Intellectual Property Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Borrie and Lord Howarth of Newport
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, it grieves me to part company with my noble friend Lord Young of Norwood Green but I cannot agree with him on this matter. Of course, I agree with him that the Government and their appointees should back British business, but not to the exclusion of other interests and responsibilities. Of course, I agree that intellectual property should be championed, but I do not agree with him that it should be championed as much as possible.
In an earlier debate, we reviewed some of the unhappy consequences that followed the decision to allow patenting of the human genome. If a new public functionary called the director-general of intellectual property rights is to be created, it seems to me that that official, acting and speaking in a public capacity created by the Government, ought to maintain a balance in his approach to the whole question of intellectual property rights. He should champion the creation of new intellectual property rights where it is appropriate but he should also recognise where the limitations ought to be and where the public interest needs to be balanced.
I shall certainly not weary the Committee by repeating the arguments that I deployed in our earlier discussion about what should be covered in the annual report, but many of the arguments that I suggested should apply there also apply to this proposal. In any case, I think it is unnecessary to create such an appointment. It seems to me that the chief executive of the Intellectual Property Office himself ought to take this wide and balanced view. If his remit from the business department is narrower than that, none the less, the noble Viscount, in his capacity as Intellectual Property Minister, speaking and acting collectively on behalf of the Government as a whole, ought always to have regard to that wider range of interests and a balanced approach to policy.
Lord Borrie
My Lords, I want to intervene in a small way. I had a certain nostalgic feeling when reference was made to setting up a director-general of intellectual property because I was once the director-general of fair trading for some 16 years and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed the fact that the legislation that applied to me directed everything in a sort of pyramid set-up, whereby I was at the top of the pyramid and everybody else was down below. That was rather enjoyable, but surely my noble friends who have put forward this amendment must realise that it is terribly dated now. In the 1970s and 1980s, as each old-fashioned nationalised industry became privatised, a director-general was set up—for example, of Ofgas, Offer or Ofcom. They were all set up as sort of clones of the director-general of fair trading with specialised functions. However, roughly from the 1990s, into this century, all these offices have been remodelled on what I might call more private enterprise bases, whereby there is a board, a chairman and a chief executive. The same person can no longer be both chairman and chief executive in either private enterprise or the public sector.
Bodies that have been set up in recent years to do a job of this sort, to act as offices to receive public concerns and complaints and to bring forward policy, have been set up in the more modern way. If I may put it in simple terms, previously there has been an “Office of” something or other. Now there is the Financial Services Authority—or, rather, the Financial Conduct Authority—and the new competition body is not called the Office of Fair Trading or “Office of Competition” but the Competition and Markets Authority. It has a board, a chairman and chief executive. I am simply saying to my noble friends that I am not sure that I care for this amendment anyway, for the reasons given by my noble friend Lord Howarth, but it is technically not an up-to-date way of doing it.