Science and Technology: Economy

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

I declare my interests as the incoming chair of King’s College London and the chair of Cancer Research UK.

I start by picking up where the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, left off: congratulating the Government on not whacking the science budget to the tune of £1 billion with the Horizon costs in yesterday’s Budget. That is clearly a bullet dodged, but that is not the same as success assured. The question between now and the spending review, when decisions are made as to what the next decade’s worth of science funding will look like, is: are we going to get the sort of progress that we need?

I will make three brief observations, the first of which concerns, as has been touched earlier, the current state of universities as providers of the research excellence and scientific and technological progress we all want to see. Unfortunately, the reality is that, in yesterday’s Budget, universities got what we now can describe as a “POBA”: point one of bugger all. Essentially, there was no great reference to universities and no attempt—yesterday, at least—to deal with the underlying funding pressures and the opaque cross-subsidies that are just about keeping the show on the road, but which nevertheless constitute the slow and inexorable decline in the relative performance of UK science and research compared with other countries, as measured by most of the relevant league tables.

We want strength to the elbow of the Science department, but that cannot be seen in isolation from what is happening at the Department for Education. As other noble Lords have said, there is a funding gap between the cost of research undertaken and the resourcing to deliver it—only £0.69 in the pound is being funded across the sector in the full economic cost of research, and £0.74 in the pound for the most research-intensive universities—a huge wedge that is being cross-subsidised through international students and other mechanisms. That cannot continue over the next decade if we are going to see the kind of progress we want.

Secondly, we need to connect the debate we have just had with the debate we are having. Charities’ support for medical and life sciences research, in particular, plays an enormous role in the overall ecosystem: north of £1.7 billion in research funding; and in the case of Cancer Research UK, which I chair, over £4 billion in the last decade for cancer science, providing three in four NHS patients being treated for cancer with some of the drugs they receive. That is half the cancer drugs on the WHO’s top 100 list. Yet the ratio of the cost of science being funded through charities is even lower than that from the research councils: some £0.58 in the pound through that route. One of the great things that the last Labour Government did was to introduce the Charity Research Support Fund, which has somewhat atrophied in the intervening years. That would need to double, roughly, to get the charity funding contribution back to the £0.80 in the pound that is necessary to sustain the excellence we see in university research.

Finally, to pick up on the excellent maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman, I almost want to argue with the exam question that the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, has set us. It is quite easy in these debates to become relatively reductionist about the role of translational science at the technology-commercial interface and the economic benefits that has, whereas we need to remember that basic science— discovery science—in all sorts of serendipitous ways is the secret to our success as well.