Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Baroness Buscombe Excerpts

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Whitty]

To clarify, there is a range, but I am using a figure close to the best estimate which amounts to about £250 million.

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister. I have been sitting here and slowly thinking to myself that I cannot continue to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, making this incredible, disingenuous argument. I am going to go back down memory lane briefly. I remember when the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, was Minister for Agriculture and we had the Burns report.

[Lord Myners]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. The Chairman has already read from the guidance on participation in debates. The noble Baroness was not here at the beginning of the debate and in that circumstance—

[Baroness Buscombe]

Excuse me, I was here.

[Lord Myners]

Then I apologise.

[Baroness Buscombe]

Good.

I remember so well that when the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, was in government, the Burns report looked into the future of hunting. The report came back saying that if we lost hunting, the lives of a huge number of people in rural areas would be affected. They would lose their jobs and that would have a massive impact on the rural economy. I remember the noble Lord standing at the Dispatch Box saying “I do not like hunting. I am not interested in what the Burns report says. We are going to get rid of it anyway”. Here is the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, talking so much about the need for consultation as if he really cares what the result might be. This is all about dogma. What has been going on this afternoon has been vacuous and disingenuous, and I hope that the Minister will feel strong in his argument and ignore these disingenuous requests to remove the amendment.

[Lord Whitty]

I am quite happy to have another debate about hunting. I understand, however, that the Prime Minister is not prepared to pursue it. I have not seen the devastation in jobs in hunting since the hunting Act was passed, but let us put that to one side. All I was asking the Minister was whether he stood by his own department’s calculations of the effect on wages in the agricultural sector of abolishing the board. It is a straightforward question on which I would like a clear answer: if he does still accept it then everything we have been saying on this side is correct and there will be a serious detrimental effect. If he wishes to change it, however, I suggest he produces a different impact assessment before we reach Report.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Clement-Jones]

My Lords, it would be a shame not to savour the final quarter-hour of Committee today—although I have probably learnt more about agriculture than I ever wished to. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, is still here; he is clearly incredibly versatile in all these matters. Seeing him and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, I am afraid that I am reminded of the passage of the Digital Economy Bill, which may or may not be a good thing. As we know from that, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is never knowingly underprovocative, particularly on the question of intellectual property rights, and I am not going to enter the lists with him on the issue of the format-shifting exception that was the subject of the Christmas present he mentioned.

Amendment 28A is an incredibly sweeping amendment that would have a massive impact on the cloud computing industry in the UK, which is forecast to grow from something like £2 billion to £6 billion. It would have an incredibly damaging effect, which makes it highly undesirable for various commercial reasons. Quite frankly, it also happens to be in contravention of the existing EU directive on computer software, which gives the exclusive rights to copyright owners in those circumstances. Of course, there are issues about the ownership of digital content, but this is not the way to deal with them. There are issues about who owns what you have on your iPad or tablet from other manufacturers, but this is an incredibly sweeping way to do it. In the way the amendment is phrased, I doubt whether it will cure the issue by itself.

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, I rise to resist the amendment of my noble friend Lord Lucas and to support what my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones said. My noble friend Lord Lucas’s argument in relation to Amendment 28A; that if someone has a book they should be allowed to own it, enjoy it and pass it on to others sounds, emotionally, like a good thing. Indeed, I have done that on many occasions among my family and friends. But passing one book among one or two friends is a million miles from what is now possible because of the speed of technology. Because of the digital world we inhabit, the whole of the creative being of that book can be out in the ether and transmitted globally within moments. The creative right is all but destroyed rather than shared in a small and special way. While I entirely understand the emotion behind the idea that we should continue to feel that we can share something we really enjoy, it is neither wise nor sensible to do that in this world because it will deter creators from creating more wonderful books. That is the tragedy of this. It is a perverse consequence of technology.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I do not wish to detain the Committee, but I wish to thank the noble Lord for his introductory comments and reflect on two points. First, a number of the issues he raises will come up in other amendments and I hope that he will share his wisdom on those occasions as well. Secondly, I must disappoint him in one respect. He suggested that part of what he wanted to say was covered by the Christmas present provided by the additional copyright exceptions and other things that were coming forward and that there might be an opportunity to discuss those in a separate Bill. That will not happen because the Government are, at the moment, choosing to implement those proposals by secondary legislation, bundled in, as the note says, “as few SIs as possible”.

Unless we get a late Christmas present from the Minister, we will have to oppose that because there are very large issues within what has been proposed. Not all of them are unwelcome and we would probably want to get behind most of them. But the way in which it has been done leaves a gap in the expectation outside that there should be a lot of discussion about these things. As has just been said, they affect the very heart of what we are trying to say around our creative economy, how people create and how things are consumed. If we do not get that right, there will be a wave of concern outside. I therefore lay down a small elephant trap for the Minister to fall into then leap out of with one bound later on when we reach that point in the Bill.