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Lord Addington: My Lords, does the Minister accept that in this current environment there is a grave danger that farmers will feel under pressure and may start illegally to cull this protected species? What measures are the Government taking to restore confidence that their actions will affect the rate of TB infection?
Lord Whitty: My Lords, I hope that that would not be the response from farmers. I recognise their anxiety but it is important that we operate on a scientific basis. The group headed by Professor Bourne indicates that about four months has been lost on the Krebs trial rather than a full year, as is sometimes suggested. Over the past few months we have significantly reduced the backlog in testing. It has come down from 27,000 to 22,000, and that improvement will continue. Therefore, I hope that farmers are assured that we are moving in the right direction as rapidly as we can within the resources available.
The Earl of Onslow: My Lords, first, I congratulate my noble friend on raising a very important Question on the subject of badgers. To the best of my knowledge, debates on a connection between badgers and bovine tuberculosis have been going on for at least 20 years, as have attempts by the Ministry of Agriculture to find out whether there is any such connection. Is not 20 years rather a long time, and should we not have found an answer much more quickly?
Lord Whitty: My Lords, the allegation of a connection between badgers and bovine TB has, indeed, been long-running. However, the scientific basis for it has been unproven. That is why Sir John Krebs and his team proposed a scientific trial. The trial was to last five years and was set up on the robust basis of having three different parallel forms. Of course, the foot and mouth outbreak set that back slightly, but, as I said, we are still on course for a delay of only four months. We need to see the full results of that trial before we can be absolutely sure whether there is such a connection and to what degree, whether badgers are a contributing factor and what other factors are involved.
Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, is not there something very wrong with this country? On the one hand we have unproven allegations that MMR vaccine in human babies causes all sorts of nasty side effects and the Government are insistent that MMR is the right course to pursue; on the other, as my noble
friend, Lord Onslow, pointed out, the situation as regards badgers and TB is unproven yet we continue to cull badgers.
Lord Whitty: My Lords, it is clear that there is a correlation between the growth in the number of badgers and the growth in bovine TB, but not area by area. Correlation does not mean cause. Therefore, we have to assess whether there is a causal element in the badger population. We are culling in a specific, targeted and scientific way. This is not an overall cull, and we would not engage in one. I understand the frustrations to which the noble Earl refers. I understand also the anxiety that we do not cull badgers unnecessarily. However, the experiment is designed to try to deliver a scientific basis on which we can proceed sensibly and not by allegations and rumour.
The Earl of Sandwich: My Lords, the Minister continually mentions the scientist but only occasionally and reluctantly mentions farmers and, I would add, gardeners. Does not he think that the new department is becoming lackadaisical in producing the results of research that has been carried out for many years? Would he go into the South West and talk to some of the farmers about the effects which badgers are having at present?
Lord Whitty: My Lords, as regards going into the South West, I was at the Devon County Show on Saturday, where a number of farmers made clear to me what they thought about badgers, bovine TB and the general stance taken by the department. However, it is important that whatever we do as regards agriculture has a scientific basis. The strong scientific advice was that the trial had to run for the full five years. There has been a slight set-back; nevertheless, that must be the basis of the way forward. I believe that most farmers recognise fully that a scientific basis is needed to justify the approach to badgers which some of them would like to pursue.
Baroness Strange: My Lords, is the Minister aware that we used to have a tame badger? Is he also aware that one of my children sometimes slept in the straw with the badger and never developed any kind of TB?
Lord Whitty: My Lords, I was unaware of the sleeping arrangements referred to by the noble Baroness, and shall not comment further. Clearly, there are people who are fond of badgers. Equally, as I hear from the farmers, there are many who blame them for many of their ills.
Lord Glentoran: My Lords, is the Minister aware—there is no reason why he should be—that I, too, was at an agricultural show on Friday, this time at the Royal Show in Belfast? Coincidentally, not knowing that I would be responding to this Question, I spoke about bovine TB and brucellosis, both with farmers and the department. Since the ceasing of testing for foot and mouth disease, the situation has become worse and
people are concerned. Can the Minister assure the House that serious measures are being taken to catch up with the testing for those two diseases? I am not a Bertie Badger knocker, but farmers in my part of the world are convinced that there is a close association between the spread of bovine TB and badgers. Can he also tell the House, because I do not know the answer, whether bovine TB is transmissible to humans?
Lord Whitty: My Lords, in response to the last question asked by the noble Lord, bovine TB is transmissible to humans. However, the vast majority of cases which have occurred within this country are in people significantly over the age of 55 years, who probably developed the disease from unpasteurised milk rather than through contact with animals. The perceptions in Northern Ireland reflect the situation in England. Many farmers are similarly convinced. Nevertheless, I underline the need for a strong scientific basis if we are to move further down the culling road. It may well be that there is a partial causal effect. However, we are also examining other means of transmission, in particular, direct cattle-to-cattle transmission. We want to have the full results of that research before we have the final strategy.
Finally, I assure the noble Lord that we are addressing the backlog which, as I indicated earlier, has been rapidly reduced.
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, would the cattle-to-cattle transmission be relevant in Cumbria? Until recently, there was no bovine TB in Cumbria but, since foot and mouth, there has been.
Lord Whitty: My Lords, I have to be careful. The answer is that it may be relevant. Although there was a significant increase in TB prior to foot and mouth—it increased by 20 per cent from a relatively low level—it is also possible that some of the latest outbreaks, particularly in areas which did not have TB prior to foot and mouth, are related to restocking. That is a matter we are examining.
Employment Bill
3.6 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Trade and Industry (Lord Sainsbury of Turville): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the amendments for the Report stage be marshalled and considered in the following order:
Clauses 1 to 12, Schedule 1, Clauses 13 to 29, Schedule 2, Clauses 30 and 31, Schedule 3, Clause 32, Schedule 4, Clauses 33 to 38,
Schedule 5, Clauses 39 to 50, Schedule 6, Clauses 51 to 53, Schedule 7, Clause 54 , Schedule 8, Clause 55.—(Lord Sainsbury of Turville.)On Question, Motion agreed to.
Export Control Bill
Baroness Miller of Hendon moved Amendment No. 1:
- Page 3, line 46, at end insert "or
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, in moving Amendment No. 1, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 2 and 3. The amendments all relate to new Clause 4 inserted in the Bill on Report by your Lordships following an amendment proposed by me and my noble friend Lord Rotherwick, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford.
The purposes of these further three amendments is simply to respond to objections made by the Minister either during debate or subsequently. It is not that I agree with those objections or comments; I was perfectly happy with the clause as passed on Report. However, I want to try to accommodate the Minister and his worries and to dissuade him from having his colleagues in the other place overturn your Lordships' decision. I remind the Minister and, indeed, the House that the clause was passed by an overwhelming majority in this House of 150 to 108; that is, a majority of one-third. That majority comprised noble Lords on all three party Benches as well as distinguished Cross-Benchers, and therefore cannot be dismissed as a party political act.
The Government often pay lip service to your Lordships' House as the finest revising Chamber in the world. Just as we pay due respect to the wishes of the elected House, I believe that the Government should pay due attention to what in this case is the carefully considered and authoritative opinion of so many highly qualified Members of this Chamber with no political axe to grind; merely the wish to preserve academic freedom and maintain the status of the United Kingdom as an international centre of academic excellence.
In my closing remarks before testing the opinion of the House on Report, I said in response to some of the observations of the Minister:
In order to see how I could accommodate any genuine technical problems that the Government might have over the clear wishes of this House, I offered to meet the Minister to discuss them with him. I received an offer of an appointment from the Minister's office which, to my amazement, as I told the Minister when I later saw him, was cancelled within a matter of a few minutes. The second telephone call I received from the Minister's department simply stated: "Forget the previous message, the Minister is unable to see you". I thought that meant that the Minister did not wish to talk to me. I am sure that that could not be true, but I did at that stage following such a brusque push off. Therefore, I tabled my amendments to meet my understanding of the Minister's problems—ill founded as they were, as I said. It was only then that the Minister agreed to meet me as late as last Wednesday, 15th May, exactly four weeks after the Report stage of the Bill.
He then wrote to the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, of Universities UK. That organisation, I remind your Lordships, represents university vice-chancellors. The copy of the letter which he faxed to me arrived incomplete with several important pages somehow missing. I did not see what he said to her until last Friday afternoon. I cannot tell your Lordships the exact time because—the Minister may like to know—his fax machine thought the time was 32 minutes past midnight on 27th June 1996. Perhaps that is an undiscovered example of the dreaded Y2K virus, and it lurks in his office.
I shall return to that fax shortly. First, however, I should like to explain each of my amendments, which are all quite simple and which, I hope, improve the clause to the Government's satisfaction. Clause 4(1) sets out the matters on which the Government may not impose transfer of controls or technical assistance controls; in other words, what academic teaching and publication may not be prohibited. Clause 4(1)(c) limits publication and teaching where the teachers know or ought to know that the information is intended or may be used for a number of highly objectionable purposes. These include such matters as the development, operation, and so on, of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. I shall not read out the 10 lines of the paragraph, but I remind your Lordships that the words used exactly follow Article 4 of the EC dual-use regulation.
Amendment No. 1 seeks to add the words "military technology" to that lengthy catalogue. I propose those words because of the Minister's astonishing intervention after he had lost the first technical Division on a paving amendment. In the discussion on the main amendment he stated:
It would be a particularly foolhardy barrister who tried to persuade even the most gullible magistrate or jury that the manufacture of weapons is—I repeat—
However, leaving no "i" undotted or "t" uncrossed, I have added the words "military technology" to the list of prohibited subjects.
Amendment No. 2 is a purely housekeeping or drafting amendment which seeks to make Clause 4(2) clearer. Clause 4(2) preserves the legal restrictions on two types of publication. I hope that I have made the subsection clearer by breaking it up into its two component parts. The first part—which eventually will be lettered (a)—refers to the powers of the Comptroller-General of Patents and new paragraph (b) refers to any other enactment or common law obligation as to secrecy—for example, the Official Secrets Act.
Amendment No. 3 is new. It seeks to replace the previous subsection (4) passed by your Lordships. That made clear that there is nothing in the Act which enables the Government to prevent anyone leaving the country merely because he is possessed of certain information. It followed yet another EC directive.
However, at the belated meeting with the Minister, he expressly assured me that there were no such powers either in the Act or elsewhere, at least in relation to the export of arms and technology. He said that he would repeat that assurance today for the purposes of the record. I shall be glad to accept that assurance from him in due course.
I propose to use the space vacated by that now redundant provision with new subsection (4). Its purpose is to meet yet another of the points raised by the noble Lord—that licensing may in any case be subject to international obligations entered into by the United Kingdom. I believe that the Minister's problem—whatever it is—was anticipated by me and resolved in the wording of Clause 4(1). That states expressly that academic freedom is subject to,
The amendment is, as I said, new and reflects my understanding of the Minister's views. I am sure that if your Lordships agree to the amendment, or, better still, the Minister accepts it, my colleagues in the other place will be happy to fine tune the wording if the Minister considers that necessary.
Perhaps I may now briefly turn to the Minister's letter to the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, who I see is not in her place. The Minister gave an example of overseas students studying programmes on the modification of semi-conductor chips or medicine including toxology. The Minster admits that the professor would need to be teaching something not in the public domain. He would need to know that the student might intend to use the information for what I will in shorthand call "a bad purpose". That is exactly what Clause 4 (1) and (2) spell out. They do not leave a decision to some over-zealous prosecutor.
The letter to the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, confirms that information already in the public domain is exempt from the operation of the Act. Indeed, it is. But it most certainly was not before the new Clause 4 was added as a result of our amendment, which the Government bitterly opposed and which I infer from their present attitude they want to argue is unnecessary. Using the analogy of belt and braces, we want the law to be precisely defined and not left to the possible changing attitudes of Whitehall.
The letter to the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, talks at great length about transfer controls and technical assistance controls in the case of dual-use technology, which the Minister says, quite rightly, are subject to European Community legislation. Clause 4 ensures that the United Kingdom keeps within the same boundaries as our European partners. The Government will not be able to achieve their apparent ambition of exercising even more stringent control over academic teaching in the United Kingdom than that which applies in the rest of the EC, and imposing on universities an impossible degree of control which they are not willing to undertake themselves.
I shall return to that point in a moment or two. The last point in the Minister's letter to the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, referred to the new Clause 9 which was added to the Bill by the Government, obviously as an attempt to answer the new Clause 4. I mention that now in anticipation of the Minister offering it as an explanation to your Lordships. The clause simply instructs the Secretary of State to have regard to the need to avoid unreasonable restrictions. What on earth does that mean?
On Thursday 16th May—the day after my meeting with the Minister—I wrote two letters to him attempting to clarify remaining issues and I received a reply by e-mail to my home at one minute to eight o'clock on Saturday evening when, purely by chance, I was sitting at my personal computer working on these speaking notes. I was astonished at some of the contents of the e-mail. Throughout the Bill's earlier stages, the Minister vehemently denied that the Government were seeking to impose a licensing regime affecting students. The Minister said:
My advisers and I believe that Clause 2 as drafted, before it was amended on Report, could definitely have been interpreted as imposing powers to require
In other words, despite the Minister's denial in his e-mail to me, it is clear that the Government still harbour ambitions to license the teaching of some subjects to some students, as is borne out by his rearguard action over Clause 4—his refusal to accept it and reluctance to discuss it with me. Similarly, the Government have consistently denied that they are imposing a responsibility—indeed, a liability—on universities to vet the motives of students seeking to study here. Yet in his e-mail, concerning offences in connection with weapons of mass destruction programmes, the Minister said:
Short of refusing all students from certain countries or backgrounds—which the universities obviously cannot do, and would not even if they could—how can they do what the Immigration Service, with its vast information resources, cannot or will not do? Let us consider what happened in the United States last year. Certain students took flying lessons and used the information that they obtained to turn four planes into weapons of mass destruction. The combined resources of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency were unable to fathom what they were up to. Why then is it to be the responsibility of universities to vet the bona fides of overseas students when, according to the Minister, the Government cannot or will not do so?
Finally, I repeat that of the three amendments in this group, Amendment No. 2 purely tidies up the drafting and the other two are intended to do no more than meet the Government's objections—even though I do not accept that they are valid. Amendment No. 1 is intended unequivocally to answer the Minister's specious claim that academics would be free to teach their students how to manufacture cluster bombs and other weapons of mass destruction. The question for
(ii) that such information is military technology"
"my amendment may not be perfect but it could certainly be put right at Third Reading. That would be the appropriate thing to do".—[Official Report, 18/4/02; col. 1126.]
"I was talking about blueprints on cluster bombs and other activities. That is exactly what the Export Control Bill will control . . . We have just made a large hole in the Bill by saying that if someone is an academic, he can export blueprint instructions on how to make cluster bombs, electric shock batons . . . and any military equipment".—[Official Report, 18/4/02; col. 1135.]
With every respect to the Minister, I find it difficult to answer such a fanciful interpretation of the new clause without using the word "nonsense". I hope that the
Minister does not mind that word. I content myself by pointing out to the noble Lord and to your Lordships that the whole of the clause is governed by the phrase,
"in the ordinary course of academic teaching or research".
"in the ordinary course of academic teaching or research".
"any international treaty obligation of the United Kingdom or a Directive of the Council of the European Community".
The amendment reinforces that. It also, conversely, makes clear that where any such EC law permits the transfer of technology and technical assistance, the Secretary of State shall grant any necessary licences and not leave the United Kingdom isolated and alone in a sea of secrecy and restriction which is not endured by the rest of the world. The amendment provides that where information is freely obtainable by a touch of a European button, it should not be denied here.
"subsections (2)(c) and (d) of Clause 2 do not cover the licensing of students. The clause contains no power to license students, and no such a power is contained in the Bill".—[Official Report, 18/4/02; col. 1120.]
"It is not currently an offence to acquire knowledge which in future could be used in connection with a weapons of mass destruction programme. That is precisely why we are introducing the controls . . . which will enable the government to prevent transfers of technology".
I echo the Ministers word "precisely". Before Clause 2(2) was drastically modified by our amendment, it enabled the Secretary of State to restrict the transfer of technology within the United Kingdom, including from persons who were outside the United Kingdom. Similarly, Clause 3 enables the Secretary of State to impose controls on technical assistance but, as a result of our successful amendment, that is now also subject to the new Clause 4 protecting academic freedom.
"You suggested that . . . should be prevented by entry control of overseas students by the immigration authorities"—
which I had done in my letter to the Minister. He then went on to give me a lengthy explanation of why that is impractical.
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