this issue of social media and online safety—as this Government promised on various other things—and I am pleased that my party has a very clear position on it.

I will now turn to the issue of copyright protections. I held a roundtable with creatives in Cheltenham, which is home to many tech businesses and AI companies. The creative industries in my town are also extremely strong, and I hear a lot of concern about the need to protect copyright for our creators. The industry, is worth £124 billion or more every year, remains concerned about the Government’s approach. The effects of these issues on our culture should not be understated.

We would be far poorer both culturally and financially if our creatives were unable to make a living from their artistic talents. I believe there is still a risk of the creative industry being undermined if the Government remove protections to the benefit of AI developers. I trust that Ministers are listening, and I know that they have been listening over the many debates we have had on this issue. If they were to remove those protections, they would tip the scales in favour of AI companies at the cost of the creative industry. When we ask AI companies and people in tech where the jobs are going to come from, the answers are just not there.

The amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) would reinstate copyright protections at all levels of AI development and reinforce the law as it currently stands. It is only fair that when creative work is used for AI development, the creator is properly compensated. The Government have made positive noises on this issue in multiple debates over the last few months. That is a positive sign, and I think that in all parts of this House we have developed a consensus on where things need to move—but creatives remain uneasy about the implications for their work and are awaiting firm action.

Ministers may wish to tackle this issue with future action, and I understand that it might not be dealt with today, but our amendments would enable that to happen. They also have an opportunity today: nothing would send a stronger signal than Government support and support from Members from across the House for my hon. Friend’s amendments, and I implore all Members to back them.

[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.