Scientific Infrastructure (S&T Report)

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

My Lords, I start by thanking most sincerely the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for having introduced this debate and for having chaired the inquiry—and, indeed, for having chaired the Select Committee for the past four years with great distinction. He chaired his final meeting this morning. He will be very greatly missed by members of the committee. His introduction to today’s debate reminds us of his great expertise in so many of these areas, where his own background complements so well the subject under discussion. I, too, declare an interest as chair of the advisory committee of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, which is a Natural Environment Research Council research centre. I also thank our very distinguished specialist adviser, Professor Brian Collins, for his help with our inquiry.

I think we all recognise that it is one of the consequences of a successful research programme in most areas of science and technology—perhaps not all but almost all—that as you achieve international renown, so the stakes get ever higher. That is certainly true of many of the areas that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, referred to. Whole new research areas open up on the back of dramatic advances, which in turn require new infrastructure facilities, sometimes extremely expensive ones, for those who wish to remain relevant and internationally competitive. As box 1 at the beginning of our report says,

“the Diamond Light Source is the UK’s national synchrotron facility”,

which is a very good example of a major investment in scientific infrastructure and one which has the prospect of leading to applications of great economic and cultural importance in engineering, pharmaceuticals and the environment.

However, I want to concentrate on box 2 on page 10, which is the area that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, described as the third category of infrastructure. Box 2 refers to the continuing need for scientific infrastructure,

“for monitoring and understanding the natural environment”.

I reiterate my interest at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. Box 2 lists seven research centres funded by the NERC, which have for many years required very considerable scientific infrastructure expenditure in terms of research ships, aircraft, laboratories, the maintenance of vast data sets and, in the case of the British Antarctic Survey, research stations in a highly hostile environment and all the costs involved therein.

As a maritime nation, we are rightly proud of our contribution to oceanography but, again, the price of membership as a world-leading research centre is high. The cost of maintaining and servicing ships and the cost of fuel—let alone the cost of building ships in the first place—increases faster than research budgets. Research in polar regions—the Arctic as well as Antarctica—is, again, a field in which we have always played a very significant role. Some would say that we started the discipline in the time of Scott. If we want to continue to be a major contributor to polar research—we clearly cannot be the largest any more—as I hope we will be, we simply must understand the infrastructure implications. You cannot be half in and half out. You have either got to have a commitment or have none at all.

Again, in the area of big data, as the report points out, the computing advisory panel at the Science and Technology Facilities Council reminds us that for the effective handling and analysis of increasingly large data sets, and for the purposes of curating these data and making them available for further exploitation, we simply have to put the appropriate infrastructure in place. The sort of environmental research to which I have been referring is very much about accumulating, curating and exploiting data of sometimes mammoth proportions.

These NERC research centres—and this will be true of other research council centres—will over the next generation need access to large infrastructure funds if they are to retain their status as world-leading research organisations. There is simply no way that you can carry out world-class research with outdated facilities. I remember vividly that in the 1990s, when I chaired the Agricultural and Food Research Council, now subsumed into the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Government of the day decided—perfectly reasonably, perhaps, some would have thought—that much of the funding for food production was no longer a priority and that, because research funding was, as always, tight, we had to close down and amalgamate a considerable number of institutes. It was a painful exercise, as I remember to my cost; I still bear the scars. Quite frankly, 20 years later, many now regret that quite such draconian measures were taken as food security comes up the political agenda.

If we look forward to the present situation, I hope that we will not allow our environmental research centres to wither through a failure to recognise the inevitable need to update infrastructure facilities. As we address the need for both mediation of and adaptation to climate change, the loss of both terrestrial and marine biodiversity, ocean acidification and the need for new energy sources, for all of these we will have to rely on national capability and independent scientific advice for managing this environmental change and building national resilience to environmental hazards. We will need world-leading research organisations that advance knowledge across land, freshwater, oceans and the atmosphere. We will need to advance our understanding of the structure, properties and processes of the solid earth system.

We will also need to maintain the extremely important—indeed, unique—data networks which we have amassed. I shall list one or two to give noble Lords a flavour of the range, all of which require continuing upkeep to be serviceable: the Biological Records Centre; the National River Flow Archive; the Environmental Change Network; the national geological datasets; the National Geological Repository; the deep-sea core sediment repository; and other national oceanographic assets. These are assets of which we are custodians for future generations. With this comes a responsibility which cannot be abandoned. Yet this is where I do not envy the role of those, now, who have to make these difficult decisions in research councils—nor, indeed, the role of Ministers. When new areas of science open up, such as nanotechnology, genomics, graphene research and many others, these inevitably require commitments also. It will inevitably be an extremely difficult decision as to how you prioritise.

That is why I strongly support the main thrust of the report set out in the recommendations in paragraphs 27 to 29. The BIS director-general of knowledge and innovation is to be charged with the responsibility of producing a long-term strategy and investment plan for scientific infrastructure. This would go well beyond the research councils and the universities and must include the facilities required by industry and, indeed, those which complement industry and the private sector. These are not just the structures that need to inform our investment priorities for the next 10 to 15 years, but should give a pointer for the next generation or even more. That is not an unreasonable timescale when considering the lifetime of many of the facilities we are talking about.

Again, I join the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, in congratulating the Government on their response; they have taken up the challenge. I accept that what we are asking for is indeed a challenge. We need an assessment of our investment priorities for infrastructure for effectively the next generation. I shall read from the Government’s response, which states that,

“the Minister for Universities and Science will be leading a consultation on long term science and research capital … This consultation will inform the roadmap on long term science capital, which will be central to the Science and Innovation Strategy HMG are publishing at Autumn Statement 2014”.

If the report by Professor Sir John O’Reilly achieves what we hope it will, it could be a document of absolutely seminal importance. I do not think that anyone underrates how difficult it will be to produce and how many hard decisions will no doubt have to be taken, but as a member of the committee which put forward these proposals, I am enormously heartened that the challenge has been taken up.