Publishing Industry

Lord Wills Excerpts

Wednesday 6th February 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Dubs on securing this debate. I draw your Lordships’ attention to my declaration of interests.

This is a timely debate. As we have heard, digital technologies are disrupting the business models that have sustained the industry for so long. They are redistributing power within publishing, between publishers and retailers and between different sorts of retailers. However, as my noble friend Lord Dubs so eloquently set out, there is no existential threat to publishing in the way that canals, for example, were replaced by railways. Millions will continue to derive huge pleasure from reading and, as long as they do so, there will be a publishing industry.

However, these new technologies are potentially disruptive for what is available to read. For all the growth of self-publishing which has been enabled by these new technologies, and it is welcome, publishing is for the most part still a fragile ecology, where a wide range of talents and skills remain critically interdependent. Creative artists, whether writing fiction or non-fiction, rarely, if ever, create on their own in a garret. They are supported by agents and publishers, all striving together for that elusive creative and commercial success which underpins not just publishing but all the creative industries which do so much for this country. Those support systems depend, above all else, on effective intellectual property rights.

This is a complex area of public policy, as the Government have recognised. Rightly, they are trying to balance the interests of rights holders, creators, consumers and users, and this has always been a difficult balance to strike. However, it has been made all the more difficult by the extraordinary developments in digital technology over recent years. In the light of this rapid change and the inherent difficulty of the task, no one can be certain that the Government have got the balance right. If they have not, there could be serious consequences for publishing and all the creative industries.

I was therefore dismayed to see the Government reject amendments to the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill in Committee, which unfortunately I was unable to attend, which sought to provide mechanisms to protect against such uncertainty—particularly the proposal for a new office to keep the interests of intellectual property rights holders in the forefront of public policy which, in such a rapidly changing world, and in which their importance has been overlooked in the past, seems simply prudent. To rely, as the Government seem to wish to do, on the existence of, in Sir Robin Day’s immortal phrase, here-today and gone-tomorrow Ministers seems to defy all the experience of recent years when the development of public policy in this area has painfully failed to keep pace with the implications of rapid technological change. I hope the noble Lords who proposed these amendments—I am glad to see that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, is down to speak in this debate—will submit them again on Report and that the Government will then reconsider their approach.

More generally, it is likely that the publishing industry will change even more in the next 10 years than it has done in the previous 10 years. Its customers—readers—will determine those changes, but public policy cannot stand aside. I look forward to the Minister setting out what the Government are going to do to support this vital industry.