My Lords, it has been a very good debate, and it has got us off to a very good start this afternoon in our task to whip through the various clauses on copyright. I start where my noble friend Lady Morris ended. We have to be clear that in addressing these clauses we adjust for the realities of the digital world in a way that makes sense to consumers. We have to start with where people are at present, not where we would like them to be. The points about education are really important here.
We are playing a big price for the lack of reform in recent years from schools unable to make use to libraries, unable to make preservation copies of films and television programmes that they hold in the national interest. Copyright raises issues of reasonable social and cultural freedom as well as one very key issue with economic ramifications. The presence of the internet allows all sorts of new forms of creativity, so we need a copyright set-up that encourages one-click licensing for a long tail of material that is out there and which could bring economic and cultural growth. But without a well balanced and modernised framework, we will put ourselves at a big disadvantage over some other countries, most obviously the US but also other emerging players. Countries such as Singapore and Iceland are seeking roles as leading edge players in creative product licensing.
Technological change will mean that we in the UK need to keep on adapting our rules, because our fair dealing regime is part of a European system that requires us to exploit fair dealing exceptions, rather than the US fair use system that enables the regime to flex in response to changing attitudes, behaviours and court decisions. I wonder whether the time has not come to think hard about why we differ from the US on this key point.
As we have heard, the argument for the post of director-general of IP is that such a post is needed to ensure that the successful record of IP generation in the UK is properly recognised, celebrated and built on to ensure its contribution to growth, employment, culture and society. As the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said, the key to that is definitely education.
The noble Viscount, Lord Younger, is the newest IP Minister, and I note that he is the sixth person to hold this position since it was created about six years ago. This will undoubtedly lead to a lack of continuity and policy uncertainty for businesses. It is not an exact parallel, but before the creation of the Department for National Heritage, which is now DCMS, there was a period when there were 18 different Ministers with responsibility for films in the then sponsoring department, the DTI, over a period of 17 years. As I was working at the BFI in part of that period, I know what that does to industry. I shall leave it to the Minister, who is barely 18 days into his post, let alone 18 years, to assess whether his location in BIS makes cross-government co-ordination more difficult and sporadic, as has been rather persuasively argued.
One problem for those working on this section of the Bill is that the creative industries do not generally feel that they are being looked after properly. Indeed, there is a wide sense of unease, as the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, called it, and of imbalance, as my noble friends Lady Morris, Lord Smith and Lord Howarth also mentioned. This is in part because of the rather unfortunate split in responsibilities between BIS and DCMS, which can sometimes—or, indeed, all the time—appear to pull in different directions. My noble friend Lady Morris put it well; she spoke from experience, and I think that she spoke the truth. IP is not well served by the current system. But it is also because there have been no real opportunities to debate in this House and the other place some of the issues in the foreground of this sector’s thinking at a time of great change in every aspect of their businesses. The occasional SI does not compensate for this—something that we will return to in other debates. That is why, to me, the idea of an annual report and a subsequent debate in Parliament seems such a good idea, which I am happy to support.