My Lords, my Amendments 41 and 42 have been bracketed with this amendment, and I would like to speak to them at this point. I have great sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, has just said about auditors, and I hope attention will be paid to that.
In Clause 7(9) the Bill has:
“After paragraph 14 insert … a fair and accurate … report of proceedings of a scientific or academic conference”.
The Joint Committee spent a lot of time talking about this. It felt strongly that peer-reviewed articles were certainly right to be covered—and I would like to pay particular thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Bew, for his considerable help in helping the committee understand the issues on this particular matter—but it was much more nervous about the inclusion of conferences. I should add that from 1968 to 1984 I was an assistant professor, a lecturer and a senior lecturer in universities in the United States, and in this country and in those capacities I attended many academic conferences, as has the noble Lord, Lord Bew, and other noble Lords.
“Conference” is a very widely drawn word. Having attended the world conference on radiation biology and radiation physics, I would have no difficulty in saying that it qualified for special consideration in the context of the Bill. On the other hand, and I speak carefully, conferences are called by a variety of people for a variety of reasons, not all of which deserve the sort of protection that we are envisaging in this legislation.
The Joint Committee came fairly firmly to the view that there ought to be protection. The wording “scientific or academic” included medicine. There were queries as to why medicine was not specifically mentioned but we thought “scientific or academic” was sufficient to cover all of the academic disciplines.
We were very strongly of the view that there ought to be protection. We were equally strongly of the view that conferences ought not to be included unless my noble friend intends on Report to define, delineate and describe what the Government mean by an academic conference, or unless he wishes to add regulations about the reviewing of contents of conferences to bring them into line with peer-reviewed papers.
Amendment 42 adds to peer-reviewed papers coverage for material in archives that is of academic importance and subject to the ground rules specified in the particular amendment. The effect of the two amendments together is strongly to endorse peer-reviewed scientific and academic papers, to remove the Government’s intention to include conferences and to add authentic archive material.