Speeches by Bryant.

“As usual, it is a great delight to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I warmly commend the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) for doing something perhaps intrinsic to our political system—because, unlike in many other systems around the world, we have a constituency model—and standing up for her constitu…”

“I will not give way to the right hon. Lady for a moment, because she has posed quite a lot of questions that I need to answer. The right hon. Lady asked about funding. A statutory instrument was laid to change the ICO’s funding arrangements, because successive Governments have loaded it up with more and more work, and …”

“I am not, I am afraid, going to give way now—[Interruption.]”

“The ICO went through a thorough process. It had to gain approval at the end of that process, although it had been speaking to the Cabinet Office from the very beginning. That is why I believe it has come up with the best solution to ensure it has the talent it needs into the future, bearing in mind that nearly 10% of i…”

“Yes—well, it would have been endlessly hard rock, wouldn’t it, if it was just to please him? Of course, this debate is timely because the Proms are about to start. The Proms are one of the most renowned British cultural institutions in the UK, where the BBC meets the public in a more open way than in any other. The con…”

“And the former Minister for common sense has now completely abandoned common sense, clearly. Anyway, Emeli Sandé sang: “You’ve got the words to change a nation But you’re biting your tongue, You’ve spent a lifetime stuck in silence Afraid you’ll say something wrong.” Since the Government do not have anything to say on …”

“Well, this is a rum old affair, isn’t it? I think we can definitely put this down as one of the recondite moments of parliamentary democracy. A number of people have asked me today, “What on earth is all this about?” and then said, “What is an opposed private Bill?” or “What has the Chairman of Ways and Means got to do…”

“I am not going to sing. Do behave! The right hon. Gentleman is almost as bad as I used to be when I sat where he is sitting now.”

“I think I will make sure that gets into Hansard now. The right hon. Gentleman is taking objection to me personally. Well, there we are.”

“Of course. I was merely responding to the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Gateshead South. If we had a debate in which there was a venue mentioned and she were not to stand up and make a speech about ticket touts, we would think that something was wrong; we would go and search all the A&…”

“Oh dear.”

“I am going to be a bit cautious. For instance, it is perfectly possible that DACS, which represents visual artists, photographers and painters and so on, has a large amount of data. It might want to take part in this and effectively sell or license—permanently, temporarily, for fixed purposes or whatever—the content th…”

“Well, it might not be a Government activity. For instance, if I go back to my data Minister side, there are companies working in this sphere that would like to create a data exchange like the stock exchange, because there are lots of organisations that simply do not know where to go to find data, to buy data that they …”

“This is precisely the question I asked them yesterday.”

“Not always. One of the points that they make is that they want to know whether there are legislative barriers for them that might need to be unpicked. They want to know whether at some point the Government will have to decide what they are doing about their own data. There are a lot of privacy issues and GDPR issues ar…”

“You said “presumably”.”

“Sorry, Mr Hinds, but what matters is that it needs to be data that is usable by others. That is the point. For instance, if you are buying your ticket from Trainline and you have a condition, at the moment you cannot know. You would have to use some other means of finding out what railway stations—”

“Sorry, I do not know enough about the copyright hub. Alastair might know more; I think he was in the Department.”

“He is against it being Government-run, and you are—”

“Yes. I know that some have managed to keep it. For instance, they are making a film of “Heartstopper” at the moment, which I guess is for Netflix. That is being made by See-Saw productions, because it made the TV series as well; I think intellectual property is staying with See-Saw productions. I want to see a mixed ec…”