Science and Technology Superpower (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I join everyone in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, and her committee; I look forward to its future work and future reports—which I hope will be debated more promptly.

This report from August 2022 reveals gaping holes where government action should have been. I thank Imperial College London for its useful briefing, which identified how some of those gaping holes have been plugged, at least with stopgap measures. However, as many other noble Lords have already noted, the remaining enormous holes in the house of scientific and technological endeavour, out of which human and financial resources are fast flowing, are the lack of UK association with the Horizon Europe programme; the disastrous hostile environment immigration policies; and the collapse in the genuine official development assistance support. The Royal Academy of Engineering also provided useful reflections, stressing principles including a willingness to act for the long term; moving with agility and at pace; trusted and capable leadership; and action that accelerates progress. Those are not, I am afraid, anything with which this Government are associated.

However, rather than taking pot shots—as tempting and easy as that is—I will seek to bring a unique Green perspective to this debate, and make three challenges to the very foundations of the Government’s approach and, in some respects—and with respect—to that of your Lordships’ committee. The first is the assumption, underlying much of the Government’s rhetoric, that the aim of the science and technology framework—with its talk of bringing technologies to market and of private sector involvement and profit—is to make things, or to create services or intellectual property, to sell.

Certainly, when one looks at the UKRI five-year strategy from March 2022, I am not going to argue with the aim of driving the development, adoption and diffusion of green technologies, but also in that list is developing preventive measures to improve the nation’s health and well-being. The new Secretary of State talks of helping British people to live longer, smarter, healthier and happier lives, but what if achieving that means not making things or creating services to sell, not improving profits but finding ways in which to heal lives and environments without making a profit, thus cutting demand for expensive drugs or invasive treatments, ending the need for farmers to use pesticides or herbicides, or co-creating essential knowledge, working with researchers and communities in the global South and sharing that knowledge for free? Identifying the bad things that we do now and stopping them is also science, even if that means cutting profits and reducing GDP. We need to think hard about how we find funding for research and development for such measures, and that has to be a government priority.

Secondly, I disagree with the five critical technologies identified in the science and technology framework. Crucially, there are two things that are not there: ecology and social innovation. I disagree particularly with one that is there:

“Engineering biology–the application of rigorous engineering principles to the design of biological systems”.


That is such a 20th-century reductionist and outdated view, the kind that we saw on full display in the creation of the so called Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act. Are they really the same Government who occasionally, at odd moments, will claim to believe in the principles of agroecology and to understand that the survival of human systems on this planet to maintain a liveable climate and natural systems means working with the incredibly complex and still little understood natural systems of animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses and archaea that together have created life on this planet?

Finally, although noble Lords may think that I have been radical enough, I am going to finish with an even more radical thought. The UKRI again speaks of securing UK strategic advantage in game-changing technologies, but rather than thinking about beating others in a world facing the climate emergency and nature crisis, with epidemics of poverty and ill health, rampant pandemic threats and a planet poisoned with plastics, pesticides and pharmaceuticals, we have to co-operate with others to make the best possible collective use of human ingenuity, skills, talent and time to survive and thrive through this next dangerous century.