The noble Lord makes a very good point, one that I was actually aware of. While I fully understand the ambiguity to which he referred, the reason why I am more open to the provision as it stands for press conferences is that in recent time we have had, to my knowledge, at least one celebrated case where a particular government department gave a press conference and people subsequently wrote perfectly legitimate articles on the basis of what was said by that department but none the less, the case went to court and substantial payments were made.
I cannot bring myself to say that it is reasonable that if a department of government holds a press conference and people actively report or elucidate on what is said there, there should subsequently be libel actions, which there have been in recent times. That is the reason why at the moment I am living with the press conference issue.
I am open to persuasion on this question of conferences, but those of us on the Select Committee want to know that the Government have thought enough about the fact that some academic conferences are not very well run and are somewhat chaotic, and that they have some way of thinking that responds to that. A fundamental thinking of our committee was that the deepest problem is that academics, in the sciences or in the humanities, can be driven by their research to certain conclusions, and at this point there is a chill point that means they would discover it was difficult to find an academic outlet because a journal might say, “Our budget is so small that if there is a libel action here, even though your research looks very interesting to us, we can’t possibly publish it”. We know that this is currently going on, and that seems to be the greatest single evil in this field that needs to be addressed. I feel less concerned in principle about defending the rights of someone who may be spouting off a little at a conference.