Science and Technology: Economy

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, for giving the chance of this debate, and I really enjoyed the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman. I totally agree with her on the need for trustworthiness and openness. I very much hope that the Government will give her the job of writing the story of the road to net zero, which is currently not displaying those characteristics.

There are three things that I want to urge on the Government. The first is that they really put money and effort into the international standards and regulations by sending really good people to the conferences which set the standards. By doing regulation really well in this country, we make this a really good place to do business. Look at the opposite; look at what happened to telecoms. When I was young, we were top of the tree and now we are nowhere. We started sending rubbish people to the standards conferences and we just became irrelevant.

The second point I wanted to make to the noble Lord is that science must challenge. We spend billions on string theory and dark matter: lots of scientists cuddled up in the comfort of an unfalsifiable consensus. It may be that this is right, and that the universe is as cold and uninteresting as those theories offer, but there are alternatives. Faced by consensus, our bias ought to be to challenge. We ought to be looking at things like quantised inertia, because of its explanatory power and the hope it offers for things such as motion and power. We ought not to be leaving that on the sideline, as we are doing now with its tiny bit of funding. This applies to lots of other interesting alternatives to the consensus and to many other bits of consensus which have established themselves around science.

We must be better at supporting challenge. We must help the Civil Service to be better at dealing with failure. We ought to reward good failure and to encourage the Civil Service to go for the kill factor. Do first what is really difficult and dangerous, and leave the easy things. If you fail early doing something difficult and dangerous, you learn from it and you do not spend a lot of money doing things that will only fail later, because you did not tackle the main subject.

To pick up on something that I think my noble friend Lord Markham was aiming towards, let us have more pull mechanisms—prizes for success and advance market commitments. Give Innovate UK a clear mandate to do those things, because that way will really crowd in private sector interest and investment and end up rewarding success, leaving the cost of failures to the private sector.

I know that the noble Lord is keen on resilience and fire drills. I hope that we have a serious fire drill in the course of this Government. To engage the country in understanding the vulnerabilities of, say, the electricity supply system will really help us to understand the need to have and benefit from having manufacturing in this country in a serious way, so that we can recover from a setback. To have a fire drill will give the public confidence that we will react well when something happens. Suppose we were to have a Carrington Event—a huge solar storm knocking out the transformers in the electricity network. There would be no power for a year or two, because we do not have the capacity to rebuild the transformers. Having a fire drill means that we do not make that mistake, because we will have the courage to turn off the transformers in time and the public will know that we will do it and do it well.