I beg to move amendment No. 2, in

clause 6, page 3, line 20, leave out from ‘may’ to ‘works’ in line 21 and insert—

‘make regulations supplementing sections 1 and 2 as they apply to’.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment No. 3, in

clause 6, page 4, line 2, at end insert—

‘()Regulations under this section may not be made unless the Secretary of State has considered the impact of those regulations on persons who publish works of a description prescribed in the regulations.’.

Amendment No. 14, in

clause 6, page 4, line 2, at end insert—

‘(4)Regulations under this section shall contain appropriate obligations on the part of a deposit library, or person acting on its behalf, to maintain in place adequate technical and organisational measures to ensure the secure and confidential storage of the data and content to be deposited.’.

Amendment No. 2 is a technical amendment intended merely to improve clarity.

With the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, we listened to publishers’ concerns about the economic burden of deposit; some publishers are concerned that they have a small market and deposit libraries can take a significant part of their output. We touched on that subject a moment ago. If the libraries could demand publications for free, publishers would suffer a big drop in sales, which might make it no longer viable to produce the item in question. Amendment No. 3 provides an explicit safeguard. In addition to a regulatory impact assessment, it would require the Secretary of State to consider the financial impact of regulations on those who would be affected by them. That should ensure that the financial viability of production of those products is safeguarded.

I wish to speak to amendment No. 14. Clause 6 deals with non-print publications. We have already had some discussion on the subject, but the regulations have yet to be defined. We acknowledge and welcome the Minister’s repeated assurances of pretty well immediate, powerful and meaningful consultation with interested parties to get to grips with the regulations. Having sent non-print material to library—by offline communication such as a CD-ROM, or online in a way that has to be defined—it seems only fair and reasonable that the material, some of which will be sensitive and which will certainly be valuable, should not be capable of being hacked into through the computer resources of the library.

The amendment would provide that the library is responsible for ensuring full protection of the information communicated to it.

I am curious about what communications the hon. Gentleman has in mind. Publications are all public documents. What confidentiality can pertain to them?

We do not know which online publications will be required to be deposited. Until the definitions of what online publications should be deposited are set down in regulations, we shall be in a grey area and shall not know. All that we are saying is that there may be valuable information that must go through under the regulations and it is only fair and reasonable that it should not be possible to hack into it.

If I may try to help the hon. Gentleman, there could well be a time-limiting factor, as the hon. Member for Wantage (Mr. Jackson) pointed out. A high-value, low-volume item may be deposited in the period for obligatory deposition, such as a map of Iraq. That item could benefit someone who had managed to get a copy of it and published it widely, but there might be a detrimental effect on the publisher that had been required to deposit it at a library.

I am grateful for the Minister’s helpful contribution. I am sure that sensitive, important and valuable online information will in the future be deposited. We are going to make regulations about access to that, which will normally be in a controlled environment in which someone with bona fides downloads and looks at that information on a computer. However, that information will still be there in the library—it will not move anywhere. That person doing research will be in a controlled environment and will not be able to take the information away with them, for obvious reasons. However, that does not mean that that library’s computer system could not be hacked into. That is a possibility, so the library has a responsibility to ensure that its systems are as modern and secure as is necessary to prevent confidential, sensitive and important information that might be deposited from being used in the way that the Bill is designed to protect against.

I certainly appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s point, but if the Committee accepts new clause 1, as tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich, obligations that are imposed on libraries with regard to use of and access to legally deposited material can be dealt with by regulations. I hope that with both that reassurance and my response to the point that the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire made in support of the amendment, he will accept that both the Committee and the Government are well aware of the problems of security, which reflect much wider concerns about the protection of intellectual property. However, such concerns can properly be dealt with under the proposals in new clause 1.

I certainly appreciate the import of what the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire is attempting to do with the amendment. However, I think that it focuses on only half of what we should consider, which is why the Minister is probably correct in what he said about new clause 1. The amendment is appropriate and I do not suppose that any archivists would have a problem with

an obligation for secure storage and adequate technical provision. However, the other side of the coin is ensuring adequate availability and distribution of that material to readers. The new clause is perhaps stronger on that.

I still have a question. I certainly accept the need for security—material could be under embargo for six months, a year or however long, during which it should not be hacked into and must be secure. However, the use of the word “confidential” unguards me somewhat. The publications in question are all made available to the public, although one might have to pay £10,000 to get access to them, so someone who wanted to see them for free in the National Library of Wales would have to wait for 18 months. It is important to stress that there is nothing confidential about such material. We are not asking legal deposit libraries to collect material that is confidential or that pertains to an individual and might contravene the Data Protection Acts. The hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire is right about security and I hope that the Bill will deal with that matter. However, the use of the word “confidential” could make some librarians, whose job is to make material available to people who request it, somewhat unhappy in their posts.

Amendment No. 14 says “confidential storage” rather than “confidential data”. Perhaps I did not need to use the word “confidential”; I could have used “secure storage”. “Confidential storage” implies that there is restricted access under the conditions that we know would obtain in a legal deposit library. However, I accept the hon. Gentleman’s point that it is the storage rather than the data that is confidential.

I accept that the hon. Gentleman is not attempting to shape or change the librarian’s job. I myself underwent a librarianship course and it was drummed into us that we should make information available to the public, that learning was for everyone and that although we were the guardians of knowledge, we should not prevent people from gaining access to it. I hope the hon. Gentleman will accept that that word might upset some librarians and archivists. However, I support the intention behind the amendment.

I was not intending to comment on this matter, because I thought that the Minister had dealt well with the amendment. However, I agree with the hon. Member for Ceredigion that the word “confidential” is perhaps not appropriate. I hope that the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire will be reassured by the assurances that we have given about the regulations that the Secretary of State will make on when material might be accessed after it has been deposited. There will be a period of “purdah”, when the material would not be generally available to readers, and if the hon. Gentleman’s concern is about the security of access during that period, the Minister and the libraries would certainly take that into account during the drafting of regulations.

If the Minister assures me that new clause 1 could probably deal with that problem by means of regulations, I am happy to accept that, and therefore beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Order. For the sake of good order, I should point out that the hon. Gentleman’s amendment does not have to be withdrawn, because it has not been moved.

Amendment agreed to.

Amendment made: No. 3, in

clause 6, page 4, line 2, at end insert—

‘()Regulations under this section may not be made unless the Secretary of State has considered the impact of those regulations on persons who publish works of a description prescribed in the regulations.’.—[Mr. Mole.]

Question proposed, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill.

I wish to raise a couple of points, which I hope will be clarified when we discuss the regulations. However, I put a marker down now, although we are not discussing the detail of the regulations but what will be contained within them.

I had two concerns about the clause. Subsection (2)(b) would require the delivery of a copy of any computer program necessary to access the material. The supplier of the content may not be in a position legally to deliver that computer program. It might be licensed from someone else, so they would not be able to hand over someone else’s copyrighted work. I hope that we will be sensitive to that issue. In the case of online material, the company that is providing an online news service has brought in the technology for delivering it from a third party and will not be able to provide it to the legal deposit library, even if they wished to.

Secondly, on access, a large amount of material may be delivered in an inaccessible format, unless libraries are prepared to put in a huge amount of work. For example, we referred earlier to the BBC Online website and the only sensible way to deliver it in the context of a deposit library is to mirror it. It will be hugely expensive to deliver one BBC News Online website, and it will be similarly expensive to deliver a second. Aside from the cost of producing the content, the cost of delivery is very high.

It will not be enough simply to deliver the technological platform on which the BBC News Online website is built and a feed of the content in raw form—the expensive bit is putting the two together to make a useable product. That will require the providers of the source material and the deposit libraries to co-operate closely, in a way that is not the case with print material. One can deliver a book, but there is no equivalent for online material. One cannot simply push a button so that something accessible drops out—the process is far more complex than that.

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that that raises the issue of archival retrieval systems? Making a small investment in deposit libraries to

provide such systems might solve many problems and might be better than dealing with them individually as they arise.

I certainly concur with that. One hope is that we will develop common archival retrieval systems and common formats, which would make life a lot easier. However, at the moment, we do not have common formats. Some are evolving, and portable document format is freely available—one does not need to pay a licence fee to use it and one can create readers for it. That is all fine, but we should be clear about the fact that the Bill does not require someone who uses a non-standard format to carry out a further development, which might be as expensive as the original development, to deliver material. Such development may be in the public good, but it will not be in the interests of the publisher.

We are not dealing with the details of the regulations, but it is helpful to put on record that they should be framed in a way that encourages partnership. That will involve people moving towards common standards to comply with the Bill. It will involve carrots as much as sticks, although the stick element would worry me given the present state of the technology.

Of course, the hon. Gentleman is right, but the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, North-East made an interesting point about finance. We have a spread of legal deposit libraries that are financed by different institutions. The National Library of Wales is financed by the National Assembly, the National Library of Scotland is financed by the Scottish Parliament and the situation is different again at Trinity college in Dublin. That leaves us with a problem. The DCMS does not fund all deposit libraries, so we cannot simply roll out a funding programme to pay for archival retrieval systems. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam is right to mention such things, but we must reflect on how we can help to implement them at the UK level. We need some leadership from the Department and the libraries, which must work together.

I would love deposit libraries to become national and international centres of excellence for electronic archiving and retrieval. They certainly have huge expertise, but the hon. Gentleman is right that it will not be cheap to develop that further, as we will need to do if the Bill is successful in bringing in all this extra material. We must consider such issues in the context of how libraries are funded and how they develop the technical skills that will be required to deal with the massive volume of new work. Seeing them as centres of excellence is a positive way forward.

Libraries will deal with organisations from the very small—from the MP who writes their website in some obscure programming language—to the very large. Getting the co-operation that will be necessary for both sides to play their part will be a delicate operation, but the Bill does not make that clear. The fact that it makes things sound a bit too simple should sound an alarm bell. It seems that people will simply have to deliver the computer programmes and the

content, and everything will be okay. I simply want to flag up at this stage that those who draw up the regulations will be dealing with a complex issue on which detailed co-operation will be required.

The clause sets out the terms and regulations for deposit that the Secretary of State can make in relation to non-print material. It is important enough for me to set out the purpose of the subsections.

Subsection (1) gives a general power to the Secretary of State to make regulations regarding the duty to deposit non-print materials.

Subsection (2) sets out the sorts of things that the Secretary of State may include in regulations, such as determining how and when a non-print publication must be deposited, the obligation to provide the information necessary to make the work accessible, the timing of the deposit, the means of delivery of the work, the quality of the copy, the format of a deposit where a work is published in different formats, determining when online publications are to be considered as published in the United Kingdom—an important issue that was touched on at the beginning of the debate—and specifying the medium in which the publication is to be delivered.

It will not be necessary to deposit works published before the necessary regulations are made, but I hope that the point that was made about voluntary arrangements continuing will address that concern.

The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam is right to stress the importance of the development of standards for format. Some of these are already being developed, whether through HTML or XML. I hope that the requirement to deposit a computer program may not be the general rule as much as the exception. I appreciate, however, that those exceptions will clearly involve difficulties, and I imagine that in certain circumstances the library will buy software directly if it is not made freely available. The hon. Gentleman gave the example of Adobe’s portable document format.

There are serious issues about inaccessible formats, and the library would not necessarily wish to mirror a whole website. Indeed, it would be an important part of the deposit policy of the libraries to determine whether they would take full functionality of a website or whether they would simply take a snapshot of a particular site to preserve the sense of what was available at a particular point in history.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, as I said on Second Reading, it is vital that the regulations that the Department draw up give sufficient discretion for librarians and archivists to exercise their discretion in exactly the way that he just suggested? I have been involved in collection policies for audiovisual material and taking a snapshot of different things at different times to give the overall view was precisely what we did. However, it was technically and physically impossible to collect every single thing. It is clearly beyond the capacity of any of the deposit libraries to collect every piece of information that appears on a very large website, such

as the BBC’s, for example. However, it is important for someone who is clued up, such as an archivist, to know to collect not only the official BBC publication but also the views of the viewers as they are received. That is an archivist’s job.

I certainly support the sentiment that there should be discretion, but that—

Sitting suspended for a Division in theHouse.

On resuming—

I was telling the hon. Member for Ceredigion that I would support his principle that there should be discretion among librarians, but that they should use that discretion reasonably. I also wanted to reiterate the points made by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam that libraries are already doing good work to obtain access to materials held on discontinued systems. I give the example of the work that has just been completed by the British Library on the BBC Domesday project videodisc. Using its own resources, it has ensured that a format that is no longer accessible could be made available once again to the public. That touches on the point about funding. Funding to allow such work to continue is important. I draw the attention of the hon. Member for Ceredigion to the requirement in the regulations that the Secretary of State should consult with the National Assembly and the Scottish Executive to ensure that such regimes are appropriately put in place.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 6, as amended, ordered to stand part of the Bill.