Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Debate between Lord Sikka and Lord Triesman

Committee stage
Wednesday 2nd November 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, on this. He mentioned money; I wish I had some, like many other people. Let me declare an interest: I am emeritus professor at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield.

My amendment seeks to loosen the shackles imposed by private sector research funders upon the ability of academics to publish research. Those shackles have got much tighter with the advent of the research excellence framework, which attaches weight to the external research funding that is raised by universities. Within universities, indeed, any academic these days wishing to be promoted has to show that he or she has managed to secure a lot of research funding.

This research funding comes with lots and lots of strings attached, which raises conflicts of interest. Can your Lordships imagine trying to get some research money to look into gambling or the development of weapons? It would come from the gambling industry or from British Aerospace and others. Then if you produce research which is critical, would they really let you publish it? That is really the question.

I have looked at many research contracts—some colleagues have told me about them—that include clauses which give the funders the final say on whether the research can be published. Funders can vet, and have vetted, the research questions, methodologies and methods, data analysis and the conclusions of the studies. In many cases, draft papers need to be submitted to the funders. I have experienced that myself, and their approval is needed before anything can be disseminated, perhaps at a conference—because many academics present papers at conferences before they submit them to any peer-reviewed journal—so they need to be vetted. Funders can block, delay, or demand changes to the papers because they do not like the research findings, or they may just sit on the paper for a prolonged period to make its research very stale and untimely. Again, I have experienced that, as I explained at Second Reading.

One prominent scholar told a peer-reviewed journal:

“In our commissioned research project, the commissioner’s representative interfered with both the entire study and the publication because I did not let him influence the sample. Instead of random sampling, we should have made a ‘comfort sample’.”


There is a classic example of a pharmaceutical company funding a researcher to compare its branded thyroid drug with a generic competitor’s. The researcher found that the generic products were as good as the expensive branded products. The publication of the research could have jeopardised the funder’s sales and profits so the drug company went to enormous lengths to suppress the research, including taking legal action against the researcher and her university to prevent the paper’s publication.

In the past few days, one UK academic told me that the funder vetted his paper and did not like the negative health effects associated with the consumption of processed food. The funder decided that some cases of negative effects were outliers and were to be eliminated from the paper. It is bit like saying, “Somebody has died from this disease but it is an outlier so let us ignore and suppress it”. The academic concerned refused to accommodate the changes and the paper was never presented at a conference nor published. Another academic told me:

“The funder demanded control of all the raw data relating to the negative effects of a drug. Under pressure, I agreed. Subsequently, the funder would not allow me to release the data to a peer-reviewed journal and I could not publish the study, which was less than complimentary about the funder’s products.”


Over the years, several studies have established links between passive smoking and lung cancer. Tobacco companies have a long history of trying to subvert research by framing the research questions, designing the study, collecting and providing data and even writing the final papers for academics. Industry funding and the quest for research grants have persuaded many scholars to ignore important research questions because they simply will not get funding otherwise. Indeed, in my own field, it is incredibly rare to find research that is critical of auditing or the anti-social practices of the finance industry. None is ever funded by anybody from the City or the world of accounting because that is not the kind of thing that they fund. Many academics also do not do that kind of research because it jeopardises their chances of getting research funding from the world of accounting and the City, so such issues are basically ignored.

The Government are also a culprit. Commenting on a June 2016 report by Sir Stephen Sedley, Missing Evidence: An Inquiry into the Delayed Publication of Government-Commissioned Research, Nick Ross concluded that

“expensively commissioned findings sometimes fail to see the light of day and weak rules are used to bury unwelcome evidence for long enough to make it stale.”

In November 2020, the British Medical Journal published an article, “Covid-19: Politicisation, ‘Corruption’ and Suppression of Science”, which reported four instances of the suppression of science during the pandemic. It was all to do with the government-funded research. One instance related to the suppression of the 2016 study codenamed Operation Cygnus, which documented deficiencies in the UK’s pandemic preparedness. The report was eventually released in 2020 after an outcry in the media and interventions by the freedom of information commissioner. The Government did not want to publish it; their suppression denied the public, parliamentarians and medical communities vital information. The funder of the study stifled the debate.

The BMJ reported that a Public Health England report on Covid-19 and inequalities was delayed by the Department of Health; a section on ethnic minorities was initially withheld and then, following public outcry, was published as part of a follow-up report in 2020. Authors from Public Health England were instructed not to talk to the media about it. On 15 October 2020, Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, publicly stated that an author of a research paper, a government scientist, was being blocked by the Government from speaking to the media because of a “difficult political landscape.”

Another example relates to what the Government codenamed Operation Moonshot. The project required an immediate and wide availability of accurate, rapid diagnostic tests for Covid. This research concluded that the Government procured an antibody test, which cost £75 million, that in real-world tests fell well short of the performance claims made by its manufacturer. Researchers from Public Health England and collaborating institutions sought to publish their study findings before the Government committed to buying a million of these tests but were blocked from releasing them by the Department of Health and the Prime Minister’s office. Public Health England then unsuccessfully attempted to block the British Medical Journal’s press release about the research paper. The reason for all this was that the research was damaging to the commercial interests of the corporation involved in these tests.

I have provided only a brief glimpse of some of the ways in which academic research is subverted and suppressed and, consequently, scholars and policymakers are denied the opportunity to see the evidence, data and findings. This is damaging to academic freedoms, scholarly endeavours and society as a whole. Amendment 53 seeks to prevent funders exercising undue influence on the design, conduct and dissemination of research. After all, what kind of expertise do they have in these matters? If they had any, maybe they would be doing the research themselves. This amendment makes scholars, their communities and journal reviewers the final arbiters of the quality of research. I urge the Minister and the House to support it.

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I can probably do this quite briefly. These are very helpful amendments, which illustrate an extremely important point. To work out why or how the Bill will be useful or effective, it is important to understand what academics do—what life on the ground is actually like and what having a career entails. I want to follow my noble friend Lord Smith of Finsbury’s earlier comments, but I think that is for a later debate. If academics want to pursue a career, there are facts on the ground that cannot be overlooked, and these amendments address them.

There is a longish history to this; I must confess to having my fingerprints on parts of the REF at different times in the past, so I want to acknowledge that I have probably contributed to a problem. Today, if you want to make progress, it is entirely commonplace in universities to expect that, in the last period of assessment of research, you will have produced at least three articles in reputable referee journals. If you have not done so, you will not be promoted and if you do not have tenure, you will probably not survive at all. It is imperative. It is a gating process about which this Grand Committee will do nothing, because it is not in our power, but that is how it happens.