Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Lord Brennan of Canton Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Monday 19th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I have two brief points in answer to things that both the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, and Chris Bryant have said in the last week, and that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, has said today. First, when the Government say that the Bill is not the right vehicle for my noble friend Lady Kidron’s amendment, one has to profoundly disagree. Concerns of copyright are integral to the use and access of data; you cannot prise the two things apart. Let us make no mistake: this amendment belongs in the Bill, and the enacted Bill belongs in law.

The second point revolves around the principle of the argument. The Government themselves believe that there is an issue with copyright and that there should be much greater transparency. When Chris Bryant says we need to look at these things in the round and not piecemeal, I agree entirely. If we agree between ourselves that something is right, and that that right is not previously enabled in law, we should pass the law, and the principle will find the solution. We do not legalise things that are criminally wrong because they cannot at the present time be sufficiently policed. Having this in law will speed up the solution. Not having it in law inevitably means that we will drag our feet for who knows how long. That will be to the detriment of the creative industries, as creators such as Elton John know full well and are rightly angry about. We agreed on the principle that this is the right thing to do—make it law.

[Lord Brennan of Canton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is in some sadness that I rise again to talk on this matter. I thank Government Ministers for the very positive way in which they have engaged with my noble friends and me to discuss how to make some progress and find some kind of compromise on this matter in the Bill.

I completely accept that the Commons voted overwhelmingly to reject the amendment originally in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, which we sent to them last week. As Disraeli said:

“A majority is always the best repartee”,


but it is sad if you simply rely on a majority in order to have your way when others are trying to have their say. I would welcome the Government doing a little bit more listening, because this amendment moves quite a long way towards what the Government are saying.

When the Commons debated this matter last week, a number of us went down to watch in person what the reaction was like in the Chamber. I have to say that there was a considerable amount of disquiet from the Government Benches about the direction of travel and there were a considerable number of interventions on and questions asked of the Minister, Chris Bryant. I thought he was extremely generous in the way he gave way and entertained those questions and interventions from Members of the House of Commons. He said in the course of his remarks,

“we all agree that we should introduce transparency measures”.—[Official Report, Commons, 14/5/25; col. 422.]

Those were the words that he uttered on the Floor of the House of Commons. Ministers have said to us elsewhere, and we accept, that you cannot have remuneration without transparency—unless you are an AI company, in which case you do not have to reveal what you are training your models on, even if you use the intellectual property of others. We cannot have a double standard on this matter.

My noble friend the Minister made a point that Ministers and others have made on a number of occasions: we cannot ring-fence ourselves from the rest of the world. That is true—we live in a highly interconnected world—but the whole history of copyright has been about leadership, having high standards and showing why intellectual property is a source of economic growth. This country has shown leadership throughout history in relation to copyright and setting the highest standards to try to drag people up to our level, rather than simply putting up the flag of surrender and going down to the levels of the rest of the world. I fear there is a view that we have to allow AI companies to do anything they want because otherwise they will just go and do it somewhere else. Surely we should show some leadership on this. If anyone did not have the pleasure, as I did, of listening to my noble friend Lord Bragg’s “In Our Time” programme on Radio 4 about the history of copyright, I recommend that they go back and listen to it on BBC Sounds, including the additional conversation that went on afterwards.

My preference, as I made clear last week and have made clear to Ministers, is that if Ministers cannot accept the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, they come back with their own amendment in lieu that at the very least makes sure that Ministers are given a permissive power to require transparency. That can be a “may” instead of a “must”; I know that would not be satisfactory to everybody, but a reasonable concession is needed that provides Ministers with a backstop power that will focus the minds of all concerned on the need to deal with this issue without waiting for a piece of primary legislation—a vehicle that may be some considerable way down the road, even if commitments are made by Ministers.

If these amendments are carried today, I hope the Government will come back with their own amendment in lieu to enable there to be a backstop power, even if it is not exactly the amendment we are considering today. That would go a great way towards providing the level playing field we should have for our creative industries.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, it seems that the Government are relying on two arguments to reject the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. The first is that regulating AI is such a big, complex problem that we cannot deal with one bit; we have to deal with it all. The second is that it is so big that it is global, so we cannot do anything local. The noble Lord, Lord Brennan, just demolished the global argument, so I am sure noble Lords are pleased that I am not going to repeat his arguments.

I want to demolish the first argument as well, which is that we should wait to do everything in one place on AI. That is for old-world technology, not new, agile technology. If we are going to regulate the digital world, we will need to test and learn. We will need to regulate through things that are necessary, even though we know that they are not sufficient. I have not heard a single argument from the Government in any place suggesting that transparency is not necessary. It is necessary, so this amendment is necessary; it is not sufficient to regulate this extraordinary, groundbreaking technology called AI, but that does not mean we should not regulate now in this way and build on it. I am afraid we will debate AI in this Chamber for decades to come, but that does not mean that we should reject this amendment. Like the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, I hope that the other place and the Government will hear the cross-party support for the work that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has been doing and bring back something listening to what we have to say.