I am grateful to the Opposition Front Bench and the Minister for their interventions on my amendment. I was slightly surprised by the approach of the Opposition Front Bench on this occasion, because this is intended to inform debates on outcomes for higher education.
On the Minister’s point, first, the initiative on 7 July is very helpful for broadening access to LEO data. One of the aims of this amendment was to promote that broadening of access, so I am very grateful for what has happened. My one disagreement, if I may say so, with what she said is that, being very familiar with the Digital Economy Act 2017, which had a long gestation and undoubtedly has moved things forward a lot, I can say that the Digital Economy Act does not cover all sets of data that are relevant to educational outcomes. This amendment is therefore deliberately broader to enable, for example, health data to be used for educational research; clearly, as the Minister rightly said, with proper security to ensure protection of confidentiality, anonymity where appropriate, and suchlike.
I will of course withdraw the amendment today, but I hope that the Minister will accept that, if we can provide practical examples of any gaps in the current legal and regulatory framework which mean that we are falling short of the objective—the admirable objective she set out: that there should be proper access for all researchers to data relevant to researching learner outcomes—perhaps it might be possible to return to this issue at a later date.