Contribution
In reference to the earlier exchange, it seems that if you remember the Minister’s 60th birthday, you were not really there—but I really was not there. [Interruption.] Did I? I knew there must have been some very good reason. Why I was not there is now in Hansard.
There is profound disappointment within the creative sector today. Everyone in the sector really believed and hoped that the Minister would appear today with something in his back pocket that he would be able to bring out to give reassurance to the many artists and creators right across the country who are extremely anxious and concerned about the direction of the debate and conversations about the use of their work. They are really concerned that some of their precious work, into which they have put so much time, effort, blood, sweat and tears, will be scraped up, trawled through by a bot and ingested by one of the large American tech companies, and then reappear as some minor mirror of itself.
No one has been satisfied with what has been said today, and the Minister has one last chance. I really hope that he can give something to the creative industries, or at least give them some sort of hope as we go forward into the next few months and years, because they are going into the next few months and years unprotected. They will have nothing that they can rely on, other than what is in the amendments, and I know for a fact that the Minister will ensure that they are voted down.
Today has been a curious day, too, because financial privilege has been invoked for a particular amendment. In my almost quarter of a century in this House, I have never seen that before. I think I know why it has been done: it is to ensure that the House of Lords does not get another opportunity to bring this measure back. I say to the Minister and the Secretary of State, who is shaking his head, that the Lords are already designing it. After it goes back to the House of Lords, it will come back once again. I am sure it does not invoke any financial privilege, but it is ultimately disappointing that the Lords will not be able to present the same motion again, which was their intention. That amendment has received overwhelming support from everybody across the creative sector, and I had really hoped that the Government would support it today.
The only reason we are here is the efforts of the Members of the House of Lords. I usually do not pay them much of a tribute or respect what they do, but they have played a blinder. In particular, Beeban Kidron—Baroness Kidron—has stuck to this agenda to ensure that these Lords amendments have been reinserted into the Bill. They have had to do it because the Government have not done so. The Government have done nothing to ensure that our creative sector is protected.
The Government say that there should be more time for this, but we do not have time. We have to act now to protect the livelihoods of 2.4 million creators in the UK against exploitation by some of the richest companies in the world. As I have said countless times throughout this Bill’s passage, if we continue at this rate there will soon be nothing left to protect. The thing is that the Government should have acted earlier. They should have taken steps to protect creators’ rights as a matter of urgency. Instead, it has been left to others to scramble to find a way to ensure that we had these vital Lords amendments to a Bill that, as the Minister has said on several occasions, was not designed for them.
The Government’s motions will in effect set a timeline of several years before any resolution is reached on copyright transparency. I listened very carefully, as I always do, to what the Minister had to say about transparency, but I still do not understand why this cannot be done immediately. All the Government have to do is tell inventors, creators and copyright holders that their work is going to be used or ingested by one of the web crawlers that are in operation. That is all they would have to do, and it could be done very easily. There is no great technical problem in introducing transparency as a priority, and it could possibly happen within a few weeks.