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Digital Economy Bill [Lords]

We are often concerned about why members of the public hold us in such low regard, but anybody observing our proceedings tonight will not be convinced that this House is doing its job of holding the Government to account. We have spent more than an hour discussing just one clause of a 50-clause Bill in the knowledge that we have less than an hour left to cover all the remaining clauses—that is hardly evidence that we are doing our job properly. It is frankly totally disgraceful that a Bill of this complexity has been given so little time for debate in this House. As I said earlier, it would have been possible to have the Second Reading much earlier—nearly three weeks ago—and to have had full deliberations in Committee for a three-week period before bringing the Bill back for the final stages. That is why so many of us are in such a difficult position. The hon. Member for West Bromwich, East (Mr. Watson) has already moved a number of really important probing amendments about various aspects of the legislation. We already know that this evening there will be no time to discuss, for instance, orphan works and the very legitimate concerns raised by photographers. That means that we will all be forced, I suspect, to vote against new clause 43. There will be no opportunity to discuss why the Government are going to announce later this evening that they are backing down on one of their cherished projects, which is to have independently funded news consortiums, or to discuss in detail the other very important amendments tabled by the hon. Member for West Bromwich, East, me and other Members. I speak to amendments 16 and 17 in particular. On Second Reading, I acknowledged that there was a serious problem in terms of providing support to our creative industries, which are losing hundreds of millions of pounds because of illegal activity on the internet. Action needs to be taken. That is why we have been willing to consider supporting the string of clauses—4 to 17—on illegal peer-to-peer file sharing. We pointed out then that three additional conditions need to be put in place. The first was that we needed to have the super-affirmative resolution to ensure that the next Parliament could have proper scrutiny of any proposals to introduce technical measures, which we believe should be introduced only as a last resort based on clear evidence of the need for them. The super-affirmative resolution is what is proposed in amendments 16 and 17. We also said that we needed to resolve the serious problems faced by our universities, schools and wi-fi cafés to ensure that they will not fall foul of this legislation, given that they often have one IP address and a very large number of users. That is the case, for example, in this place. Many of us use the same IP address. We also said that we need to address the time scale in which the initial obligations code is produced by Ofcom, arguing that it could not possibly be given full justice if it was done within a six-month period, given that three of those months have to be spent in consultation with our European colleagues.