Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

Absolutely. I pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend on this subject and look forward to following his leadership in driving up the number of women in engineering apprenticeships.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

17. What assessment he has made of the potential effect on UK artists and creators of introducing a private copying exception without compensation.

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

This change will allow people to make personal copies of content they have bought. For example, it will allow an individual to copy their CDs on to an iPad. Many people already do this without realising it is illegal under copyright law. Most people think it is reasonable and should not be prevented by copyright. The Government agree and our new law will recognise this. This change will not allow people to obtain copies unlawfully, and British creators will continue to be rewarded when people buy copies of their works.

[Kerry McCarthy]

So far, the 22 EU member states that have introduced private copying exceptions have all introduced corresponding levy schemes on MP3 players and other copying devices to compensate artists for the loss of income. Why will the UK not do the same?

[Mr Willetts]

The reason is very simple: those European countries have introduced far wider exemptions than we are proposing. Many of them allow content borrowed from friends, families and libraries to be shared very widely. That damages creators, so they need to provide compensation, but our proposal is carefully targeted to protect what happens, as we all know, in almost every family in the country without doing damage to creators.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Willetts]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; indeed, today is the day, 50 years ago, when the then Conservative Government accepted the Robbins report. We are marking the 50th anniversary with more funding going into universities, with more students and with more applications from students from disadvantaged backgrounds than ever before, so we can be proud of our record on higher education.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

A report published today by the 1994 Group of universities shows that, although the overall figures for post-graduate study in the United Kingdom look healthy, that is mainly due to a 90% increase in the number of overseas students. What are the Government doing to support British post-graduate students?

[Mr Willetts]

That is an issue, which is why the Higher Education Funding Council for England has provided an extra £25 million of support for next year’s post-graduate students. We will increase that amount to £75 million for the following year, because we do not wish to see people who could benefit from post-graduate education missing out.