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Science and Technology

My Lords, I, too, join other noble Lords who have spoken today in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, on securing today’s debate. I congratulate him also on his very informative and excellent speech, which was to be expected bearing in mind his background in engineering and the sciences. The debate has been excellent, with wonderful contributions. In order for the Minister to have his full time allowance, I would have to finish my speech by eleven minutes past one. So I have chopped bits and pieces out of my speech to make sure that I could do that. I may have chopped out rather more than perhaps I ought to have done as it does not follow as well as I would like. So I shall say very few things in order that the Minister has a minute or two extra to answer the excellent contributions that most certainly have been made today. For me to stand here when the noble Lords, Lord May and Lord Hunt, my noble friend Lord Soulsby, and the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, who I know so well, and think that I can add anything that has not already been said is ludicrous. I wanted to say a little about knowledge technology, but the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, has covered that. I will just make a couple of points. I was very interested—I hope that the noble Lord took note of this point—in the amount of money that has to go into research to produce results. This has not been a political debate. It has been a very informed debate. But I was interested in what my noble friend Loud Soulsby said about the contribution that goes into research in China and the results of that contribution. Practically everything that we buy in the stores today has ““Made in China”” on it. The noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, referred to global warming. We need money to find solutions to that. I shall read very carefully the speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan. I am sure that what she said was excellent. I heard bits of it, but for her to try to keep within the time limit with the content that she had made it difficult. I shall now sit down.