Alcohol

Lord Oxburgh Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

It certainly impacts most on cheaper alcohol which is, by its nature, more likely to be consumed by those in the lower socioeconomic groups.

[Lord Oxburgh (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister tell the House what it costs the NHS each year to deal with alcohol-related conditions?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I can tell the noble Lord that alcohol related-costs amount to about £3.5 billion a year for the NHS.

Protection of Freedoms Bill

Lord Oxburgh Excerpts

Monday 12th March 2012 Lords Chamber

If we want the life sciences strategy—an admirable strategy—to succeed and to benefit the UK biotech industries, we shall need a code that incorporates robust responses to the results of post-legislative scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act, which may require further legislation. We shall also need a code that achieves a high degree of clarity about the conditions under which research data must be disclosed to the entire world, and the conditions under which they may not be disclosed. Amendment 19 seeks to set out steps by which these objectives might be achieved. I beg to move.

[Lord Oxburgh]

My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment. I think it is widely accepted that when the freedom of information legislation was originally conceived, little or no thought was given to the effect that it might have on universities. In the event, this is of less importance today because since that time there have been major changes in the role of universities, but it means that the new legislation should reflect those changes—and frankly, this has not happened. The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that the outcomes of post-legislative scrutiny are taken fully into account before the relevant parts of the Bill come into force. Unless they are, there is a risk of serious damage to our university system. It is damage that will not make tabloid headlines. It will be slow and incremental, but it will be certain.

Under current legislation, universities are regarded as “publicly owned companies” and carry the concomitant Freedom of Information Act disclosure obligations. This is in spite of the fact that they now receive more of their income from private sources than from the Government—a greater proportion, in some cases, than private companies. This comparison is relevant because, following the policies of successive Governments, universities are now expected to behave as private bodies, collaborating and/or competing with private industry in commercialising their research. They are also in competition for students with each other, with overseas universities and with private universities. Under the legislation as it stands, they cannot do any of this on equal terms because details of their plans, costings and research activities may have to be disclosed.

On the matter of university/industry collaboration, the present disclosure arrangements, to which my noble friend Lady O’Neill has referred, are deeply unattractive to business because of the belief, right or wrong, that the confidentiality of collaborative work may depend on discretionary exemptions that can be challenged. Such collaborations are difficult enough to set up in the first place, and uncertainty over the implications of FOI can cause the company simply to walk away.

One of the first questions that have to be addressed by scrutiny is whether the current definition of a publicly owned company is satisfactory. Another is whether there is a presumption in favour of disclosure of all the information held by such a body, or whether there is a class of competition-relevant information for which the presumption might be non-disclosure. This problem is not addressed by the current system of exemptions. It may be worth pointing out, and this relates to the cost question raised by my noble friend, that there is a recent example of a university incurring massive legal fees of over £250,000 in a case in which it believed that the release of data requested would put its staff at risk from animal rights activists.

Another serious question is whether there should there be any qualification of the right of access to public body information. At present, anyone anywhere in the world can exercise that right. Should the right be restricted to UK citizens and bodies? To offer an example, a British university was conducting a study for Cancer Research UK into the factors that influenced the behaviour of young people smoking tobacco. An FOI request for the data was received from a foreign tobacco company. It is clear that the funders of the research would not have wished the data to be released to the company and, to pick up an earlier point, might well not have funded the work at the university had they regarded this as a possibility.

A final area that requires attention and clarification is the conflict that can arise between the requirements of FOI legislation and obligations under other laws. There are examples of conflicts with the Data Protection Act, the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act and environmental information regulations. The purpose of our amendment is therefore to ensure that full weight is given to the outcome of the scrutiny and that Parliament has the opportunity to confirm that it is satisfied with the Government’s response.

Some of the points that I have made have already been made and submitted in evidence to the scrutiny group by Universities UK and the Russell Group in their submissions to the scrutiny process. I strongly support all the points made by my noble friend in her speech.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, the speeches that we have heard from two very senior practitioners in relevant fields make a powerful case. I shall not run through their arguments again, nor the ones that I put forward during the previous stage of the Bill. I simply underline the fact that if people of this calibre are expressing concerns and those concerns could be dealt with by using the government procedure of post-legislative scrutiny to inform practice, that is a very reasonable request and I hope that the Minister will feel free to accede to it.

Protection of Freedoms Bill

Lord Oxburgh Excerpts

Wednesday 15th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oxburgh]

My Lords, I support the intention, if not the precise wording, of Amendments 55A and 56. I feel that, if the legislation goes forward as is proposed at the moment, a series of what I hope are unintended consequences will ensue, which will be seriously damaging to the research community in this country.

One of the points that has not yet been made or emphasised is that the ability to demand information under the Freedom of Information Act is international, so it may be demanded by any person, anywhere in the world, without any specific purpose whatever. We may say that there is copyright, or that the information is released under certain conditions, but probably the places that we would have most concern about making demands of this kind would not respect these conditions, and we would have no means of enforcement.

A serious point, which was made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas—although I do not support the purpose with which he made it—is that it is not clear from the legislation, as it now stands, what constitutes a data set. My days at the bench are a little behind me, but if I spend a couple of days carrying out a series of experiments and arrive at a series of data points, are they instantly a data set which may be requested by the competition, in North America or elsewhere, and incorporated, published and what have you? The results may or may not have significant commercial significance, but it would certainly undermine the career of an individual who was making them if they were pre-published by someone else.

I wonder whether we should not think of some reasonable amount of time—this concept has been used by research councils from time to time—during which the results of any particular piece of research should be accessible only to those who have carried it out, after which they could be available subject to the Freedom of Information Act: a year, maybe, or two years, or something like that. Certainly the results should be in the public domain; but equally, the person or group that has put in the time, building the apparatus and making painstaking observations, should be the person or group with first access to them.

Another point worth making is that the costs of redaction of some of the information which would be freed under the legislation at the moment are really significant. As I understand it, they would be able to be passed on to the individual or group requesting the information. However, a good example would be data which were acquired from a health study—perhaps clinical trials, or something of that kind—where all the information that would have made it possible to identify the individuals concerned has to be removed: this is a long and expensive business and it is the kind of cost against which someone requiring the data might seek to complain. Provided all of these things are genuinely covered, it seems to me that this is not a serious point, but it has to be recognised.

Overall, what the Government have to recognise is that the net effect of the legislation going ahead as it is now would be to make the UK a relatively unattractive place to do research. It seems to me that this goes counter to the trend of all other government thinking.

[Viscount Hanworth]

I shall speak briefly in support of Amendment 56. It is clear that this amendment is seeking to address a substantial problem with the Freedom of Information Act 2000. We have seen some remarkable evidence of how the provisions of the Act can be used maliciously to frustrate research programmes by those who dislike the conclusions that the research is supporting. Is it not the freedom to conduct research without hindrance that we ought to be protecting? It is clear that the existing regulations within the Act that relate to vexatious requests have proved to be inefficient in warding off the nuisance. The amendment seems to fulfil that purpose perfectly.