I, too, welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Benton. I also welcome my colleagues to the Committee for what I hope will be an interesting

discussion of my Bill. There was enormous consensus on Second Reading about the importance of such legislation.

As we all appreciate, the world of new media publishing is fast changing and we are here today to discuss a Bill whose generic nature we consider to be the best way to tackle the issue. In fact, the practice of legislating for a legal deposit is not far behind the technological advances in publishing. A few weeks ago, as the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire mentioned, the New Zealand Parliament passed the National Library of New Zealand Act 2003, which is designed to protect New Zealand’s most precious heritage items and to allow its library to operate with credibility in the electronic environment. That reinforces the point made about the international nature of much of the information, especially as we move into the online world with all the difficulties about the concepts of where ideas actually reside. I am encouraged by later amendments, which show how the Secretary of State can address some of those issues in due course.

As has been said, the process of a private Member’s Bill is, and will be, very different from the processes that the Government will pursue in setting out secondary legislation intended to address many of the points that have been raised. Indeed, much of the intention has been for that to unfold in various tranches that allow the different sorts of media to be addressed one at a time. Offline media will obviously be the first to be addressed. Some of the media with more complex difficulties, to which the Minister referred, will be dealt with later after even more extensive consultation. The Bill will create a credible approach to working in the electronic environment, as has been achieved in New Zealand.

The British Library and other deposit libraries have an enormous shared expertise in this area, which is respected throughout the world. The Legal Deposit Libraries Bill is essential for them to build on their excellent work of collecting and preserving print material by extending legal deposits to non-print material.