Lord Krebs
Main Page: Lord Krebs (Crossbench - Life peer)Scientific Infrastructure (S&T Report)
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Lord Krebs
To move that this House takes note of the report of the Science and Technology Committee on scientific infrastructure (2nd Report, HL Paper 76).
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of Oxford University, as a career scientific researcher and as a former chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council.
I thank the members of the Science and Technology Committee for their excellent contributions in producing this report. I particularly thank our specialist adviser, Professor Brian Collins, who was formerly the Chief Scientific Adviser in the Department for Transport and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and who is currently at UCL. We certainly benefited very much from his wise guidance and advice. I also thank the Minister for the Government’s response to our report. I will say at the outset that the Government’s response and the associated announcements have been very encouraging. I congratulate the Minister on that, and I will return to the good news story later on.
I will start by setting the scene by defining what the report, entitled Scientific Infrastructure, is concerned with. If asked what the ingredients are that you need to carry out scientific research successfully, clearly, you need the right people, the costs of conducting research—whether experiments or theoretical work—and the appropriate equipment and facilities in which to carry out research. Our report is concerned with the last of those three elements: the infrastructure that is essential for scientific research.
To look at how we define infrastructure, we include three things. First, we include the very large facilities of which there may be perhaps only one in the UK, one in Europe or even one in the world. An example is the Diamond Light Source based near Oxford; there is one of those synchrotron sources in the United Kingdom. Another is the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, which I am about to visit later this week and which is the only one in Europe. Secondly, in our definition of infrastructure, there are medium-sized pieces of equipment that are shared between several institutions, such as the London Centre for Nanotechnology, in which specialist equipment is accessed by researchers from leading London universities such as UCL and Imperial College. Thirdly, and importantly, we included in our definition the national laboratories—the public sector research establishments—that are repositories of data, expertise and national capabilities, and that serve the public good of the whole country; for example, the British Geological Survey and the former Institute for Animal Health.
We undertook this inquiry because of our concern about the consequences of a swingeing 46% cut in the capital spend for science that was announced in the 2010 comprehensive spending review. At that time the flat cash settlement for capital for science for the five-year CSR period would have been £3.295 billion, whereas the sum announced in 2010 was £1.896 billion. In the subsequent years there have been a number of ad hoc announcements by Ministers of new investment in capital for science, including for areas such as graphene research, space science and the “eight great technologies”—big data, space, robotics, synthetic biology, regenerative medicine, agri-science, advanced materials and energy. Between them, those later ad hoc announcements have brought the capital spend up to 94% of where it would have been with flat cash in 2010. However, the problem with those one-off announcements is that they do not add up to a coherent strategy for investment in the future of our scientific infrastructure.
As an aside, in contrast to the cut in 2010 to capital spend for science, the Government have since maintained the flat cash ring-fence around the science budget for programmes and projects. That has been welcomed by the scientific community as relatively good news in times of austerity. I will refer to that again later, but we wanted to ask whether the future potential of that investment in programmes and projects might be threatened by the lack of a coherent plan and sufficient investment in scientific infrastructure. The importance attached to that question is illustrated by the fact that we received around 100 submissions of evidence not just from academia but from industry, charities, learned societies, public sector laboratories and so on—and not just from the UK; they were from overseas as well.
Before I summarise what this plethora of evidence told us, let me just provide a bit of background context about UK science. As noble Lords will know, the United Kingdom punches well above its weight in science; it is one of our great success stories. In its 2013 report, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills states that we have 4.1% of the world’s scientists, 11.6% of the world’s citations of scientific papers and 15.9% of the most highly cited papers in the scientific literature—the papers that really make a difference. Furthermore, that astounding achievement is delivered on an investment well below the OECD average. In 2012, our investment was 1.72% of GDP, the lowest of the G8 countries and well below the EU average of 2.08%. Our main competitors such as the USA, Germany and Japan spend around 3% of GDP on research and development. According to the Campaign for Science and Engineering, in 2011-12—the last year for which figures are available—government spend on science was at its lowest level for 10 years. Therefore, as I have said, although the scientific community has welcomed the protection of the ring-fence for programmes and projects and other commitments to science, we as a nation are still investing far less than our competitors.
That was a bit of context, but now let me summarise the key results of our inquiry, and I am sure that other noble Lords will wish to speak in more detail on particular points. First and foremost, we concluded that at the moment the UK has globally competitive scientific infrastructure in many areas, but there is no room for complacency. As I said, other countries invest more than we do in science and we cannot take our position at the top table for granted. We identified two shortcomings in our investment in scientific infrastructure: the lack of a long-term strategy; and the failure to provide adequate running costs for facilities, so that we have sometimes ended up with expensive kit and not enough money to run it to full capacity.
As I mentioned, the series of one-off announcements since 2010 of investment in scientific infrastructure have not added up to a coherent strategy. As was made clear to us in our evidence, investment in very large facilities such as the Diamond Light Source requires decades of planning rather than the approach—it looked like pulling rabbits out of hats—that we have seen in recent years. The lack of running costs for large infrastructure was brought home to us by the fact that the ISIS pulsed neutron and muon source, used for the study of the atomic structure of materials, is operated for only 120 days a year, well below its capacity of 180 days a year, because of a lack of an operational budget. That was just one of many examples. As one witness put it to us:
“When we are not running very expensive machines with capital costs in the hundreds of millions or even billions of pounds, and we are saving a few million in electricity bills every year, that is not a reasonable economic strategy”.
In addition to those two key findings—the lack of a strategy and the lack of operational costs—we draw attention in our report to three other key points. First, and of really high importance, we note our concern that the future of some public sector research establishments as custodians of data and national capability may be eroded by the urge to turn them into quasi-private money-making ventures. We are concerned that this may be a very short-sighted policy in relation to national need.
Secondly, there is great benefit to the UK in engaging proactively in international infrastructure projects. Many of the very large pieces of kit cannot be supported by one country and are built on an international basis. The host country can gain significant benefit, such as substantial leverage of funding and jobs. However, we hear that the Government sometimes have appeared reluctant to take the lead in hosting major international facilities. For instance, the UK currently hosts the Joint European Torus, or JET, project at Culham near Oxford for research on nuclear fusion. This facility, for which we pay 12.5% of the costs, has brought great benefit to the local community and the opportunity for training and development of technical skills. Yet, for reasons that were not explained to us, the UK did not bid to host the successor to JET, which will instead be hosted by France.
Thirdly, we heard from industry witnesses that the charging regime for industrial users for access to UK scientific infrastructure is more punitive than in some other countries. Rolls-Royce, for instance, told us that its US competitors have free or low-cost access to high-performance computing. It goes on to say:
“It is important that UK companies have the playing-field levelled”.
Those are our key conclusions and recommendations.
As I said earlier, the Government’s response was extremely positive. First, the Government have since our report announced a new commitment to invest in scientific infrastructure starting at £1.1 billion per year in 2015-16 and rising with inflation each year up to 2020-21. That is a welcome commitment to reverse the decline that took place in 2010. At the same time, at the end of April, the Government launched a consultation on how best to invest this money for the future of UK science. We had recommended that the director-general for knowledge and innovation in BIS, Sir John O’Reilly, should lead an advisory group to develop a long-term strategy for investment in infrastructure. This has been accepted, and the group will be a ministerial group chaired by the DGKI with representatives from the key funders, as we suggested, and from industry. The Government in their response also state that our other recommendations, including those related to operational costs and international collaboration, will be considered by this advisory group. This response, as I have said already, is very encouraging, and we look forward to the report of Sir John O’Reilly’s group.
In previous debates on my Select Committee’s reports, the Government have usually been pressed to take further action or make further commitments. In this case, however, I have to take the unusual step of congratulating them on their positive response and commitments.
More generally, the Government’s commitment to investing in science, including scientific infrastructure, is, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer said in his recent speech in Cambridge, based in part on the notion of building on success—science is something that we are extraordinarily good at—and in part on the notion that investment in science will bring economic gains to the country. I quote from the Chancellor’s speech:
“I’m here to talk about British science because it is something that I am personally passionate about. I get that this is something Britain is brilliant at—and that it is vitally important to our economic future”.
In this vein, we must not forget, as I have already said, that although the Government’s commitment to science is welcome, we are nevertheless as a nation underinvesting when we compare ourselves with our global competitors. We cannot expect to stay in the very top group of scientific nations on brain power and imagination alone; we need sustained and increased investment from both public and private sectors. We must also not forget that many, if not most, of the scientific advances—from lasers to liquid crystal, from DNA to monoclonal antibodies—that have yielded commercial or other benefit to the nation have arisen not as a result of applied research but as a result of pure blue-skies, curiosity-driven research. It is vital that we protect the ability and capacity of scientists to follow their own intuition and curiosity.
I will close by asking the Minister two questions. First, does he agree that, following the very welcome commitment to a sustained investment in infrastructure, we cannot be complacent? This should not be taken as “job done, box ticked” but rather as a start in the UK’s long-term commitment not just to maintain but to increase its investment in science R&D.
Secondly, this is perhaps slightly tangential to today’s debate but I cannot resist the opportunity of raising the question of the future of AstraZeneca. Biomedical science is an area in which we are absolutely at the top of the world league. The translation of that science into benefits to society in terms of health and to the economy in terms of jobs and prosperity depends on the close relationships between the UK academic base and UK industry. I very much hope that the Minister can confirm that the Government are acutely aware of this in considering their response to Pfizer’s approach to AstraZeneca. I beg to move.
Lord Krebs
I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. It has been extraordinarily well informed and at a very high level of sophistication. I also thank the Minister for his very detailed response, covering, I think, all the points that were raised in the debate. I do not wish to dwell on the conclusions. I think we all recognise the importance of scientific infrastructure for the long-term health of the country, both economically and in terms of well-being. We recognise that the Government have made a commitment. The key words for me, which have recurred several times—and I was delighted to hear the Minister reiterate them on several occasions—are “long term”. This is not just about the next five years; this is about thinking beyond 2020 into the distant future so that we can ensure that we have the right facilities to support our scientists to deliver world-class research, as they have done in the past and I am sure they will do in the future.