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Science Budget

It is a little known fact that at the age of 12, I aspired to being a plant breeder, but I never got there. The hon. Gentleman is making a characteristically trenchant speech. Does he agree that one important aspect is not merely the cross-cutting of different departments, but the ability to maintain certain national capacities in order to take a strategic view and move things forward? Where one is simply decentralising to the research councils and looking at peer review and so forth, the difficulty is that when we need a lever to pull, we suddenly find that we have no one left to pull it.