Universities: Sensitive Research

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Tuesday 30th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for the question. The first thing to say is that the independence of universities is absolutely critical to the quality of their research. While the integrated review refresh has of course indicated a great many concerns about working closely with China, and necessitated a reduction of academic collaboration with China, I hope our recent reassociation to the Horizon programme, and a number of other third countries also considering or being very close to associating with Horizon, will go some way towards providing a new pool of collaboration partners in academic research.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, I am sure that all of us agree with the noble Lord, Lord Young, that we need to protect scientific development from malign actors. But is there not a real problem here—that new technology and advances in scientific knowledge not only require international collaboration, on a scale hitherto unknown, but that most of it, ever since the bow and arrow, is dual-purpose? In other words, it can be used for benevolent or malign reasons. How do the departments charged with this responsibility distinguish between these two, so that in protecting us from the misuse of scientific advances, they are not smothering scientific research as a whole?

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right in his analysis of the problem, which I agree with wholeheartedly. The most powerful tool we have at our disposal in this is RCAT—the Research Collaboration Advice Team—which provides hundreds of individual items of advice in these areas, where it can actually be quite subtle whether something is dual or single-use or has a military or defence application. It is not something that can be very easily defined up front, and does require a certain wisdom and delicacy of advice to provide that.