Time is Money: How Regulators Can Support Growth (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Lord Black of Brentwood Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

My Lords, like others, I warmly welcome this report from the Industry and Regulators Committee. I pay special tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for her exemplary leadership in this area. As I know from other issues on which she and I work, she is a doughty campaigner and we are lucky that she has brought her skills to bear in this vital area of regulation.

The title of the committee’s report, Time is Money, is spot on. Nowhere is this truer than in digital markets, which the noble Baroness just mentioned, where delay and inaction are not neutral. Every day that the unaccountable big tech platforms go unchecked is another day in which they entrench their monopolies further and, frankly, pile up profits on the back of other people’s labours.

The recent issue surrounding Meta, which was raised in our Oral Questions last week, is an excellent case in point. Last month, it told every business with a Facebook or Instagram account that its new terms and conditions would allow it to scrape their websites with impunity. That was a huge threat to news publishers; it was almost existential—I declare my interest as deputy chairman of the Telegraph Media Group. Its message was: “You pay to produce the news, and we’ll harvest it for free”. The CMA deserves real credit for opening an investigation into this under the Competition Act 1998, but the truth is that it should not have to resort to a tool that can take many months to extract binding commitments or—if Meta does not accept that it is in the wrong and offer solutions—years to reach a remedy. As the report says and the noble Baroness powerfully underlined, speed is essential for effective regulation.

The CMA has called Meta a potential candidate for strategic market status designation under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, which would allow it to publish tailored, focused, ex ante requirements. However, “potential” is the problem word there. As far back as 2020, the CMA itself concluded that Facebook’s market power warranted this regime, yet Meta is still not designated. Had it been, I doubt it would have attempted anything so brazen as it did last month.

The legislation, if applied, really does work. Because Google was designated under the regime as having strategic market status, publishers can now withhold content from AI overviews without vanishing from search results. That is the DMCC Act at its best: flexible, targeted remedies, built firm by firm on the evidence. I believe this is far preferable to the blunt instrument of news prominence proposed in the Government’s media Green Paper. What use is prominence if publishers have to withdraw their content because the price of admission to a platform is having their content used as AI training material for free? That way lies commercial perdition—and, indeed, the end of a free press, which my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral believes so strongly in.

Also relevant to this excellent report, we need to ask why the CMA has not designated Meta or other big tech services that extract excess profits from consumers and crowd out UK start-ups. I do not think the fault lies with the CMA itself, which has done really good work under difficult circumstances; I fear the culprit is the Government’s 2025 strategic steer to put inward investment front and centre. The IPPR report, Bottleneck Britain, found that digital-intensive UK businesses rank big tech’s market power as the second biggest constraint on growth, ahead of finance and talent. The Government’s steer has the priorities backwards, and they should urgently change their direction by expressly backing the CMA to use the powers that we in Parliament gave it and resource it to match. A regulator facing the world’s most valuable companies cannot do the job on a shoestring.

The same question matters for the regulating for growth Bill, which the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos raised. What type of growth will it mandate? I hope it will not be the sugar rush of inward investment announcements of the sort that lets big tech off the hook. It should be growth felt by British businesses and citizens, powered by firms that scale and stay here. The growth duty must never override regulators’ core functions. There is little point in a £500 million sovereign AI fund if the CMA cannot regulate monopolists who swallow up potential UK tech champions. That Bill also risks being lopsided. Ministers propose AI growth labs to exempt AI firms from regulation, potentially with sweeping Henry VIII powers to make those relaxations permanent. Yet where a light-touch rule would unlock massive growth for UK firms, they hold back. AI crawlers harvest content anonymously and ignore the wishes of content creators. The Government should put bot transparency provisions into the regulating for growth Bill.

I would like to press the Minister on a number of points. First, will the Government urgently issue a new strategic steer that backs the CMA to take on big tech with the resources that it needs? Secondly, will they ensure that the regulating for growth Bill focuses on growth that will be felt by UK citizens and businesses? Thirdly, will they put bot transparency provisions into the same legislation? Time is indeed money, and British firms, including our world-class content creators, are paying for every day of delay.