Minority Ethnic and Religious Communities: Cultural and Economic Contribution

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe]

My Lords, I am delighted to contribute to this debate and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, on securing it.

The contributions of many of today’s speakers—not only to the debate but through their own life stories—bear testimony to the many varied and vital contributions the religious and ethnic minority communities make to this country. The huge part played by immigrant communities in Britain’s economic and social development since the Second World War is now widely recognised. Their role in creating a more diverse and tolerant society is indisputable.

I echo the question to the Minister of the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, on international students. Our key competitor nations—the USA, Australia and Canada—all class international students as temporary migrants and exclude them from the calculation of net migration. Why cannot the UK do the same?

In 21st century Britain, we live in a truly multiracial society. Estimates updating the latest census figures suggest that ethnic minorities now make up some 12 per cent of the population in England and Wales. London, our capital, is one of the most ethnically diverse cities on earth, with over 300 languages spoken. In particular, the creative industries, which have been among the fastest growing and most important to the capital’s economy, owe much to London’s cultural diversity. The capability of London’s businesses to communicate in many languages across cultures means that London’s creative industries can flourish on a global scale.

Over the next 10 years, ethnic minorities will account for more than half the growth in the working-age population. Nowhere is this more evident than in my home town of Bradford. Bradford has the youngest, fastest-growing population outside London. Some 22% are of British-Asian origin.

As a former textile capital of the world, Bradford has a long history of immigration and, as a result, has become enriched as one of the north’s most culturally and ethnically diverse cities. The German merchants who settled there in the 19th century were followed by Italians and eastern Europeans, then by immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, particularly Pakistan, who came to work in the mills. As the textile industry declined, the workforce moved to other sectors of the economy so that today the city has a thriving Asian business community. Engineering, printing and packaging, chemical, financial, banking and export industries, as well as high technology and the media industries, are all part of the local economy.

Culturally, it is buzzing. Its National Media Museum is the most visited museum outside London. It was the first of the two UNESCO Cities of Film. It has the world’s first Fairtrade café. It has the internationally renowned Hockney Gallery in Salt’s Mill, where I try to make an annual pilgrimage. The Bradford Mela—which, back in 1988, was the first such festival in Europe and is now the biggest of its kind outside Asia—takes place in a couple of weeks. It attracts thousands every year, who come together to share and celebrate their cultures.

Other speakers have lauded the work of ethnic chefs. Bradford is also, of course, famous for being home to some of the best curry houses in the country and was last year crowned Curry Capital of Britain.

I could continue with my ode to Bradford but I simply urge noble Lords to visit and enjoy it for themselves.

With my noble friend Lord Griffiths of Burry Port I happily acknowledge the talent, entrepreneurialism and creativity that ethnic and religious minorities give to our country. I add my congratulations to those of others on the 150th anniversary of the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe, celebrated with such passion and warmth by the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe]

My Lords, I will focus my brief remarks on those elements of the Government’s programme that relate to higher education. What is most striking is that there is so much missing. Last year’s Students at the Heart of the System White Paper promised us a higher education Bill in this Session. That has not materialised, although the Government have said that we may see a draft Bill in the new year.

My first anxiety centres on funding. In the 2010 spending review, the average cut in departmental expenditure was 11.7%. BIS did considerably worse than the average, suffering a 29% cut. In 2012-13, that translated into an 18% cut in recurrent funding to HEIs. For most institutions, this will be more than offset by the increase in income from tuition fees, but this year’s Budget made it clear that there are further cuts to come. Departmental budgets will be cut by an average of 3.8% a year between 2015 and 2017. Therefore, it seems inevitable that the cuts will need to be bigger than they were last time. However, the political climate is much more difficult now. Those cuts that might be regarded as having been more straightforward have already been made. The question for universities is whether BIS will again face a larger-than-average cut and, if so, how that will translate into university finances.

The proportion of university funds that comes from the state will fall to around 40% following the shift to higher fees this September. Nevertheless, universities are still highly dependent on public funding for research, as well as for supporting high-cost subjects and activities such as widening participation. If university budgets were to be targeted for hasher cuts in the next spending round, what else could be cut? The research budget and the all-important science ring-fence that protects it could start to look vulnerable. Universities can make an excellent case that cutting back on research that drives innovation and inward investment in the UK is economically suicidal. Universities are essential to the Government’s core purpose of—in the words of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, in opening this debate—“sustainable recovery”. Therefore, I look to the Minister’s reply for reassurance on the Government’s commitment to research funding.

My second anxiety is about the impact of student numbers in the private sector. This matters because at the moment a growing number of private higher education providers have access to public funds via student loans but remain largely unregulated. These private providers will not be subject to the £9,000 fee cap, financial scrutiny by the Higher Education Funding Council or, for example, oversight by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. From September, students at such institutions will be able to access loans of up to £6,000 if their course is one of those that has been designated—to use the jargon—for student support. I have no objection to this. However, I note that because of the delayed introduction of the higher education Bill, the Government will not be able to control the student numbers on such courses.

Those numbers are, at present, relatively small; there were around 6,000 full-time students in 2009. However, applications are growing rapidly, partly because of constraints on student numbers in the publicly funded part of the sector. We do not know a great deal about enrolment in private providers because they do not provide data to HESA, but it is known that the Government spent around £33 million on loans to students in these institutions in 2010-11. With the maximum loan to students at these institutions almost doubling to £6,000 in September, we know that expenditure will increase to somewhere in the region of £100 million without factoring in any significant expansion.

I fear that, in the absence of the higher education Bill, there will be no means of either controlling costs or protecting student interests. For that reason alone, the Government should act swiftly, either to impose a moratorium on the designation of courses for student support or to enable those measures that are necessary to bring private providers into line with other institutions. In his reply, will the Minister tell me how the Government propose to control expenditure on loans to students at private institutions, given that they cannot control numbers?

Finally, I should briefly like to mention the communications Bill, which we are told to expect in draft next year. This Bill would, among other things, implement the recommendations of the Hargreaves review and introduce new copyright exceptions for research activity, such as text and data mining. That is important because our copyright regime currently prevents academics from making use of technology to search and compare published research. Many of our competitors in other countries do not face the same restrictions, which places the UK at a distinct disadvantage. Freeing researchers to use the potential of this technology will, I believe, deliver real benefits to UK research. Hargreaves’s proposals were entirely sensible. I welcome the fact that the Government have agreed to adopt them and I look forward to the relevant legislation being introduced.

Universities: Non-EU Students

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Monday 6th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, it is right that we should stamp down on those institutions which are trying to get round immigration by means of the bogus college route. My noble friend is also right to draw attention to the fact that there are some areas, such as the Indian sub-continent, where we are losing market share. There are, however, areas where there have been significant rises, particularly from Australasia where there has been an increase of some 20 per cent and from Hong Kong of some 37 per cent. We wish to continue to see those students coming in, but I also think they should be treated as part of the migration statistics. It is important that we get to grips with those, but we want to see them because they are a valuable export for this country.

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe]

My Lords, the Government have recognised the considerable economic and wider benefits that international students bring to this country and that is enormously welcome. However, in a speech on 2 February, the Immigration Minister, Damian Green, suggested that,

“the debate on student immigration needs to move on”.

He also said:

“There needs to be a focus on quality rather than quantity. The principle of selectivity should apply to student migration just as it does to work migration”.

Can the Minister explain what is meant by “selectivity” in relation to student migration and reassure the House that, on the basis of what he has said previously, it does not herald a further tightening of visa arrangements for international students in bona fide institutions?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I welcome the intervention from the noble Baroness, particularly as she used to chair Universities UK. I will remind her that Universities UK said recently that our reforms will allow British universities to remain at the forefront of international student recruitment. We want that to continue, and that is what my honourable friend was making clear in his remarks. I want to underline again why we have seen an increase in the number of undergraduates coming in, but at the same time, we think it is right to tighten up on those coming in for other reasons and trying to get around the immigration rules.

Protection of Freedoms Bill

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2012 Grand Committee

The last of my amendments in this group is Amendment 151A. Although it is the largest, it is the simplest. It merely says that if a local authority is asked for something that is not a dataset but is for reuse, it cannot charge for it.

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendments tabled in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. There is some confusion outside this House about the definitions of “dataset” and “re-use” in this Bill. Although the provisions in Clause 100 do not actually change any of the obligations under FOI, other than so far as they relate to the format of the information provided, this clause has stimulated some debate about what it is that might need to be provided, as the Bill says, in a form which is, “capable of re-use”. In particular, there is a question about whether we are talking about raw data, which, as the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, has argued, may be pretty meaningless in themselves, or the associated metadata—information which would allow someone to interpret the data. This might include the information identifying the individual records to which the data relate, or, say, the geographic location of a sample. In some cases this might be relatively straightforward. Indeed, I think that the Bill envisages data sets as something relatively contained and manageable—say, an Excel spreadsheet.

In the context of university research, however, data sets might be very much more complicated. Universities UK has given a very helpful example. The European Bioinformatics Institute’s 1,000 genomes data set comprises approximately 200 terabytes of data equivalent to the capacity of 3,200 iPods or 40,000 DVDs. The metadata are stored separately from the data themselves and accessing the data requires specialist software. As it happens, this data set is already in the public domain, which brings me to my next point.

There is already a move towards making data more widely available. This is a requirement of several major funders—the Wellcome Trust and research councils, for example. I believe that we should encourage this as the best way to ensure that access to data can be provided in such a way as to increase the transparency of research. We know that there is already important work under way on this issue, not least the work by the Royal Society to which the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, has referred. In addition, the Government’s recently published Innovation and Research Strategy included a commitment to look at the potential to increase access to data assets, including through providing funding for the world’s first open data institute. The Government will publish an open data White Paper this spring. This will be informed by the work of a group chaired by Dame Janet Finch on improving access to research publications, which will also report shortly.

In addition, the research councils are setting up a UK gateway to research, which will allow ready access to research council funding, research information and related data. For this reason I particularly support Amendment 147B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, which states that public authorities should,

“provide … or undertake to provide”

access to their data, which I take to mean that an adequate data-sharing plan should be sufficient to satisfy their obligations under the Act.

Will the Minister in his response comment on some specific questions? If the research team uses specialist software to organise their data, is there an expectation that it should have to alter the format to make it accessible to a non-specialist user? Would the cost of making data available in an alternative format be chargeable under FOIA? Does the Act require researchers to provide metadata to aid interpretation of the data set? Would the costs of providing metadata be chargeable under FOIA? If the Minister is unable to concede to an amendment exempting research information at the pre-publication stage, could he reassure the research community that robust data-sharing plans will be favourably considered by the ICO as evidence of intention to publish, and thus consistent with the appropriate use of the existing Section 22 exemption?

[Lord May of Oxford]

My Lords, I support the set of amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady O'Neill, and Amendment 148B, which the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has put down. I begin slightly narcissistically by saying that I think I have form in relation to openness. As Chief Scientific Adviser, I put in place the protocols for science advice on policy-making, which have gone through rounds of revision, saying “No more closed rooms. Everything open. We want to see it published”. I have been associated, and still am, with two of the three major journals in science—the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US and Science—in both cases promoting more open access within the framework of profit-making journals. More generally at the Royal Society, when I was its president I made our journals much more available, particularly to people in countries that could not afford to pay for them.

I am all for making things available but, at the same time, I shall mention something which is perhaps tactless—if not even politically incorrect—which is that the Freedom of Information Act has, as many of your Lordships will know, been used as a weapon of harassment in some circumstances. The climate change community in general, and the community at the University of East Anglia in particular, have not only been subject to criminal invasion of their databases, carefully timed for particular events, but are continually bombarded with very elaborate requests for information that go well beyond the sharing of basic data, so we have to be careful in how we draft this.

That brings me to two specific elements of the amendments suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady O'Neill. On the suggestion that data should be provided in a format which the user requires, while I am sympathetic to the argument that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, gave that it can be very inconvenient, on the other hand it invites the abuse of saying, “I want the data in some manner which is extraordinarily inconvenient”. This can be only partly protected by the other thing that I draw particular attention to: recognising that there is a cost associated with providing this data in any form and that it is only reasonable that people should be allowed to charge for it. I can see an offsetting, in some sense. If you allowed that people could request the form in which it be given, the offset would have to be really realistic. In some cases, that could reflect the degree of harassment and so on, so there are complexities nested within this.

I also like Amendment 148B, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, simply because, like him, I could not understand what the provision meant.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe]

My Lords, I added my name to this amendment because, as noble Lords will know, I have a long-standing interest in promoting the interests of our universities. Like others, I feel that when the Freedom of Information Act was passed, this House did not foresee how its provisions would relate to the university context. The Act’s intention—to increase public access to information held by public authorities—is right.

In relation to university research, like others, I strongly support access to research data and the transparency of the research process. That is a culture that the Government should encourage, not least because it will increase public confidence in science and research and will also help the research community to make the most of the products of its collective work. However, access to research information must be balanced with the need to support the research process itself. It is not in the national interest to provide access to information in a way that inhibits research in contentious areas, discourages people taking part in research projects or drives commercial research funders away from the university research base. Nor is it in our national interest to put a brake on the competitive position of our universities internationally.

There are already exemptions that can be used by university research staff to refuse to disclose information requested under FOI. The ICO has done much to explain, in sector-specific guidance as the Minister indicated, how the exemptions can be applied by universities, but I do not believe that they go far enough. For example, although there is an exemption for commercially sensitive information, how does that apply to university research? Research is a competitive business, where the challenge is always to publish first. If your findings are already in the public domain, it becomes quite difficult to get a journal to take your article. Your standing in the research excellence framework will be affected. Your ability to secure future funds, grants and contracts may be compromised. Your reputation, and that of your institution, will be hit.

Can the Minister explain what protections exist to prevent a competitor academic requesting your research data as they emerge? Universities UK, which supports this amendment and has provided an extremely helpful briefing to which other speakers have referred, has given an example of exactly this situation, in which a researcher was subject to FOI requests from a former collaborator who was now at a different institution. Another example comes from Queen Mary, University of London, where a research team was subject to an FOI request while still conducting its analysis. The university believed that,

“releasing data at the individual-participant level would prejudice publication of future study papers … and could set a precedent that may affect our ability to attract research funding and participants in the future”.

Releasing data before the process of validation and analysis is complete also carries the risk that misleading information will get into the public domain. We know that this is a particular concern in medicine, where misleading information can have serious consequences for public health. The peer-review system in the UK is one of the major strengths of our research base because it ensures that, before findings are published, they are checked by experts. This helps to ensure that poorly designed and executed research with dubious findings does not enter the public domain. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, mentioned, the Environmental Information Regulations include a protection for,

“material which is still in the course of completion, to unfinished documents or to incomplete data”.

Why cannot FOI have something similar?

We all want universities to do more to work effectively with business. Indeed, the Minister of State for Universities made an announcement about this only last week. The fact that university research can be subject to FOI causes difficulties in working with commercial research partners. Negotiations can often be long and difficult. Businesses will look at the recent cases where research findings have been requested by companies with a commercial interest in the data and wonder—quite legitimately, in my view—whether they would not be better off doing research with non-university research bodies that do not carry that responsibility.

I, too, want to mention that in Scotland there is now a pre-publication exemption—on which the proposal in the amendment is modelled—which has been used to deal with exactly this point. Let me quote an example from one Scottish university, which received an FOI request for the annual report written for the funder of some early-stage research. There was no commercial value in the findings to date, but the report described avenues that could, with further investigation, yield commercially valuable results. Not surprisingly, the university wanted to use this information to apply for further funding, but that would have been compromised by releasing the report to potential competitors. The request was refused using the Scottish pre-publication exemption. Will the Minister tell the Committee whether he believes that it is right that researchers in Scotland and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has said, in Ireland and the United States should have this protection that our universities do not have?

I note that Universities UK is not alone in calling for this House to scrutinise the way in which this Bill relates to university research. The Wellcome Trust, the Association of Medical Research Charities and the Ethical Medicines Industry Group have all written to noble Lords in relation to this, especially in support of the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. I urge the Minister to consider whether he can accommodate these concerns by accepting this amendment. I do not believe that it will do any harm. It is clearly limited in its scope and it could do a great deal of good.

[Lord Scott of Foscote]

My Lords, I rise to express my complete support for the spirit and intention behind this amendment, which has been so cogently and lucidly explained by the three noble Baronesses in whose names it stands. I rise simply to make a drafting point on the amendment, which some of your Lordships may think is a rather tedious reason. It proposes two conditions to be applied to,

“Information obtained in the course of, or derived from, a programme of research”,

to enable that information to qualify as exempt information. The two conditions are under paragraphs (a) and (b) of new subsection (1A) that the amendment would insert into Section 22 of the Freedom of Information Act.

My point relates to the condition under paragraph (a), which states that,

“the programme or project is continuing with a view to a report of the research … being published by”,

bodies specified in paragraphs (a)(i) and (a)(ii) in the amendment.

I puzzled over the identity of the possible publishers who would fall under those categories. Paragraph (a)(i) refers to,

“a public authority as defined by section 3 of this Act”,

which would exclude other public authorities that are not so defined. Paragraph (a)(ii) refers to “any other person”. When the word “person” is found in statute, it may include, according to the Interpretation Act,

“a body of persons corporate or unincorporate”,

but that depends on the context. An authority which is not a public authority as defined in Section 3 could be a corporate or unincorporated body and could qualify as a person. It is the contrast between the two that might, if someone wanted to argue the contrary, raise some doubt.

I began to wonder why it was necessary to identify the proposed publishers at all. The important condition is that,

“the programme or project is continuing with a view to a report of the research … being published”.

It really does not matter by whom the matter will be published because anyone will do. I think that that is the intention behind paragraphs (a)(i) and (a)(ii), although the language used might suggest the contrary. Therefore, I respectfully suggest that the words in those paragraphs (a)(i) and (a)(ii), and the preceding preposition “by”, should go and that the condition in paragraph (a) should simply refer to,

“the programme or project is continuing with a view to a report of the research … being published”.

Doubt and confusion is simply raised by the attempt to specify the individuals or organisations which fall under paragraphs (a)(i) or (a)(ii).