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Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I add my support to the amendment of my noble friend Lord Stevenson and join him in congratulating those who won the Oscars. I perhaps should not forget the BAFTAs, which are more local and also well worth winning, as the same pattern of achievement was there. I want to address the Committee on this amendment as I had the very good fortune to be the first person designated as the Minister for Intellectual Property, a role which I know that the new Government have also taken on as a ministerial post. The enjoyment from that role came from being involved not only in helping to drive forward businesses but in assisting in the development of cultural industries. I was under no illusion while doing so that Governments do not create business; they simply do their best to set out the conditions in which business might be able to thrive. The advantages of doing that are that, certainly in this country, we are unlikely to make much of our living doing many of the things which we have traditionally done, but we make a very good living from being successful in the creative industries. My noble friend Lord Stevenson has pointed out that film adds between an additional 6 and 9 per cent per annum to the value created. The data that I read when I was responsible for the matter showed that the creative economy as a whole grew consistently by between 7 and 8 per cent per annum. Almost no other part of the United Kingdom’s economy had a growth pattern that came anywhere near that level of achievement. I recognise immediately some of the difficulties in measuring economic performance, but very good research from Queen Mary, London University, and other universities, has come back pretty consistently with the figure of between 7 and 8 per cent and one or two estimates which were higher. That is a fantastic achievement. That is why I want to look particularly carefully at what might disrupt elements of that achievement and I will do so by focusing on subsection (1)(b) of the proposed new clause. The difficulty that the industry described most frequently—as, incidentally, did the music industry—was the wholesale theft of the properties being created and the tendency for people to steal intellectual property such as a new film almost as soon as it was made. We had a range of options to try to deal with that problem. For a start, trading standards officers locally would try to identify the criminals involved and get their hands on the contraband. On occasion, the police made that effort as well. I have to say—and I mean no complaint by this, because trading standards officers and police forces have many other priorities—that it was seldom at the top of their priority list. The result was that a great deal of the great value in a great product made in this country was consistently lost. Of course it is true that American, French and other films are also stolen, but today we are concerned with what has been achieved in our film industry. The efforts that had to be made to stop the damage being done to the industry were highly specialised, not only in the companies that made films, which of course had real concern about their property being stolen, but in the British Film Institute, which tried to work with and assist those companies in responding to that wholesale theft. It was not a simple matter of a fixed pattern of theft. The development of the internet world and digital technology meant that the character of the crime and the way in which people could perpetrate it kept changing. That meant that consistent attention had to be paid to how people stole the intellectual property. Some people—of course, nobody in your Lordships' House—thought, as they did with the music industry, that this was a good fun, picaresque event, involving a modern-day Robin Hood banditry that was perfectly acceptable. You could steal a band's music; you could steal someone's movie; it did not really make a difference; it was all part of the public good and in the public domain so it was all right. I took a different view for a couple of reasons, which I shall sum up briefly for the Committee. First, you cannot have a viable industry creating great products if people feel that they can steal the product easily. That is why the function referred to in the amendment is vital if we have serious intent to protect the industry. My second reason is that many of the people who were detected in the theft of intellectual property, particularly in music and film, turned out to be criminals who were also involved in a number of other activities, including people trafficking—it was often people who had been trafficked who were selling these products in car boot sales, public houses and so on—and drug distribution. It was often a way of incorporating those individuals in a wider range of crime. There was strong evidence, not least from the police forces, for which I was very grateful, which indicated that we were addressing a problem wider even than the damage being done to the creative industries. How precisely are we to protect that intellectual property from theft? If we do not, I am genuinely fearful that the film industry will go into decline, as have many parts of the music industry. I ask the Committee not to underestimate just how steep a downward curve that industry has faced.