Catapults (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I begin my intervention in this debate by declaring my interests as a member of the board of UKRI and as chair of the board of the UK Space Agency, which works closely with the Satellite Applications Catapult, but I am speaking very much in a personal capacity rather than on behalf of those bodies. I very much welcome this excellent report and congratulate the whole committee on it. It has been marvellous to hear the extremely constructive interventions from the noble Lords, Lord Mair and Lord Patel.

There have been a lot of reports about catapults. They began, of course, with that excellent report from Hermann Hauser, which was commissioned by the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, towards the end of his time as Secretary of State. At the same time, my party, while in opposition, commissioned James Dyson to produce a report on this. It was a very happy coincidence that both Hermann Hauser and James Dyson proposed that Britain should have something modelled on the Fraunhofer institutes. As we often debate in this Chamber the frustrations and difficulties of getting cross-party consensus and long-term planning, I think the fact that this idea emerged from two parallel exercises from two different political parties has helped to make them a long-term feature of the environment. I occasionally used to tease my colleague and friend Sir Vince Cable that he represented the only party which had not advocated the creation of catapults in its manifesto.

We have had many reviews of catapults since. To be honest, I think we have had rather too many reviews, some of which have not been particularly constructive and have been a distraction. But this report—we have heard the emphasis already on the fact that it is not a review—stands out. It is well informed and crisp, and it has some practical, actionable proposals which it has put to the Government. Of course, we all look forward to the response from the Minister, but I think it is true to say that, already, in the period since the official government response to the committee’s report, there has been more activity that has led to the implementation of more of the proposals—especially because we now have the framework of the three-year comprehensive spending review and a longer-term and increasing budget for Innovate UK.

I would like to make a few quick reflections on the roles of catapults and how they can fulfil them. In many ways, they are to be seen as an intermediate body between universities and business. Of course, we all want to see universities and businesses dealing direct; that is excellent and needs to be promoted. However, at the same time, the analysis was that there are some kinds of TRLs—technology readiness levels—in the middle that are not the focus of attention for university research and are not yet suitable for full-blown commercial investment. That is where catapults have a really important role to play.

I still see them as torn between these two gravitational forces: on the one hand is the university academic agenda, and on the other are the requirements and needs of business. If I may draw on my new role as chair of the UK Space Agency, I hope they occupy a kind of Lagrangian point, happily balanced between these two different gravitational forces. If I were to hazard a guess, my assessment at the moment is that, if anything, the gravitational pull from business is proving rather stronger and the engagement from universities rather weaker. There are risks in that.

Catapults must find the best way of showing that they are delivering private spend by joining up with quite close-to-market projects that business is willing to finance and moving to that end of the technology readiness scale, while also thinking of more upstream activities and closer links to universities. I very much welcome the proposals in this report about getting catapults to work more closely with universities. They are not supposed to be simply recipients of contract funding for applied research which business wishes to see happen anyway; they are more at that midpoint, and we should always bear that in mind.

They went out of fashion for a few years—I never quite understood why—but they are certainly back and I think they are receiving strong support from the Government now, which I am sure is influenced partly by this excellent report. One thing that was striking during the period when they were out of favour was that an opportunity was missed to use catapults as a template whenever a new applied research institute was being created. One of the reasons for the catapult model was that too much time and effort was being expended on getting elaborate teams of lawyers to write tailor-made articles of association and deciding whether a new entity would be in the public or private sector and whether it would be a charitable body or a limited company with a public purpose. Instead, I saw the catapult model as an easily accessible template that made that whole process simpler. For example, I think the Faraday Institute, which is an excellent body, would have been up and running a year earlier if it had been simply a batteries catapult. I hope the Minister will agree that catapults are a useful template for getting on with something when we have clearly reached the stage where some mix of public and private funding is required to move a technology forward. It should be the standard template that is always available and used in those circumstances.

I very much welcome the stress the noble Lord, Lord Mair, placed on catapults as a kind of strategic opportunity. Again, in the past year we have seen the Government recognising them in that light. I had at the back of my mind the hope that, eventually, in a neat and tidy world—the world is not like that—all of the eight great technologies that we identified would have some kind of catapult support to help bring them forward. That applies now to the seven technology families identified in the Government’s innovation strategy. It is not a neat and tidy alignment, but it would be welcome if the Minister could say that, as the Government look to how they can implement their commitment in the strategy to those seven technology families, they will check to see whether, within each family, there are particular technologies or groups of technologies for which a catapult could really help deliver the Government’s ambitions.

Finally, I want to add an angle that I do not think has been touched on so far. As we look to how this country can deliver the ambitions for 2.4% of GDP being spent on R&D—let us hope it will go beyond that—there is one constraint which I fear will be the biggest single one, because I think there is now political will and a commitment to do it. The biggest single constraint is the skilled people needed to do it: the scientists and researchers, but also the technicians and technologists who will either ensure that kit works or, even better, help create new kit in that endless, exciting interaction between science and technology that brings both human progress and economic advance. Here, there is an opportunity for catapults to do far more than they do at the moment in technical training and to overtrain, training more people than may be needed for the specific operation of the catapult. If they are seen as a resource which can train more technicians to go out into industry or indeed other research institutes and universities, with proper expertise and vocational or university qualifications, that would be an extra useful role that is very relevant to the Government’s vocational and technical training agenda.

I very much welcome this excellent report, which provides a set of practical policy proposals that can be acted on, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.