Higher Education and Research Bill

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

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

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of the Foundation for Science and Technology and as a former chancellor of Southampton University. Today’s proceedings have been full of interest. It has been a fascinating debate, not least in giving a new meaning to the concept of a “long-standing Minister”.

I, like the noble Lord, Lord Rees, will address only Part 3. Of all the speeches on this part of the Bill, the one that I found myself in greatest accord with was that of the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, some two and a half hours ago. In case some noble Lords have already forgotten what he said, he reminded us that we are a research superpower—there is no doubt about that by every possible measure. He also referred to the need for a strategic vision of research—not something that we have heard a lot of from elsewhere today—and the need to promote cross-disciplinary research. We should pause on that issue. Just because we are a superpower does not mean there is no place for some strategic thinking and prompting of the players to complement each other ever more successfully.

We need a research champion, which is how I see UKRI, not just to secure appropriate funding—I suspect that it has already been helpful in that respect even though it does not yet exist—but to help us put research, technology and innovation where they belong: at the centre of delivering the new industrial strategy on which, post-Brexit, this country will be absolutely dependent for economic growth and for enhancing our quality of life. The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, reminded us of the competition: 40% of patents are now filed by China. We should be in no doubt that competition will get ever fiercer and that we will be ever more dependent on new technologies. Therefore, we need a road map of our research and innovation capacity and of our strengths and opportunities, and we need to consider how we should expect these to contribute to national economic priorities and to quality of life.

Listening to this debate, one would think that all research was done by research councils, but in fact 64% or thereabouts, or approximately two-thirds, is conducted by business and charities—in other words, outside the public sector. Yet our business sector is not terribly successful at attracting collaborative programmes, whether national or international. Therefore, there is plenty of scope for improvement; let us not be complacent.

Some have said that you cannot predict where innovation will come from. I accept that entirely—you certainly cannot; you get the most unexpected findings. Very often innovation is incremental: it happens on the factory floor and has nothing to do with universities or research institutes. Nevertheless, help will sometimes be needed in the market to attract the right university support and much else. That is where it will be helpful to have Innovate UK within the fold, although I hope it keeps a very strong commercial focus and is not overawed by being part of the research council family.

The remaining third of our national research is conducted by our seven research councils, government departments, the devolved Administrations and a plethora of agencies. I once chaired an environmental programme called Living With Environmental Change. It attempted to co-ordinate publicly funded research related to environmental matters. More than 20 different organisations were involved and, believe me, it was pretty well hopeless. Not even the research councils collaborated very well, and here I am talking about publicly funded research relating just to the environment. So, again, let us just agree that a bit of co-ordination could well prove helpful.

The noble Lord, Lord Patel, asked what was broken. I would not say that anything broke, but we are not exploiting our status as a research superpower successfully. It has always been a complaint that other people tend to implement our research more successfully than we do.

Let me give two sobering statistics: 75% of employees work for organisations in this country whose productivity is below the EU average; and 50% of United Kingdom cities are in the bottom 25% in the EU in terms of productivity. This is where UKRI could well prove helpful. I hope my noble friend Lord Waldegrave will be proved wrong and that it will not be a bureaucratic burden but that it might, with a light touch, where research is going well, help us to emerge with the new technologies—robotics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology—we need to provide new jobs where they are most desperately needed.

I draw attention to the small but significant failure at the moment to have joined-up research. If a research institute gets more than 50% of its funds from one source of public funds—say the BBSRC, one of the research councils—such an institute is prevented from applying for response-mode funding. The noble Lord, Lord Mair, referred to the new industrial strategy challenge funds which are to help Britain capitalise on its strength in cutting-edge research. Can the Minister assure me that the 50% rule will not in future inhibit any research institute bidding for such funds? If UKRI is to succeed, successful science must be allowed to flourish wherever the best science is found, and such pettifogging rules should be consigned to history.