Protection of Freedoms Bill

My Lords, I have a clutch of amendments in this group. I will not at this moment comment on those proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, although I am looking forward to listening to others’ contributions on that subject. But it is very important that when a group of scientists ask us as a Government or community to take action based on results that they have published, the data underlying those results must be open to scrutiny. I understand that that has a difficult interaction with the questions raised by the noble Baroness, but I look forward to others’ contribution on how to solve that. The first amendment that I have in the group is Amendment 148. I should declare that I am an extensive user of freedom of information legislation, particularly as regards universities, which I have found unutterably tiresome and difficult to deal with. One of their more tiresome habits is to refuse to provide information in anything other than PDF format. They get it in Excel, or whatever form, and translate it into PDF to provide it to me, merely to cause me extra work. I have to buy a program to suck it out of the PDF again. PDF is not a transmissible format, as it were, and they are merely trying to make life difficult by putting it in that format. So I would like to be sure that when data are provided they are provided in a properly reusable format. I have never come across a data set that cannot be reduced to tabbed, delimited text. Maybe that happens in a collection of tables, but data are essentially a simple thing. Although the data may be held in an immensely complex form in the program that the scientists are using, in any program that I have come across it should be easy—if only for the purposes of sharing with other people—to drop out at least the base data into relatively simple form. Amendment 148B attacks page 85, lines 31 and 32. I fail to understand what is behind this particular phrase. Any data set has within it analysis and interpretation—it is a part of putting a data set together. You are generally dealing with fairly dirty incoming information. Processing the information is not only a matter of applying mathematics; there is also a question of discrimination and decision. I do not know what is intended by the phrase or what kinds of things are intended to be excluded by it, so I hope that the Minister will be able to enlighten me as to the purpose of the provision. Amendment 148D attacks lines 36 to 39 on page 85. On reading it, it seemed to me that by making relatively minor presentational changes to a collection of data an authority could avoid it becoming a data set. Perhaps I am misreading what is there and misunderstanding the intention of the paragraph, but I should be grateful for enlightenment. Amendments 149 and 150 concern the question of fees. It has been the practice of, for instance, the Higher Education Statistics Agency to restrict the availability of data by putting very high prices on them. The last time I asked the agency for a quote for some basic information on the levels of attainment required for entry to particular university courses, it quoted me a fee of £10,000. That is the use of fees as a mechanism for not distributing data. It is important that, in order to follow the purposes of this legislation, authorities should not be able to use fees in that way. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’ Neill, said, authorities should be able to use fees to cover costs. Where they have accumulated the data partly for the purposes of distribution, as may be the case with the Ordnance Survey, the Met Office and similar organisations, they should be able to charge a reasonable fee for them. However, such fees should take into account a return on investment but not as if the income from FOI was the only income from the data set. The data set may be of peripheral use—most of the costs may be attributed to accumulating information for the purposes of running government—and the whole of those costs should not be loaded on to an FOI request when you are calculating what the return on investment is. It is important that the use of fees to avoid distributing data is kept under review and that authorities should take into account the desirability of the data set being widely available to the public rather than the data being restricted because of high fees. I am in the middle of an interesting discussion with UCAS, which has recently come under the Freedom of Information Act. When I put in a request to UCAS, it said, ““No, you cannot have this information under the Freedom of Information Act. We would need to redact it to some extent to protect the private information of individuals””. I understand that. They also said, ““By the way, if you asked for the data set that had been sufficiently redacted, you could not have that either because that would be available under our publication scheme. Here are the details of how you can pay for it””. UCAS has worked the system so that there can be no successful FOI requests of UCAS at all—either the information is not available under FOI or it is available under its publication scheme and you pay for it—so it is very important to know how payment works in these sorts of circumstances. The last of my amendments in this group is Amendment 151A. Although it is the largest, it is the simplest. It merely says that if a local authority is asked for something that is not a dataset but is for reuse, it cannot charge for it.