Industry and Exports (Financial Assistance) Bill

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Bryant

Committee of the whole House
Monday 23rd February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I note that the creative industries have now achieved 5% growth in the last year, faster than any other part of the economy—and I think we have seen quite a creative industry this evening, with Members managing to get amendments into this very tightly constricted Bill. I am happy to address some of the issues that were mentioned, but I think some of them strayed somewhat wide of the mark of the Bill itself.

Let me turn first to the amendment from the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). He and I have participated in many campaigns on forced labour and other issues, and I am entirely with him on the aim of preventing all modern slavery. I will just correct him on one factual mistake that he made. He said that the UK was the first country to ban slavery, but it was Haiti in 1804. It could be argued that Napoleon abolished it, but then they returned to slavery afterwards. It was Haiti that abolished it first.

The right hon. Member makes the very good point that modern slavery is an abomination. It is morally wrong. Forced labour is morally wrong. It is also a taint on any kind of international trade, and it undermines fair practice from other countries that do not engage in forced labour. I am determined to do everything I possibly can, both in this role and in the future if I am not in this role, to make sure that we tackle forced labour in every single part of the way we run our economy. As a Labour Member, it would be shocking if I were not to say precisely that.

The right hon. Member knows that I am not going to accept his amendment—

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

What!

[Chris Bryant]

Fake shock does not suit him as a look. It would be wrong for us in this country to feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, and house ourselves on the back of forced labour. At the moment we are engaged in a review of responsible business conduct, and I very much hope that that will move us in the direction of being able to tackle this issue comprehensively, rather than just in this particular area.

I reassure the right hon. Member that UK Export Finance takes these issues extremely seriously. It is very diligent in the way that it analyses and looks at any of the investments it makes to ensure that environmental and human rights issues are fully addressed before making any financial commitment. We intend to produce our response to the responsible business conduct review very soon. I cannot give a precise date, as Ministers rarely manage to produce dates, which the right hon. Member knows.

UKEF uses OECD standards and the Equator Principles. It also reports extensively on this area, as it is required to do under the two Acts that apply to it. It works with the Office for Responsible Business Conduct’s dispute resolution unit, which provides a non-judicial grievance mechanism for looking at precisely all these issues. I am not saying a long-term no to the right hon. Member’s request. I completely agree with the aim of what he is seeking to achieve, but I think we already do that under UKEF. If particular issues arise in the future, I hope the right hon. Member will write to me. I would be very happy to respond to him.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I understand what the Minister is saying very clearly, but a couple of the examples I gave where things had slipped through the net show that the system is not perfect. Does he think that the Government are likely therefore to deliver, as that said they would, on taking the Modern Slavery Act and beefing it up to such an extent that companies importing and exporting have a responsibility to check their supply chains, and if they do not it would be a criminal offence?

[Chris Bryant]

I cannot say anything more clearly than that I want to make sure that we in the UK are not reliant for our economic prosperity on the forced labour of others. We need to make that as comprehensive and effective as we possibly can. I know the two cases that the right hon. Member referred to, and I am happy to write to him, if he wants, in precise detail about those rather than to delay the House tonight. Funnily enough, the precise processes that we went through in the UK with UKEF in relation to those cases would have been met by the US legislation as well, which is arguably not as effective as it would like to be. I am as interested as he is in being effective in this space.

The hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister) gave an exceptionally good speech, I thought, on why we should not have left the European Union and why we should never have accepted the deal that was put on the table. I note that the people of Northern Ireland agreed with me and not with him on whether the UK should leave the European Union. I am afraid that—

Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Bryant

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I model myself in all things on the right hon. Gentleman, apart from the fact that I left the Tory party many years ago, and it is about time that he came over to the Labour Benches.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

It is not too late.

[Chris Bryant]

No, the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) could come over here; I am not going back over there.

The point I was going to make is that I am fully cognisant of my duties. I think the right hon. Gentleman was referring to the artificial intelligence copyright issues that we will be addressing fairly shortly. I like the fact that I am in both Departments, because it means I can bring the knowledge of both sectors to bear on each other. If we are lucky, and if we work hard at it, I hope that I will be able to persuade him that we can come to a win-win solution. As he knows, this is not easy. When I had my first meeting with him after I was appointed in the post, he said, “This is not an easy area to resolve.” I hope I am not breaking a confidence—but he is smiling.

I have a large number of topics to cover, and I am conscious that many Members will think this is the data Bill, when we will actually be dealing with an awful lot of subjects this afternoon that do not feel as if they have anything to do with the measures in the original version brought forward by the right hon. Gentleman and previously. I hope that Members will bear with me. I intend to address the Government’s amendments as follows: first, AI and copyright; secondly, deepfakes; thirdly, the national underground assets register; and then smart data and other minor and technical amendments.

I will start with AI and intellectual property. As Members know, it was never the Government’s intention to legislate on that issue at all in this Bill. It is a complex and important issue, which is why we have consulted on a package of measures. That consultation had more than 11,500 responses, which we are still considering. Several hon. Members have said to me, “Will you remove the opt-out clause in the Bill?” I need to make it absolutely clear that no such opt-out clause is in the Bill. We never laid one in the Bill, so there is not an opt-out clause to remove.

As Members will also know, the Lords inserted a set of amendments on AI and copyright, which we removed in Committee. They reappear on the amendment paper today as new clauses 2 to 6, tabled by the hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins). A similar measure has been tabled as new clause 14 by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel).

We oppose all these new clauses for several reasons. First, they pre-empt the results of the consultation. It must surely be better to legislate on this complex subject in the round rather than piecemeal. The amendments are also unworkable. New clause 5, for instance, would make the Information Commissioner the regulator of transparency requirements, but the Information Commissioner’s Office has neither the skills nor the resources to perform that function. Obviously, transparency requirements without an effective enforcement mechanism are worse than useless, which means the other clauses on transparency are also unworkable in this context. The new clauses also fail to address some of the most important questions in this area. They effectively legislate piecemeal rather than in the round. Whenever Parliament has done that in the past, it has rued the day, and I think the same is true today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I agree with my right hon. Friend: that is the peculiarity. The Minister knows only too well about the nature of what goes on in countries such as China. Chinese companies are frankly scared stiff of cutting across what their Government tell them they have to do, because what happens is quite brutal.

We have to figure out how we protect data from ill use by bad regimes. I use China as an example because it is simply the most powerful of those bad regimes, but many others do not observe data protection in the way that we would assume under contract law. For example, BGI’s harnessing of the data it has gleaned from covid tests, and its dominance in the pregnancy test market, is staggering. It has been officially allowed to take 15% of the data, but it has taken considerably more, and that is just one area.

Genomics is a huge and vital area right now, because it will dominate everything in our lives, and it populates AI with an ability to describe and recreate the whole essence of individuals, so this is not a casual or small matter. We talk about AI being used in the creative industries—I have a vested interest, because my son is in the creative industries and would support what has been said by many others about protecting them—but this area goes a whole quantum leap in advance of that. We may not even know in the future, from the nature of who they are, who we are talking to and what their vital statistics are.

This amendment is not about one country; it is about providing a yardstick against which all third countries should be measured. If we are to maintain the UK’s standing as a nation that upholds privacy, the rule of law, democracy and accountability, we must not allow data to be transferred to regimes that fundamentally do not share those values. It is high time that we did this, and I am glad to see the Minister nodding. I hope therefore that he might look again at the amendment. Out of old involvement in an organisation that he knows I am still part of, he might think to himself that maybe this is worth doing or finding some way through.

[Chris Bryant]

I do not resile from my views just because I have become a Minister, just as the right hon. Member did not when he became a Minister. He makes an important set of points. I do think, however, that they are already met by the changes in the schedule to article 45B, which is not an exhaustive list of things that the Secretary of State may consider. The points he refers to are certainly things that the Secretary of State could—and should, I would argue—consider.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I am grateful to the Minister, and I hope that that might find its way on to the face of the Bill with a little more description, but I understand that and I acknowledge that he does as well.