May I at the outset declare a minor interest? First, I spent 20 years in publishing and I am very familiar with the subject of this Bill. Secondly, I acted as a scrutineer of the survey to which the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Moss) referred. I did so on behalf of publishers and I received a small remuneration. I shall refer to the points that I made then. That was nine months ago, before I had seen the Bill and there was no real prospect of it emerging from the woods of possible handouts that lie around most Ministries.

As the hon. Gentleman made clear, we have to get this matter straight in the first clause as it sets down the core issues of the Bill. We need to understand what legal deposit is for. It is a system for ensuring that we have a corpus of information in our country that reflects our literature and information industry at that moment in time. It is there for future use by historians and others to gather a reflection of what we are saying, doing, thinking and writing then. That is its purpose.

It is also important to understand what its purpose is not. It is not to substitute for the normal process of acquiring information through, for example, a specialist library or purchasing a book from a publisher or subscribing to an online information provider. It is not to provide free access to what is often extremely expensive information.

I can give an illustration from my own experience. For a period, I ran a specialist database business that produced a product that described British science and technology expertise. It sold for £10,000 to business subscribers. That was in the early 1990s, which gives an idea of that in relative money terms. I would have been mortified if instead of paying that £10,000 to my business and thus support its development and future health, someone could pop into one of the deposit libraries and obtain that information for nothing. That illustrates the difference between the two purposes of the Bill.

Sometimes, there is confusion about the purpose of legal deposit. It is not about making information available to people freely because that is something that they should have as of right. It has a specific, narrow purpose. In that context, we have to recognise the specialist section of information providers who are deeply impacted by this legislation.

As I said, I spent 20 years in the industry. The fact that publishers had an obligation to deposit their product with the various copyright libraries, as we tended to call them, was a matter of no controversy whatever. It was a voluntary scheme. I am sure that the Minister will be told that there were some enforcement actions but I never knew of any, either in my own business or businesses I had dealings with and I was at a pretty senior level in the company by the end.

That is a monument of voluntarism in Britain, supported by statutory power. The statutory power is there to enable that voluntarism to function as well as it does between two groups of people—specialist librarians and publishers—to produce this corpus of information that we all value. We must therefore ensure that any steps we take do not harm that essential voluntary ethic. It must be seen as in the publisher’s or information provider’s interest to participate willingly in the exercise.

I do not think that the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire knows the industry as well as I do, but he has learned some of the key points well. The critical issues include how the Bill will relate to dynamic products—in other words, products that change hour to hour, minute to minute and second to second—particularly, as the hon. Gentleman said, when the person involved with the information provision does not own the information and cannot speak for its use in quite the way that might be imagined in the Bill. They certainly cannot predict the precise usage that might be followed through by an individual library. The Bill therefore needs to define more sharply how it relates to that community and I have gently suggested that a way forward, at least pro tem, might be, rather like the hon. Gentleman suggested, to narrow slightly the focus of the Bill while we think a little harder about that sector.

That is enough of that part. I shall now deal with the second element. Incidentally, I did not publish a dynamic product. In those days, dynamic products were pretty scarce; they are much more commonplace now. However, it is still the case that if those who

publish very low volumes of a product have to give a copy to a deposit library, which makes it available relatively freely, they will find their market completely destroyed. We will just do away with those businesses in this country; they will go and operate somewhere else.

The business that I worked for and brought to reasonable health would have been one of those businesses. I would not have dreamed of running that business in a context in which I had to make such a product freely available to a wider information community without proper restrictions. I would have wanted at least to say, “I’m sorry. We’ll deposit the product now, but you will not be able to allow access to it for another 12 months, by which time I will have published a new edition, which will then be available to the people who are paying the money for it.” In that way, people would retain the right to the corpus of information, which reflects what information was provided at that time, but they would not be able to use it for commercial gain or other purposes, which a person dropping into a deposit library would be able to do without restrictions.

We also need to consider the restrictions that are already in place. Under the voluntary scheme, there is recognition of some very low-volume publishers and their needs and we need a proper definition of that. It may not need to be in the Bill, but it certainly needs to be clearly understood because otherwise we will just kill the sector stone dead.

It would have been nice if the Bill had gone back to first principles, although I certainly do not attach any blame to my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich in that regard. The note that I prepared on that nine months ago says,

“this is surely an opportunity to reconsider the Legal Deposit scheme as a whole. What was its purpose ... Is that purpose still relevant? Is the shape of the scheme right in its balance between the responsibilities of publishers, the state and the end user? Are the current recipient libraries the right ones for the purpose defined?”

A little issue scooted across the horizon there, but I will not touch on it, because it has an element of controversy in it. I said that the reason why now was the time for a rethink was set out tangentially in the paper that I was considering, and that the scale of electronic delivery was already too large for the voluntary scheme to cope with.

People may not have seen that research, but I did. It was demonstrated that the library system was not coping with the existing voluntary deposit process, and we were loading an obligatory process of an unknown scale on top of that. How were we going to cope with that? Some estimates were prepared, which I must admit I entered some cautionary notes on. My note goes on to say that the value of cataloguing the data received is already implicitly thrown into doubt by the failure to address the problem today.

Secondly, I was interested in the remarks of the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire on the lack of international perspective. Other countries have equivalent legal deposit schemes of some regard and we can learn from them. Thirdly, we have no indication of the perceptions of the users of the legal

deposit materials on this question. Who uses it, and what do they think? How do they use the materials, and how critical is instant access?

I would have liked a more fundamental examination of the thrust of the provisions, but I nevertheless welcome the Bill. I am delighted to help with its passage, but it would help if sharper thought was given to how some of the issues relate to the industry in which I have spent my working life. As the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire said, it is one of our most important industries; it is quite disproportionate in scale to our nation’s trade. The crux of that is twofold. First, the English language offers us a huge advantage in providing resources for an information industry. Secondly, the strength of our financial institutions often provides a nexus for a large flow of information.

Those huge advantages have helped us to build a world-beating sector, and I was proud to have been part of it. I shall not make the apocalyptic statement that the Bill would destroy all that. No, it will not. However, it will make it harder for the voluntary principles on which the industry and the libraries that it worked with to operate. We should try to protect those principles within the Bill’s focus.