Export Control Bill
3:30 pm
Lord Sainsbury of Turville (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Science and Innovation), Department of Trade and Industry; Labour)
My Lords, we must be clear about it. There comes a point at which it is no longer the case that we want the process to be totally free. For example, in cases in which a student is working on a piece of applied research and there is no intention of making it publicly available, we would have to consider licences.
The Bill must cover a situation in which an academic is giving someone information that is not for the public domain. It must deal with the secret passing on of information about the sort of military technology that we need to cover. If the information is secret to start with and is not in the public domain and if the research is applied research that could be used for the sort of things with which the Bill is concerned, we would have a different situation.