Chris Bryant

No, the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) could come over here; I am not going back over there. The point I was going to make is that I am fully cognisant of my duties. I think the right hon. Gentleman was referring to the artificial intelligence copyright issues that we will be addressing fairly shortly. I like the fact that I am in both Departments, because it means I can bring the knowledge of both sectors to bear on each other. If we are lucky, and if we work hard at it, I hope that I will be able to persuade him that we can come to a win-win solution. As he knows, this is not easy. When I had my first meeting with him after I was appointed in the post, he said, “This is not an easy area to resolve.” I hope I am not breaking a confidence—but he is smiling. I have a large number of topics to cover, and I am conscious that many Members will think this is the data Bill, when we will actually be dealing with an awful lot of subjects this afternoon that do not feel as if they have anything to do with the measures in the original version brought forward by the right hon. Gentleman and previously. I hope that Members will bear with me. I intend to address the Government’s amendments as follows: first, AI and copyright; secondly, deepfakes; thirdly, the national underground assets register; and then smart data and other minor and technical amendments. I will start with AI and intellectual property. As Members know, it was never the Government’s intention to legislate on that issue at all in this Bill. It is a complex and important issue, which is why we have consulted on a package of measures. That consultation had more than 11,500 responses, which we are still considering. Several hon. Members have said to me, “Will you remove the opt-out clause in the Bill?” I need to make it absolutely clear that no such opt-out clause is in the Bill. We never laid one in the Bill, so there is not an opt-out clause to remove. As Members will also know, the Lords inserted a set of amendments on AI and copyright, which we removed in Committee. They reappear on the amendment paper today as new clauses 2 to 6, tabled by the hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins). A similar measure has been tabled as new clause 14 by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel). We oppose all these new clauses for several reasons. First, they pre-empt the results of the consultation. It must surely be better to legislate on this complex subject in the round rather than piecemeal. The amendments are also unworkable. New clause 5, for instance, would make the Information Commissioner the regulator of transparency requirements, but the Information Commissioner’s Office has neither the skills nor the resources to perform that function. Obviously, transparency requirements without an effective enforcement mechanism are worse than useless, which means the other clauses on transparency are also unworkable in this context. The new clauses also fail to address some of the most important questions in this area. They effectively legislate piecemeal rather than in the round. Whenever Parliament has done that in the past, it has rued the day, and I think the same is true today.