EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Lord Broers Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Broers (CB) [V]]

It is a privilege to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wharton of Yarm, on his appropriate and concise maiden speech.

If the UK is to remain a major industrial nation, we will have to sustain our competitiveness in the advancement of some, if not all, of the hard technologies that underpin medicine, agriculture, transport, information technology, communications, control systems and power generation. Progress in hard technologies is driven by international competition; it is rare that single nations or companies possess everything that is necessary.

Modern communications allow collaboration across international borders, and this capability must be harnessed to be competitive. Success almost always relies on the exchange of people. The easiest way to transfer new ideas is through exchange between the people who come up with the ideas and those who use them. The closer the collaboration, the better. Our nearest neighbours are in Europe, and we have enjoyed working with them to sustain, for example, our aerospace, automobile and IT and communications industries.

Erasmus has been a major force for good in these exchanges of researchers; it is two-way and includes not only students but university staff and those undertaking vocational and continuing education. Its loss is potentially very dangerous, as mentioned by many others in this debate, and the Turing scheme as presently proposed will not be an adequate replacement. If our advancement of these crucial technologies is to succeed, the Turing scheme will have to be either expanded to include two-way exchange and this broader group of people or complemented by other schemes that do this. It should be noted that students coming to the UK will produce income that will offset the cost of sending our students abroad.

Beyond Brexit (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Broers Excerpts

Tuesday 12th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Broers (CB)]

My Lords, I compliment the European Union Committee and my noble friend Lord Boswell on this report. I agree with all that it says, but I suggest that it should have said more, especially about the continued participation of the UK in the new European education, science and innovation programmes. These programmes include Erasmus, which was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and Horizon Europe and those of the European Research Council and the European Research Infrastructure Consortium. In this report the words “Erasmus” and “Horizon” appear only in footnotes and in a diagram, although reference is made to the European Union Committee’s comprehensive report published in February 2019 on Erasmus and Horizon. Overall, however, this report does not give them the prominence they deserve.

Our future competitiveness as a modern nation will depend to a huge extent on the skills of our citizens in all spheres of endeavour, and our economic survival will rely on the application of modern advances in engineering and science. It seems we have successfully negotiated our continuance in Horizon 2020 through to its conclusion in 2021, but the situation with Horizon Europe remains unclear. That programme has a budget of €100 billion and even more important than the money will be our involvement in the partnerships that it would provide. Modern advances in science, and especially in innovation, can be made only through collaboration. It is an inherently global activity and success is strongly influenced by proximity, so a large fraction of our collaborations have been with our European neighbours. Our engineers and scientists know each other. There is a lot of mutual admiration and successful collaboration. Let us make sure that that continues. Many pages of the report are devoted to the specialist committees and their importance, but I could not find any committee devoted specifically to our collaboration on education, science and engineering whose members are engineers and scientists. Will the Minister assure us that the Government are committed to doing all they can to preserve as many of our educational and scientific collaborations with Europe as possible?