Creative Sector

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, first, I very warmly congratulate my noble friend Lady Featherstone on her brilliant introduction and on painting a picture of the breadth of the creative industries. No debate that I can remember recently has been more inspiring. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Spencer, on his maiden speech, and I look forward to hearing more from him. I just say in passing to the noble Baroness, Lady Fleet, that of course red squirrels have come together with the arts in the form of Beatrix Potter, who really laid the foundations of the understanding of books for many children with The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.

I must turn to what this Government are consulting on. This was touched on by my noble friends Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Foster when they explained that the Government are consulting on what sort of intellectual property regime to pursue now, after Brexit. In my contribution today, I shall emphasise the importance of a territorial—in other words a national—copyright regime to the British book trade. The British book trade has been and still is a really great success story. Britain is the world’s number one exporter of books. That is a great achievement, and the publishing industry is worth £6 billion. Culturally, British books export the English language around the world, and British books are a very important means of exerting soft power.

Of course, books are also the foundation for many films. James Bond has been much mentioned, and I am sure Ian Fleming would be very pleased that his books live on in that form. Books transform into other things, including video games, and of course people also buy books as a record of such things as exhibitions and for reference. Very importantly, books open the world, both real and imaginary, from the moment a parent starts reading to their child. Books expand our horizons. They are companions and they enable us to walk in other shoes than our own. Non-fiction books have held their own very well in a digital world. Indeed, I love books so much that I spent the first half of my working life first in publishing and then in bookselling, so I understand the critical relationship between authors, publishers and booksellers and how this relationship nurtures the new, unknown author.

Any change in the intellectual property regime would mean, for example, that a blockbuster success for a publisher and for a bookseller would be threatened. The blockbuster success is the wave that is necessary to give momentum to the trade that then carries the riskier, the lesser-known and the niche authors. Were the Government to move to an international copyright regime, floods of cheap books produced elsewhere in the world would flood on to the market, but only the blockbusters. It would undermine the publishing trade very critically and diminish authors’ incomes. It would undermine how physical books published in the UK are distributed around the world. I cannot emphasise enough that copyright is the key to the UK book trade: it offers our authors the right to protect their IP and benefit from it.

There may be a view in the Government that the book trade is old-fashioned and that authors can just publish online, but the fact that books are still such a valued purchase for the British public is partly because of their content, but partly because of how they look—their design and their typeface. The book trade is a survivor: it survived the abolition of the net book agreement, which proved a death sentence for many independent book shops, and it survived the onslaught of Amazon, which of course started out as a book outlet before it diversified into everything including the kitchen sink.

I cannot really believe that the Government wish to undermine the book trade, but can the Minister assure me that they have decided on a firm choice to maintain a system that protects British authors and the British book trade? The Conservative mantra during Brexit was “Take back control”. If the Government change the copyright regime around books, so that it takes away control from British authors, it will be a disaster for the British book trade.

I have one last question for the Minister: have the Government done an impact assessment of changing the intellectual property regime across the creative arts, and an impact assessment specifically for the British book trade on the effect of ending our British territorial protection?