Publishing Industry

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Wednesday 6th February 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

I thank my noble friend Lord Dubs for initiating this debate and all noble Lords for their contributions, which have been of a very high standard indeed. As my noble friend Lady Rendell said, this is a very timely debate, and we appreciate that. My noble friend Lord Giddens warned us that this is an industry in which conditions are worse than we think. They may get much worse before they get better, if indeed they do. We need to bear in mind also that this is a complex industry, like all creative industries. With some notable exceptions, we have focused today mainly on the creative side—the agents and publishers—but we also have to think about the retailing end: the designers, the marketers, the logistics and, of course, the concept of electronic publishing, which is an underlying thread here.

This debate has really been about whether the current leadership that this country’s publishing industry deservedly has can be sustained and whether there will be growth. There have been a very large number of questions for the Minister and I do not intend to cover them all. I hope that he will be able to give a particular mention to them all but, if not, that he will write to us about them. I think that there will be too many, even for the time that he has been allocated. However, from the questions that were raised, the first was on this vexing question of the public lending right, which is so important to authors and publishers. Of course, it does a much wider job by raising people’s interest in books and writing and, more generally, in education. Will and can that be extended to e-books?

On VAT, the differential between the printed and electronic versions is obviously a major issue. What approach are the Government taking on this? I know that the Minister will say the usual thing when he comes to reply: that taxation is a matter for the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Of course it is but, six weeks out from the Budget, surely budget submissions will have been made. Can the Minister confirm that DCMS has raised this issue with the Chancellor and is making the right sort of noises, along the lines that he has heard today?

On copyright, the issue that comes up time and again is whether the Government have got their approach right, along with the question of who is actually in the lead on this issue. In debate on the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill, the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, confirmed that he was the Minister for Intellectual Property and therefore has, within BIS,

“a role to champion the IP system as a whole”.

Indeed, he was proud of the fact,

“that no other country has such a post”.—[Official Report, 28/1/13; cols. GC414-16.]

He felt that that solved the problem. However, what then is the role of DCMS in relation to copyright? Perhaps the Minister could say a few things about the approach that he is taking in this matter and how the department gets its point of view, which we note to be significantly different in terms of discourse from that which is currently being led by the IPO. There is much more sympathy with some of the points that have been made today. It would be a pity if that was being boxed out by government structures.

On the key issue of education and the circularity of the approach that has to be taken across libraries and supportive reading, and about the role of English more generally—but particularly on reading and writing and on creative work in the EBacc—it would again be useful if the Minister could explain what DCMS’s role in that has been, whether meetings have been taken and whether it is making progress.

Finally, can the Minister say a bit more about the general role of the DCMS in this industry? Many of the issues that we have discussed today are, as I have said, largely in the gift of BIS and not that of DCMS. Can he therefore explain a bit more what its role is?