Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Baroness Benjamin

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Wednesday 4th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, as I have often said in this House, I will accept nothing less than a compromise, but it seems that this Government are refusing to act on the wisdom, knowledge and experience of this House. My heart is broken to think that the Government could be so irresponsible and not see the damage being done to our creative industries. I declare my interests as set out in the register.

I will tell the House a personal story about something that happened to me the other day. I was in the supermarket discussing with my husband which apples to buy, when a woman standing nearby said, “I would recognise that voice anywhere. You’re Floella. I’m one of your ‘Play School’ babies”. I smiled, happily posed for a selfie and gave her my autograph. However, it made me realise that my voice is linked to my character and legacy and is also an asset. This is the perfect example of how many people in my creative industry rely on their voices to earn a living.

The deep concern is that AI models could replicate an actor’s or presenter’s voice and distinctive vocal style, almost perfectly, and use it in an advert or voiceover without their knowledge or permission, without payment, and without care or moral conscience—and in such a cavalier fashion. This is why people in the creative industries are so frightened about the consequences of an AI free-for-all where transparency and copyright law are non-existent.

I once again speak in support of the intrepid noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and stand shoulder to shoulder with her to make sure that we keep fighting to prevent the livelihoods of thousands and thousands of people—their lifeblood—being stolen. Yes, it is a shame that we have to be involved in ping-pong in this way, but I do so because, at the end of the day, I cannot face my friends and colleagues in the creative industries knowing that I did not do the right thing and make a stand. I can now look them in the eye and say, like many other noble Lords across this House, “I stood up for you and the future of your creative industries, and for the benefit of our children’s future, as I have always done”. They will be excluded from being part of the creative industries as we know them, and from forging careers in this exciting, adventurous, creative, highly respected world.

I do not see this as a party-political matter, and, in years to come, we will suffer the consequences of this error of judgment and the mental anguish it has caused. In my 15 years in this House, I have been assured many times by Ministers, “We will make changes later”, only to realise that “later” never comes. So, we are standing up for the creative industries and their fight for survival and fairness—now, not later. I urge all Members of this House to show strength of support, stand together with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and send a clear message to the Government that we are not accepting this on our watch. The creative industries deserve better and must be saved.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I have yet to vote with the Government on this issue. We all owe a great debt of gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for the way in which she has championed the interests of the creative sector against the daylight robbery of its rights by big tech to train its models. She has given another powerful speech today. But I have decided that today, I will support the Government, to the disappointment of her and my friends alongside me, for three reasons. First, I accept we are not there yet, but we are perilously close to losing an important Bill that is needed to secure data adequacy with the European Union, to give coroners access to social media companies’ data, and to secure the offences relating to deepfake porn championed by the noble Baroness, Lady Owen.

Secondly, constitutionally, it is now time to listen to the elected House on a Bill that has been through the Commons three times and this House twice, more or less, and was a manifesto commitment. Thirdly, we now have some modest movement from the Government in their amendment, reflecting more urgency and a commitment to comprehensively dealing with the issues of AI and copyright together.

This issue has been appallingly dealt with by the Government. I am not referring to my noble friend the Minister, because some things are out of her hands; but I hope that, as a result of ping-pong, the Government now understand this House better, that they understand the passion and power of the creative sector better, and that they deliver on their promises to legislate comprehensively on the issues of AI and copyright as quickly as possible, and based on the need for transparency. On that, I will work with anybody else to hold their feet to the fire.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Baroness Benjamin

Committee stage
Thursday 27th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I speak in support of these amendments with hope in my heart. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, for leading the charge with such vigour, passion and determination: I am with them all the way.

The Government have said that the purpose of the Bill is to protect children, and it rests on our shoulders to make sure it delivers on this mission. Last week, on the first day in Committee, the Minister said:

“Through their duties of care, all platforms will be required proactively to identify and manage risk factors associated with their services in order to ensure that users do not encounter illegal content and that children are protected from harmful content. To achieve this, they will need to design their services to reduce the risk of harmful content or activity occurring and take swift action if it does.—[Official Report, 19/4/23; cols. 274-75.]


This is excellent and I thank the Government for saying it. But the full range of harms and risk to children will not be mitigated by services if they do not know what they are expected to risk-assess for and if they must wait for secondary legislation for this guidance.

The comprehensive range of harms children face every day is not reflected in the Bill. This includes sexual content that does not meet the threshold of pornography. This was highlighted recently in an investigation into TikTok by the Telegraph, which found that a 13 year-old boy was recommended a video about the top 10 porn-making countries, and that a 13 year-old girl was shown a livestream of a pornography actor in her underwear answering questions from viewers. This content is being marketed to children without a user even seeking out pornographic content, but this would still be allowed under the Bill.

Furthermore, high-risk challenges, such as the Benadryl and blackout challenges, which encourage dangerous behaviour on TikTok, are not dealt with in the Bill. Some features, such as the ability of children to share their location, are not dealt with either. I declare an interest as vice-president of Barnardo’s, which has highlighted how these features can be exploited by organised criminal gangs that sexually exploit children to keep tabs on them and trap them in a cycle of exploitation.

It cannot be right that the user-empowerment duties in the Bill include a list of harmful content that services must enable adults to toggle off, yet the Government refuse to produce this list for children. Instead, we have to wait for secondary legislation to outline harms to children, causing further delay to the enforcement of services’ safety duties. Perhaps the Minister can explain why this is.

The four Cs framework of harm, as set out in these amendments, is a robust framework that will ensure service risk assessments consider the full range of harms children face. I will repeat it once again: childhood lasts a lifetime, so we cannot fail children any longer. Protections are needed now, not in years to come. We have waited far too long for this. Protections need to be fast-tracked and must be included in the Bill. That is why I fully support these amendments.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, in keeping with the Stevenson-Knight double act, I am leaving it to my noble friend to wind up the debate. I will come in at this point with a couple of questions and allow the Minister to have a bit of time to reflect on them. In doing so, I reinforce my support for Amendment 295 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Russell, which refers to volume and frequency also being risk factors.

When I compare Amendment 20 with Clause 10(6), which refers to children’s risk assessments and what factors should be taken into account in terms of the risk profile, I see some commonality and then some further things which Amendment 20, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, adds. In my opinion, it adds value. I am interested in how the Minister sees the Bill, as it stands currently, covering some issues that I will briefly set out. I think it would be helpful if the Committee could understand that there may be ways that the Bill already deals with some of the issues so wonderfully raised by the noble Baroness; it would be helpful if we can flush those out.

I do not see proposed new subsection (b)(iii),

“risks which can build up over time”,

mentioned in the Bill, nor explicit mention of proposed new subsection (b)(iv),

“the ways in which level of risks can change when experienced in combination with others”,

which I think is critical in terms of the way the systems work. Furthermore, proposed new subsection (b)(vii),

“the different ways in which the service is used including but not limited to via virtual and augmented reality technologies”,

starts to anticipate some other potential harms that may be coming very rapidly towards us and our children. Again, I do not quite see it included. I see “the design of functionalities”, “the business model” and “the revenue model”. There is a lot about content in the original wording of the Bill, which is less so here, and, clearly, I do not see anything in respect of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been debated in separate amendments anyway. I wanted to give the Minister some opportunity on that.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Baroness Benjamin

Committee stage
Wednesday 19th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord. I hope that the amendments I support will be supported by CEASE, Refuge and Barnardo’s—I declare an interest here. Let us not let the chance of creating a robust Online Safety Bill slip through our fingers. It is now time to act with boldness, vision, morality and determination. I trust that we will continue to focus on the purpose of the Bill: to make the online world safer, especially for our children. They are relying on us to do the right thing, so let us do so.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I strongly support my noble friend in his amendment. I clarify that, in doing so, I am occupying a guest slot on the Front Bench: I do so as a member of his team but also as a member of the former Joint Committee. As my noble friend set out, this reflects where we got to in our thinking as a Joint Committee all that time ago. My noble friend said “at last”, and I echo that and what others said. I am grateful for the many briefings and conversations that we have had in the run-up to Committee, but it is good to finally be able to get on with it and start to clear some of these things out of my head, if nothing else.

In the end, as everyone has said, this is a highly complex Bill. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, in preparation for this I had another go at trying to read the blooming thing, and it is pretty much unreadable —it is very challenging. That is right at the heart of why I think this amendment is so important. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, I worry that this will be a bonanza for the legal profession, because it is almost impenetrable when you work your way through the wiring of the Bill. I am sure that, in trying to amend it, some of us will have made errors. We have been helped by the Public Bill Office, but we will have missed things and got things the wrong way around.

It is important to have something purposive, as the Joint Committee wanted, and to have clarity of intent for Ofcom, including that this is so much more about systems than about content. Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell—clearly, we all respect her work chairing the communications committee and the insights she brings to the House—I think that a very simple statement, restricting it just to proposed new paragraph (g), is not enough. It would almost be the same as the description at the beginning of the Bill, before Clause 1. We need to go beyond that to get the most from having a clear statement of how we want Ofcom to do its job and the Secretary of State to support Ofcom.

I like what the noble Lord, Lord Allan, said about the risk of overcommitment and underdevelopment. When the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford talked about being the safest place in the world to go online, which is the claim that has been made about the Bill from the beginning, I was reminded again of the difficulty of overcommitting and underdelivering. The Bill is not perfect, and I do not believe that it will be when this Committee and this House have finished their work; we will need to keep coming back and legislating and regulating in this area, as we pursue the goal of being the safest place in the world to go online —but it will not be any time soon.

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, who I respect, that I understand what she is saying about some of her concerns about a risk-free child safety regime and the unintended consequences that may come in this legislation. But at its heart, what motivate us and make us believe that getting the Bill right is one of the most important things we will do in all of our times in this Parliament are the unintended consequences of the algorithms that these tech companies have created in pushing content at children that they do not want to hear. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, wanting to comment.

Education Bill

Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Baroness Benjamin

Monday 11th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Benjamin]

My Lords, the TDA has undertaken excellent work in raising equality in schools. Recruitment from BME groups is important to ensure that white and BME pupils benefit from a more balanced representation of society. The experience of teachers from diverse groups is important. Therefore, I hope that the Minister can confirm that this policy will continue under the new body.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, we have had a useful debate and I was pleased to hear the comment that the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, has just made. I listened carefully to the Minister’s reasonable tone in responding to it. I understand the argument that runs through the Bill about increasing ministerial accountability. He knows that I think the Government are being brave because we all know that there are periodic crises in education and Ministers will be a lot more accountable for those than they have been to date.

I say in passing that Ministers are not the only individuals accountable to Parliament. The Permanent Secretary is the accounting officer and is accountable to Parliament through the Public Accounts Committee. I worry who on earth will want to be the next Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education, not just because they will follow a class act in the form of David Bell but because they will be accountable for so much to the Public Accounts Committee. The TDA has a chief accounting officer in the form of the chief executive but the Permanent Secretary will replace the roles of five or six other accounting officers as well as being accountable for his own department. I think that permanent secretaries will also be taking a pay cut. It is going to be a tough task to recruit them. Perhaps the Government need to set up a recruitment agency for permanent secretaries.

Now that we have seen that dip in applicants, perhaps the Minister would be minded to write a letter to tell us how much was saved in the freeze on advertising in terms of the TDA in isolation. Given the current labour market conditions, which we know make teaching more attractive because there are not so many alternative graduate careers, it is extraordinary that we have had that dip. In the end, I did not hear an argument from the Minister which told me why the previous experience of things being run from Whitehall would be improved this time around. I cannot say that I am persuaded but being a co-operative sort of chap, I am happy to withdraw my amendment.