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Mr. Forth: My hon. Friend would help me if he were to expand his remarks now so that I could set my remarks in a better context. I am curious to know whether my hon. Friend thinks that we have a mechanism that is robust enough to make a judgment about what he is calling the national intellectual, cultural or scientific record. That definition seems to have the potential to involve subjective judgments. I think that that necessarily must be so. Does my hon. Friend think that the provision in amendment No. 24 will be able effectively to be implemented? The wording, which sounds rather grand, helpful and positive, may in the end be of little or no meaning when it comes to implementation.

Mr. Chope: I share my right hon. Friend's concern that my amendment might introduce what is in the nature of a subjective test. However, there will have to be some subjectivity. If not, we shall find that every schoolchild's essay and every piece of any other material, however ghastly it is in terms of content or grammar, will have to be deposited in the national archive collection, if it has appeared online on a website.

On Second Reading, the promoter said:

"The purpose of legal deposit is to ensure that the nation's published output, and thereby its intellectual record and future published heritage, is collected systematically and as comprehensively as possible. We do this to make material available to current researchers in the libraries of the legal deposit system, and to preserve it for the use of future generations of researchers. Both purposes are important. The system dates back several hundred years and has been vital in preserving and making available the published record of previous generations for the researchers of today and of the future."

However, that has not included the odd jottings of previous generations of schoolchildren, or their scribblings. Partly in answer to the question raised by my right hon. Friend, the promoter said:

"What might we be losing? The material at risk includes: major directories, such as the Europe Information directory, which is available on DVD; news sources, including the web-published results of public opinion polls from companies such as MORI; indexes to help researchers to locate material such as the Legal Journals Index; the Cochrane Library, which is arguably the best single source of reliable evidence on the effects of health care and which is available only on CD-ROM and the web; a wide range of important local government and national Government documents, such as the Home Office series of 'online only' research reports; and an increasing number of e-journals, such as Sociological Research Online, which is available only on the web."—[Official Report, 14 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 577.]

When the promoter was addressing the issue on Second Reading, in a sense he was inserting his own subjective judgment on what he regarded as documents or material that would not be available for future generations because it had not been deposited in the

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library. However, even his examples are minor compared with the vast quantity of material that would be envisaged by the Bill as it stands, as extended to online publication.

I refer again to the regulatory impact assessment, which states under the heading "Risk Assessment" on page 3, sub-paragraph (iv):

"If the provisions of legal deposit are not extended to non-print publications there is a considerable risk that important material contributing to the national intellectual, cultural and scientific record will not be secured and preserved for the benefit of future generations."

The wording of my amendment is taken directly from the regulatory impact assessment. The assessment goes on:

"It is generally accepted that publishers do not have the expertise, or infrastructure, to preserve their publications or provide access beyond the timespan during which they are of commercial value to them."

When one looks at the regulatory impact assessment, particularly at how thin it is in respect of online publications, one realises that there must be some safeguards in the Bill. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst may be of the opinion that it should not cover online publications at all, but accepting that there may be a case for certain online publications, my amendment seeks to restrict that category significantly.

My right hon. Friend will probably ask me what the regulatory impact assessment says about the overall costs of dealing with UK websites.

Mr. Forth: Good guess.

Mr. Chope: That is dealt with under option 4 on page 7 of the regulatory impact assessment, which states:

"Harvesting UK websites


This would involve the selective archiving of UK websites, with priority given to sites of current and future research potential. This would work on the basis of partnership and sharing with other agencies. It is assumed that the main institutions who would undertake and co-ordinate this work would be the National Libraries."

The document goes on to discuss the costs and benefits and states:

"The benefits include the ability to preserve, selectively, a representative sample of UK websites, and thus create a more complete national archive in the web domain."

That speaks for itself. The assessment goes on:

"Benefits will be accrued if this is undertaken in partnership with other agencies, eg the Public Record Office."

As regards the costs, option 4, "Harvesting UK Websites", states:

"There is no means of estimating the costs of archiving non-commercial websites, especially in the absence of reliable data as to how costs might be shared through partnership arrangements. The experience of the British Library's experimental Domain UK: Interim Report (March 2002) is valuable. On a three-year time horizon, it can be assumed that the running cost of £600,000 per annum (real costs at 2003 prices) would allow the management of an archive of UK domain websites in accordance with following targets: 10,000 research-focused UK domain websites (0.3 per cent. of the total domain of UK websites"—

in other words, only three in a thousand websites—

"on a quarterly basis, and undertake an annual harvest of the entire UK domain of three million websites."

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I am not sure how it is possible to carry out an annual harvest of 3 million websites, but perhaps the promoter of the Bill will explain.

The regulatory impact assessment goes on:

"However, at this juncture it is not possible to estimate, with confidence, what costs would look like over a 10-year time horizon."

Mr. Forth: Is my hon. Friend effectively telling me that the regulatory impact assessment concludes that an assessment cannot be made, and that despite the entire mechanism that is designed to allow us as legislators to make a judgment about the legislation, we are rendered virtually incapable of making such a judgment and are being asked to sign a blank and open cheque? Is that what my hon. Friend is suggesting?

Mr. Chope: I am not just suggesting that—I am stating it. That is the import of what is contained in—or rather, omitted from—the regulatory impact assessment. This is an extremely important debate. There may be people out there listening to the debate who have failed to get their work published with authorised publishers, and who may think that the way to get their work into the British Library is to set up their own website and put their essay, novel or whatever on that website. They may think that they have made a contribution to future generations that will be secured for the national archive. In the light of the regulatory impact assessment, it appears that such people may be acting under a misapprehension in building their own website and displaying the material on it, but one cannot be sure because of the vagueness of the issue.

12.30 pm

Mr. Forth: Is not my hon. Friend getting himself into some difficulty? Having made those remarks, how does he expect the mechanism envisaged in amendment No. 24, which he tabled, to work? Somebody, somewhere will have to make an assessment of the intellectual, cultural or scientific nature of the material, yet he has just graphically pointed out that the volume of material is enormous and that the resources are, presumably, limited. In the light of what he has said, can he help me to understand, before I make my contribution, how amendment No. 24 could be made to work?

Mr. Chope: I accept that the amendment could be made to work only with a very expensive bureaucracy that would assess the material to see whether it complied with the requirements that the amendment sets out. However, the alternative is the even larger bureaucracy involved in archiving and cataloguing every single item of online material from anybody's website, albeit within the confines of the United Kingdom—I give that the benefit of the doubt. In my submission, that task is even more unmanageable. That is why I tabled the amendment; I am attempting not to drive a coach and horses through the Bill or to undermine its purpose, but to bring some rationality to the issue of online material.

In Committee, the now Minister of State, Department for Transport, who was then responsible for the Bill, said that the National Library of Wales had a fantastic collection of pornography. I do not know whether we will find that national libraries vie with one another as to which has the largest and most extensive collection of

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pornography, but if that is their ambition, the burden will be breathtaking. That is why we need to give some serious thought to the implications of requiring everybody with online material to submit it to one of the national collections.

I could speak at greater length, but the point has been made and it does not need repeating. I hope that the hon. Member for Ipswich (Mr. Mole) can respond to the genuine concerns that have been expressed and explain how he believes the provisions can be applied in a common-sense way under the terms of the Bill as it currently stands.

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