Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I must thank the Minister, the honourable Jo Johnson, for his courtesy and patience in seeing so many of us beforehand and in such detail—that was deeply appreciated. I declare an interest as chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University and note that the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, has just pointed out how much the university has done for the local community—that essential contact with communities is one issue for universities. I am also chairman of the Royal College of Music in London and am employed by Imperial College London partly as a researcher and partly running an outreach programme.

It seems completely bonkers to have this Bill at this time. If we had it in a year and a half’s time, I think that we would be discussing very different issues, one of which, clearly, is that all three of those organisations that I am intimately involved with, like most other higher education institutions, are deeply concerned about the impact of Brexit.

I shall make three points, the first on the Haldane principle. I had the privilege of being on the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for 10 years. One issue for us was the independence of our decisions. It was always a problem when the Haldane principle was threatened by individual Ministers. I remember, for example, the issue of graphene in the north-west of England, when quite a large sum of money was taken from the budget, but the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council had to pay for the running costs thereafter when we were dealing with flat cash. While our current Minister may be trusted, it is clear that when we come to look at amendments to the Bill we will have to make certain that the Haldane principle is firmly embedded in it.

Secondly, there is the issue of innovation and business. I am very sceptical about this. Of course, as a member of Imperial College, I recognise that we are doing a tremendous amount in building innovation. We have a new establishment on our new university campus in west London looking at innovation and business. Of course, so much innovation does not come as something planned. If you take the 10 great inventions of the last 50 or 60 years, none came by any kind of planning beforehand. The oral contraceptive pill was not designed as such; in fact, nobody had the slightest idea that it would totally change our society. The internet is another example of something that has completely democratised our society in a way that we could not have imagined beforehand but that also carries certain threats. Ultrasound for looking inside the body was thought of only as the result of somebody coming back from the war having done work as a bomb navigator looking at submarines.

Another example is the laser, which was first thought of in 1905 by Albert Einstein. It was not until 1960 that somebody made a laser—and they did not have the slightest idea how to use it. Now we think of the laser as absolutely ubiquitous. It runs the internet and the telephone system, and we bank with it. We use it to measure distances and to build buildings. Many of your Lordships’ will have had operations at the back of the eye. We are using it in quantum computing. In my laboratory at Imperial College, we use it every day to look at details of the human embryo that we cannot see with a light microscope—with exquisite beauty. Of course, everybody also uses a laser printer. It is a ubiquitous, important instrument but not something we could have predicted. Therefore, you cannot do this as the result of having an institute of innovation.

Thirdly, there is the missed opportunity in the Bill—one of many—that we have failed to understand that the real issue in our society is access to universities and how we manage the real issue of school students who have never set foot inside a mysterious, arcane building: a university. This year—it is not a boast but my PA told me this week—I have addressed a total around the United Kingdom of 35,000 schoolchildren in different situations. So many of them have not the slightest idea about going to university. At Imperial College, we try with our outreach to build a lab for them to come into. Every university should do that but the Government should imprint something like it in a Bill of this kind so that that sort of access is available to students to enable them to come in and understand why they should have that aspiration. At present, the Bill does nothing about aspiration. There is no connection between the school and university systems. That is a major fault in the Bill.

However, we will have an interesting time in the next stages of the Bill. I look forward to seeing some really useful amendments. I hope to see how we can adjust the Bill to make it more workable.