Lord Clement-Jones (LD)

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response. I do not doubt her motives at all; it is just the outcome that we are not happy with. I thank those who have spoken in favour of this regret Motion. The noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, talked about US session musicians, who are an important aspect of this. Clearly, they are being discriminated against if they are working with musicians from countries that are reciprocating and paying our musicians. This seems to be unfairly singling out those session musicians in those circumstances. My noble friend Lady Featherstone talked about fair play and the risk of US retaliation. The Government may have the right motives, but I do not think they have quite come to terms with what a US Administration might do in this regard. The noble Lord, Lord Markham, rightly said that any system needs to have the confidence of those who are supposed to benefit from it. I thought that his injunction to tread carefully in these circumstances was very important. I do not propose to put this Motion to a vote; the SI has already gone through on the negative procedure. However, we are not wholly reassured. I very much hope that the Government will initiative a dialogue with Equity. When I raised with Minister Clark whether they had actually met Equity to discuss this SI, it was interesting that they had not. There are other issues that Equity would, I am sure, very much want to talk about, such as synthesisation of performances, in relation to AI—that is probably another area. It seemed rather extraordinary that a Labour Government had not properly engaged with Equity in the last six months. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to take that back to the department and reinforce the desire to meet with Equity and the Musicians’ Union. The Government have been unduly influenced by the figures from the BPI. I do not recognise the figures that the Minister maintained about the income which would be forgone if another option had been taken. As I said when I introduced the Motion, those figures are very much disputed by the MU. We have not seen any real workings that prove that that would be the loss of income, but we can argue the toss on that. I very much hope that the Government will at least take back from this regret Motion that in producing an option at the last minute, however creative it may be—I would not deny that creativity is a useful thing to have in the department—you can be slightly overly creative if you are not consulting on a particular option. I thought it was a neat piece of speechwriting but not necessarily to be desired. It is the kind of thing that would go to judicial review if a commercial organisation was involved in this SI. If this was BT, or another major telecom company, disputing an SI in which an option had not been consulted on, they would take this kind of thing to court. As it happens, this is about artists and unions, so they are not going to do that; they are going to go through the political process. I welcome that, but it nevertheless shows the fragility of the decision that has been taken in this case. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.