Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chancellor of Cranfield University, a postgraduate university that as its stock in trade works very closely with business to bring practical benefits to society. I am also a member of the Science and Technology Committee of your Lordships’ House. It is quite late and it is getting later. I thought I might just try standing up and saying, “I agree with Lord Mair”, but then I thought perhaps no one would have remembered what the noble Lord said since this has been a very long speakers list, so I shall bore the House for a bit longer.

I shall focus on the provision for enfolding Innovate UK into UKRI. Innovate UK has done a good job of promoting innovation, so you could ask the question, “Why change?”. If pressed, the Government say they are implementing the recommendations of the Nurse review, but in his report Paul Nurse said:

“Innovate UK has a different customer base as well as differences in delivery mechanisms, which Government needs to bear in mind in considering such an approach, and which this review, according to its remit, has not looked at in depth”.

So I do not think the Government can really rely on that, since he seems to be saying, “There are pros and cons, and by the way I haven’t looked at it very much myself”.

My concerns are similar to those outlined in the Nurse report. Innovate UK has been a strong influence for good in the commercialisation of university research and has a great track record in working with the research councils. However, its pre-eminent effectiveness has been in its business-facing role, helping businesses, particularly SMEs, and indeed individuals to bring ideas to market. The most significant driver of innovation and R&D in business is the kind of ecosystems that Innovate UK plays an important role in developing, including the role of supply chains and customers in helping businesses to talk to other businesses.

In particular, Innovate UK plays a unique role in fostering very early-stage development. It is probably caricaturing a bit to say that it helps mad, scary inventors with a high passion for a bright idea at a stage when it is only a twinkle in their eye, but it certainly engages with the sort of ideas that have not reached proof-of-concept stage and therefore are not the sort of thing that the banks are going to support—higher risk but worth a punt, as it were. That is where Innovate UK plays a unique role that nobody else does. It is quite telling that the current split of Innovate UK activity is less than 20% on the commercialisation of university research and 80% on business-facing activities.

Although expanding support to the universities for the commercialisation of its research is important, this must not mean that Innovate UK within the UKRI simply just becomes the creature that is there to commercialise the work of the research councils. The research councils, of course, will be a very big factor in UKRI and Innovate UK will simply be a small part of it. It is interesting that, when these concerns were raised with the Government—I am delighted to see that the long-standing, temporarily sitting, and now again standing Minister is still with us tonight—the Minister kindly issued a fact sheet in October 2016 and gave assurances that,

“Innovate UK will retain its current business-facing focus. Innovate UK will not become just the commercialisation arm of the Research Councils. … Innovation is a complex, non-linear process with much innovation occurring business-to-business”.

After that stirring start, the fact sheet goes a bit flaky from its early promise and proceeds to list the extensive benefits of academic to business partnerships, and seems to lose the plot on the business-to-business innovation. In a number of subsequent briefings that we have been lucky enough to have with the Minister, his focus very rapidly shifts to university research when he talks about Innovate UK.

I should reassure the House that I am not against the principles of UKRI. There is a need for the promotion of cross-cutting research, for having a strategic capability to review research agenda in the UK, to have more weight for research in the industrial strategy, and indeed to have a united and strong voice for research in the face of Brexit. I make one simple request: the Government should honour the commitment to enshrine Innovate UK’s business-facing focus in the legislation. The current wording in Clause 90 is inadequate. We need a new clause that lists briefly all the terms of reference of Innovate UK, which is very much needed if we are to be reassured that the Government and UKRI will not tend to forget the business-facing role in the future.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chancellor of Cranfield University, a truly global university in science and technology, with almost two-thirds of its students coming from outside of the UK. In looking at the Government’s Green Paper on industrial strategy, it is clear that what we want to try to forge for a post-Brexit UK is a vibrant industrial sector that is truly multinational in its businesses. That depends on being truly global in our approach to research and in recruiting the best and brightest students from across the world.

I know that we are in a particularly overheated moment in terms of immigration, and the Government are quite understandably nervous as a kitten in that respect. However, the reality is that we cannot regard international students as people who are coming here as supplicants to us. We are going as supplicants to them, because they have many choices. What international students want is to go somewhere where they will be able to study as an undergraduate, and then potentially as a postgraduate, at the cutting edge of whatever their discipline is, where they feel that their families are welcome to come and stay with them because they might be here for many years, and where they have the opportunity of moving seamlessly into employment with a company or organisation that they might have had contact with during their university years. That is what they want, and that is what we are preventing from happening if we are not careful.

The signal has gone out that Britain is not open for business for international students, whether or not that is true. The time has come, after all of these reports from other committees saying that we should change this very important signal, for the Government to ponder on that. The reality is that we are not going to see any diminution in the heat and steam around immigration in the next few years: we are going to see it getting worse and worse as we exit from Europe. The time has now come to make sure that the by-product of that heat and steam is not that we failed to deliver for our high standards of education, our high standards of research or our place in the global business community.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, in supporting Amendment 150 I declare an interest as having, for many years in the past, led a large research group at Oxford University that was heavily dependent on international students, not just from the European Union but from all over the world, from Argentina to the far eastern corner of what was then the Soviet Union.

I want in particular to refer back to one of the many Select Committee reports. The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, referred to the fact that this whole question of overseas students has been examined in recent years by many Select Committees. One such committee was the Science and Technology Select Committee when I was the chair; in 2014 we produced a report on STEM students—science, technology, engineering and mathematics students—in relation to international students and immigration rules. In the summary of our report, we concluded:

“Above all, we are concerned that Government policy is contradictory. The Government are simultaneously committed to reducing net migration and attracting increasing numbers of international students”.


Echoing what my noble friend Lord Bilimoria said, certainly in 2014, the Government had a target of increasing international students by 15% to 20% over the next five years. We went on to say, as other noble Lords have said during this debate:

“This contradiction could be resolved if the Government removed students from the net migration figures”.


Will the Minister, in his reply, tell us whether he recognises this target that the Government certainly had two or three years ago? Does it still exist and, if so, does he recognise that government policy is currently contradictory?

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Report: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 15th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 166 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, and the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara. I apologise that I was not present for this item when it was dealt with in Committee because I was abroad, but I have read carefully the discussion that happened at that point.

I, too, am a member of the Science and Technology Committee, which looked at this issue recently. I share the concern that was raised by a number of witnesses that Innovate UK would be hijacked by the research councils and become the commercialisation and innovation arm of the research councils, and that that would usurp the hugely valuable role that Innovate UK currently has in being business facing and supporting innovation, especially by small businesses and especially at very early stages, when an entrepreneur has a bright idea but no backers and no proof of concept. I share the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, that the membership and chairmanship of the committee for Innovate UK need to be very much business focused and to include a predominance of business-focused people.

I recognise that the Government have gone some way in Amendment 183 and I welcome that. Indeed, I welcome the meetings that I have had with Ministers here and Sir John Kingman and with the Minister of State for Universities and Science in the other place—who is not here today, although he regularly is—but it is probably my conversations with Jo Johnson that have made me the most alarmed, I am afraid, because although he gives assurances throughout about the business-facing role of Innovate UK, every time I have heard him describe it unprompted, he immediately describes it as being the innovation arm of the research councils.

I hope the Minister will recognise that the role of Innovate UK needs further strengthening and that to give it a business-based chairman and a predominance of business-based members on the committee would do that.

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome government Amendment 183, which addresses the issue that the noble Baroness, Lady Young, has just referred to. As chairman of the Science and Technology Committee, I can confirm that we were indeed concerned at the original proposals, some months back now, that Innovate UK should be put together with Research England into a research council, because it was clearly absolutely essential that the business community should have confidence that it had Innovate UK very much at its disposal as its organisation, and it was not somehow going to be subsumed by the research councils to be the commercial arm of Research Councils UK.

I accept that the concerns expressed by the noble Baronesses, Lady Brown and Lady Young, have validity, but I recognise that the government amendments, particularly paragraphs (a) and (b) in Amendment 183, requiring arrangements to have regard to,

“persons engaged in business activities”,

and,

“the need to promote innovation by persons carrying on business”,

go a very long way from where we were some months ago. I, for one, am content to accept these as meeting most of my original concerns.