Offshore Gas Rigs
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(3 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Callanan (Con)
The Health and Safety Executive will continue to hold operators to account to investigate any gas leaks, given that this is, as the noble Lord says, a significant safety concern. The industry actively works to reduce any opportunity for a leak where possible, and there is an ongoing initiative between the industry and regulators to reduce the number of hydrocarbon releases in the offshore sector.
Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]
My Lords, I declare that a family member works in the oil and gas industry. The Oil and Gas Authority’s policy on flaring is to ensure that the flare and vent volume requested for permission is at a level where it is “technically and economically justified”. Why is the word “environment” not included in this policy?
Lord Callanan (Con)
The environment is clearly very important in this matter; I agree with the noble Baroness about that. However, our revised Oil and Gas Authority strategy came into force last month and features a range of net-zero obligations for the oil and gas industry.
Energy White Paper
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Callanan (Con)
Like a number of other contributors, the noble Lord points out the importance of hydrogen. It is a potential key option for decarbonising heating, but it also needs to be looked at alongside the potential for heat pumps, heat networks, et cetera. We are developing all these options simultaneously, ensuring that we have the best available option for consumers and preparing the ground for the strategic decisions on these areas that will need to be made in the mid-2020s. On hydrogen heating, as I said, we are supporting a range of research, development and testing projects designed to help determine the feasibility of using low-carbon hydrogen as an alternative to the use of natural gas for heating. However, these are long-term decisions. We will publish the heat and buildings strategy next year. If the noble Lord is a bit patient, he will see the hydrogen strategy in the new year as well.
Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]
My Lords, will the Government focus on green hydrogen production for heavy transport and industrial use, and phase out other types of hydrogen production as soon as possible? Our gas infrastructure for homes is currently unsuitable for pure hydrogen. What is the cost of upgrading it and how does that cost compare with installing heat pump networks, which are safer, deliverable now, cheaper and require less generating capacity than other available options?
Lord Callanan (Con)
The noble Baroness is right to point out the challenges but, of course, what we require is probably a combination of all these different strategies. Further work will be needed to understand the full extent of the changes that are required to transition the national gas infrastructure to carry hydrogen and to understand the associated costs. Not all properties are suitable for the use of heat pumps, but we are working closely with the gas industry and stakeholders to develop a programme of works to assess the safety, feasibility costs and benefits of using low-carbon hydrogen as an alternative to natural gas.
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Obligations of Hospitality Undertakings) (England) Regulations 2020
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]
My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy with the views expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee in its 29th report said:
“We are concerned about the growing complexity of the rules, and in particular about how this complexity may affect the public’s understanding of what is required and people’s willingness to follow new restrictions.”
Is the Minister not concerned about that? During the national lockdown there was a very high level of compliance. People understood what they had to do and why, so they did it. But now it is total chaos: local lockdowns all have their own set of rules, and the regular changes to the national legal requirements mean that people have lost track. They have also lost trust in the legitimacy of the regulations because in some cases they appear to be totally stupid.
For example, in today’s regulations, dancing is forbidden in pubs and restaurants, with some exceptions, and the poor, pressured landlord has the job of enforcing it under pain of fines. At a wedding, only the couple can dance at their reception, of only 15 people, but the couple’s parents cannot dance together even if they live in the same household—this is silly. Who is going to enforce this, because the police certainly cannot?
In pubs, people can sing in groups of six. Indeed, there could be six groups of six if they do not mingle—but you cannot have seven people singing in a great big church. And then, some bright spark in the department has decided this is a great opportunity to ban loud music. I am no fan of loud music, but regulations to protect public health are no place to start banning it. This might have been reasonable if they had said, “outdoors in a residential area”, but they do not. Such things would have been simplified and clarified if there had been proper consultation with local government. Will the Minister promise the House that that will change?
Science Research Funding in Universities (Science and Technology Committee Report)
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]
My Lords, this has been a wide-ranging debate and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the committee on an excellent speech and report. I was not a member of the committee when the report was written, but I am now. Nor am I chancellor of any university, which puts me in a minority today. Leaving aside the fact that it has been more than a year coming, this debate is timely in other respects. University funding has been hard hit by Covid-19. A London Economics report suggests an average loss of income per higher education institution of approximately £20 million, with some potentially losing £100 million. This could lead to approximately 30,000 job losses in the sector. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, outlined the other shortfalls in research funding, which can only cause us to lose valuable researchers. Today, students are returning to university, with consequent worries about contagion entailing extra cleaning costs, and the end of the EU transition phase is upon us without a deal yet, with all the uncertainties that brings for the university research sector.
The committee strongly regretted that the Augar report on post-18 education suggested lowering the cap on tuition fees for UK students but did not address the fact that student fees often have to cross-subsidise research. Such cross-subsidy has been a result of quality-related funding not keeping up with inflation since 2010, so a deficit has built up. Can the Minister confirm the rumours that this idea has been shelved? If not, can I join my noble friend Lady Bowles of Berkhamsted in asking the Minister to confirm that the teaching grant will be increased to cover the shortfall in funding from students? If not, as the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, warned, important spending areas such as widening participation programmes could be affected. This consequence could not be described as “levelling up”. It is vital that funding covers the full economic cost of research or else the resilience of the sector will be adversely affected as subsidies will not be available from elsewhere.
On foreign students, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, mentioned, several factors have affected the number of these high-fee-paying students starting this year, among them the Covid pandemic and the uncertainties over our exit from the European Union. This is bad enough, but also to lower the domestic fee cap would be pretty disastrous unless it was compensated.
The Augar review also proposed wider powers for the Office for Students to rule on the value of courses. The committee was very sceptical about this, suggesting that it would erode university autonomy. It rightly emphasised that funding should be based on research excellence. I strongly agree that we need to be very careful about this. I hope that we will be given details of the criteria very soon, with an opportunity to question Ministers about them, because they could badly affect pure scientific research. During the Covid-19 pandemic, we have greatly benefited from research about the nature of the virus itself. This has underpinned the work on vaccines, treatments and mitigations and public behaviour recommendations. It has been vital and therefore I would not want any system that disadvantaged discovery research.
Noble Lords have received briefings from several medical research charities warning that their share of funding for research and clinical trials will be reduced by at least £310 million this year because the pandemic has badly affected their ability to fundraise. The noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, gave us some detail about this issue. Although the Government have offered some money to charities, for some strange reason medical research charities have been left out. I join the noble Lord in asking the Minister whether the Government will consider the AMRC’s proposal to rectify this.
The pandemic has highlighted the strength of our scientific and medical research sector. Our rapid progress in understanding, modelling and predicting the nature and spread of the virus, and ongoing work to develop treatments and a possible vaccine, is the result of investment in research over many decades allowing the build-up of highly-skilled teams of scientists collaborating across the globe. It is likely that many lives have been saved through this research, so it is vital that the resilience of the sector is protected.
In its response to the committee, the Government repeated their manifesto commitment to increase investment in research and development to 2.4% of gross domestic product by 2027. Total R&D spending is currently 1.7%, so one might be encouraged by this commitment. However, as my noble friend Lord Shipley pointed out, GDP has been badly hit by the pandemic and it is anticipated that this will continue for several years, so there would be a consequent reduction in the absolute amount of money which would become available through the commitment. He suggested the solution that the baseline for the 2.4% should be 2019 GDP before Covid-19 hit it. Will the Minister recommend this idea to the Chancellor?
During our membership of the EU, the UK has been particularly successful in attracting EU scientific and medical research funding, as well as bringing collaborators here from EU countries. In order to address concerns about the loss of such funding, the noble Lord, Lord Mair, strongly supported the committee’s recommendation that the UK Government negotiate strong association with Horizon Europe so that UK research groups would not be disadvantaged by our exit. I heard this week that Canada, Australia and other countries are applying to join this excellent programme and yet, despite 40 years’ close relationship, the UK Government have not yet been able to negotiate membership or association. Indeed, with the way things are going and the Government by their own admission planning to break international law and renege from elements of the withdrawal agreement, I would be surprised if the EU wanted us as a member of something as vital as Horizon Europe. How can anyone trust a country that tries unilaterally to change elements of an international agreement signed only eight months ago? Can the Minister therefore say what progress has been made in negotiations to enable the UK to take part in the benefits of Horizon Europe?
Several noble Lords mentioned international mobility, and the committee expressed great concern that new immigration laws should not prevent or deter researchers and technicians from other countries from coming to the UK to join international teams. They particularly mentioned science technicians, who may fall below the salary threshold. It is not just getting the visas that matters but the costs. As my noble friend Lady Randerson pointed out, up-front visa costs here are four to six times higher than in other leading science nations. Besides that, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, emphasised, a researcher wanting to come to work in our NHS on clinical trials, for example, and to bring their family would have to pay thousands of pounds to use the very NHS in which they are working. That is a deterrent. What do the Government propose to do to correct this?
It is tempting at this time of the Covid pandemic to focus on medical research and the contribution of our university researchers to tackling it, but another crisis is looming—the climate crisis. It is vital that our universities are enabled to provide us with information about the progress and effects of global warming and to develop innovative ways of preventing it going any further and mitigating the effects it is already having on our planet. I was fascinated to read one example in the briefing from Imperial College about Dr Qilei Song, who is researching cost-effective redox flow batteries which are energy storage devices large enough to power cities. This research aims to accelerate developments in renewable energy, mitigate climate change, and solve the mismatch between intermittent supply of renewable energy and the variable demands of the power grid. The noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow, mentioned the work of the Faraday Institution on battery research, an example of the diversity of research institutions for which the noble Lord, Lord Willets, was calling. This vital work must not be put at risk.
Finally, I return to the next immediate crisis, Brexit. As the UK has been so successful in the past at attracting EU funding for scientific research, the Government must take into account that to replace that funding they are going to have to put in more than our former contribution to the Horizon programme and not just match it. Can the Minister assure the Committee that they will provide sufficient funds to avoid a shortfall?
Committee on Climate Change: Progress Report
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Lord Callanan
The Chancellor will be setting out our financial policies in this area when he makes his Statement but, as I said in an earlier answer, we will be publishing a heat and building strategy in due course, which will address many of these issues. The noble Lord’s point is well made.
Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]
My Lords, in its Future Support for Low Carbon Heat consultation, BEIS acknowledges the significant role that heat pump technology will play. Why, then, is the support proposed for heat pump technology restricted to 45 kilowatts, and therefore small-scale domestic settings, cutting out even those currently deployed or planned for supermarkets, schools, universities and businesses? If we are to build back greener, is not this technology worthy of support?
Lord Callanan
I very much agree with the noble Baroness that heat pump technology requires support. In line with our commitment to achieving net-zero carbon emissions, we consider the role of heat pumps in driving down emissions extremely important. This includes large-scale heat pumps. We have the clean heat grant, designed as part of a wider package of measures to support the decarbonisation of heat. The focus of the scheme is on supporting the supply chains that will be needed to phase out the installation of high-carbon fossil fuels in heating and take it off the gas grid.
Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Callanan
I agree with the noble Lord that transparency, including on the evidence informing the views of SAGE, is important in helping to maintain the public’s trust and helping to grow understanding of the disease. As I said earlier, and as is normal procedure except in cases of national security, the minutes of SAGE will be published at the end of the pandemic.
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, the Government have said that they are following the science, but SAGE does not include people from three very relevant sciences: public health, social science and molecular virology. Why not? Does the Prime Minister read the full minutes of SAGE? If not, who briefs him? Is it the Chief Medical Officer or is it Dominic Cummings, whose understanding of the deliberations may be very different?
Lord Callanan
As I said earlier, SAGE does not have a specific membership. The people attending SAGE vary depending on the subjects under discussion; something like 100 participants in total can be called on. BEIS holds a central list of appropriate experts in the different sciences, academia and industry. They are brought into particular meetings when their expertise is required, and that is the call of the Chief Medical Officer and the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser.
Space Science and Technology
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, for securing this debate. When devising our industrial strategy, it makes sense to assess our opportunities and play to our strengths. In relation to both, the UK should be doing more: though only 3% of the world economy, we are 5% to 6% of the world space economy, so we are already doing well, although we need to do a whole lot better if we are to reach the Government’s target of having 10% of the global space market by 2030. Apart from the trade and the very high-value jobs we can create from space exploitation, there are four good reasons why we need to be active in this field. Space programmes allow us to monitor and observe our world: this is vital for environmental protection and climate change mitigation. Communications rely on space programmes, as does navigation. Then there is the vital area of defence. We need to be independent in all these areas.
We are already active in two of the major sectors of space exploitation: building satellites and receiving and interpreting data from them. The area where we are lacking is in independent launch facilities, although this aspect of space exploitation could be worth £3.8 billion to our economy by the end of the decade.
The Sutherland space hub being developed by Highlands and Islands Enterprise is supported by £2.5 million from the UK Government as part of its £17.3 million funding, and other grants have been made available to companies developing a new rocket, launch operations and a new satellite. The location of this site makes sense, so that we can launch to the north-east, but it is in Scotland, a part of the UK where the people and the Government do not want to leave the European Union and where the SNP Government have threatened to attempt to break up the union if we Brexit. What happens to the Sutherland site then? I understand that there is another site in Cornwall where there are plans for a launch site, but the investment in Sutherland is already great. What discussions have taken place with the Scottish Government to protect that investment?
Brexit threatens more than that. Half our current satellite manufacturing is exported to the EU. Tariffs would make us less competitive and a no-deal exit would be a disaster for companies such as those in the Glasgow and Surrey clusters, which build a lot of small satellites. One area in which we excel at the moment is removing space debris. There is a parallel here with the plastics that pollute our oceans. In our race for development, we have polluted the oceans with plastics that do not decompose and we have polluted space with bits of technology that are no longer used. A British satellite manufacturer has a clever netting system that can remove them. Surely this technology has enormous potential. Are the Government backing it?
Climate Change
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, yesterday I received a letter from four children called Bamba, Louie, Oscar and Jakson, from year 6 at the Rofft Primary School in Marford, near my home. They are learning about climate change and are concerned that polar bears are losing their habitat. They have questions for the Government which I will come to later. To help me reply to the children, I turned to scientists at one of our leading Welsh universities, Bangor. They told me about the increasing rate of decline of the sea ice in the Barents Sea, and the feedback loop which will mean that within a decade the limit of the Arctic habitat may have moved a great deal further north. As mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, there is little we can do to stop it—it is going to carry on. This indicates the danger of the 1 degree of warming we already have, already affecting our climate in the UK. Last year’s “beast from the east” may very well have been caused by it, so polar bears are not the only ones affected by loss of sea ice—we are too.
The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, may not, but 97% of scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions are the cause of our warming climate. The Paris accord and government policy were based on estimates of how quickly we need to reduce emissions to avoid the dangerous 1.5 degree rise. However, a recent article in Nature magazine quoted evidence that current predictions may be too conservative and we could get to dangerous levels as early as 2025. The Government’s target of 2050 may sound a very long way off—though it is not for the children of the Rofft school—but 2025 is a great deal nearer.
Far away from the polar bears’ habitat, but also related to warming oceans, Dr Gareth Williams of the School of Ocean Sciences at Bangor drew my attention to the effect of the more severe climate change estimates on coral reef regeneration. His conclusion is that in some areas it is much more severe than previously predicted. The warming effect that would result, even if all the Paris Agreement pledges are realised, would not allow corals sufficient time to regenerate between bleaching events.
Why should we in the UK care about coral reefs? The answers are: biodiversity; new medicines; fishing to feed millions; that the loss of low-lying islands means the relocation of people; and that the UK has several overseas territories with coral reefs. Is the UK prepared for increased frequency and intensity of coral bleaching events? What if we start to lose some of our overseas territories due to the erosion of coral reefs? Many of these places support human populations and some house military bases that we share with allies. Will the Government respond to the latest research and revise their emission targets to halt the speed at which ocean warming events are occurring? I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rees, that the Paris Agreement is not enough—it will be too little too late.
Moving from sea to land, every sector must reduce its impact on climate change. Agriculture accounts for 9% of UK greenhouse gas emissions. Another paper, from Professor Chadwick of Bangor, showed that greenhouse gas emissions from global agriculture are increasing at around 1% per year, yet substantial cuts in emissions could be achieved. His group assesses the mitigation potential of land sparing: increasing agricultural yields, thereby reducing the area of farmland needed and at the same time actively restoring natural habitats on the land spared. Restored habitats such as broad-leaved woodlands, wetlands and peatlands can sequester massive amounts of carbon and offset emissions from agriculture. The study showed that planting mixed broad-leaf woodland is much better at sequestering carbon than monocultures of fast-growing conifers, as well as promoting biodiversity. As has been said, it also contributes to cooling, prevents soil erosion and flooding, and slows down the release of fertilisers into waterways. Combining this approach with strategies to reduce food waste and meat consumption could help the UK achieve its climate objectives.
Higher yield potential could mean 30% to 40% of current farmland being used for carbon storage, with numerous biodiversity and social benefits. The researchers concluded that if this “spare land” was used to increase UK tree cover from 12% to 30% by the middle of this century and to restore 700,000 hectares of wet peatland, the farming sector could deliver its contribution to the legal target of cutting carbon emissions by 80% from 1990 levels.
The most promise was shown by improved crop plants that are more efficient at capturing nutrients from the soil, using water and photosynthesising. This requires investment in non-medical life science research, which had only a minor role in the Government’s industrial strategy, so I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Selborne, about the potential improvements that we could make through agriculture. Will the Minister say what work is being done in this area? Might our revised agriculture environmental support strategy, aimed at payments for delivering ecosystem services, result in displacing food production overseas unless we improve our own yields at the same time? There is a danger that, unless we increase yields, we could reduce our own emissions at the expense of those of other countries where there might be worse environmental and animal welfare standards.
Is Defra looking at land sparing? What government support is being given to efforts to plant more trees? As for the children, they ask what the Government are doing to get companies to reduce their emissions since only 10% of companies have a strategy for doing so. They are going to write to some local companies to ask them. They also want the Government to encourage more use of renewable energy. I think those are very sensible questions and I hope the Minister can answer them.
Smart Meters
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Henley
It is entirely open to the noble Lord to refuse to have a meter, if he so wishes. All we are trying to ensure is that everyone is offered a smart meter if they should so wish, because we feel that to go on using metering technology that is somewhat over 100 years old is not the right approach and that new meters would be better. I can give him an assurance that GCHQ and other people have looked at the security of the smart meters and are satisfied that they are suitably secure.
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, is the Minister aware that if you have solar panels on your roof, you cannot have a smart meter? I know that because I have tried several times and have been told that I cannot have a smart meter if I have solar panels, which we are all encouraged to have. Does he agree that unless a smart meter is developed that can work with solar panels, we are never going to have smart meters in every household in the country?
Lord Henley
I am afraid that what the noble Baroness says is a myth, but I will look at her case. There is no reason why one cannot have solar panels feeding into a smart meter and being taken into account. If the noble Baroness is having problems, she can come to me and I will look at them.
EU Membership: UK Science
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(7 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, the tone of our debates at Question Time this morning was more subdued than usual for obvious reasons, but in this debate we have rightly returned to a considerably more forthright tone. We have heard words such as “idiocy”, “derisory” and “carelessness”, so if I continue in that forthright tone, I hope the Minister will accept it in the spirit of returning to business as usual as soon as possible.
No scientist in her right mind would think of Brexit as being anything other than the worst challenge we could impose on UK science. Why would we want to lose access to major sources of funding, put at risk valuable international collaborations, deter top scientists from coming here and leave our biggest market for the outputs of science that make our lives better, healthier and longer? The committee’s report does its best to be optimistic, but it expresses very clearly the serious downsides of the choice this hard Brexit Government have made. As someone who is particularly concerned about the effect of Brexit on our life sciences, UK patients’ access to cutting-edge medicines and treatments, and the survival of our health and care services, I welcome the committee’s report, which highlights many of the concerns I have felt ever since 24 June last year, and it proposes some solutions to mitigate the worst of them.
One of the first effects I heard about, within a week of the referendum, concerned a research scientist I know who was in the early stages of a collaborative research funding application to the EU with scientists from elsewhere in Europe. He was asked to withdraw on the basis that his presence in the team would reduce the chances of the application being successful. So, while the committee states that there is a scarcity of hard evidence for this effect, it accepts that there is anecdotal evidence of discrimination in ways that may never be documented. I know that to be true.
A great many of our research projects are funded by the EU. The UK has benefited more than any other member country from EU money for science, partly because we are very good at spending it well, so the Government’s commitment to underwrite Horizon 2020 funding with new UK money is very welcome. However, what happens when Horizon 2020 comes to an end? It would be better if the Government tried to negotiate continued access for UK scientists to Horizon 2020, its successor and other EU funding, given that other countries outside the EU already have such access. The Prime Minister may not have the stomach to try to negotiate continued access to the single market, but surely our negotiators can have a try at this one, given its importance to our economy.
Harmonised regulations are particularly important to the development of medicines and medical technologies. While I agree with the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, on the issue of GM crops, I find myself more in agreement with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, about regulation. Regulation is not necessarily a burden, and if it was faulty we could have tried to improve it from within rather than walk away. We have the freedom to sell and the confidence to buy when our regulations are identical to those of our major customers. It is therefore not surprising that most of the submissions to the committee called for UK regulations in the scientific domain to remain harmonised with the EU.
In the medical domain, UK scientists have played a major role in the European Medicines Agency, and we have here in London a great deal of the expertise in medicines licensing and regulation. Where will that expertise go after Brexit? Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell pointed out that if we wish to trade with Europe, we are going to have to abide by the European regulatory system. But of course, that system will not remain static; it will change over the years, so I ask the Minister, how are we going to keep up? If the Government decide to set up our own system it will be very expensive, as pointed out by Mr James Lawford Davies, a solicitor and partner at Hempsons, in his submission to the committee. The UK would have to set up its own infrastructure and administration, with no additional benefit to us. It looks to me like a classic example of shooting yourself in the foot. The Government tell us that it will be all right but I am afraid that, based on their record to date, I doubt it.
Have the Government assessed the cost of setting up such a system, and if not, why not? The Government appear not to have heard of the phrase “plan B”. Will the increased trade we are supposed to be expecting post Brexit be in excess of the costs of this system? The committee recommends that such an assessment be made and published prior to the introduction of what my noble friend Lady Ludford calls, “The not so great cut-and-paste Bill”. Can the Minister assure us that that will happen so that we can assess the damage? Of course, the costs of an independent system are a fact, while the potential for increased global trade is speculation. No sensible business person exchanges facts for speculation, and neither do they take on unnecessary costs. That is why much of business is against Brexit, although as we know, big business is very flexible and resourceful and will survive.
UK science depends not just on international collaborations but on attracting top-flight scientists and student scientists to the UK. Here, the committee expresses serious concerns in its report about the Government’s approach to immigration. On the one hand, Jo Johnson MP stated:
“We remain fully open to scientists and researchers from across the EU”,
while on the other hand, the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, told the Conservative Party Conference that she would,
“look again at whether our immigration system provides the right incentives for businesses to invest in British workers”—
a not so veiled threat that is to be followed up by action. In two weeks’ time the immigration skills charge—a charge of £1,000 per year for workers brought in from abroad on a tier 2 visa—will be implemented. There are exemptions for PhD chemists, physicists, social scientists, research and development managers and so on, but there are no exemptions for health and care employers bringing in essential doctors and nurses to fill the gaps in our health service. When we discussed the regulations two days ago, I demanded an exemption for the NHS and social care, and I repeat that demand today. The tax will cost front-line services £7.2 million per year and add to the black hole in funding, at a time of severe Brexit challenge to the health workforce. It is a very short-sighted thing to do. The committee pointed out that the Government are also being “less than helpful” in refusing to exclude international students from their immigration targets, rightly described as “idiocy” by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne. The financial viability of many of our universities depends on being able to attract international undergraduate and graduate students and staff, so no wonder they are concerned about the Government’s intransigent attitude.
There are other avoidable threats. When the Health Service Medical Supplies (Costs) Bill went through the House, we passed an amendment to ensure that when the Government use their new powers in the Bill, they have to take account of the need to promote a thriving life sciences sector and access for UK patients to new medicines. Considering the challenges outlined by the committee in the report we are debating today, I am surprised that the Government overturned the amendment in another place. I hope that noble Lords will stand their ground on this when the Bill comes back to your Lordships’ House in a couple of weeks’ time.
I end by congratulating all members of the committee on their forensic examination of the threats of Brexit to British science, and I congratulate them on their valiant effort to be optimistic. I hope the Government will accept the committee’s helpful recommendations.