My Lords, my noble friend Lord Sikka knows the Labour Front Bench’s position on his amendment, because I wrote to him about it. He knows that we are very sympathetic to the issues and, like the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, believe that they need to be addressed. Certainly, over the years, all Governments have been focused on sufficient funding of research, through different mechanisms, such as the Medical Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council—all these bodies through which we have attempted to ensure that research is open and transparent.
One of the problems that my noble friend is seeking to address is the sort of research when somebody decides to ask a question, hoping they know what the answer will be, and those tend to be funders, whether from business or industry. They are seeking a particular outcome and, if they invest in that research and the outcome is not the one they want, of course they will not publish. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, focused on charities. I keep harping on about my own experience in the trade union movement, but I must admit that we certainly funded research in the hope that it would support our case for greater workers’ rights and higher pay. It did not always come out the way we wanted and we were sometimes not particularly keen to publish it. We did not prevent the academic from expressing the view and certainly did not stop them from publishing it themselves, but we were not necessarily going to promote it.
The Bill is about freedom of speech—we have had a long debate about it. When it comes to academic freedom and research, there are much more complex questions that should not really be dealt with in the Bill. I am
fully sympathetic to some of the arguments that my noble friend Lord Sikka made, but this is not the right Bill, and certainly these amendments are not the right ones.