Higher Education

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a familiar aspersion that the scientific and technological innovations that occur in our universities are too slow in giving rise to practical industrial applications that might sustain our economic growth and prosperity. It has been suggested that much of the fault lies with the universities: the academics appear unwilling to become engaged in promoting the fruits of their research, which is a much less attractive activity than pursuing the research. I contend that much of the fault lies elsewhere. Britain’s industrial sector is so attenuated that it is hardly in a position to benefit from the fruits of applied research. Those fruits are gathered mainly by other nations.

There are abundant examples of this. It applies, in particular, in the cases of inventions that are capable of contributing to what is optimistically described as the green revolution. A tragic example concerns the battery technology on which electric vehicles depend. The lithium-ion battery was the invention of a British scientist, but the dominant manufacturers of batteries are in the Far East. There is an optimistic notion that, although we are severely behind in establishing British manufacturers of batteries, we are nevertheless in a good position to exploit future technical developments in this area. We are sponsoring academic research to this purpose. However, the support from the Government is pitiful. It is provided in research grants, which are small sums of money available for only three years at a time.

There is also a failure on the part of civil servants and others to recognise that much of any research effort is bound to run to waste. This accounts for the very stinting provision of financial support and the alacrity with which scientific and technological projects are cancelled. Often, they are cancelled at the very point when they reach fruition. An example concerns the British advanced gas-cooled reactor. It suffered a long and expensive process of development, but when the technology had been perfected it was abandoned in favour of an American pressurised water reactor, which is the Sizewell B reactor. We may be in the act of perpetrating the same folly by abandoning the small modular British reactor in favour of an American reactor for which we shall not have to bear the costs of development.

In Britain there has traditionally been an uncomfortable distinction between the arts and humanities on the one hand and science and technology on the other. This has been sustained by a distinction between a gentlemanly university education and a technical education deemed to be more appropriate to the working masses. This was reflected in the distinction between universities and colleges of technology.

The 1956 White Paper on technical education proposed the creation of 10 colleges of advanced technology, albeit that the number had originally been 25. This reflected the anxiety that universities were not adequately fulfilling the role of technical education. In the Robbins report of 1963, it was proposed that these colleges, which had been under the control of local authorities, should become chartered universities. The proposal was greatly welcomed by the Labour Party, which had decried the seeming class distinction between a university education and a technical education.

Of course, I applaud the removal of any such distinction. However, the change has been to the detriment of technical education. The erstwhile colleges of advanced technology and the polytechnics, which became universities in 1966, have abandoned much of their original mission. This is partly because they have been catering to consumer demand, but it is also for financial reasons. A course in the arts and the social sciences or a course that teaches commercial skills is much cheaper to run than a fully fledged technical or scientific course.

Our universities are suffering from perilous ill health. They are understaffed by academics who are severely overworked. The academics have lost a large proportion of their real income, and their pension rights have been severely affected by the disastrous investments of the universities superannuation fund. It has been raided on successive occasions to finance the early retirement of staff, in consequence of successive rounds of cuts.

Recently, a large proportion of the university staff were European nationals. Since Brexit, they have ceased to come in such large numbers. The temporary employment contracts, to which the majority of new university staff are subject, are not attractive to them. The income from overseas students is now set to decline. The exceptions are liable to be in departments of engineering and computer science, which continue to attract large numbers of foreign students. They will carry their skills back to their native countries, with which we may no longer be able to compete in economic terms.

All told, these circumstances evince a profound sense of pessimism.