Economy: Productivity

Debate between Lord Prior of Brampton and Earl Attlee

Wednesday 8th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

The noble Lord makes a good point. The fact is that the productivity of our investment in research in British universities is incredibly high and the output of our top universities is fantastically high by any world standards. He will know as well as I do that we are now committed to raising an extra £2 billion a year in research by 2021, which is a very significant increase. He is also right that even after that increase we are still not investing as much on a per capita basis or on a percentage of GDP basis as some of our biggest competitors—Germany and the US, for example. So we are making good progress but the job is not yet done.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

Will the Minister say what we are doing to enhance the social status of professional engineers, and can he write to me and say how many professional engineers have received an honour for engineering, as opposed to financial services?

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My noble friend raises the profound point that culturally in this country we have tended to encourage people more in the humanities than we have in engineering and STEM subjects. Perhaps the country is being run by too many people who have done PPE at Oxford and too few who did engineering at Cambridge—but there we are. On the honours given to people with a background in engineering, I will look into that and write to my noble friend.