Academic Health Science Centres

Lord Prior of Brampton Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Prior of Brampton (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I should first declare an interest as chairman of NHS England and a non-executive director of Genomics England. I support the noble Lord, Lord Butler, especially and all the arguments other noble Lords have made.

I will begin by taking noble Lords’ minds back to 1980, when two Senators in the US, Senator Bayh and Senator Dole, passed the Bayh-Dole legislation, which forced universities receiving money for federal research to commercialise their IP. Until that day the IP had sat in the ivory towers of the universities and had not been exploited. From 1980 on we saw this extraordinary growth in Silicon Valley and, latterly, Boston as universities were forced to commercialise their intellectual property.

We have been much slower in the UK. Until recently, universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, were ivory towers. That has changed and the AHSCs are part of that change. We have developed an ecosystem in the UK that is both hard to replicate elsewhere and extensive. Whether it is the BRCs, the HSCs, the AHSNs, the Crick or the LMB, we have an extraordinary and competitive life sciences ecosystem. It is becoming even more competitive as we see the convergence of biology with data, statistics, computer sciences and artificial intelligence. That puts the UK in a very strong position.

Money comes into this. I have done the Minister’s job and I was involved at BEIS with the industrial strategy. Our problem is that our ambition is so low. Our ambition was to get up to the OECD average for research spending in five years—2.4% of GNP, at a time when the Germans were already at more than 3%. We have to argue for £5 million for a new LICRE digital application across London. We have to argue for £20 million or £15 million for a new dataset for people with polygenic risk scores, for example. We are fiddling while the rest of the world—China and the US—is putting huge resources into this. When I was working on the industrial strategy, I looked at countries as diverse as Singapore, Israel, Ireland and Switzerland, where there was active government involvement in research and industrial strategy. America is always seen as the land of small government, but the NIH is a massive funder of life sciences research.

I do not know how we can change the mindset of the Treasury and the British Government. The only good thing that might come out of Brexit, which I think is a universally bad thing, is that it will provide us with a big shot in the arm. Whether we put in the money through AHSCs or through other vehicles in our ecosystem—UKRI, the MRC, the BBSRC—I do not care, as long as we get more money into fundamental, basic research and support the translational research for the BRCs, the NIHR and the AHSCs. I am fully in alignment with the redesignations of AHSCs. Whether more money comes in through them or other parts of the ecosystem, we have a huge opportunity in life sciences. I know that the Minister supports that, too.