Science Research Funding in Universities (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]]

My Lords, this has been a wide-ranging debate and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the committee on an excellent speech and report. I was not a member of the committee when the report was written, but I am now. Nor am I chancellor of any university, which puts me in a minority today. Leaving aside the fact that it has been more than a year coming, this debate is timely in other respects. University funding has been hard hit by Covid-19. A London Economics report suggests an average loss of income per higher education institution of approximately £20 million, with some potentially losing £100 million. This could lead to approximately 30,000 job losses in the sector. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, outlined the other shortfalls in research funding, which can only cause us to lose valuable researchers. Today, students are returning to university, with consequent worries about contagion entailing extra cleaning costs, and the end of the EU transition phase is upon us without a deal yet, with all the uncertainties that brings for the university research sector.

The committee strongly regretted that the Augar report on post-18 education suggested lowering the cap on tuition fees for UK students but did not address the fact that student fees often have to cross-subsidise research. Such cross-subsidy has been a result of quality-related funding not keeping up with inflation since 2010, so a deficit has built up. Can the Minister confirm the rumours that this idea has been shelved? If not, can I join my noble friend Lady Bowles of Berkhamsted in asking the Minister to confirm that the teaching grant will be increased to cover the shortfall in funding from students? If not, as the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, warned, important spending areas such as widening participation programmes could be affected. This consequence could not be described as “levelling up”. It is vital that funding covers the full economic cost of research or else the resilience of the sector will be adversely affected as subsidies will not be available from elsewhere.

On foreign students, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, mentioned, several factors have affected the number of these high-fee-paying students starting this year, among them the Covid pandemic and the uncertainties over our exit from the European Union. This is bad enough, but also to lower the domestic fee cap would be pretty disastrous unless it was compensated.

The Augar review also proposed wider powers for the Office for Students to rule on the value of courses. The committee was very sceptical about this, suggesting that it would erode university autonomy. It rightly emphasised that funding should be based on research excellence. I strongly agree that we need to be very careful about this. I hope that we will be given details of the criteria very soon, with an opportunity to question Ministers about them, because they could badly affect pure scientific research. During the Covid-19 pandemic, we have greatly benefited from research about the nature of the virus itself. This has underpinned the work on vaccines, treatments and mitigations and public behaviour recommendations. It has been vital and therefore I would not want any system that disadvantaged discovery research.

Noble Lords have received briefings from several medical research charities warning that their share of funding for research and clinical trials will be reduced by at least £310 million this year because the pandemic has badly affected their ability to fundraise. The noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, gave us some detail about this issue. Although the Government have offered some money to charities, for some strange reason medical research charities have been left out. I join the noble Lord in asking the Minister whether the Government will consider the AMRC’s proposal to rectify this.

The pandemic has highlighted the strength of our scientific and medical research sector. Our rapid progress in understanding, modelling and predicting the nature and spread of the virus, and ongoing work to develop treatments and a possible vaccine, is the result of investment in research over many decades allowing the build-up of highly-skilled teams of scientists collaborating across the globe. It is likely that many lives have been saved through this research, so it is vital that the resilience of the sector is protected.

In its response to the committee, the Government repeated their manifesto commitment to increase investment in research and development to 2.4% of gross domestic product by 2027. Total R&D spending is currently 1.7%, so one might be encouraged by this commitment. However, as my noble friend Lord Shipley pointed out, GDP has been badly hit by the pandemic and it is anticipated that this will continue for several years, so there would be a consequent reduction in the absolute amount of money which would become available through the commitment. He suggested the solution that the baseline for the 2.4% should be 2019 GDP before Covid-19 hit it. Will the Minister recommend this idea to the Chancellor?

During our membership of the EU, the UK has been particularly successful in attracting EU scientific and medical research funding, as well as bringing collaborators here from EU countries. In order to address concerns about the loss of such funding, the noble Lord, Lord Mair, strongly supported the committee’s recommendation that the UK Government negotiate strong association with Horizon Europe so that UK research groups would not be disadvantaged by our exit. I heard this week that Canada, Australia and other countries are applying to join this excellent programme and yet, despite 40 years’ close relationship, the UK Government have not yet been able to negotiate membership or association. Indeed, with the way things are going and the Government by their own admission planning to break international law and renege from elements of the withdrawal agreement, I would be surprised if the EU wanted us as a member of something as vital as Horizon Europe. How can anyone trust a country that tries unilaterally to change elements of an international agreement signed only eight months ago? Can the Minister therefore say what progress has been made in negotiations to enable the UK to take part in the benefits of Horizon Europe?

Several noble Lords mentioned international mobility, and the committee expressed great concern that new immigration laws should not prevent or deter researchers and technicians from other countries from coming to the UK to join international teams. They particularly mentioned science technicians, who may fall below the salary threshold. It is not just getting the visas that matters but the costs. As my noble friend Lady Randerson pointed out, up-front visa costs here are four to six times higher than in other leading science nations. Besides that, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, emphasised, a researcher wanting to come to work in our NHS on clinical trials, for example, and to bring their family would have to pay thousands of pounds to use the very NHS in which they are working. That is a deterrent. What do the Government propose to do to correct this?

It is tempting at this time of the Covid pandemic to focus on medical research and the contribution of our university researchers to tackling it, but another crisis is looming—the climate crisis. It is vital that our universities are enabled to provide us with information about the progress and effects of global warming and to develop innovative ways of preventing it going any further and mitigating the effects it is already having on our planet. I was fascinated to read one example in the briefing from Imperial College about Dr Qilei Song, who is researching cost-effective redox flow batteries which are energy storage devices large enough to power cities. This research aims to accelerate developments in renewable energy, mitigate climate change, and solve the mismatch between intermittent supply of renewable energy and the variable demands of the power grid. The noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow, mentioned the work of the Faraday Institution on battery research, an example of the diversity of research institutions for which the noble Lord, Lord Willets, was calling. This vital work must not be put at risk.

Finally, I return to the next immediate crisis, Brexit. As the UK has been so successful in the past at attracting EU funding for scientific research, the Government must take into account that to replace that funding they are going to have to put in more than our former contribution to the Horizon programme and not just match it. Can the Minister assure the Committee that they will provide sufficient funds to avoid a shortfall?