EU Membership: UK Science

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I first thank the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, for his extraordinarily good chairmanship of the Select Committee; I remember very well from when I was a member of that Select Committee some time ago his wisdom in leading our inquiries and debates. In response to the excellent report that the Select Committee has produced, the Government state that,

“a global Britain must … be a country that looks to the future. That means being one of the best places in the world for science and innovation”.

It also goes on to assert:

“The Government made a series of announcements on EU research and innovation … to provide assurance and certainty to stakeholders”.


But the Government’s response to the recommendations to distinguish immigration statistics and student entries is, I am afraid, totally inadequate. Moreover, it gives no reassurance at all to the backbone of British science, the post-doctoral fellow—the first stage in a scientist’s career when he or she is working independently, supervising students, publishing key scientific advances and making innovations. Often these post-docs are underpaid and naturally insecure, because they are really only good for as long as their grant income lasts, and they have a constant problem with that. The added insecurity under which they are now placed is a very serious threat to them indeed. I repeat: they are undoubtedly the backbone of British science.

In a powerful speech yesterday, Alice Gast, president of one of the country’s leading scientific universities, Imperial College, pointed out the need for the Government to resolve the uncertainties that they have created and to demonstrate practically our continued welcome to this important science research force and not to use this research force as a tool for negotiation. I agree with that completely. She also pointed out in her speech the richness of the collaboration that universities in this country have with the EU—I can testify to that in my statement.

I understand some of the evidence that the Select Committee received, but not all of it. It suggests that there had not been a downturn yet in EU doctoral students and postgraduates applying to work in the UK, but I do not find this evidence convincing. In many respects it is far too flawed. It is, in any case, far too soon after the referendum to make a judgment on the longer-term prospects. From our practical experience in our labs—for example at Imperial College, in my research building, which houses up to, I suppose, 100 scientists—we are hearing of many students who are increasingly reluctant to come to Britain to train and work here because of this longer-term insecurity. As we have been saying to the Home Office for years—particularly as the Science and Technology Select Committee has been saying—we need to have much better records from the Home Office of those entering the UK for study, exactly what they are studying and how they are contributing to our universities. But, yet again, I am afraid that the Government’s response to what is a basic and important request has been totally inadequate.

I have worked in reproductive medicine; it may seem a trivial area, but it is not just about in vitro fertilisation and infertile couples, this research is important to human growth and development, the ageing process, regenerative medicine and stem cell biology, and genetic disease—there are some 6,500 gene defects that cause serious diseases, many of which are a result of thousands of different mutations. This research also involves cancer treatments, because how the early cell reacts, how you see apoptosis—cell death—and how you regulate cell growth is of vital importance in cancer research. Most importantly of course, reproductive medicine is important in public health, because of the epigenetic and environmental influences that affect all medicine. In my view—though as a reproductive biologist I would say this, wouldn’t I?—reproductive biology is the very foundation of biological science.

At the height of my laboratory’s international impact, we had scientists and doctors from France, Spain, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Scandinavia and the Republic of Ireland, as well as from some eastern bloc countries. It is not an idle boast to say that we trained most of the Greek scientists here in Britain, at Hammersmith hospital at Imperial College. They are still in practice and their research is now starting to lead our research, as is happening generally across Europe.

Regrettably, the work that is going on in Belgium, and sometimes in France, has in my view a higher impact than the work we are doing in Britain. In a typical academic year, we might have once had some 15 global languages spoken in the laboratory, mostly European, of course, and usually 10 to 20 EU nationals working on research and clinical translation of research. Now things are beginning to look very different and the number of EU nationals in our laboratories has undoubtedly decreased. For example, we now need a new chair in reproductive medicine at Imperial College. We have been looking for a long time for this chair but we cannot find a single British candidate who is up to the standard that we need. The best chance we have of finding such a person is to look to Europe, but I do not think we will find a professor in Europe who will be prepared to come here, given the uncertainty I have mentioned. We cannot find sufficiently well-qualified candidates from Britain. The situation does not look at all hopeful. We need more people from the EU to apply. In excluding post-doctoral fellows who have received the best training and then refusing their access to continued research in the UK we are, I am afraid, further bruising UK science. They go elsewhere and become eventually not our collaborators but our competitors. We need to consider the effect that immigration policy is having, and will increasingly have, on British science.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Prior of Brampton) (Con)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to those of other noble Lords to my noble friend Lord Selborne on this extremely good report. I hope that his committee can build on that report and that it will form a very big part of our industrial strategy.

I do not think there is any doubt that research is one of the jewels in the UK’s crown, but we should never take it for granted. The report is called A Time For Boldness and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, that while it may be an unusual title for something from the House of Lords, we do need boldness. I have heard, in talking to many other people about the industrial strategy, that the UK is incorrigibly incrementalist. When the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, asks, “Where is the magic?” or “Where has the magic not been?”, it is because we have been incorrigibly incrementalist. So it is a time for boldness. If Brexit does only one thing, if it acts as a catalyst for change and boldness, then it will have achieved considerably more than the eight industrial strategies that the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, referred to. We should take Brexit as a catalyst for change.

As noble Lords have mentioned, of course there are risks, but I say to noble Lords who are naturally enthusiasts and naturally positive people that, if they become too pessimistic about the future, they will help create this perception that post-docs and younger academics to whom they referred have—the feeling that somehow things are not good. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Winston, for whom I have huge respect, that although I cannot comment on the state of current reproductive medicine at Imperial, if he walks down the corridor he will see one of his colleagues, the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, and what is being done on robotic surgery, for example. Imperial is at the absolute forefront of many technologies and the noble Lord, Lord Winston, should not forget that.

The noble Lord, Lord Mair, referred to issues at Cambridge. Again, if we take an area such as artificial intelligence, Cambridge is clearly among the world leaders. Look at robotics and go down to Bristol and see what Bristol University is doing in robotics. We have some world-class technology still in the UK. If we want evidence of recent investments, we can look at the £60 million Novo Nordisk investment around diabetes at Oxford University, or the new investments that GSK and Apple are making in this country. Google has made huge investments, through DeepMind, in artificial intelligence in this country. So let us not be too depressed about the future when a lot of very good things are happening.

It is not unreasonable that we have focused today on what I will call the consequences of Brexit rather than looking slightly more fundamentally at the causes of Brexit. Actually, the causes of Brexit, together with the consequences of Brexit, are what we should be looking at, because, if we are honest, many of our difficulties predate Brexit. They predate even our accession to the European Union back in 1972. I think we set these out pretty clearly in the industrial strategy. We have gone through various stages of industrial strategy. We have gone through big government, nationalisation after the war and the sort of tri-partite power-sharing of the 1960s and 1970s, with the CBI, the TUC and the Government sitting around trying to sort things out. We then went to the privatisation and markets of the 1980s and then, more recently, with the coalition Government, we had more of a focus on sectors, but the one common constant throughout that time is that we have had low productivity in this country. Today, after all the iterations we have gone through, we are still 20% or maybe 30% behind the leading countries of Europe and the USA. The Green Paper is explicit about that, as indeed was Andy Haldane, the chief economist of the Bank of England, in his speech, if anyone saw it earlier this week. We have a productivity problem in this country.

It is not just a productivity problem. Since the 1980s—with the third Industrial Revolution, the information technology revolution and, as we move increasingly into what is called the fourth Industrial Revolution, with machine learning and artificial intelligence, as ever more cognitive skills get replaced by machines, rather than just manual skills—we have seen to some extent a hollowing-out of the labour market, as Andy Haldane put it, which is resulting in more inequality. In our country, we have not just societal inequality but geographic inequality. We have a hugely successful and productive area in London, particularly, and the south-east more generally, but that level of productivity is not shared in the rest of the country. That is why what we face today is a productivity question but also an inequality question. Those are the questions we really have to address and that is the context in which we should see the research and innovation strategy.

The emerging themes of the industrial strategy—some of the magic that I hope we will be able to identify—are, of course, around the vocational skills that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, mentioned earlier. It is clearly critical that we address that. Looking back, perhaps one of the great policy mistakes that successive Governments made was to encourage too many people to go to university at the expense of vocational training, apprenticeship training and the like. The work that David Sainsbury—the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury—has done in that area is hugely important and I hope that it will be a critical part of our industrial strategy.

Then there is place: we have to address the fact that many parts of the UK have not done as well as they could. Look back at the history of towns such as Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham: if we can rebuild those civic institutions, there is a chance that we can rebuild those clusters of technology and manufacturing that we used to have.

I turn to research, which is the specific issue that we are debating. In terms of the message and narrative, the Government could not have been more explicit that science and innovation are critical to our future. As noble Lords know, that was set out in the White Paper published in February this year, from which I will read a short extract:

“The Government is committed to building on the UK’s world-leading science base—including more Nobel Laureates than any country outside the United States—and making the UK the go-to nation for scientists, innovators and investors in technology”.


I appreciate that fine words butter no parsnips but look at the actions we have taken: the Treasury has underwritten all successful bids for Horizon 2020 funding and we have provided further assurance by confirming that existing EU students and those starting courses in 2016-17 and 2017-18 will continue to be eligible for student loans and home fee status. We have also provided assurance about postgraduate support through research council studentships. These will remain open to EU students starting courses in 2017-18.

We have gone further to support a healthy science and technology ecosystem in this country than ever before. We are spending an extra £4.7 billion on research over the rest of this Parliament, with an extra £2 billion a year by 2020-21. That is the biggest increase in research spending since 1979, so we are putting our money where our mouth is. Our new industrial strategy challenge fund will direct some of that investment to scientific research and in particular to the development of a number of priority technologies, helping to address Britain’s historic weakness on commercialisation and turning our world-leading research into long-term success.

I tend to look to the USA—just look at the work that DARPA has done over the years. The federal funding of research in the US is far higher than it is in our country. That country, which purports to have small government, spends on a per capita basis significantly more on research than we do. Through institutions such as DARPA, the USA has managed to turn that into huge commercial success. Just look at the iPhone, which is probably the most obvious success: nearly all the technology in the iPhone, whether it is the chip, the global positioning, the LCD or whatever it happens to be, came out of federally funded research. That was of course taken up by great entrepreneurs, backed up by deep capital markets to turn it into a huge commercial success. That is something we need to do but in many of these areas, whether in robotics, AI, machine learning or whatever, we still have some fantastic technology in this country.

I turn to the issue that I think concerns noble Lords the most: attracting people. Can we attract the world’s best people into this country? I agree that if we cannot do that, then we have a serious problem. It has been said that perception is hugely important, but let me quote the Prime Minister:

“I want this United Kingdom to emerge from this period of change stronger, fairer, more united and more outward-looking than ever before. I want us to be a secure, prosperous, tolerant country—a magnet for international talent and a home to the pioneers and innovators who will shape the world ahead. I want us to be a truly Global Britain—the best friend and neighbour to our European partners, but a country that reaches beyond the borders of Europe too”.


David Davis also said that pulling out of the European Union does not,

“mean pulling up the drawbridge. That’s also not in our national interest. We will always welcome those with the skills, the drive and the expertise to make our nation better still. If we are to win in the global marketplace, we must win the global battle for talent. Britain has always been one of the most tolerant and welcoming places on the face of the earth. It must and it will remain so”.

We should not confuse our rightful desire to have control of our immigration policy with a policy that is anti people coming into this country. The two are not in conflict with each other. It is perfectly reasonable for any country to want to have some control over levels of immigration. That does not mean that we are in any way against immigration or, in particular, against encouraging people to come in with the skills and talents that we need to grow and maintain our research base.

I turn to what we are doing in that area. In terms of putting our money where our mouth is in that respect, we have announced a £250-million investment from the national productivity investment fund, which will include £90 million to fund 1,000 new PhD places. At least 85% of those will be in STEM disciplines and 40% will directly help to strengthen collaboration between business and academia through industrial partnerships. There will be a further £160 million to support new fellowships for early and mid-career researchers. We also announced over £100 million on global research talent over the next four years to attract the brightest minds to the UK and help maintain the UK’s position as a world leader in R&D. This includes £50 million which will be ring-fenced for fellowship programmes to attract global talent in areas that align with the industrial strategy. For example, that could be in life sciences or battery technology. Over £50 million of existing international funds will support fellowships that attract researchers to the UK from emerging research powerhouses such as India, China, Brazil and Mexico.

Not only do we have a compelling narrative in this Government about wanting to attract the best of the world to this country; I also believe that we are putting a lot more resource and funding into research in this country. Yet there is a perception out there that we are somehow not doing either of those things. To some extent, that perception is built up by people in this House who are incorrigibly pessimistic. We have some great technology and research in this country and we should start to talk it up.

[Lord Winston]

I was going to be very trivial by wondering whether the Minister might care to apply for the vacant post of the reproductive professor at Imperial.

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

I may have many talents but I think that is one post that I am not qualified to do.

I did not address the particular issue that was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. I would like to meet him on that issue to understand more about it before I reply to him.