I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in the debate. I agree with everything my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) said at the beginning of the debate and am pleased to see a joined-up approach between the teams from the Departments for Business, Innovation and Skills and for Culture, Media and Sport.
As the hon. Member for Burnley (Gordon Birtwistle) has said, protecting intellectual property is essential in the modern, knowledge-based economy. It is particularly important in the creative industries, which support 1.5 million jobs and produce about £36 billion-worth of output.
The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) described the problem of illegal downloads, but he did not tell the House how large the number of illegal downloads is when aggregated. Ofcom estimates that, every three months, 280 million music tracks, 52 million television programmes, 29 million films, 18 million e-books and 7 million games are downloaded from sites without payment. It also estimates that about a fifth of households in this country go to those sites and do not pay for content. On behalf of the music recording industry, the BPI estimates that that costs the industry £250 million a year.
In the wash-up at the end of the previous Parliament, Labour and the Conservatives—the two major parties—agreed to pass the Digital Economy Act 2010. Unfortunately, the Government have been extremely dilatory in implementing its provisions. I am not saying that the provisions are perfect in every respect and that they do not need amendment, but the Government’s failure to get to grips properly with illegal downloading will cost the industry more than £1 billion in the lifetime of this Parliament.
The Government’s measures will not come into effect until the end of the next calendar year. They propose a voluntary code for ISPs. Under the Bill, the ISPs would notify people three times, after which the copyright holders of illegally downloaded content can call for slow connections, disconnections and so forth.
I do not agree with the proposals of the hon. Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley), the Prime Minister’s adviser, because he has brought no common sense to the debate. It is important that we distinguish between 14-year-olds in their bedrooms downloading two or three Justin Bieber tracks on to an iPod and people who make multi-billion pound businesses out of providing illegal material. It is not right to treat the two groups in the same way. We need measures that address the audience, who are unconscious of what they are doing, and the
industry, which knows perfectly well what it is doing and is utterly disingenuous. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) is mithering from a sedentary position. I am not saying that there should not be a penalty for the teenagers downloading material illegally, but I am saying that we should regard the problem much as we regard driving fines—we should have a points system building up to fines.