Science Research

David Mowat Excerpts

Wednesday 10th November 2010 Westminster Hall

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) for giving me the chance to speak. I am one of three hon. Members in the Chamber from Imperial college—I think that there are only three of us—so we should get our retaliation in first—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) is one of them.

I wish to talk about the application of science. We have heard a lot about pure research and so on, but when we think about the economy over the next 20 or 30 years, and the fact that we can no longer rely on the City and North sea oil to the extent that we have over the past two decades, we must ask where the innovation will come from. With respect to the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) and the large contribution made by arts graduates, that innovation will, to a great extent, come from science.

My constituency, like many in the north-west, will lose around 2,000 public sector jobs over the lifetime of this Parliament. The Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast that it will gain 5,000 private sector jobs. All north-west Members, and those more widely, must think about where those jobs will come from and what we can do to help their creation.

Hon. Members have mentioned silicon valley, and it is interesting to note that companies such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Dell, Apple and eBay, and their supply chains, have probably generated in excess of 1 million jobs over the past two decades. For the most part, those companies did not exist 30 years ago. In 20 or 30 years’ time, there will be another list that people will talk about. I do not know what companies will be on it—if I did, I would probably not be in the Chamber—but they will come from innovation and science. We must do what we can towards achieving that.

On the border of my constituency is a place called Daresbury. We have heard something of the golden triangle, which makes me feel a bit outnumbered, but Daresbury is a fantastic place that, together with Harwell, is one of two SFTC locations in the UK. Daresbury is a little different from Harwell because it focuses strongly on innovation as well as on pure science. There is also pure science, however, and Daresbury has a fourth-generation accelerator—a lot of the design work on the Diamond synchrotron was carried out there. However, the distinctive thing about Daresbury—if the Minister has not seen it, he should come and visit—is that there are about 100 small companies that are growing, taking output from the universities and turning that into commercial exploitation. On average, those organisations have grown by 20% over each of the past two years. That has happened through the recession, so it is quite a thing. A 36,000 square feet extension is being built and is already nearly full. There is a significant chance that 10,000 jobs will be created by those 100 companies and the public-private partnership that is being put into place.

[Andrew Miller]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that those 100 or so tiny companies are in Daresbury as a result of the magnet provided by the research facility? They would not have come there on their own; this is part of the integration between very small and very large companies that I was speaking about.

[David Mowat]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. The key term is multidisciplinary. Those companies interact with each other, and the pure science laboratory, which was there in the first place, has been the driver.

I want to contrast the multidisciplinary model of the Daresbury campus with some of the ideas that have come out of the Hauser review. That is more about excellence, with the Government picking areas in which they want to invest and going for it. I am not against that, but there are two models to determine how we invest in science and applied science. One is what could be called, “Let’s pick a winner and go for it,” and the other is, “Let 1,000 flowers bloom. Let’s try lots of things. Some of them will be brilliant and some of them won’t.”

My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) pointed out that silicon valley was created by Government procurement, but I do not think that that is true. I think that it was created by innovation, entrepreneurship, encouragement and the linkage of money to brilliant technologists.

I do not wish to overrun my time, but I have two minutes left and a couple of concerns to raise, to which I shall be interested to hear my hon. Friend the Minister’s response. I welcome the local enterprise partnerships as a way forward. There is a risk, however, that they will be quite fragmented in a way that the regional development agencies were not and other things are not. I recently had a ridiculous conversation with a colleague who said to me, “Which LEP is Daresbury going to be in?” That is not the right way for us to think about how we do all this, and if we let that mindset grow, it will be quite dangerous.

I mentioned the Hauser review and technology and innovation centres. It is not clear to me how they will interact with what we call regional growth hubs—or at least there is a lot of language in this area that seems to be quite loose—so I would welcome input on that.

With regard to the success of Daresbury, I have a bit of concern about the way in which the Science and Technology Facilities Council funding goes between Daresbury and Harwell. I am not an expert in how that works, but I think that nearly all the members of the board of the STFC are Harwell-based, not Daresbury-based. We must be careful that we do not have a south-centric civil service and a south-centric triangle driving science in a way that we do not want.

You will be pleased to hear that I shall stop speaking shortly, Mrs Brooke. I just want to reiterate that this has been a good and positive debate, principally because it has not been party political. We have much more in common with one another—especially those of us who went to Imperial college—than party politics allows, and it is extremely important to us all and to our children that we get this right.