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Programme for Research: EUC Report

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Woolmer, for bringing to the House this extremely timely report. The seventh framework programme reaches its crucial decision point with the European Parliament at the end of the month, so the House now has an opportunity to debate the programme and what we are likely to gain from it. I have to confess that I asked to speak in the debate because before I came into the House—I celebrated my eighth birthday as a Member last week—I was the author of a book on the framework programmes with Professor John Peterson from Edinburgh University. It took us up to the end of the fourth framework programme and was to an extent a definitive text on framework programme workings. Given that my responsibilities on these Benches have been concentrated largely on education, I am afraid that I have not kept completely up to date, so I am enjoying the opportunity to be able to dig back into this area, although, thanks to the Education and Inspections Bill being considered both in this House and the other place this week, I have not been able to give it as much time as I would have wished. It is interesting to be able to look back and make comparisons between what is now being proposed under the seventh framework programme and what was set out in the earlier ones. In many ways, the shape and processes of the programmes have not changed much. There is still a large element of co-operative, collaborative research where research institutions and companies are asked to get together to form networks across Europe to progress research projects within identified areas of priority. The co-operation element of the budget is still in place,as is the mobility element, which has been an extraordinarily important part of it. That is because moving young researchers to different research institutes across Europe has been of enormous value to all the European institutions. At a meeting of the Foundation for Science and Technology, the noble Lord, Lord Rees, said that when he was a young postdoctoral student the natural thing was for him to go to America, where he met up with other European researchers. He said that, thanks largely to the framework programmes, as frequently as not young researchers now spend time meeting their European counterparts in European centres—indeed, as much as they do at American centres. That is of enormous value to Europe as a whole and particularly to the United Kingdom. Money is also available for infrastructureand building up capacities under the cohesion element of the programmes, which should not be underestimated. It is important that countries more backward in research should be encouraged to move forward. I believe that when I was writing in the 1990s I had more sympathy with this point than most. A substantial amount of the budget is still devoted to the joint research centres and to the nuclear aspects of EURATOM. There are some questions to be asked about that. What is new? I am delighted to see on the agenda the European Research Council, which is going to fund basic research. I always thought it anomalous that we were funding applied research at the federal, Commission level in Europe. It has limited immediate knock-on effects and is called ““pre-competitive”” research. In the United States, basic research is funded at the federal level because its effects are long term and diffuse; they cannot easily be measured. It makes more sense and is more natural to fund such research at the higher levels of government. In the US, individual states, which are the equivalent of the European member states, provide funding for applied research. We argued back in the 1990s in my book that it would make sense for the Community to put more money into basic research, and I am delighted that this idea has got off the ground with the European Research Council and even more delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Patten, is its chairman. We have two excellent representatives on the council board and I look forward to seeing what comes from it. I think that they are going to put particular emphasis on enabling two sets of researchers to carry forward their work. One set comprises young researchers without a track record but who need a leg up and the other is a set of more experienced researchers who want to pursue what are known as blue-skies projects. Also new are the joint technology platforms and the joint technology initiatives, which pull together industrial capabilities. These put industry in the lead in applied research—or pre-competitive research, which the CBI has said is never competitive research. I shall come back to this in a moment, because I have a few reservations about what is happening and I should like to explore those further with noble Lords. There is also the new thematic field of space and security, which the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, talked about. I believe that I am right in saying that space research has now been separated from security work. My figures for the July budget show that it is now very much in line with the proposals made by the Commission in May 2006. Over the seven-year period, there is some €1.4 billion for space and slightly less than that, €1.35 billion, for security. It has been agreed that the security elements should concentrate on civil research. This has been a difficult issue for some time. In the 1980s, we got to the point where the defence sector relied more on civil technologies than on defence technologies per se. The degree to which the defence sector now uses developments made in the electronic communications area is enormous, and by the 1980s civilian research was leading the field. The same is true for space and satellite technologies, which are of immense value to the military sector. It is difficult to draw a neat line here. However, I understand what noble Lords are saying and I sympathise with it. Totally separate from the framework programme but nevertheless being proposed at the same time is what some people call Barossa’s baby; namely, the European Institute of Technology. There is deep scepticism about this project. We know that it has taken 150 years to develop the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and I am afraid that I do not agree that a virtual institute is the same thing as a physical place. In a way, the whole issue about the exchange and cross-fertilisation of ideas by being able to rub shoulders with others is extremely important, and location plays a part in that. That is why the United States has organisations such as the Santa Fe Institute, which serve to bring people together in one place. So I share in the scepticism expressed by members of the committee about the European Institute of Technology. We shall have to watch it fairly carefully. I am sorry that the committee reported as early as May, although the report was not actually published until the end of June. I recognise that it was trying to feed into discussions being held at the time, but some interesting things such as actual decisions on budgets and carrying forward ideas about the technology platforms have been taking place since then. I have to admit that I would have liked to see a slightly more substantial report from the committee covering rather more areas and taking more evidence that it did. The budget arrived at is very close indeed to the ideas put forward in May. In giving evidence to the committee, the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, was quite right to say that it would be about €50 billion. The total is €52 billion, but includes €2.7 billion for EURATOM. So, if you take EURATOM away, it is about €50 billion for the framework programme. That is €7 billion a year spread across 25, soon to be 27, countries. If we all had equal shares, it would be less than €200 million a year each. The UK research budget is now about €3.5 billion if you take together the research councils’ budget and the HEFCE research element. Very little now goes from the Government into industrial research but, if you look at what the Government are putting in here, you see that the UK has done particularly well in the various framework programmes. We took something like16 per cent of the fifth framework programme, so we are looking at about €500 million, which, although it is not big money, is extremely useful—we certainly should not demean it. However, I question where some of that money is going. There remain questions about the joint research centres and whether we need to put as much money into them. I return now to the question of what benefit the industrial technology platforms bring to the UK. Those platforms aim to bring together the key players—industries, small and medium-sized businesses, financial institutions, national and regional governments, the research communities, such as universities and research centres, and the NGOs. There are somewhere in the region of 10 areas where these platforms are being put forward. They fall into six different categories, including new technologies per se, which cover, for example, work on hydrogen fuel cells and nanotechnologies; the sustainability agenda, which ranges from research into photovoltaics through to water supply; the new technologies applied to public services, including, for example, a technology platform on industrial safety; keeping high technologies at the leading edge, which includes platforms on materials and space technology; and new technologies applied to old industrial fields—the steel, construction and textile industries fall into this category. The committee endorsed the concept of technology platforms. Paragraph 31 of its report states that it is important that FP7 succeeds in making R&D more industry driven. Paragraph 39 states: "““We welcome the proposal for European Technology Platforms … to implement a strategic research agenda through public-private partnerships … as this is most likely to ensure that the research projects are industry-driven””." But, in paragraph 40, the committee also callsfor more effective monitoring of the European technology platforms. I endorse that call. The committee expressed scepticism about what we have got out of these European programmes in industrial terms. I should point out that, without the early developments in the framework programme, we would not have achieved the advances in mobile telephony and European satellite technology that we have made. There are many other achievements that we can look back on—for instance, the developments in biotechnology and the human genome project, in which our participation in the early days played a very important part. The pay-offs have been long term. There is a great danger that the large companies will dominate some of these technology platforms. This certainly happened in the early days of the ICT programmes. Perhaps one reason why we have seen a fall-off in industrial participation is that they have been tougher on the larger companies. But it is important to query whether industry is always right. I end by quoting from the evaluation report on these programmes that was carried out for the UK Government. It emphasises the importance of the degree to which some of these pay-offs fromthese programmes are long-term. Paragraph 10 of the Targeted Review of Added Value Provided by International R&D Programmes states: "““The literature makes clear that the value of R&D is not confined to (eventual) commercial outputs. ‘Indirect’ payoffs such as expanding the supply of trained graduates may be as, or even more, important to business and society. Framework Programme evaluations permit us to understand the range of types of benefits, as well as participant satisfaction. However, they say nothing directly regarding the extent of the Programme’s impact on UK (or European) competitiveness. The benefits identified are essentially intermediate outputs (knowledge, skills, tools, relationships, et cetera). Of the many Framework sub-objectives, the evaluations reveal that ‘stimulation of collaboration’ is being achieved constantly””." I come back to the point that I made at the beginning—the value of the collaborative effortsthat have been achieved from these framework programmes.