Higher Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: Science and Technology Committee Report

Lord Broers Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Broers]

I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Willis, on obtaining this debate and on his excellent opening speech. I also thank the clerks for their support, and Professor William Wakeham for his invaluable and insightful advice. He knows as much about this field as anyone.

I will address my brief remarks to the issue of ensuring that science-based industries are supplied with the outstanding creative scientists and engineers they need to produce competitive, up-to-date products, across a full range: pharmaceuticals, automobiles, aeronautical components, IT and software-based systems, et cetera. These researchers are almost always postgraduates. Without them, modern technology companies cannot survive. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, has talked about this. The Government seem to have a blind spot when it comes to postgraduates.

The Select Committee report contains a number of recommendations that relate to postgraduates. I am going to concentrate on just one, recommendation 15, which suggests that,

“the Government set up an expert group to consider the supply and demand of STEM postgraduate provision in the UK and to identify weaknesses and areas of skills shortage”.

This recommendation was rejected by the Government. I believe this was a mistake.

Universities and industry have traditionally developed an understanding of their mutual interests by being members of the same international research communities. It was at conferences or through publications that industrial researchers met academics whose work was relevant to their products. This frequently led to companies retaining these academics as consultants and, as a consequence, their research students became aware of the interests of industry. Industrialists got to know who the most talented students were and could approach them to join their company or to support them through CASE studentships et cetera.

A striking statistic is that 76% of doctoral students are studying STEM subjects, of which I would expect at least 40% to be working in applied science or engineering. In today’s difficult financial times, the most relevant way to measure the success of their applied research is to find out how many of these postgraduate students have ended up working in industry in the field of their postgraduate studies. The best time to assess this is probably five years after they graduated. Many just leave and never come back to research, let alone research for industry. Technology transfer is most easily achieved through the transfer of people, and this is also an accurate measure of whether the technology has actually been transferred. I doubt that such data are available, but they should be. We have to know how much of our research is having an impact on real products in the real market. We keep boasting about our science base, but it is increasingly clear that it is placing only a few of our industries in a competitive international position. Let us find out what is actually the situation. If we are doing really well, 20% of our applied science and engineering research should be influencing products. I recall that in the US research laboratories I worked in for 20 years we regarded a laboratory as very successful if 20% of its research influenced new product development. Mind you, I am talking about research and not development; we always conflate these two, just showing how ignorant we are of that world. Research and development are different. Ten per cent was the cut-even point; let us find out how we are doing.

Regrettably, ever fewer companies today carry out research, as opposed to development, with the consequence that fewer UK industrial researchers are reporting state-of-the-art research and that the traditional meeting place for industry and academia is disappearing. Several of our successful companies have developed alternative ways of bridging to universities. They have the knowledge and skills to understand how to operate in the new environment, where academic research must play a much more important role than in the past.

This issue will not be solved by HEFCE consulting industry by using existing mechanisms as the Government’s response to the Select Committee report hopes. We need to understand better how we compare with others in the employment by industry of postgraduates in STEM subjects. A specialist group, headed by successful entrepreneurs and senior industrialists, needs to be formed and asked to determine whether we are internationally competitive in having our government-funded research taken up by industry and, if so, why we appear so low on the table of R&D spend as a fraction of GDP. As I have said, it is widely acknowledged that the best way to succeed in technology transfer is through the transfer of people. We need to know how many of our postgraduate students are working in industry and whether they have carried with them the research expertise and results that they gained while pursuing government-funded research at universities. We then need to reinforce the methods that the most successful companies have used to make up for a shortfall if that is what the data show.

As far as I can see, these data, and an understanding of what is influencing them, are not going to emerge using present mechanisms for interactions with industry. I therefore recommend to the Minister that means for obtaining these data be put in place and that the Select Committee’s recommendation be accepted. I ask the Government to reconsider their decision.