Protection of Freedoms Bill

Lord Bew Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support Amendment 148A, in particular, and to make the point even more starkly that in an era when these requests are more and more common, unless some protection for universities, as envisaged in the amendment, comes in, there will be an implicit negative tax on research, as researchers will have to take these possibilities into account. That is the last thing that our universities need at present. I support Amendment 148A very strongly. The real cost of complying with the requests that currently come in is a stark issue.

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, I, too, rise briefly to support the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve. My experience now is somewhat dated, but back in the early 1990s I was responsible for supervising a group of researchers putting together a substantial database on bibliometrics. The difficulties of cleaning up such a database are extreme and costly. The group of four young researchers I was supervising worked for two or three years in just cleaning up the database. One issue that we were looking at then was the advantage of concentrating research into large laboratories rather than having a lot of smaller researchers. You cannot do such research until you have cleaned up the database. Someone coming in and using your data is clearly something that we need to protect against. We also need to make sure that the costs involved in putting databases together are fully met.