European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Patel Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I was a strong remainer and at times I still cannot believe that the result went the other way, but, like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, I am a believer in democracy and I accept the result. In accepting the result, I, like him, now want to get on with it so that I can begin to influence the legislation that will come to get the best deal for the United Kingdom. It is one of those areas that I shall speak about today.

The Prime Minister identified science and innovation as one of her 12 priority areas in the forthcoming Brexit negotiations. The Prime Minister is right to do so. Science is a global endeavour, and the UK’s collaborative attitude and pre-eminence in science are the reasons why significant numbers of scientists in the UK are from overseas, including many from non-British EU countries. Some have stayed and have even achieved Nobel prizes, such as Professor Geim and Professor Novoselov in Manchester, who won the Nobel prize for graphene, and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, the current president of the Royal Society, who won a Nobel prize while working at the LMB of the MRC. Those are just two examples of Nobel prizes.

The UK is a popular place for talented scientists, certainly in the area of life sciences, which I am most familiar with. To continue to attract to the UK the finest scientists from EU countries, we need to address three issues. The first issue is that those scientists who are already here should have peace of mind about staying and working in the UK beyond Brexit. We must also convey to those currently thinking of applying for posts in the United Kingdom that they can do so with confidence that their future is safe in the United Kingdom and that they should feel welcome. We appear at times to be giving mixed messages to those who are here and those who wish to come. They get the feeling that they will be bargaining chips in our negotiations, and I hope we can alleviate that anxiety.

I shall give an example of the numbers of life scientists working here. I shall use as an example the Francis Crick Institute, which was opened by Her Majesty the Queen in November 2016. It is Europe’s largest biomedical research institute under one roof and 1,500 scientists will work there soon. Of the 800 scientists who are already there, 56% of post-doc scientists—the ones who do most of the work—are from non-UK EU countries. Most of them have done their training in the United Kingdom. Forty-four percent of the lab-based staff and 30% of all staff are from EU countries. The number of EU scientists in other universities is similar. In my university, there are 350 scientists working in life sciences and we have 1,000 students.

On the other hand, there are concerns. For instance, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, our world-class centre for genomic studies, saw a drop of nearly 50% in applications from PhD students from EU countries. If we are to continue to maintain the flow of scientific talent from EU countries and countries outside the EU, we need an immigration policy that makes it simple for scientists and technicians to come to the United Kingdom. In my view, it is unnecessary to cap the numbers of highly skilled people whom we need to come to the United Kingdom.

The second issue I shall highlight is the need for the UK to have continued access to funding from and collaboration with the European Research Council. Funding and participation allow worldwide collaboration with the best scientists in the world. While access to funding from the European Research Council and the Horizon 2020 programme is important, the opportunity of collaboration with scientists worldwide is the important point. The European area produces one-third of the world’s research output, and we contribute to that considerably. It is not surprising that other European countries are already inviting our top scientists to relocate to their universities, for example in France, so that they can apply for funding and collaboration.

The third important area relates to aligning UK regulation with EU regulation. The example I give is the new appraisal system under the EU clinical trials regulation. We need access for our pharma industry, our scientists and our biotech industries to the important IT infrastructure without which we cannot share the information. If we do not have that access, we ourselves will be too small when it comes to the informatics required to conduct clinical trials.

For these and other reasons, I hope that in the negotiations that we will enter into soon the issue of EU scientists coming to work here, our ability to access funding and collaboration and our ability to access IT infrastructure will be early negotiating points.