Protection of Freedoms Bill

Debate between Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe and Lord May of Oxford

Thursday 12th January 2012 Grand Committee

[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.