British Library Board (Power to Borrow) Bill

Lord Eatwell Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Eatwell (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I declare an interest as another former chair of the British Library.

As has been acknowledged already, there is no rational reason why the BL should be excluded from a source of finance that is available to other great public institutions. However, the government scheme itself is questionable. The very essence of a project that is funded by borrowing is that it should earn a return. Hence, borrowing will inevitably push the BL towards a more commercial approach to the provision of its services. Could the Minister explain how that fits with the library’s mission statement: to

“make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone, for research, inspiration and enjoyment”?

In this context, what commercial activities do the Government have in mind, and will the Minister reaffirm the assurance asked for and given by the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, that government will not consider borrowing in any way as an alternative to the grant in aid?

One of the great success stories of the past 15 years has been the growth of the BL’s business and intellectual property sector. As the then chair of the BL board, I opened the first centre in 2006, taking over two reading rooms previously dedicated to access to patents. Now they are fully accessible online. As we have heard, the initiative has spread, with 10 centres opened in London and 15 around the rest of the country, and now there is a plan for further expansion. This business and intellectual property centre national network provides entrepreneurs and SMEs across the UK with free access to databases, market research, journals, directories and reports, backed up with seminars and business advice. The whole package is worth thousands of pounds to a start-up. The result: in the past three years, the network has helped to create 12,000 new businesses. Can the Minister assure the House that the Government will continue to support the BL in building on that remarkable success and continuing to provide these services free of charge?

I make one final point relevant to the role of the BL in the UK’s research base. The British Library is in the wrong place in government. As the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, argued, it is a research institution. It should be working together with the other research institutions that are gathered under UKRI. As chairman, I attempted to move the BL from DCMS to UKRI. The relevant Secretaries of State totally agreed, but we were all foiled by Sir Humphrey at the DCMS—or rather, as was the case at the time, Dame Humphrey—who was anxious to retain the 8% of the DCMS budget that the BL represented. Will the Government now do the right thing: allow the BL to join the nation’s research base at UKRI, where it rightly belongs?