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Employment, Universities and Skills and Housing

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. What the Government are worried about—hon. Members in all parts of the Chamber should be worried, too—is this: if we double the amount of money from the Government, not to mention from industry, going into research and development, we would expect to see outcomes now, after 10 years of extra funding. I have warned the academics several times that the Government are looking for outcomes, but there is a problem. The innovation and the R and D in our universities are as good as any in the world. The big difficulty is getting the products through the spin-out companies, but we are doing better than ever on that. I have never seen so many spin-out companies, so many incubators and science parks dotted around our universities or so many clusters of companies feeding into them, but still we do not see the volume of outcomes that the Government perhaps expect. However, the academics wanted me to remind the House today that it takes 10 or even up to 30 years for a brilliant invention such as DNA fingerprinting—that is just one example that flies off the top of my head—to become a reality that is useful for society. That cannot be done in 10 years, the academics tell me; it will take far longer than that. Perhaps we are therefore being over-anxious about that aspect of our work. The Sainsbury review, by Lord Sainsbury, flagged up those issues for us.