UK Data Bill Still No Closer to Passage As Parliamentary ‘Ping-Pong’ Drags On

After the House of Lords voted on Monday to reattach an amendment to the data bill requiring AI companies to disclose all data used in the pre-training, training, fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation of an AI model, the UK government used an arcane parliamentary procedure to again strip out the amendment during debate in the House of Commons on the Peers’ amendments on Wednesday.

The Labour government of Keir Starmer invoked a rarely used “financial privilege” to kill the measure, essentially declaring there is no money available in the budget for any new regulation, The Guardian reported. MPs then voted 297-168 to remove the amendment, although 106 Labour MPs did not vote, reflecting divisions within Starmer’s own party.

The maneuver sends the measure back to the Lords for the third time, where Baroness Beeban Kidron vowed to introduce a reworded amendment. Should the Peers again approve Kidron’s amendment the bill would again have to go back to the Commons for approval.

“A Government that is facing issues of productivity, wealth creation, unemployment among the young at record levels has just thrown one of its most successful, skilled and valuable industries under the bus,” Kidron said in a statement. “This is unprecedented in my time in Parliament to be so deaf to the arguments, to the votes and to the country.”

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The Peers also added an amendment to narrow the scope of the bill’s scientific data provision by setting a higher standard for determining whether scientific research is conducted “according to appropriate ethical, legal and professional frameworks, obligations and standards.” MPs had voted to expand the provision by removing the requirement that research be conducted “in the public interest.”

Last week, a group of nearly 400 high-profile members of the British creative industries, including Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, Andrew-Lloyd Webber, singer Dua Lipa, and the members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, wrote No. 10 to urge Starmer to reconsider the government’s approach to copyright.

During Wednesday’s debate in Commons Wednesday, Labour MP Polly Billington pressed Minster of  Culture Chris Bryant to “prioritize transparency by committing at the despatch box to introducing enforceable obligations, if not through a statutory instrument then at least through a clear public commitment that transparency will be central to the Government’s approach on AI and copyright.”

Bryant vowed the government would “prioritize the issue of transparency in all the work we do as we go forward.”

Whether that will be enough to get the Data Bill through the House of Lords will be learned next week, when the Peers take up the latest version.