I am grateful to the Deputy Chairman. I hope the Committee will forgive my ignorance; I hope that will help others as well.
I think noble Lords are really on to something here. I have found all the previous contributions compelling. They speak to aspects of my own experience. I have seen the way that funding can either promote or chill free speech, expression and academic inquiry. I understand that there are real challenges in this area. In particular, it is going to be very difficult to compel a corporation in any way to fund research that would be directly contrary to its interests. However, I do not think that we should totally give up on all of this; I do think that my noble friend Lord Sikka and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, are on to something.
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For example, where research has been commissioned, an attempt to use a contract or another document to prevent it being published could be made unenforceable by way of statute. Arguably, when the funder is a public authority, it may be breaching the Human Rights Act in any event—depending on the nature of the recipient of the grant. In legislating in this area, why do we say that it is easy enough to legislate for students’ views on campus but do not try to legislate for something as important as academic funding being used to chill free speech?
Something could be attempted in this Bill. It will not solve the complexity of the problem that my noble friend Lord Triesman described, where people are just given a nod and a wink and told, “You ain’t going anywhere in this town; you’re not going to get funded or refereed”. Some of this stuff is never written down. It is a nudge; it is cultural. You cannot deal with that in statute but, if Ministers and the Government ever abuse their financial relationships with other public bodies, that can be legislated for, to some extent. If corporates—or, for that matter, philanthropists, NGOs or charities; whoever they are, whatever their politics—put clauses into research grants or contracts that the Committee thinks are contrary to our consensus idea of academic freedom and free speech, those gagging clauses can be made unenforceable as a matter of statute. That may be something that the noble Lords who have done the work in this area might want to contemplate for the next stage of the Bill.