UK Science Budget

Jo Churchill Excerpts

Wednesday 21st October 2015 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Joseph Johnson)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) on securing the debate on a subject that is being explored in great detail at the moment by the Science and Technology Committee. I am glad to see the Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), here, along with other members of the Committee.

My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey raised the issue of medical research and the contributions of the British Heart Foundation to that. I was pleased earlier this month to see BHF employees in Manchester during the Conservative party conference, and I enjoyed looking at their stand and hearing at first hand about the high-quality research that the organisation is doing on cardiovascular diseases. The BHF’s research remains one of this country’s great success stories, and it has a long history going all the way back to the pioneering heart surgery technique for babies developed by Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub in the 1970s, which is still used today, all the way through to the more recent and ongoing improvements in heart attack diagnosis that are helping to save lives in Britain and across the world.

Research investment in medicine and cardiovascular disease is an important illustration of the strength of our science base. The investment we are making as a country through charities, Government and pharmaceutical companies is helping to ensure that Britain remains at the forefront of science and research in Europe and throughout the world. I should like to point out a few examples of that investment. The Medical Research Council currently spends around £20 million a year. That, coupled with the £49 million spent by the National Institute for Health Research, which is funded by the Department of Health, makes the UK the top contributor among EU member states to cardiovascular research. We are building on that base. This year, we committed to fund the Academy of Medical Sciences, alongside the other national academies, for the first time, granting it £0.5 million.

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

We are talking about what we are spending, but we are not talking about what we are saving. We are developing the life sciences, agritech—agritech is hugely important to rural constituencies such as mine, and my constituency is on the edge of the Cambridge phenomenon—biotech, digital health and so on, and we need to take those savings into consideration. If we lose that research abroad, we will lose the savings, too.

[Joseph Johnson]

Indeed, this is a good investment, which is why the Government have been supporting our science base over time. We recognise the huge economic benefits that it brings to the country.

I was in the middle of describing the investments we are making in cardiovascular and other medical technologies research. We have supplemented the ongoing spending of the MRC and the NIHR by announcing a couple of new innovation institutions, which will be extremely helpful to the sector in developing new medical technologies. We have just announced a new medicines technologies catapult, which will be based at Alderley Park in Cheshire. We have also announced the headquarters of the new precision medicine catapult in Cambridge, which will have one of its five centres of excellence in the north of England. The hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) focused on excellence in Cambridge. I am happy to tell him that I was in Cambridge last week and saw the laboratory of molecular biology. I was as impressed as his comments would have led me to expect—it is an extraordinary centre, and we have every intention of continuing to ensure that it remains one of the world’s leading research institutes.

The examples that Members have already cited, such as Cambridge and the scientific centres in the northern powerhouse, are good examples of why Britain is such a powerhouse in the world of science and why we want to ensure that we make Britain the best place in the world to do science. Our global scientific impact is completely out of proportion with both our population and the size of our research spend as a share of global research and development expenditure. The UK punches well above its weight.