Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

Alison Hume Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 12th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alison Hume (Scarborough and Whitby) (Lab)]

I would like to draw the attention of the House to my membership of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.

I rise to contribute to today’s debate on the Data (Use and Access) Bill as a creative who worked as a screenwriter before I entered this place. To write a good script takes discipline, focus, sweat and tears—I have found that tea and biscuits help, too. Us mere mortals cannot create something out of nothing. Creativity is an act of synthesis: pulling together the flotsam and jetsam of our experiences and observations and applying them in an original way. We pour our life experiences into our work, creating the humanity behind the lines, which lifts characters from the pages and into the public’s consciousness.

If the public want to hang out by watching the shows that we create, we have on our hands the rarest of commodities—a hit.

Many years ago, I worked on the hit show “New Tricks”. It was a cold case cop drama that ran to 12 series on the BBC, created by Nigel McCrery, who died this week. “New Tricks” was, and remains, a very popular show. Twice a year, I receive the royalties collected for me by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. I am paid fairly for my original work when it is rebroadcast around the world, or on digital platforms.

This week, I discovered that the subtitles from one of my episodes for “New Tricks” have been scraped and are being used to create learning materials for artificial intelligence. Along with thousands of other films and television shows, my original work is being used by generative AI to write scripts, which one day may replace versions produced by mere humans like me. This is theft and it is happening on an industrial scale. As the law stands, AI companies do not have to be transparent about what they are stealing. I therefore welcome the principle of the amendments in the Bill before us today, which address this issue. The amendments require generative artificial intelligence firms to be transparent about the content used to train their models, allowing creators to know when our work has been used. Another amendment expands the existing copyright regime, which is completely clear that the unlicensed use of creative content to train AI models is theft, to cover all GAI models marketed in the UK.

Over in the United States, Thomson Reuters has just received a summary judgment on its infringement claim. It is the first pure AI training case decided in the US, and the judge has said that AI training is not fair use. I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement and his listening mode, but the creative industries worry that the Government’s preferred position of creators of original material opting out of having work scraped is not workable because no such model currently exists anywhere in the world. We are worried because creators build our industries. The creative industries are at the heart of our industrial strategy.

[Sir John Hayes]

I fully endorse much of what the hon. Lady has said. We as a House were slow to regulate the internet when it first emerged. The fascination with the new blinded people to the damage it could do. We have had the online harms Bill more recently and so on and so forth. The risk in this case is not that we go too far, but that we do not go far enough. It is important, based on what she just said, that we take swift, decisive and firm action to avoid the eventuality of reducing humans, as she described them, to “mere” puppets.

[Alison Hume]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point, and it is crucial that the Government take that into account at the end of the consultation.

[Peter Kyle]

We have heard lots of voices from the creative arts sector. The point of the consultation is to hear from all sectors. So far in the debate we have not heard representations or voices from the technology sector—I look forward to the contribution by the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone)—but I have been reassured by the technology companies that they are engaging with the consultation and are trying to present the technological solutions for which my hon. Friend inquires. That is why the live consultation is so important: so that I, and we as a House, can judge whether the submissions from technology companies are robust and implementable enough and can see where the technology will go. The consultation is still live during this debate, and I hope that by the time we are in Committee, we can have more of an informed discussion, even though, as I said before, there is the likelihood of further parliamentary involvement down the line in a fully informed way.

[Alison Hume]

I thank the Secretary of State for his reassurances. I know that creatives are worried because the scraping is happening now and will carry on until we have a solution. We must protect the creative industries. They grew by over a third between 2010 and 2023 in terms of gross value added, far outpacing growth in the UK economy as a whole. They are worth more to the economy than life sciences, car manufacturing, aerospace and the oil and gas sectors combined. They are a glorious British success story. They make us proud. They make us feel good. They shape the nation’s identity. They make us, well, us. They are represented in every corner of the UK, with 2.4 million workers, 70% of whom live outside London. They are writers, musicians, photographers, artists—all manner of wonderful creative folk, powering one of our greatest success stories and one of our best engines for growth.

In my constituency of Scarborough and Whitby, I have been entreated by individual creatives and small and medium-sized enterprises to ask the Government to look after their rights and to protect their income. Recently, I proudly served on the Employment Rights Bill Committee—a Bill that will see the biggest improvements for working people in a generation. Creatives are working people, too. Creative work is work. The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has talked about her determination to take the brakes off the creative industries and turbocharge growth.

If the creative industries are a fast car, the creative is the driver. Without us, it is the equivalent of a driverless car—fine, maybe, to get from A to B—but if we are to produce the kind of quality scripts behind the superb television dramas that entertain, comfort, inspire and, as recently shown in the case of “Mr Bates vs The Post Office”, effect meaningful change, we need a human being at the wheel. To have a human there, we need to ensure that they are paid for doing what they do best: being original.

We should inspire the rest of the world to adopt high standards, lead from the front and amplify our influence on the global stage. Britain’s creative industries deserve a dynamic licensing market that protects copyright and drives growth and innovation in both the creative and tech sectors. I look forward to the outcome of the consultation on AI and copyright and to working with the Secretary of State and the Minister to find a future-proofed solution, which protects original work and the ability to earn an income from it. The Labour party was founded on the principle of a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. Being in government is our opportunity to fulfil that principle for UK creatives.

Creative Industries

Alison Hume Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alison Hume (Scarborough and Whitby) (Lab)]

The creative industries are rightly a priority for our Government, and I warmly welcome the Minister’s speech, as will our creatives in the coastal communities of Scarborough and Whitby. Having been a screenwriter by trade, I declare my membership of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. This has been a fascinating debate, and I rise to ask whether, in our headlong rush to embrace the white heat of scientific revolution, we are at risk of extinguishing the spark of original human creativity. Sparks were indeed flying in the 1982 cult sci-fi film “Blade Runner”; Ridley Scott drew upon the landscape where he grew up—the flaring oil stacks of the refineries in the north-east, sending up big fireballs of gas—to create a dystopian future world where humans battle synthetic humans known as replicants.

As we move into a future where artificial intelligence is no longer the stuff of sci-fi films but the tool that will revolutionise our lives, we should pause to ensure that we safeguard our original content creators, because unless we tighten copyright laws around intellectual property to protect creators, AI data mining will stem the flow of creative content. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) mentioned, the AI systems that mine content to gain artificial intelligence could run out of new material in the next few years—this is known as model collapse—and generative AI models could start training on their own low-quality outputs. To return to “Blade Runner”, the replicants would be breeding with the replicants.

To enjoy a future that protects human creativity, we should reform the UK text and data mining regime to place the onus on GAI firms to seek permission from rights holders to use their original published work. Amendments tabled by Baroness Kidron to the Data (Use and Access) Bill, which will be discussed shortly in the other place, offer meaningful transparency provisions that would make the UK’s gold-standard copyright regime enforceable and counter the widespread theft of intellectual copyright by AI companies. The amendments chime with public opinion, and I ask the Minister to reflect on whether the Government will support them.

I finish with dialogue from “Blade Runner”—words spoken by the replicant Roy Batty:

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

We must act to protect our creative talent in the UK—the screenwriters who wrote those unforgettable lines, and all future writers. In the fight to win the battle for intellectual copyright, surely we must be on the side of the human, not the replicant.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alison Hume Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the hon. Member for raising that very important issue and for championing the voices of women in his constituency. We are committed to ensuring that all women and babies receive safe, compassionate and personalised care through pregnancy, birth and the critical following months. Reconfiguration of the services, as he knows, is a matter for the integrated care boards, which is important, as it allows decisions to be made locally and to be tailored to local interests. All changes should be based on evidence, be clinically led and involve engagement with patients to ensure that they will deliver better outcomes. This is a very important matter.

[Alison Hume (Scarborough and Whitby) (Lab)]

Q3. Whitby InterActive has provided inclusive play schemes and holiday activities for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities for 26 years. It has been a lifeline for families continually failed by Conservative Governments, but InterActive is set to close due to a funding shortfall. Does the Prime Minister agree that action to tackle the crisis in SEND provision is urgently needed and that charities, such as InterActive, deserve our support more than ever?

[The Prime Minister]

Yes, I do, and I know this is a concerning time for families who rely on the brilliant work of Whitby InterActive. Children with special educational needs and disabilities have been failed for too long. It comes up repeatedly in the House, with parents struggling to get their children the support they need and deserve. We must raise the standards for every child so that they can succeed in education. We will fix the foundations and ensure that every child can achieve their potential.