Scientific Infrastructure (S&T Report)

Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)]

My Lords, I am delighted to speak in this debate and to pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who not only chaired this inquiry but, as the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, has just said, has been the chairman of the committee for the past four years. I have been a member for three years now, and I have greatly enjoyed working under his chairmanship. I am sorry that he is standing down, but as we all know, there is a House rule that after four years one must do so. I should also declare an interest as a former fellow of and researcher at the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex and currently as an honorary fellow of Birkbeck college.

This was an interesting inquiry for the committee to undertake. As the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, indicated, it was stimulated by what has happened to the science budget over the past three or four years. In the 2010 austerity Autumn Statement, although science funding itself was ring-fenced, it was done only in money terms and not in real terms, and only for current expenditure, thus not for capital expenditure. In relation to capital expenditure, the 2010-11 funding had originally been set at £872 million. Had that been carried through for the five years of this Government, it would have amounted to a total expenditure of £3.49 billion, whereas actually the Budget cut it to £1.896 billion, representing a cut in funding for science capital of 40%. This in turn led to substantial changes in plans that had been under way, with many projects being put on hold. But, in practice, the cuts were largely offset by a series of ad hoc announcements in Autumn Statements and March Budgets which restored the capital sum of funding to the original 2010 target level of around £3.5 billion. Some of these announcements were in addition to general funding, but quite a lot were committed to very specific projects, a point mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, such as the Open Data Institute, or associated with the announcement of the “eight great technologies”.

However, what we generally heard from our witnesses was that this sort of blowing hot and cold is highly disruptive to the long-term planning of science infrastructure, and it has happened several times over the past three decades. One looks back over time. In the 1980s, capital funding suffered severe cuts, but was restored to some extent in the early 1990s with cutbacks again at the end of the 1990s, and made good by the joint infrastructure programmes and science research infrastructure programmes of the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, in the 2000s. Then again in 2010 there were sharp cutbacks, summed up well by the Oxford University submission, which said that:

“The irregular appearance of capital to be allocated at short notice tends to militate against sustainable strategic investments in research infrastructure”.

That sums up the essence of our inquiry: we were worried that the erratic funding of capital projects was damaging Britain’s ability to hold its own within world science, and that what we needed was a longer-term sustainable planning framework that allowed, sometimes, for the 15, 20, 25 or even 30-year horizon necessary for some of these very major projects.

One of our main recommendations was that we needed to build some form of strategic framework with which to plan the investment, developed over time and adhered to by Governments. As has already been mentioned, there was the idea that the BIS director-general for knowledge and innovation should have responsibility for developing a long-term strategy and investment plan for scientific infrastructure, setting investment priorities over the next 10 to 15 years, and that for that purpose he should have an ad hoc committee of some sort to back him up. Again, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, mentioned, we were particularly concerned at the disconnect between capital and operational budgets—at the fact that the ISIS facility at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory was able to operate for only 120 days a year because of the need to save on electricity costs.

We were also anxious to see proper links between research council and higher education funding council expenditures at universities and big infrastructure projects—what we called the mid-range issues. As the University of Nottingham pointed out, it is important that samples are tested at the home laboratory before being taken to the Diamond Light Source. That optimises use of the very expensive national facility there, but requires the university itself to have access to appropriate up-to-date equipment. We put much emphasis here on the participation of universities in collaborations—not necessarily having the mid-size equipment themselves but being able to access it within their regional framework.

We also noted the benefits that stemmed from participating in and hosting major international scientific projects such as CERN or JET. Some quite interesting evidence was given about the development of CERN within the Swiss and French environment, and it was felt that the UK was not always as ready as it might be either to participate or to think about hosting such facilities. We wanted to see an evaluation of the costs and benefits of hosting such activities. In particular, we thought that successive Governments had perhaps underestimated the knock-on benefits from having both the highly trained scientific workforce that they created and the spillover benefits for start-up SMEs and small companies.

Finally, while welcoming the Government’s initiative to encourage collaboration with universities through the UK research partnership investment fund, we felt that rather more could be done to encourage industry to participate and contribute to the long-term planning of facilities.

Like others, one can only be very pleased with the Government’s response, and not only the response that we received in January; I was particularly impressed by the announcements in the Minister’s speech at Cambridge two or three weeks ago, and the publication at the end of April of the big consultation document on proposals for long-term capital investment in science and research, because essentially it picks up and does what we asked for. In the Autumn Statement, there was a commitment to a capital budget for 2015-16 of £1.1 billion a year, higher than up till now, which the Government now pledge to maintain in real terms through to 2021, over a five-year period, leading to a total spend of £5.9 billion—almost £6 billion.

As their response in January promised, the Government have now set up a major consultation exercise to discuss how best this money is to be spent. Some £1 billion of it is already committed to projects such as the European Space Agency, the Met Office, the Higgs institute and the new polar flagship. However, decisions about how best to allocate the approximately £5 billion that is left are to be made after consultation to assess the views of the scientific community and where its priorities lie. This consultation is to be led not by the director-general of knowledge and innovation, as we had suggested, but by the Science Minister himself. In some ways that is an extremely good thing; it gives real credibility to the fact that the Government are giving this priority and ministerial time. There will be an advisory group chaired by the director-general of knowledge and innovation, which will include representatives from the learned societies, the research councils, the higher education funding councils, industry and the charities. Essentially, the idea of this group, as of the consultation exercise itself, is to advise the Minister on the development of a strategic road map for science and research infrastructure.

There is great deal to be pleased about in terms of what we have achieved. I have a number of questions to put to the Minister, and perhaps he can answer either now or later. First, on technical skills, the response from the Government rightly put a good deal of emphasis on the development of digital skills and what the Government are doing to promote them. Our report, however, placed emphasis on the importance of infrastructure and providing a wider, technically trained workforce. The Government have been putting much emphasis on developing the technician-level apprenticeships in the STEM area. While we celebrate the very substantial increase in the number of apprentices under the Government, the figures in detail show that the majority of these apprenticeships are in fact only at level 2 and are in such areas as business administration and the retail trade. Do the Government have any up-to-date figures on how their attempts to get specialist apprentices working up to technician level—the sort of HND level—in the STEM area are doing? Do they have any more recent figures than are available?

Secondly, in terms of hosting international facilities, in their response the Government mentioned two studies under way, looking at the costs and benefits of hosting such centres, one led by BIS and the other by the OECD. This was in January. Has either of these studies been published and, if so, what were their main conclusions?

Thirdly, both we and the Government have put emphasis on the need for collaboration between institutions and with industry. In particular, both of us praised the achievements of the UK research partnership investment fund. However one of the very depressing features, probably the most depressing, of the scientific R&D scene in Britain is the degree to which industrial R&D fails to increase. Indeed, in real terms it has been falling. As we know, if we look at it as a proportion of GDP it has recently fallen even lower than it has been before. We are well below our international competitors on this issue.

A feature of this is that statistics on R&D usually lag two or three years behind the present. One would hope very much that the pick-up in economic growth over the past year has perhaps led industry to begin to move forward on this. Do the Minister or the department have any indication that we are seeing a turn in industrial R&D? What was encouraging was that the response to the partnership fund was a positive one, and we managed to lever a great deal of extra resource from industry as a result of it. However, it would be good to know that industry really is backing up what is happening more generally.

My final question, which is in a sense a plea, is this. One of the features of the evidence we received was that the timescales are extremely long. We are talking about going through to 2021, which is a seven-year horizon, and in budgetary terms about a five-year horizon. But one really needs a horizon of 15 or 20 years, and sometimes even 30 years. There was some discussion of whether there is a need for some sort of cross-party agreement. I raised this at a lecture a couple of weeks ago at University College, London, at which the Minister talked about the consultation exercise. I asked him whether there might be cross-party agreement to develop a long-term, forward-looking strategy for science infrastructure. He said, I think rightly, that there is no real disagreement between the Labour Party and the coalition in terms of the general targets for scientific research. However, general agreement is one thing—the Minister praised the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, for what he had achieved—but it would be good to see some kind of formal cross-party agreement in this area. That is a question as much for the Labour Party as it is for the Minister. I think that the public would be pleased to see the parties working together in an area where there is no real party-political disagreement.