Scientific Infrastructure (S&T Report)

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak in the gap; I pressed the wrong button on my computer and did not get permission to be on the list.

The long-term investment emphasised by the Government is obviously a good decision and a good plan. However, as Professor Cowley mentioned, over the past 30 years, for the applications of science, UK government laboratories in the public sector are now fewer in number. A number of the privatised labs have rather a poor international reputation. One or two, of course, are excellent. The Met Office has a worldwide reputation, which is indeed partly based upon world-leading collaboration.

To keep this emphasis on British science is surely outdated. So many of our major activities are European and international. Comments have been made that we are not as effective as we should be in that respect. I emphasise the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that government laboratories and all this funded work needs to be more open and collaborative with the UK private sector. I speak as somebody who has been on both sides of the camp; I am a chairman of a small company and an advisory committee. The fact is that some government labs see themselves as being in competition with the UK private sector, which is surely not what we want. This is utterly unlike the collaboration between government agencies and the private sector seen in the United Sates and Germany.

Data exchange is still very restrictive to the private sector. These excellent data centres to which the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, referred have more or less open access to academics. They are almost closed to the private sector, which has to go to the United States to get much of these environmental data that go in a curious loop. Senior officials to whom I have spoken in BIS seem to be very uninterested in pushing forward the idea of having better data connection with the private sector. The Treasury, I learnt from discussions between the Treasury and a large government agency, on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays believe in an open data policy, and on Thursdays and Fridays believe in charging for it. It is an extremely muddled situation, despite the famous Gordon Brown and Tim Berners-Lee report about open data during the previous Government.

Finally, I should ask how we are to move forward. One of the points made by this—if I may say so—nationalistic, inward-looking report is that we should have more international reviews of government laboratories. When I was at the Met Office, we had the ridiculous circus of the Public Accounts Committee, ending up with rounding errors and so on, whereas many of us have been on committees in other countries of the world where you look at the whole sector and the international status and so on; you do not make nit-picking points. The other feature in other countries is that they import technology; in this country, we have no system in depth for importing foreign technology. That is absolutely standard in other countries. It is ridiculous to think, “We’re going to do it all ourselves” when we are only 8%. Surely we should meet the financial and other challenges by taking a more effective international and European view. We should get advice about that, and this report might well move its objectives. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, has just emphasised some of these problems. One hopes that, as the committee looks at this report again, it might take this broader view.