Universities: Sensitive Research

Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts

Tuesday 30th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right in his analysis of the problem, which I agree with wholeheartedly. The most powerful tool we have at our disposal in this is RCAT—the Research Collaboration Advice Team—which provides hundreds of individual items of advice in these areas, where it can actually be quite subtle whether something is dual or single-use or has a military or defence application. It is not something that can be very easily defined up front, and does require a certain wisdom and delicacy of advice to provide that.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, last week the Statement did not seem to say very much about which actors might be under consideration. The noble Lord, Lord Young, has already mentioned China, but do His Majesty’s Government also think that Iran and other countries might be a problem—not by giving funding, but by researchers and students coming? If that is the case, can His Majesty’s Government really expect universities to vet individuals? Is that not the role for government? I declare my interest as a professor at Cambridge.

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

The noble Baroness raises a very important point; it is not about naming one or more countries and targeting them. The non-legislative and legislative elements of the entire approach to this are about being actor agnostic, and simply looking at the cases as they arise.