Science and Innovation Strategy

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my fellowship of the British Academy. In this evening’s debate we are dealing with twin themes that have run through the post-war years like a filigree: industrial strategies—the current one is the eighth by my calculation since 1945—and scientific and technological strategies. There have been at least 20 of those, according to a cartography compiled by Dougal Goodman and Darron Stronge for the Foundation for Science and Technology, in which, I should declare, I also had a bit of a hand.

It is interesting that our science and industrial strategies have been run in parallel rather than fused, although it is both cheering and right that science and innovation is the first of the 10 pillars in the latest industrial strategy.

The problems with which both science and industrial strategies have grappled since 1945 have shown a remarkably stubborn persistence. Let us eavesdrop for a moment on the very first: the 1946 Barlow Report on Scientific Man-Power. This is its opening paragraph:

“We do not think that it is necessary to preface our report by stating at length the case for developing our scientific resources. Never before has the importance of science been more widely recognised or so many hopes of future progress and welfare founded upon the scientist. By way of introduction, therefore, we confine ourselves to pointing out that least of all nations can Great Britain afford to neglect whatever benefits the scientists can confer upon her. If we are to maintain our position in the world and restore and improve our standard of living, we have no alternative but to strive for that scientific achievement without which our trade will wither, our Colonial Empire will remain undeveloped and our lives and freedom will be at the mercy of a potential aggressor”.


If we strip out the references to the colonial empire and Joseph Stalin, that, I venture to suggest, could be the opening paragraph of the White Paper which we all await so keenly.

We can pick out three crucial themes from the cataract of post-war reviews and strategies—again, I am grateful for the work of the Foundation for Science and Technology on this. They are these: first, funding. A continuous thread has been the difficulty in meeting the aspiration of successive Governments to raise government spending on science, research and innovation as a percentage of GDP and particularly to persuade the private sector to follow suit—as other noble Lords have highlighted already.

Secondly, commercialisation—the industrialising of our scientific prowess. From the days of Barlow in 1946, there has been a continuous struggle to take the world-class ideas created by UK R&D to the marketplace by converting them into patents which pave the way to commercial opportunities. We have not done well in comparison to most of our competitors.

Thirdly, skills, higher education and productivity. The productivity gap that yawns between ourselves and our chief competitors rings out, tocsin like, as a prime anxiety in all the industrial strategies since the days of the Attlee Government’s Central Economic Planning Staff and the Anglo-American productivity councils established by Sir Stafford Cripps in the years of Marshall aid. It rings out, too, from the latest industrial strategy.

Huge efforts have been put into skills training. The great Robbins report on Higher Education in 1963 placed eloquent stress on the need for more science and technology courses and graduates. Today, the skills, scientific and technical education elements remain a prime concern, with an enhanced national performance ever more vital in a technologically leaping and ever more globalised world.

There are reasons for hope. We are a country and a people distracted by Brexit, edgy and chippy in our often impoverished national conversation, with too many people looking for things to fall out over rather than things to fall in about. I sometimes think, as an old friend of mine puts it, that we have become a country on permanent grudge-watch. Brexit is in danger of making curmudgeons of us all, yet here is an area—the theme for tonight’s debate—where a good, solid consensus is possible, a terrain where science, technology and industrial strategy meet in what is still a great intellectual trading nation. If we get it right this time, great prizes and improved prosperity await. It is tocsin time again. It is time for a burst of shared national endeavour and more than a little dash of optimism.