First, Mr. Benton, may I say what a pleasure it is to serve on another Committee under your chairmanship, especially on the day that Liverpool was announced as the capital of culture. There will be much gnashing of teeth in the Room as a result. The hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr. Thomas) shakes his head, but some people did not give Cardiff much thought.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich on promoting the Bill and I reaffirm the Government’s support for it. It represents an important step towards the safe keeping of our national intellectual output for generations to come. I welcome the positive approach taken by the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire; it is consistent with his approach to most Committees of which we have both been members. He and my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Mr. Todd) made some important points. We have a long way to go to reassure people, especially about the protection of intellectual property—a matter of enormous importance. As my hon. Friend said, we have a disproportionate input into the world economy; an awful lot of people are employed in the sector and in many ways we lead the world. We must not do anything to jeopardise that.

My Department has worked closely with my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich, the British Library and the publishing community in the drafting of the Bill and the amendments. The principle of the Bill has received widespread support, but we were given notice of concerns immediately prior to and following Second Reading on matters of detail. If I may, Mr. Benton, I shall spend a little time discussing those concerns and outline how we have tried to respond, although the details of our response will emerge during our debates on the amendments.

At the end of March, my Department met the Digital Content Forum, which represents online publishers and representatives from the publishing industry, including from Reed Elsevier, Reuters, News International and other online publishers and others in the newspaper publishing industry. Those substantial and productive discussions have continued in smaller and more focused meetings, and have substantially informed the amendments that my hon. Friend has tabled.

Prior to the introduction of the Bill, the DCMS worked closely with the joint committee on voluntary deposits, which has been chaired by the British Library, and kept it closely informed on the Bill’s progress and on drafting the regulatory impact assessment. The joint committee comprised representatives from the deposit libraries, the deposit libraries’ agent and several publishing industry representatives, namely the Publishers Association, the Directory and Database Publishers Association, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, the Periodical Publishers Association Limited and others. They were warmly supportive of the aim behind the Bill of extending the print system to the non-print world, and were commissioned to provide an assessment of the costs and other quantifiable effects of the Bill. The report that Electronic Publishing Services provided was welcomed in the JCVD’s September meeting as an excellent piece of work. The chair of the committee recommended the report to my Department as an accurate and sensible study on 4 October 2002. In that correspondence with the Department, the chair added,

“JCVD believes that a strong case has been made that legislation on extended legal deposit will not be controversial, and that its implementation can be incremental and harmonious”.

Around the time of Second Reading, we were alerted to several concerns, which we shall discuss this afternoon. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire said, some of those concerns are due to the rapid evolution of the world of non-print. The Bill recognises that fact and provides a flexible but enduring framework for capturing new publication media to ensure that they can be represented, albeit selectively, in the national archive. The Bill does that by establishing regulation-making powers. I am glad that the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire has drawn attention to that because it is difficult to consider a Bill when those regulations do not exist—I have always found that, on whichever side of the Chamber I have been sitting. It is important that we debate that issue because the Bill is special in that sense, since we cannot draw up the relevant regulations until there has been an exhaustive consultative process.

I am also glad that the hon. Gentleman, along with my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire, suggested that it may be a good way forward to focus more strongly on the least contentious part of Bill, which concerns the offline information—CD-ROMs, microfiche, and so on—and consult thoroughly and

work hard on drawing up regulations for online material, in relation to which there has been a good deal of concern and controversy.