Treasury Support for UK Science

Roger Mullin Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Roger Mullin (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to take part in a debate under your wise chairmanship, Mr McCabe. I hope that that quality of wisdom will appear in the Minister’s response. I congratulate the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) on raising this important matter. I have a personal interest in the topic, not least because my late brother chaired the science and technology committee of the OECD at one stage, and was also secretary of the Science Council of Canada. Although I am not a pure scientist as he was, I have a deep commitment to the issues that the hon. Lady raised.

I was particularly interested in the hon. Lady’s opening remarks about the pace of change driven by science. It reminded me that several years ago I attended a lecture by Professor Tom Stonier. He related some statistics to the effect that in the last 25 years of the 20th century, more people had been working on pure research than in the entire previous history of the world. That fact, and advances in new technology and computing science that enable information to be processed very quickly, mean that we live in a world where the pace of change is great and accelerating. People at the forefront of that have a great advantage, but that pace of change means that those who do not keep themselves in the frontline can too easily fall behind rapidly. That is my concern.

Several of this afternoon’s fine contributions by hon. Members from various parties have touched on the balance between blue-sky thinking, and thinking that might be said to have a business-innovatory basis. I have felt concern at times reading remarks by the Minister, which seem to show him as heavily biased towards business-related innovative research. It is too easy to forget the importance of true blue-sky thinking, and how often its results cannot be predicted. Nevertheless, some of the most profound scientific effects and advances happened simply because someone with an inquiring mind was interested in finding out more. I have every sympathy with the 30 academics—including four Nobel laureates—who wrote to The Daily Telegraph on 2 June 2014:

“Sustained open-ended enquiries in controversial or unfashionable fields are virtually forbidden today and science is in serious danger of stagnating”.

No one who has taken part in the debate would want British science—or Scottish or Northern Ireland science—to be compromised in any way, or to stagnate because of a failure to understand the importance of blue-sky research.

I was impressed by the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan), not least because the statistics she gave mean I can glance past two or three of my own paragraphs. A comment I would make on those statistics is that all current measures of research intensity confirm the same thing: that the UK is now a laggard compared with other advanced societies. We are, as she said, at the bottom of the G8, and we lag behind on a host of other measures.

I was interested, as I always am, in the contribution of the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson), who spoke about the contributions in the Northern Ireland economy, and the way that funding from the Northern Ireland Executive is geared towards research. He said that no doubt the same was true in places such as Scotland. I can confirm to him and the Minister that that is only too true. Notwithstanding the erosion of the amount of flat cash in recent years, and the constraints caused by the Scottish Government’s limited powers because of the reserved nature of the spending, they were able to increase expenditure on research and knowledge exchange by 11% in 2013-14, and by 38% since 2007. They did that not because they received extra money, but because they chose to protect the research and science budget as much as possible. Scotland has a long history of supporting science, and I would like to think that the Scottish Government’s willingness to choose to make sacrifices in other areas to sustain scientific research is something that the UK Government will follow in the spending review.

As we have heard from many Members, there is a strong economic case for investing in science, which helps to drive and sustain the economy, but there is much we still need to understand. We need a better understanding of all the connections that are essential to driving progress in scientific fields of endeavour. One of the key means of stimulating progress and innovation is to engage different types of thinkers and researchers though networks, so they can feed off one another—a factor acknowledged by many writers.

One of my teachers many years ago was the late Professor Tom Burns. He was noted for many pieces of research, including a fairly seminal book in the early 1960s called “The Management of Innovation”, in which he pointed to the importance of networks of interacting researchers, scientists and the like. That is something that universities and the academic community are particularly well equipped to do. Hughes and Martin, writing about the value of public sector research and development, captured this pretty well, stating that

“the issue is not so much about isolating and assessing the impact of publicly funded research per se nor about determining its optimal level in isolation. It is instead about analysing how best to understand and manage the connections between differently funded and motivated research efforts in an overall system of knowledge production and innovation.”

A number of Members mentioned scientific infrastructure. Recent work, most notably that of Dr Stephen Watson at Glasgow University, has pointed to the huge significance of the infrastructure spend component of Government investment in science. There is, however, a huge mismatch between UK Government infrastructure spend for the Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle, and the spend for elsewhere in the United Kingdom. National research infrastructure investment is known to play a key role in driving fundamental scientific discovery and attracting business investment. We therefore need to map out such investment, both thematically and territorially—something that no Government have ever done.

In conclusion, I have four questions to pose to the Minister, one of which relates to the tax credit issue, but I am not going to rehearse that argument because other hon. Members have already made it fully. First, what is the Government’s view of my argument that more, not less, investment in blue-sky scientific research is needed? Secondly, will the Government commit to restoring the scientific budget spend to at least 2010 levels, in real terms? In other words, will they undo the cut of the previous Parliament? Thirdly, will the Government commit to reviewing infrastructure spend in science to ensure that the talents of the scientific community in all parts of the United Kingdom are properly supported? Finally, will the Minister confirm that there is no prospect of converting any element of research funding into loans?