My Lords, I support both amendments, which were spoken to most ably by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport. The noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, also made comments that were absolutely right on the nail.
A review is only sensible. An awful lot of the figures should be obtainable from the licensing authorities, whoever is going to be appointed, on the financial stuff, how much is done, and so on. I do not imagine that it will require a huge amount of public money to try to do a review at whatever period is thought best.
As a taxpayer, I am concerned about the up-front fees. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, almost did not stress that point enough. The notion is that those fees should be set at a rate that means that orphan works do not undercut stuff that might be in a commercial library of works that people can license. They would probably not be on the same subject in most cases; they would be for different purposes. If one of the big national libraries or a university was trying to prepare a work of academic interest, they would not rush around paying fortunes to these libraries that have collections of pictures or text. They cannot do that; they will not have the budget for it. If someone was to look at what this stuff was currently sold for, or licensed for, we could be talking about a huge sum of money going into the bodies collecting for orphan works. We are not talking about a petty million, or something like that.
A department always expands to spend the money provided, so if it is going to be ploughed into trying to collect these things will get enormous and complex, and they will spend money like water. On the subject of BIS sponsoring training programmes, well, we know what happens with most government training programmes, so just to get the point across and to see the horror on the Minister’s face, I volunteer to be either one of the societies collecting the money so that I can have a huge scheme, or one of the chief accredited training agencies, because this will be a licence to print money.
The point is well made by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth. The funding of universities and libraries and institutions like that, which this provision is aimed at, comes out of public or charitable funds, and it is there for a purpose. The concept that this is a hidden tax that then goes back to the Exchequer or to fund a nice quango or whatever is totally unethical. I cannot put that strongly enough. If the public woke up to the fact that that was happening, they would be absolutely horrified, so the Minister would be incredibly well advised to accept this amendment to protect the Government from all sorts of accusations in future—unless, of course, they do not expect to be in power by the time this happens and think that another Government will take the flack. However, given that most politicians think they will still be in power, if I were them I would protect myself.