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Science Budget

The hon. Gentleman, with whom I have enjoyed several investigative trips to various scientific and telecommunications establishments, has put his finger on it. I am grateful to him for saying ““Governments””, because there are times when I think that the Labour party believes that the world started in 1997. Actually, it did not. The project that has now come to fruition goes back a long way and has been supported, sometimes with considerable difficulty, by protecting the CERN budget from those who wished the funds had been allocated elsewhere. The hon. Member for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods), whose constituency has a very fine university, was a bit churlish, which was worrying. I would not have picked up a party political point of view in what she said were it not for one thing. It is of course correct to say that the science budget has doubled through the money that goes to the research councils, and I have paid warm tribute to my main successor, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, for the work that he did in ensuring that that was the case. I put that on the record with no caveats attached. I welcome it; I only wish I had had the ability to persuade my Chancellor of Exchequer that we should do the same thing. It was not for want of trying, but I clearly did not have the powers of persuasion that Lord Sainsbury had when it came to money. Nevertheless, it is of extreme concern that the percentage of gross domestic product spent on R and D by the Government has not increased since I left office in 1997. I wish that the hon. Member for City of Durham had made that point in her balanced speech because it is a matter of great concern to many people, not least those in industry who work closely with other Departments. Obviously, the Ministry of Defence research budget has declined. I remember working with the then chief scientific adviser to the Government, Lord May, who is now playing an important role in the other place with regard to science. He wrote a paper, which I requested, on the significance of the decline in the defence research budget. Sadly, although the paper was very influential, it did not prevent the curtailment of that departmental research. That has had a big effect on many of the value added companies that this country requires, and I hope that the Minister will take it into account when he talks about the Government's record. We have to put it in that context. Other international comparisons are of concern. We always talk about the way this country does well in citations, and I do not dispute that. Nevertheless, we can see the rate of growth of research and citations in other countries. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, China shows a particular growth in citations in mathematics, engineering and the physical sciences. For the record, and the ease of those who wish to find it, the previous figure about GDP was taken from page 34 of the Sainsbury review, which was published in October 2007. The point about the worrying tendencies in citations is on page 36. The British Government's proud record on citations is rather retrospective, and we have to be careful about other countries racing to the top. It is important to note that page 35 of the same report shows that the amount of research conducted by the British Government in the public sector is still lagging behind that of many of our competitors. It is certainly not something that we should boast about too much. In this country, the private sector does almost twice as much, in terms of percentage of GDP, as the Government. There are worrying concerns if one looks at the Government as a whole, and the impact on science. My report, which was a submission to the shadow Cabinet on science policy, indicated that we should look at whether further mergers should take place in the research councils. There is quite an unproductive hierarchy among the remaining research councils, which is duplicatory. The Minister's duty, while preserving the Haldane principles, as I had to try to do when I was Minister, is to give guidance on the linking themes and cross-disciplinary research that the research councils should bear in mind. I know that that is happening, but I am still rather worried about the process. I have talked to most of the people involved in the research councils during the past 18 months while conducting my research, and we have to be a bit careful about just saying that peer review is wonderful. It would be useful for the Minister to start a proper inquiry into whether peer review is quite what it is cracked up to be in what is increasingly becoming a multidisciplinary age. I do not get such feedback from many of the scientists involved, so perhaps it is a worthy study for the Select Committee.