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8.12 p.m.

Lord Peston: My Lords, in welcoming this splendid report, I should like to make some general remarks and then some specific ones on the Government's response. On a personal note, I am an enthusiastic user of computers and I waste more time on the net than I care to admit, even to myself. When I first came to your Lordships' House, they did not know what to do with me. They said, "He is a professor; we will put him on the Library Committee". I went to the Library Committee and at the first meeting under Any Other Business, I said, "Where are the computers?" I was like a man in a Bateman cartoon. One noble Lord said, "Oh, I am perfectly happy with a ball point", and I am afraid I was not as nice a person then as I am now and I asked him what made him give up the quill pen.

We have come a long way since then and one of the things to bear in mind is how cheap in real terms is all the equipment we use. A state-of-the-art machine with incredible computing power can be purchased for £1,500. If you do not want state-of-the-art--and most people do not although they are all as crazy as I am and they think they do--for about a third of that you can buy a computer that was state-of-the-art three or four years ago. That, by the way, is the answer to Lord Dixon-Smith. The family which has those tensions buys more than one machine. We live in a consumer society, and that is the answer. I shall not upset your Lordships by telling you how many videos, television sets, computers and hi-fis I own, but I can tell you that in each case it is much more than one. This notion that somehow it is a big deal buying a computer simply does not convince me at all.

One other subject which the committee did not discuss--and I do not criticise them for this; they cannot discuss everything under the sun--is the enormous importance of these developments for democracy. I remember when I was a research student at Princeton, and that is a long time ago now, someone said to me--and we then had no idea about the personal computer; we were thinking in terms of mainframes--"Of course, the great impact of these machines is going to be in terms of democracy. We shall be able to create in the big nation state Plato's concept of the small nation state. Everybody will be able to have their point of view expressed, and governments will be able to find out

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what people think." We were hopelessly naiive then: we actually believed that governments wanted to find out what people thought. The technology is there to do all that sort of thing and I believe that our democracy will change as a result of that, although I would not care to predict what will happen.

The only other general remark I wish to make, and it relates to what I have already said, is that the present position is primitive and, although we burst with pride when we think where we are today compared with the past, even 10 years from now--certainly a generation from now--people will regard what we are doing as so primitive that they will wonder how we got along with it. That is why the dynamics of this are so important, and although I believe that the Government should show more leadership than they are willing to show, they clearly should not show a sort of leadership which stops things happening.

I remember the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, apropos of one of my interventionist speeches not long ago saying that if we had taken that view, we would never have built the railways, and this was me trying to control something. I well take his point: in terms of technological development an enormous amount of resources are wasted; but, although I think the Government are failing on this (and why would I not say that?) I do not want interventions that prevent us wasting resources because the only way forward is both to destroy what the past contains and to have several people differing on what we ought to do next.

On the response, I think the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, used the word "complacent". I had written down "lukewarm" as the Government's response. What troubles me about the response is its negativism. Indeed, it is almost a self-contradictory negativism because the Government have rejected the main recommendation; namely, that we should have this ISTF chaired by an enthusiast, and this document demonstrates more than anything the need for someone to be enthusiastic about all this. I am enthusiastic, but I am not in the business of being chairman of whatever this body is--I bet it would not be paid anyway! However, we need someone who believes in driving it ahead, and I must admit that this document suggests exactly the reverse: no one wants to drive it ahead.

I meant to ask the Minister beforehand about the fact that he refers to the MMIAG and its membership. I hope at some point he might write to me and place a copy of his answer in the Library. I should like to know who specifically are the members of the MMIAG. I particularly should like to know whether a lot of them use the things we are talking about, and use them enthusiastically.

I have no stronger evidence about the need to do something to respond to what the committee says than doing what I do regularly: I logged in. Incidentally, one of the problems for those who are very keen is that we will get nowhere if people do not switch their machines on and log in. I am not certain there will be a law that says that when we have the whole country networked, it will also be mandatory to switch on and log in. There is nothing more boring than someone with whom you

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are trying to communicate under E-mail who does not switch his machine on for a couple of weeks. When you wonder why you have not had a reply, that is the answer. A lot of people in my business of economics--real hotshots--do not switch their machines on, yet still claim to be at the frontier.

It is possible to log into the DTI itself on the web. What do we get, My Lords? We see a nice picture of the Minister, and that cheers us up immediately. We also get the Government's response--the document we have before us--we get the competitiveness White Paper; and ministerial speeches. The one thing we do not get is information. If the idea is that the DTI is providing information, and if whoever wrote the document believes that, they cannot possibly use the web. There is no data there at all. Something has gone wrong with my method of using it because until recently there was available at least a list of all the departments with the officials and what they did. It did not contain telephone numbers or anything useful like that, but it did say who they were. That list seems to have disappeared, for it was not there this morning. However, that might be my fault.

That is the Government telling us that everything is all right. They also go out of their way to get up one's nose because they tell us that the aim of whatever service they believe they are providing is to help business people find the right contact points in the DTI quickly and easily. The idea that only business people matter is as good a way of annoying me as anything I can think of. If the department has an opportunity to edit the web, it might use the word "people" instead of "business people".

That is the DTI telling us that everything is all right. That is the DTI boasting that,

"Indeed, a vast amount of data is already available free of charge on CCTA's multiple award-winning government information service on the Internet".

I have written the word "no" in the margin because there is not a vast amount of information. There ought to be. Perhaps I may make two interesting comparisons. First, the Law Lords are on the Internet with something useful: since last week one has been able to obtain their judgments. Secondly, as regards the private sector, one can obtain excellent free access on the Internet to The Times and the Telegraph, including access to archive material. That is what we want and that is what the Government do not give us.

There is a very good reason for that, and perhaps the best way of explaining is to take as an example the Office for National Statistics. The noble Earl, Lord Selborne, made the point that it is technology-driven, which is right; but it is also economics driven. The great problem with the public sector is that it is not keen to give anything away if it believes that it can sell the original material direct to the public. Therefore, if one tries to log in to the ONS network, as I do, one receives practically nothing worth having.

In a democracy, it is interesting to ask whether we ought to have a complete government database available free on the Internet. I believe that we should. Of course,

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if one obtains information free on the Internet, one cannot sell it. That appears to be the crux of the problem, and that is why I am a good deal less impressed by the Government in this respect. That is not a political point because I am sure that if my party were in power it would take a similar mingy view of the matter, unless someone such as I had any influence. Perhaps I would, and perhaps I would not.

I turn to a matter which we debated several hours ago relating to copyright and related rights. Your Lordships' committee dealt with that issue and tonight the noble Baroness, Lady Hogg, raised the question of access. Noble Lords who are on the net obtain free access but most people pay for a provider and for the telephone bill. Some material is free but, increasingly, one pays for that which is available. At paragraph 2.21 the committee points to a fundamental issue. It states:

"If users have to pay for electronic access to what they hitherto receive freely in print form, they will question whether they need that information at all, and their usage may decline dramatically".

Perhaps I may take an obvious point. If one can go into a library and look up words in a dictionary for nothing, one will do that. However, one will not be able to go to the library, log on and get access to the same dictionary on line for nothing. The most important dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary, is not available free on the Internet but it is available in hard copy form free in your Lordships' Library. In terms of the use of resources, that is absurd.

My two favourite examples are similar: they are access to the telephone directory and access to what used to be called the British Rail Timetable. In this privatised era, I have no idea what that timetable is called but I refer to the timetable of the privatised complex of railways. Both those publications are available on CD-ROM in a user-friendly form; but, importantly, one cannot gain free access to them. When one considers that the marginal access is zero, one can see that there is an enormous waste of resources for charging for that. Furthermore, the committee is right in asking why one would gain access when it is easier to go to one's library and look something up. That situation is absurd. We must face up to the economics of the situation. We cannot ignore the copyright issue, and so forth.

I have hundreds of other comments to make, but I have already missed one half of a football match and am not prepared to devote the second half to your Lordships. I shall conclude by saying that the central message that I wish to put across is that of the committee: we are at the beginning of something marvellous. Thinking of the future, your Lordships ought to be pressing for the recommendations to go forward. I am not saying to the Government, "You must take over and control things". I believe that I am echoing the committee by saying to the Government, "You must respond enthusiastically and say that things can happen, rather than say that we cannot do this, that must be left alone and so forth". The change is going to happen, and one would like to see the Government taking the lead.

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