Science and Research

Debate between Paul Blomfield and Liz McInnes

Wednesday 24th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Paul Blomfield]

I was a student in York and am well aware of the strength of the two universities. My hon. Friend is right; linking research with its commercial application is critical. Some progress has been made with the impact approach taken in the sector, although there is more to be done. We considered that issue in the Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills during the last Parliament. Although there is more to be done, we should recognise that a huge amount is already being done to link research and its application. I shall mention a few examples from Sheffield.

We would be foolish to lose our advantage in world-leading research, but that could happen if we do not take care. “The Plan for Growth”, published by the Chancellor and the Minister’s predecessor in December 2014, acknowledged the challenge:

“If we fail to move quickly to secure our position in a globalised world, then it is highly likely that other countries....will do so ahead of us. We not only run the risk of missing out on new opportunities, but also of losing the position of strength that we have today”.

The Government acknowledge that we can and must do more.

Innovation policy now needs to focus on developing industrial and private sector research and development capacity, building on the UK’s strong and well connected science base. It will do that by working with universities. For example, to take up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), the University of Sheffield works closely with Rolls-Royce, Boeing and more than 100 supply chain companies. Also in my constituency, Sheffield Hallam University secured Toshiba as the first technology partner in the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, designing new products to help promote the integration of exercise into people’s daily lives and address common health issues. Hallam’s new National Centre of Excellence for Food Engineering is supported by more than 40 companies, including Mars and Nestlé UK, to support growth in the food industry through improved manufacturing technology and staff capability.

Across my city, and across the university sector, science and research are creating jobs, but we could do more.

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend talks about research in universities, but it starts earlier than that. On Saturday, I was privileged to visit the excellent Hopwood Hall Further Education College in my constituency, including its excellent animal studies facility. Small amounts of research are being done there, which helps students on their path towards university. However, funding for FE colleges is being cut, and I wonder what impact that is having on the availability of fledgling research for those wanting to go to university.

[Paul Blomfield]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about acknowledging research taking place outside the university sector. I said earlier that foreign investment is driven significantly by countries with strong research capacity, but it is driven equally by countries that commit to the development of skills. The cuts in the adult skills budget that my hon. Friend mentions, and particularly in further education, will weaken our capacity and our potential for economic growth.

We could do much more than is being done in the examples I have given. We could build partnerships in developing infrastructure for low-carbon energy, which we could then export to the world. If we shrink away from such a challenge, China will pay for the new generation of power stations to be built and we will miss out on the opportunity to help shape our own future. We will have little leverage in insisting that some of the investment is spent on creating jobs in the UK, and we will pay for it through increased electricity bills for decades.

What should we do? I have three suggestions. First, let us stop making things worse. We should recognise the damage done to the UK by the structural shortcomings of our economy. Research and development is a national asset and we must not incentivise companies to do less of it, or make it harder for our universities to transform our economy.

Secondly, we must certainly not threaten the important stream of research funding that comes through our membership of the European Union, because as I am sure the Minister knows—I am sure he will endorse it—the UK does disproportionately well from European Union research funding. In 2013, for example, the last year for which data are available, we won €1.11 billion out of the €9.6 billion allocated under the seventh framework programme, FP7, which was the predecessor of Horizon 2020. Were we to exit the EU, that would clearly be at risk, at enormous cost to our universities and the communities in which they are driving economic growth. Similarly, we must not undermine the flow of talent into our country by the types of measure that we have already seen affecting students or by new restrictions on tier 2 visas. I am sure the Minister agrees with me on that point as well, although whether all his colleagues will is another question.

Thirdly, we should recognise and maintain our strengths. We should build on what we have that is positive and do more of it. The UK catapult centres, where universities and industry work together, are making an important start. At the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in the Sheffield city region, more than 100 companies partner with university research to win jobs and orders for the UK. Some of them are giant companies, such as Rolls-Royce, and others are the high-tech supply companies that support them.

It is not only the companies that benefit. Research demands skills, and more than 600 young people are now training as advanced apprentices at catapult centres. They are fully funded by companies, as recognised by Times Higher Education in its widening participation initiative of the year award. Those people are working in a research environment and have the opportunity to progress to degrees, even MBAs and PhDs, all within a research setting. How was the AMRC in Sheffield built? By universities and industry working together, and through European funding and regional funding under the old regional development areas.

We should invest in other areas too, with a sense of national purpose. Our ageing society will face huge human and social costs as incurable neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s become even more common. Social, technical and medical innovations are urgently needed to deal with this, as the NHS struggles to deliver more with more limited resources. Places such as the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience will make that possible. We know that we need to decarbonise our energy supply, but the existing low-carbon alternatives are just too expensive. Research and innovation will change that.

We also need to build capacity. The Chancellor has talked about our economy needing an “extra gear”. That extra gear is research and innovation. We need more capacity in our industry, but that will not happen if we do not support the research strengths of our universities. Every industry—every city and region—needs transformational research to drive the growth and wealth that we all need. In the last Parliament I served on the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, and we highlighted that challenge in our report on business-university collaboration, in which we recommended unanimously—in a cross-party Committee dominated by Government Members—that the Government aim for 3% of GDP to be spent on R and D by 2020. Above all, I would welcome the Minister’s response on our Committee’s challenge.

We are at a crossroads. The erosion of the UK’s capacity to innovate technologically was not inevitable; it was the unintended consequence of a series of choices made over decades. But we can reverse it. If we do not, we will be condemned to continue on our trajectory of low growth and poor trade performance and will ultimately lose power over our own economic destiny. I urge the Government to recognise the vital contribution of research innovation to the UK, to ensure that we can thrive in a globally competitive environment.