My Lords, I rise with the advantage over the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, in that I will speak to only one amendment in this group; I therefore have the right page in front of me and can note that I will speak to Amendment 252, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and signed by me and the noble Lords, Lord Watson of Wyre Forest and Lord Maude of Horsham.
I apologise that I was not with the Committee earlier today, but I was chairing a meeting about the microbiome, which was curiously related to this Committee. One issue that came up in that meeting was data and data management and the great uncertainties that remain. For example, if a part of your microbiome is sampled and the data is put into a database, who owns that data about your microbiome? In fact, there is no legal framework at the moment to cover this. There is a legal framework about your genome, but not your microbiome. That is a useful illustration of how fast this whole area is moving and how fast technology, science and society are changing. I will actually say that I do not blame the Government for the fact of this gaping hole as it is an international hole. It is a demonstration of how we need to race to catch up as legislators and regulators to deal with the problem.
This relates to Amendment 252 in the sense that perhaps this is an issue that has arisen over time, kind of accidentally. However, I want to credit a number of campaigners, among them James O’Malley, who was the man who draw my attention to this issue, as well as Peter Wells, Anna Powell-Smith and Hadley Beeman. They are people who have seen a really simple and basic problem in the way that regulation is working and are reaching out including, I am sure, to many noble Lords in this Committee. This is a great demonstration of how campaigning has at least gone part of the way to working. I very much hope that, if not today, then some time soon, we can see this working.
What we are talking about here, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said, is the postal address file. It is held as a piece of private property by Royal Mail. It is important to stress that this is not people’s private information or who lives at what address; it is about where the address is. As the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, set out, all kinds of companies have to pay Royal Mail to have access to this basic information about society, basic information that is assembled by society, for society.
The noble Lord mentioned Amazon having to pay for the file. I must admit that I feel absolutely no sympathy there. I am no fan of the great parasite. It is an interesting contrast to think of Amazon paying, but also to think of an innovative new start-up company, which wants to be able to access and reach people to deliver things to their homes. For this company, the cost of acquiring this file could be prohibitive. It could stop it getting started and competing against Amazon.
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I am very interested in citizen science. We are seeing huge developments in citizen science in areas in which I often engage, such as birds, ecosystems et cetera. There is a chance for citizens who have access to data to use it in all kinds of interesting ways to help us all collectively as a society understand the social world in which we live and what is happening with it. It is crucial for people to be able access this data, and they should not have to pay to do so. It is a chance for—this is their self-description so I will use the term—civic-minded nerds to do all sorts of interesting things with the data.
It is worth stressing that this amendment does not say how the Government should do this; it simply sets out the principle that the Government should do it. It is not open to the argument that the amendment should be drafted differently or approached in another way; it simply says that we should free the postal address file. I very much hope to hear positive words and a positive direction from the Minister on Amendment 252.