Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Debate between Lord Black of Brentwood and Lord Lucas

Report stage
Wednesday 13th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendment 127 in this group. I do not hold, in any particular way, to my choice of wording, but I am fairly sure the Government’s choice of wording is not right. We all receive a huge quantity of emails; we do not want multiplicity—we want effectiveness—and to demand that these emails come separately is a mistake. I hope the Government will see this as an opportunity to rationalise and reduce the size of my inbox and everybody else’s inbox. If we allow more than one thing to be in the message, then the prominent message must be the statutory one. To have it in the subject line and in the first sentence, so that it comes up in the summary when you look at what the email is about, would be a better way of putting it than my amendment, but I am sure the Government can improve on that.

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my earlier declarations of interest.

I raised a significant number of issues relating to subscription contracts in Committee. I am very grateful to both my noble friends on the Front Bench for listening to those arguments, and for bringing forward amendments to deal with them, and I strongly support them. They help fulfil the Government’s aims without placing unacceptable burdens on business.

There is only one remaining issue that we dealt with in Committee, and that is why I am supporting the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. His amendment would remove the prescriptive wording that is currently in the Bill and allow for traders to provide notices

“in a clear and prominent manner:”

His wording simply recognises that the prescribed renewal information is at the heart of the notice and must not be skewed out of view, while allowing for other beneficial information to be included, if desired. I am sure all noble Lords will be very happy that it ensures notices do not become a GDPR-style irritant, but something which is actually helpful to consumers. It would certainly be counterproductive if consumers experienced information fatigue and stopped opening communications from traders or simply opted out of them all together.

Equally, it will alleviate the burdens on traders, who may feel obliged to send emails around the time of renewal notices, to provide information on alternative deals, packages and so on, which could otherwise be dealt with in one communication. As my noble friend said, there may be other ways of dealing with it, or other wording, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about this amendment, which I support.

Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Debate between Lord Black of Brentwood and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th February 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I get the impression from my noble friend that this is not an area of the Bill that the Government want to move on, but I get the impression from the Committee that we would very much like to see some changes. I hope that, between now and Report, there may be some constructive conversations between me, my noble friends and noble Lords opposite to see whether we can make some consolidated suggestions to the Government that we need not argue about, so we can focus the argument on them.

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

I thank all noble Lords for what have proved to be good and constructive debates on both groups of amendments.

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, that I think we pretty much have a consensus. There may be some issues at the margins, but we all agree, partly because, as my noble friend Lord Vaizey said, we are not hostile to any of these intentions. We support the intentions, but we recognise that we need to support business while protecting customers. This is important because, in many ways, it goes to the heart of the creative economy and the media ecosystem. The key point that has come across from many of the excellent contributions today is that this is a rapidly evolving environment and, as my noble friend Lady Stowell said, a highly competitive one.

The whole question about digital subs is that they are a new model for the way businesses are operating. For many, that model is becoming business-critical and should therefore not be dealt with, with what the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, rightly said is a blunt instrument. We should therefore not write things into the Bill that we will regret in subsequent days. I agree with a lot of what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said: of course there are some bad actors in this space. All we are saying is that we should not be putting into regulations things to deal just with those bad actors that would damage the much wider economy.

I hope that the Government will think again about a lot of these things. I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for saying that we will continue discussions between now and Report. That is very important, as I think he will have the mood of the Grand Committee: that we will want to return to this area. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Education Bill

Debate between Lord Black of Brentwood and Lord Lucas

Wednesday 6th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I can remember an occasion that illustrates my noble friend’s last amendment. Some boys went to a headmaster and asked if they could have a videotape to use for a project they were doing. He picked one off a shelf and gave it to them, and it was the evidence. People do put these things in the public domain by mistake. I particularly welcome my noble friend’s Amendment 73HJ. There has to be the right for pupils and parents directly affected by this to discuss things. It is the obvious way in which things will come forward. Anyway, it is going to happen. You cannot criminalise that sort of conversation within a school community about something that is happening within the school, so it has to be possible. It will be done on Twitter and on Facebook. These things will not spread. No teacher is Ryan Giggs. There is no national interest in the person’s name. They will remain in a little corner of the social media, of interest to pupils in the school and to the parents of the children, and that is where it will remain. No great harm will be done because, frankly, the school community knows already. I do not see any objection in the wider media carrying just a basic statement that so-and-so has been accused and has taken leave of absence from the school as a result. That is scarcely something that in that form is going to hit the national media, but it at least means that the basic facts that that has happened are, as they should be, a matter of public property.

Surely the evil we are trying to prevent is a newspaper aggressively trying to dig up information about a particular individual in order to make a story, which you might call a human interest story, for people who have never heard of this person and have no interest in him otherwise. It is just a composed story that might be about anybody, but it is immensely harmful to the teacher concerned. That is the sort of thing that we are trying to prevent. The fact that an allegation is made is there and is fact. It should surely not be hidden. We are not in super-injunction territory. I find my noble friend’s amendments very persuasive.

[Lord Black of Brentwood]

My Lords, I support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Phillips and will speak also to Amendment 73M. Just for the sake of the record, I draw attention to the interests I declared earlier. I was very struck by what the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, said earlier. She said that this clause as currently drafted is unworkable and that unworkable legislation simply brings the law into disrepute. My noble friend has just said that we are not in super-injunction territory, but I fear that, because of the impact of digital media, which I shall talk about in a moment or two, we will be in super-injunction territory at a sort of local level that will cast this legislation into that disrepute.

If we are to have legislation, at least let it be workable. I believe that the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, try to do that by importing into new Sections 141F and 141G the concept of the public domain and the public interest. The exclusion of any mention of the public interest in Clause 13, as it stands, is quite remarkable. I cannot think of any other legislation dealing with incursions into the freedom of the press and freedom of expression which do not have a public interest defence. That must be put right.

In my view, these amendments are crucial because the real problem with this clause—the unworkability factor—is that it takes no account of how allegations are spread and the damage that they can do to schools and to innocent teachers in the absence of responsible press reporting. As I said at Second Reading, my concern is that this legislation will simply drive innuendo and rumour underground and new Section 141F(12) will encourage that. Its definition of “publication” is designed to catch the media, which is not at the root of any mischief here, by tying it to material addressed to the public at large. That is the wrong target. The Minister in another place, Nick Gibb, made it clear that this legislation is not intended to capture private conversations, which include e-mail exchanges, texts, Facebook postings, Twitter and all sorts of other mechanisms. That is precisely where allegations and innuendo, which it seems to me that the Government want to be at the root of this legislation, will build up, now that Clause 13 makes it impossible for them to be dealt with in a responsible way in the press, which is constrained by the laws of libel and contempt. In a short space of time, the weight of individual private exchanges may mean that in a small school everyone knows when a teacher has been accused of something, but only the local newspaper will be unable to report it.