Science and Technology: Economy

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman, on an excellent maiden speech. I have to say that I hesitated to put my name down for this debate. There are so many able people, including our wonderful introducer, the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate. The whole debate has shown this House’s great expertise in and knowledge of science and technology issues.

I am afraid I am a classic of what used to be —I hope—wrong with the British education system. I was a humble grammar school boy who got a scholarship to Oxford, where I did two degrees—but I did not even have a science O-level. I hope that weakness has now been remedied.

Since then, I have tried to make up for it by taking a close interest in science and technology policy, as a result of a close interest in industrial policy. For seven years, I had the great privilege of chairing the council of Lancaster University, on which I was ably assisted by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, who knew far more about the scientific issues than I did. Lancaster is an interesting institution. It was born in the “white heat” era—Harold Wilson opened it in 1965—but in the late 1990s, it decided to make a major commitment to science, building new departments in chemistry, physics and engineering, and a medical school, all opened up while Pauline—the noble Baroness—and I were on the council. This was an interesting attempt to build a strong science base outside the golden triangle. I would like to know what the Government’s attitude is to building research bases outside the golden triangle. I hasten to add that I am all in favour of the golden triangle, and I think that one should invest in places that are globally successful, but what contribution can a small but research-intensive institution like Lancaster make?

One of the things that was essential to us was Horizon. That brought us into partnerships with continental universities in areas of expertise. We also built partnerships in the UK, but I was always pushing the vice-chancellor harder on this. I thought: why do we not merge with a comparable institution where our scientific expertise would be complementary? What are we doing to help universities outside the golden triangle to build on their strengths?

What are the Government doing to make spin-offs from universities more effective and to increase them? When I worked with Peter Mandelson—the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson—when he was Industry Secretary, I chaired an advisory panel on new industry and new jobs, and came across the wonderful Hermann Hauser, of Arm. One of his ideas was the catapult initiative, which I think the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, in his time took forward. What more are we doing to incentivise the better use of scientific research in stimulating innovation and new enterprise? This is a very big unanswered question which I hope the new Government are going to take very seriously.