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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I feel utterly chastised, and I apologise. I left the debate earlier this evening to attend a reception with the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) and Lord Crathorne. We are working with a group of young people who are blind. Most of them are also deaf, and many of them also have physical impairments. Returning to Budget debates should make us recognise the fact that the reality of what we are debating is an attempt to make people’s lives better in our communities, wherever they are. I pay tribute to the Economic Secretary, who is sitting next to the Chief Secretary, for the support that he gave to Henshaw’s college when he was a Minister in the Department for Education and Skills. I thank him for delivering on a promise that the Government made to put about £2 million into that project, and I do so with great sincerity. I should like to concentrate my brief remarks on science. This was a Budget for science. Whatever we might think of other bits of the Budget, science came out of it very well indeed. The additional supply of science teachers, the offering of pure sciences to more young people, new support for carbon capture and storage, replacing the research assessment exercise system and extending R and D tax credits were all things that I support, and my Committee—the Science and Technology Committee—was very supportive of those things, too. This was a somewhat unusual Budget. I, for one, was surprised by the extent of the changes in the Budget, and the associated ““Science and innovation investment framework 2004–2014: next steps”” reads more like a science White Paper than a Budget document. I do not think that I was the only person who was surprised by the announcements. They came as news, for instance, to organisations that will be affected by them. It appears that the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, the Medical Research Council and even some parts of the Office of Science and Technology were informed of the changes announced in the Budget only the day before. It seems that the Chancellor cannot wait to put his plans for science and technology into action and that he has even taken responsibility for reorganising the research councils. So if the Chancellor is now running science policy, I wonder what the Minister for Science and Innovation and the Office of Science and Technology have left to do. However, the real issue behind some of the changes announced in the Budget is: who in the Government is monitoring the UK’s science capacity, and where and how? In the past couple of weeks, we have been debating the closure of the chemistry department at the university of Sussex and the loss in the past two years of four major chemistry departments, which produced the very chemistry graduates who will be among the 3,000 such teachers in our schools in a few years’ time. I wonder who is monitoring the situation. It certainly is not the Higher Education Funding Council, which told my Committee last night that it had absolutely no plans to intervene in what is clearly a dire situation. We recognise the huge investment that has been made in science—the £10 billion provided in this comprehensive spending review is massive additional funding—but although the money is going in, there remains a Luddite approach to many of our world-class science facilities. The Silsoe research institute, which has world-class expertise in agricultural engineering, and the Hannah research institute, which deals with nutrition, will close this Friday. Four Centre for Ecology and Hydrology institutions will close next year, at a time when environmental science should be at the heart of our agenda, instead of being trimmed at the margins. In the past 10 years, one in three science posts in publicly funded institutions have gone. I hope that the Minister will explain in his wind-up who is doing the planning for science. Who is pulling it all together and looking at a strategic science base for the UK? I do not dispute the right of research councils to say that we do not need a particular element of science in this or that institute; nor do I question the fact that at times institutes will have to close. What I do question is the complete lack of a science plan outlining the capacity that we need in the coming years. The replacement of the RAE system was a welcome announcement. It was handled well and I compliment the Government not only on getting rid, eventually, of the RAE system, but on introducing the new metric system and running the two systems side by side. However, what our universities do not want—I hope that the Minister will take this point on board—is to be running a full RAE system in 2008 and a full new metric system at the same time. Frankly, that would simply undermine much of what has to be done. The really interesting announcement in the Budget was the reorganisation of research institutes. We Liberal Democrats and my Committee are pleased that the wealth of information in the NHS database will be used for research purposes, but where did the announcement on combining the Medical Research Council and the NHS database come from? Who will lead the organisation? Will it be Sir Colin Blakemore, or somebody brought in through open competition? What resources will the organisation have? The Chancellor mentioned a figure of approximately £1 billion, but the amount spent on the MRC and on the NHS database combined comes to £1.3 billion. So does this constitute a cut in medical research funding? It would be interesting to have an answer to that. Finally, will the Minister say what is happening with the restructuring of this country’s eight research councils? It seems that the Treasury is doing something that nobody else knows about. It is proposing that the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council surrender its grant-giving duties to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and that it then merge its facilities with the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, creating a new ““large facilities council””. Whatever the proposal’s merits—I accept that there are some—surely Research Councils UK should be doing such planning, not the Chancellor sat in the Treasury. Perhaps the Minister can reassure us on this issue. Overall, however, this is a Budget for science that is to be welcomed, and it certainly will be appreciated in the science community.