Science and Technology Superpower (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, and the committee staff. I will venture a few words on schools, universities and R&D. Ideally, these crucial sectors should be governed by a bipartisan consensus that offers long-term stability. In depressing contrast, turbulence in government has triggered unstable policies, a rapid churn of Ministers and the proliferation of committees.

Attainment levels in our schools are poor compared to nations in the Far East and northern Europe. In particular, there are far too few good science teachers. There are three things that can be done: ensuring that conditions are good enough and pay levels are appropriate for practitioners of a serious profession; encouraging mature individuals to move into teaching from a career in research, industry or the Armed Forces; and making better use of the web and distance learning.

Our international rankings are higher in higher education, but there are some worrying trends. Academia is becoming less alluring. Some people will become academics, whatever happens—the nerdish element, of which I am one—but a world-class university system cannot survive just on them. It must attract a share of young people who are savvy about their options and ambitious to achieve something distinctive by their 30s. They increasingly associate academia with years of precarity and undue financial sacrifices.

A further off-putting trend is the deployment of ever more detailed performance indicators to quantify outputs, and the labour involved in preparing grant applications with a diminishing chance of success. This pressure gives two perverse incentives to young academics: to shun high-risk research and to downplay their teaching. Indeed, the declared rationale for setting up ARIA is to foster “long-term”, “blue-skies” research and freedom from bureaucracy in a fashion not available elsewhere in the system. It should surely be a higher priority to render less vexatious the bureaucracy of UKRI, whose budget is 50 times higher than ARIA’s.

In the UK, research is still strongly concentrated in universities—not so in France and Germany—but the encroachment of audit culture and other pressures are rendering universities less propitious environments for research projects that demand intense and sustained effort. Dedicated, stand-alone labs may become preferable —although there is a downside, as they reduce contact between talented researchers and students. Indeed, the UK owes its strength in biomedical science to its famous labs, which allow full-time, long-term research, with government funding massively supplemented by the Wellcome Trust, the cancer charities and a strong pharmaceutical industry. To ensure effective exploitation of new discoveries, these institutes must be complemented by organisations that can offer adequate development and manufacturing capability. This fortunate concatenation certainly proved its worth in the recent pandemic. We likewise need this in energy, AI and other crucial technologies.

One should welcome Paul Nurse’s recent report, whatever one’s views of his earlier report that created UKRI—and the web of new committees that it embedded into. However, our ability to attract and retain mobile academic talent, and our ranking as a destination of choice by those people, is now at risk. I will not reiterate the overwhelming case for rejoining the ERC, but there is now an international market for the best students as well: they are academic assets and a long-term investment in international relations. To retain its competitiveness as a “destination of choice” for mobile experts, despite the setback of Brexit, the nation must remove impediments and raise its game. Ways of doing this are a key theme of our committee’s report.