Brexit: Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Wednesday 5th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, as a career scientist I ask myself whether the Prime Minister’s deal is good or bad for UK science. Last Friday, the Science Minister, Sam Gyimah, gave his verdict when he resigned, saying that the deal would mean that the UK’s interests,

“will be repeatedly and permanently hammered by the EU 27 for many years to come”.

He recognised the gap between the warm and encouraging words of the political declaration and the harsh reality of negotiation over the years ahead.

The president of the Royal Society, commenting on the deal, put it this way:

“This is a step in the right direction but it will be a long hard road to reach a long-term agreement”.


The report that came out today from the European Union Select Committee also highlights in paragraph 199 that nothing is said in the deal about how we will reach future agreements on science and technology with the other member states.

The trigger event for the resignation of Sam Gyimah, as noble Lords will be aware, was the European Union 27 rejecting the UK’s bid to remain in Galileo. This is the European Union’s satellite navigation system that will serve as an alternative to the GPS system from the United States that we all use every day on our smartphones. Galileo, importantly, will give European Union member states access to high-resolution data that is crucially important in military security. We are now left out in the cold. Having spent £1.24 billion on Galileo, we are going to start all over again to build our own stand-alone system. This is lunacy.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

Does the noble Lord not agree that this was a completely disgraceful and vindictive act, based on their claim that they cannot share sensitive intelligence with our nation, when on a daily basis we are giving sensitive intelligence to Europe and saving lives in Europe? Is this not a quite extraordinary decision?

[Lord Krebs]

I agree that it is an extraordinary decision but, as I am saying, it reflects the difficulty of the future negotiations. This outcome undermines the Prime Minister’s hope that the UK,

“would like the option to fully associate ourselves with the excellence-based European science and innovation programmes—including the successor to Horizon 2020 and Euratom”.

Galileo is only one example of how our science and technology could suffer in future. In a recent survey of 1,000 staff at the Francis Crick Institute, Europe’s largest biomedical research institute, scientists were overwhelmingly negative about the consequences of Brexit for UK science. On 23 October, 29 Nobel prize winners and six Fields medallists—the maths equivalent of a Nobel—wrote to the Prime Minister expressing their deep concerns. The deal simply does not do enough to reassure the scientific community.

In my own university, Oxford, roughly 12% of research funding comes from the EU, and there is no guarantee that in future we will be able to participate in the schemes that follow on from Horizon 2020. In the European Research Council funding programme, which is based on scientific excellence, the UK is far and away the most successful country in the EU, and the top three institutions in the EU for receiving funds under this scheme are Cambridge, Oxford and UCL.

[Lord Vinson (Con)]

My Lords, is it not in fact true that our annual contribution to the EU is merely recycled and comes back to our science and other bodies, so moneys should still be available?

[Lord Krebs]

I thank the noble Lord for that because it anticipates my next paragraph. The UK gets out more than 1.5 times as much as we pay in, so our return on investment is stupendous. But it is not just about money; it is the exchange of people and ideas that will be lost if we cannot remain in these European programmes.

Noble Lords might ask: why does the science base in this country matter? The reason is that it is the basis of our future prosperity. As the Prime Minister herself put it in introducing the industrial strategy:

“That is what our modern Industrial Strategy is all about. Investing in science and research to keep us at the forefront of new technologies and the benefits they bring”.


So, whether you are thinking of new medical treatments, novel sources of energy, transport or tackling climate change, all of that will depend in future on our investment in science and on the international nature of our science.

I know that the Minister will not be able to provide us with any reassurance about the future because, as other noble Lords have said, the future is quite uncertain—but perhaps he could tell us what assessment the Government have made of the impact of the deal that is on the table on the future prospects for UK science. Some have said, “Why worry about the EU, because, after all, we can collaborate with other countries?”—but it is not either/or. In my own scientific career I have done research in German, French and Dutch laboratories as well as in the United States and Canada, so it is not as if we are constrained from international collaboration outside the European Union by our membership of EU research programmes.

I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us what evidence he has to support the notion that this deal will be good for UK science. Perhaps he could also tell us what the go-it-alone replacement for Galileo will cost and how those costs compare with working within the European Union. As things stand, I do not see enough in the deal on the table that will support the future of UK science and technology for me to think that it is a satisfactory deal—which is why I will support the Motion in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon.