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Employment, Universities and Skills and Housing

Thank you for calling me to speak in this debate, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to participate under your leadership. I want to refer to two Bills in the Queen's Speech. I very much welcome the marine and coastal access Bill, which is long overdue. The former Select Committee on Science and Technology published an important report called ““Investigating the Oceans””, and I hope that some of its recommendations can be taken into account in that legislation. One of our strong recommendations, which the Government have so far rejected, was the establishment of a marine science agency to replace the Inter-Agency Committee on Marine Science and Technology, which does not have many powers and which, we felt, lacks a lot of clout. At the moment, marine policy, for example that on fisheries or shipping, is conducted in silos, but we felt that all marine policy should be pulled together under one controlling organisation. Looking at the report retrospectively, I still believe that, and I ask the Secretary of State and his Department to reconsider that recommendation. The Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee has scrutinised the draft apprenticeships Bill, and our report was published late last week. I hope that it will be helpful to Members who serve on the Public Bill Committee. The speech by the shadow Secretary of State was extremely negative. Of course, his function is to try to attack the Labour Government, but I recall when I was in a university trying to teach—I say ““trying”” deliberately—under a Conservative Government, and it was jolly difficult. I have spoken about this before, and I do not want to labour the point again, but at that time there was a huge brain drain. It is right and proper that our new graduate and postgraduate students should go abroad for postgraduate and post-doctoral studies to find out what is going on in the rest of the world, but in the hope that many of them then bring back the new skills gained in other countries, particularly America, Japan and Germany, to apply them in this country. At that time, under a Conservative Government, the huge brain drain was one way. People went across the pond to America, largely, and stayed there; many of them are still there. It is good that under the Labour Government we have attracted a substantial number of them back again, and far fewer have joined the brain drain in that direction. In fact, it is nice to see Americans coming over and joining British research groups for a change, particularly in subjects such as stem cell research. Under the Tories, things got so bad that a membership organisation was established called Save British Science, and people joined it in overwhelming numbers and campaigned to try to do just that. However, the only thing that saved British science was a change of Government in 1997. That organisation, which changed its name under the Labour Government, is now called CASE—the Campaign for Science and Engineering—and is much less militant than it was under the Conservatives. Indeed, it gives helpful advice to the Labour Government.