Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

Marsha De Cordova Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Obviously, a series of different things will happen. We will have to respond to the consultation at some point, and I guess that the Culture, Media and Sport Committee will want to respond as well. In the meantime, we will be running a working group. I am very happy to keep the House updated on how that work progresses, but I do not want to commit to producing something within 12 months without being absolutely certain that I can do so. If new clause 17 is carried today, it will be a requirement by law that we produce a response within 12 months.

I fully get the point about urgency. As the right hon. Member for Maldon knows well, this issue has been hanging around for a considerable period of time. We in the UK have perhaps been a little slow, but I want to make sure that we get it right, rather than legislate piecemeal.

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

I apologise if I have missed this, but has the Minister outlined when the Government will respond to the consultation?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

I will briefly speak to other parts of the Bill and amendments. On new clause 21, I hope the Government will set out how definitions of sex and gender will be consistent and appropriate to the need for which the data is being collected and verified under the digital verification provisions.

[Marsha De Cordova]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and for the speech she is making. We all know the importance of data. Does she agree that it is right that when we are recording sex, it is based on what the Equality Act 2010 determines as sex, being biological sex?