EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Lord Broers Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Broers (CB) [V]]

It is a privilege to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wharton of Yarm, on his appropriate and concise maiden speech.

If the UK is to remain a major industrial nation, we will have to sustain our competitiveness in the advancement of some, if not all, of the hard technologies that underpin medicine, agriculture, transport, information technology, communications, control systems and power generation. Progress in hard technologies is driven by international competition; it is rare that single nations or companies possess everything that is necessary.

Modern communications allow collaboration across international borders, and this capability must be harnessed to be competitive. Success almost always relies on the exchange of people. The easiest way to transfer new ideas is through exchange between the people who come up with the ideas and those who use them. The closer the collaboration, the better. Our nearest neighbours are in Europe, and we have enjoyed working with them to sustain, for example, our aerospace, automobile and IT and communications industries.

Erasmus has been a major force for good in these exchanges of researchers; it is two-way and includes not only students but university staff and those undertaking vocational and continuing education. Its loss is potentially very dangerous, as mentioned by many others in this debate, and the Turing scheme as presently proposed will not be an adequate replacement. If our advancement of these crucial technologies is to succeed, the Turing scheme will have to be either expanded to include two-way exchange and this broader group of people or complemented by other schemes that do this. It should be noted that students coming to the UK will produce income that will offset the cost of sending our students abroad.