Creative Industries

John Whittingdale Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate and indeed to echo what has been said by many Members on both sides of the House. I think this debate will produce pretty much unanimity on the importance of our creative industries. It is a particular pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage)—my successor but three, I believe, as Chairman of the Select Committee—and I am going to concentrate on one or two of the things she said.

It is happily now recognised how important the creative industries are to the UK’s economy. There has been a growing awareness of this over a long period, ever since a separate Department was founded in the form of the Department of National Heritage, which became the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The creative industries are something that the UK is extraordinarily good at. It is still the case that the best-selling music artists of all time, the Beatles, are British, as is the best-selling author of all time, Agatha Christie. And now, today, when we go to a Hollywood movie, the chances are that it will have been made in Pinewood, even though that is not immediately obvious from what we see on the screen. Advertisements also originate in this country, as does publishing, as the Minister and many other Members have highlighted.

As the Minister said, there is an ecosystem whereby our most successful commercial creative enterprises rely on the subsidised sector, and vice versa. Let us take David Tennant as an example. He started life in “Hamlet” with the Royal Shakespeare Company, went on to “Doctor Who” and ended up in “Rivals”. I have seen all three, and they were all highly enjoyable. The subsidised sector has also benefited over the years from a Conservative invention, the national lottery. It has produced an enormous amount of money, which the taxpayer probably could not have afforded to invest, and many enterprises have benefited from that.

I echo what has been said about the importance of education and the need to ensure that arts are at the core of our curriculum, and also about the importance of grassroots music venues. I went to a Music Venue Trust reception last week, as a number of Members did. I was really interested to hear the remarks of the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler). I did not quite get to the Roxy, but I did go regularly to the Marquee club in Wardour Street, with its sweaty atmosphere, where I heard people such as Buzzcocks and the Clash, and great bands such as Iron Maiden, who started off life in those small venues. It is a shame that the Marquee club is no longer with us and that so many venues still struggle, but I must say that had it not been for the culture recovery fund, which my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport oversaw as Minister in the Department during the covid pandemic, there would be virtually no small venues, or indeed large venues, left in this country. The culture recovery fund kept venues from the Hot Box in Chelmsford all the way up to the Royal Albert Hall going. They were looking over the precipice until the Government stepped in.

The creative industries also bring enormous benefits to this country internationally. I, too, welcome the Government’s creation of the Soft Power Council. Having served as Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, I now sit on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and we continue to collaborate between Committees in looking at the importance of soft power. About two weeks ago, we heard from the British Council, which was mentioned earlier in the debate. The British Council does an extremely important job, and it is ridiculous that it has to go to the Government every year and ask to have the loan rolled over, and that it is staring at insolvency until an agreement is reached. I hope that is something that the Government will now address.

The British Council does many worthy things, but I have a soft spot for one thing in particular that it administers—I hope that both Ministers on the Front Bench share this—and that is the cultural protection fund. That is another initiative from this country in which we use our world-beating expertise from places such as the British Museum to help to ensure that some of the world’s greatest heritage is preserved, particularly when it is at risk from conflict.

We need to recognise that there is an increasingly competitive environment across the creative industries. British music is still extraordinarily successful, but 2023 was the first year when there was no British artist among the top 10 best-selling artists across the world. Four of the best-selling artists in the world in 2023 were Korean. That shows where the markets are developing. They are developing in south America, too. It is important that we continue to support creative industries such as the music industry through, for instance, the music export growth scheme, which was set up by the last Government and which I know this Government are continuing. I welcome that and hope that it will be maintained.

I also want to say a word about copyright, as almost every other speaker in this debate has done. I chair the all-party parliamentary group on intellectual property, and we recently had a meeting with the chairs of all the APPGs representing music, publishing, the visual arts and the media, who came together to listen to representatives of those creative industries express their deep concern about the Government’s suggestion that they might introduce an exception to the copyright protection, which would benefit AI.

There are good things about AI. It is not a threat to be beaten off; it can be of real value to the creative industries. Companies such as Universal Music are using AI, and it is a new technology that consumers and those industries will benefit from. At the same time, protection is needed to ensure that intellectual property rights are not abused. The Minister says that there is legal uncertainty, but the fact that intellectual property rights owners are defending their rights by going to court does not mean that the law is wrong. They are using the law, but that does not necessarily mean that the law is not perfectly clear.

We welcome elements of the Government’s proposals, and transparency is vital. If rights owners are to be able to protect their property, they first need to know where their property is being used. Transparency is the first essential requirement for that to happen, so I very much welcome the Government’s proposal to ensure transparency where AI large language models use content from across the internet to generate their own content.

The consultation highlights the alarm about a text and data mining exception. On one hand, the Government say they are consulting on that, but on the other hand, when the Secretary of State made his statement in the House just a couple of weeks ago, he said that the Government were accepting all of Matt Clifford’s recommendations. One of those recommendations is to introduce a text and data mining exception, so I hope the Minister can say something about that.

[Chris Bryant]

Matt Clifford made that recommendation —recommendation 24—and, in response, we have said that we are consulting. We have not decided; we are consulting. It is a consultation, not the Second Reading of a Bill.

[Sir John Whittingdale]

I am extremely grateful to the Minister, and it is of some reassurance that the Government’s mind is still open. I hope they will listen to the voices across the Chamber expressing concern.

There is an objection in principle to option 3, which is the idea that rights holders have to opt out. It reverses what has long been the case—that people can rely on the protection of their rights unless they choose to give them up. They should not have to ask for their rights to be protected, and that is what an opt-out system entails. There would no longer be automatic protection under an opt-out system, and it would put a huge burden on many small rights holders. There is a suggestion that photographers might have to seek an opt-out for every picture they have ever taken. Now, I hope that is not the case, but a lot of uncertainty has been created.

Each creative industry is different. As the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society told us last week, writers may want their works to be used for some purposes but not for others, but it appears that this will be a binary system in which they either opt in or opt out.

This is also incredibly difficult to enforce. If somebody takes a picture of a painting on their phone and puts it on social media, how can the rights owner prevent it from being used by a large language model that goes out and absorbs all this content? As has already been said, there is no workable system in existence that allows for opting out. The EU has tried to introduce one and, as I am sure the Minister is fully aware, the robots.txt standard is supposed to identify—

[Chris Bryant]

It’s useless.

[Sir John Whittingdale]

The Minister is entirely right—it is useless.

The problem, therefore, is that there is no workable solution at the moment. The Minister and the Government have said that they will not introduce this option until there is a workable system in existence. That is reassuring, but how will the Minister decide whether a proposed system is indeed workable? If it is workable, how will it be enforced? Will individual rights holders have to go to court if they believe they have opted out but find that their works are still being used? There is a whole host of questions.

I recognise the Minister’s commitment and wish to find a way to protect rights, but there are an awful lot of questions at the moment, and there do not appear to be any answers. I hope he can address some of those questions.