Oral Answers to Questions

Natasha Irons Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

Part of our reforms are to ensure that those who can never work are properly supported and not put through endless assessment, and I thank the hon. Member for raising this case. We are committed to renewing the nation’s contract with those who have served, and a range of support is in place for veterans, including dedicated medical and physical healthcare pathways in the NHS, employment, and housing. The new support system, VALOUR, backed by £50 million of funding, will provide a network of support centres to connect veterans with local and national services.

[Natasha Irons (Croydon East) (Lab)]

Q13.  Successive Conservative Governments stripped our councils of funding for youth services, pitting them against services that were under statutory protections. That has led to one in eight councils no longer having a youth centre. Croydon, which is London’s youngest borough, is about to lose its youth engagement team and its last crumb of council-run universal youth provision. Can the Deputy Prime Minister outline what this Labour Government are doing to support our young people? Does she agree that it is time to look again at statutory protections for youth services, so that all young people, no matter where they live, can get the services they deserve?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend that the Conservatives left a trail of devastation across education and youth services. [Interruption.] Given half the chance, judging by their moans, they would do it all over again. We are making different choices—working with young people to draw up a landmark new national youth strategy, investing £145 million this year to provide stability to the youth sector, rolling out youth future hubs to expand access opportunities and reduce crime, and extending access to mental health support to nearly 1 million more children this year.

Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

Natasha Irons Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Wednesday 14th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Notwithstanding the views of the Chinese Government, it is a delight to see you in your place, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am only saddened that I have not been sanctioned, which feels a shame—nor by Russia, for that matter. There is still time.

I am delighted to be here today to discuss the Bill, which we last discussed in depth a week ago today. First, I would like to express how pleased I am that the other place has agreed to the Government’s amendments relating the national underground asset register and intimate image abuse. I pay tribute to all those Members of the House of Lords who took part in getting that part of the legislation to the place where it is now. I am glad we have been able to work with them. I will start by encouraging the House to agree to those amendments, before I move on to discuss the amendments relating to AI and intellectual property, scientific research, and sex and gender—in that order.

Lords amendments 55D, 55E and 56B, which were introduced to the Bill in the other place by the noble Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge, place a duty on the face of the Bill that requires the Government to: review the operation of the “reasonable excuse” defence in the offences of creating and requesting intimate image deepfakes without consent, or reasonable belief in consent; publish the outcome of the review in a report; and lay that report before Parliament. The Government were pleased to support the amendments in the other place, as we share the desire to ensure that the criminal law, and these offences in particular, work as the Government intend.

[Natasha Irons (Croydon East) (Lab)]

I think we all appreciate the amendment, because we want to protect vulnerable women, children and anybody who is at risk of this sort of harm. Could we not look at doing something similar to the amendment, and the carve-out we have created with it, for our creative industries? If we can protect our vulnerable people, can we not also protect our creative industries from copyright infringement by having territorial exemptions similar to what we have with deepfakes?

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is jumping the gun slightly—I will come on to those issues.

I want to praise Baroness Owen with regard to this part of the legislation. If it had not been for her, I do not think it would have ended up in the Bill. There was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing between her and the Ministry of Justice to ensure that we got the legislation in the right place. As I said in last week’s discussions, one of the issues was whether Baroness Owen’s original version of the second offence really worked in law; I think she agreed that our version, which we tabled in Committee, was better. We have been able to tidy up the question of the reasonable excuse. It is perfectly legitimate to ask how on earth there could be a legitimate or reasonable excuse for creating one of these images or asking for one to be created, and we went through those debates previously. I am glad that the Government have come to a settled position with Baroness Owen, and that is what I urge everybody to support here today.

The Government made a manifesto commitment to ban sexually explicit deepfakes, and the Bill delivers on that promise. For the first time, there will be punishment for perpetrators who create or ask others to create intimate deepfakes of adults without consent.

Secondly, I turn to the national underground asset register, which it does feel has been a long time coming. Of course, that is partly because the Bill is in its third iteration. Amendment 34 relates to the national underground asset register. An amendment was previously tabled in the House of Lords requiring the Secretary of State to provide guidance on cyber-security measures, which was rejected by this House. Last week, the Government tabled amendments 34B and 34C in lieu on this topic, which were drafted with the support of the security services. These amendments expand the scope from cyber-security only to general security measures, clarify the audience for the guidance and extend its reach to Northern Ireland, alongside England and Wales.

On all the amendments I have spoken to thus far, I thank our noble colleagues in the other place for their work and support to reach agreement in these areas. I urge colleagues here today to support these amendments, too; otherwise, we are never going to get the Bill through.

Intellectual Property: Artificial Intelligence

Natasha Irons Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Natasha Irons (Croydon East) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Frith) for securing this important debate. I should declare that my husband is a voiceover artist.

As with every technological leap forward, whether from theatre to cinema or television to streaming, protecting the rights and income of our creators does not create a barrier to innovation or growth. As we move into an AI-powered future, it is even more crucial to protect creators with transparency, consent and compensation for the content used to train AI models.

Our creative industries are a great British success story, worth more than £125 billion to the UK economy and supporting more than 2.4 million jobs. What underpins that success is the principle that those who create content are paid for it, and copyright protections have been the bedrock of that principle for decades. The case for updating UK copyright law for training AI is that the current framework is unclear, but there is no such ambiguity. If someone plays music in a club without a licence or sells counterfeit DVDs, they are breaking the law. If AI companies wish to train their models on copyrighted content, they have to get consent to do so.

AI companies may be harder to hold to account because their models are opaque, but that makes this a transparency and enforcement issue, not a legal one. Our content, our books, our journalism and our music are the oil needed to fuel generative AI systems. I do not think anyone would argue that oil should be mined and used for free by any other industry, so why should it be any different for the precious resource that is creative content? Creating generative AI systems with no accountability and no remuneration is not innovation; it is simply exploitation.

I welcome this Government’s commitment to our creative industries and to finding a solution fit for the future, but the current proposal of an opt-out system is unworkable and unfair. The Government even acknowledge that the technology to implement an opt-out system does not exist. We must uphold the rights of our content creators by upholding copyright protections and giving creators the transparency, consent and compensation they deserve.

Technology in Public Services

Natasha Irons Excerpts

Monday 2nd September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Natasha Irons (Croydon East) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan) for his moving and powerful words. It is an extraordinary thing to become a Member of Parliament, and becoming a Labour Member of Parliament who gets to sit on the Government Benches is even more extraordinary. I share the sense of pride and urgency that we have heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson) and for Stoke-on-Trent South (Dr Gardner) and from the hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Alex Brewer) in their maiden speeches, and I congratulate them on their contributions to this debate.

It is the honour of my life to represent Croydon East in this place, so I thank the people of this new constituency for putting their faith in me. I will never forget what a privilege it is to be their voice in Parliament, and I will do all I can to fight for Croydon’s future. As south London’s most iconic borough, Croydon is a place so big that it needs four Members of Parliament to represent it. Like the reunion tour of a much-loved ’90s band, my constituency has been reformed under an old name with new boundaries, so I pay tribute to my predecessors, starting with the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) for his work for the people of Selsdon and his commitment to public service. While I cannot apologise for campaigning against him in the election, I can attest to the number of constituents who spoke highly of him and his contribution to their community when I met them on the doorstep.

I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon West (Sarah Jones), who is not only Croydon’s first female MP, the founder and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime and violence reduction and now a Minister in this Government, but the kind of MP where everybody knows someone who has been helped by her. I thank her for her kindness, advice and encouragement over the past few months, and hope to build on her legacy and continue to stand up for Croydon in the way that she has always done. I am thrilled to join those Members and my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham and Croydon North (Steve Reed), someone who continues to work tirelessly for his constituents and who, as Secretary of State, is now taking on the urgent fight to clean up our waters. I look forward to us working together in the best interests of Croydon.

Croydon East represents so much of what is great about our city. Whether it is the bustling life of South Norwood, the close-knit communities of Addiscombe and New Addington, or the stunning views from Shirley Hills, Croydon East is a place filled with diversity, ambition and strong values. However, even in this vibrant corner of south London, the shadow of inequality persists. Whether it is the fact that a child in Croydon East is twice as likely to live in poverty as one just a few miles away in Croydon South, or that a man living in New Addington North has a life expectancy a decade shorter than a woman living in Shirley South, these stark disparities remind us that too many remain trapped in a cycle of inequality.

When we talk about technology in public services, we must not get lost in grand plans and digital transformations: we must remember those who use these services, and how they will be put to use. What do they mean for the community leaders at the coalface of the cost of living crisis—those who run services such as the Food Stop, Pathfinders and the Community Family Project in New Addington that often step up when there is no one else to step in? What do they mean to groups such as the Friends of Shirley Library, which is fighting to keep the library open—a place that not just tackles loneliness and isolation, but plays a critical role in closing the digital divide? What do they mean to my constituent Michael Lyons, a veteran who has campaigned to ensure that the memory of servicepeople from the first world war lives on? How will we ensure that digital public services remain as accessible to him as they are to the rest of us? With a considered application of technology, we have an opportunity to break down barriers instead of creating new ones, to bring people closer to democracy instead of driving them further away, and to rebuild our public services so they work better for the people who need them most.

As someone who grew up in south London in a family that was always political but did not think that politics was for people like us, I know that the decisions that we make in this place have the power to change lives for the better. Choices that have been made in this room took my family from sleeping on our living room floor to decent social housing. They enabled my mother to go back to university to retrain and to get a better job. And they gave me the opportunity to go to university, to get a career in public service broadcasting, to serve my community as a local councillor and to make my way to these Benches.

As an MP in London’s youngest borough, I want to spend my time here putting the wellbeing of our young people back on the political agenda. There is no longer-term plan than ensuring that our young people have the opportunities they deserve, so that they can go on to live the successful lives that we want them to. We need a national plan for what it is to be a young person in this country, and I look forward to showing how Croydon stands ready to lead that vital work.

Finally, every Member of the House will have those people in their lives who have supported them to get here, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank mine. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh), who allowed me to see that there was room for people like me in places like this. Without her encouragement and advice, I simply would not be here. I can only hope to be half the MP that she is. I thank my mum and dad for their support and unwavering belief in me. It is their hard work and determination that changed our lives, and I am so proud to continue our family’s track record of serving our country. To my spectacular husband, who encouraged me to get involved in politics because he was sick of me shouting at the TV: thank you for your patience and your endless support, and for being the greatest dad imaginable to our lads.

It is really an extraordinary thing to be a Member of Parliament. I hope that in our time here, we make choices in this room that change the lives of the people outside of it for the better.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call Caroline Voaden to make her maiden speech.