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Protection of Freedoms Bill

My Lords, I, too, rise briefly to support the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve. My experience now is somewhat dated, but back in the early 1990s I was responsible for supervising a group of researchers putting together a substantial database on bibliometrics. The difficulties of cleaning up such a database are extreme and costly. The group of four young researchers I was supervising worked for two or three years in just cleaning up the database. One issue that we were looking at then was the advantage of concentrating research into large laboratories rather than having a lot of smaller researchers. You cannot do such research until you have cleaned up the database. Someone coming in and using your data is clearly something that we need to protect against. We also need to make sure that the costs involved in putting databases together are fully met.