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Science, Technology and Engineering

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, for introducing this interesting and timely debate. It is timely because in the current recession, we are looking at ways in which we may emerge from it, and we all agree that we need to look at rebalancing the economy and shifting towards industries and services that have a considerable science and technology content and could play a bigger role. I think that the creative arts and heritage industries will also play a substantial part in our recovery, but that does not mean that science and technology do not play a part in those industries. If one looks at computer games and animation one recognises that digital technology, which did not exist 20 years ago, and the creative and media industries have come together there. An area in which I have a particular interest because I chaired a sub-committee of the Select Committee on Science and Technology is science and heritage. Looking at how we can engage people in the role of science and technology, I was fascinated by the degree to which the general public are fascinated by, for example, how the Madonna of the Pinks in the National Gallery was identified as the original by chemistry that identified the paints that were used at the time. When galleries expose conservation techniques to the general public, they find that the general public are interested in them. It is a means of breaking down barriers and the clash of cultures to which the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, referred. On the whole, we in Britain feel that we punch above our weight in science and technology, which a number of speakers mentioned. We say time and time again that we have an extraordinarily good science base, although we have some reservations about how far we manage to translate it into technology. The Government must be congratulated on the degree to which they have given priority to science and technology over the past 12 years. If we look at it in terms of how much money has gone into the research base, it has increased in real terms from £2.4 billion to £5.9 billion; that is, it has more than doubled over the past 12 years. However, the other part of public sector R&D, spending on government departments, has remained more or less static. While business R&D has increased from £11.7 billion to £13.4 billion, as a proportion of GDP overall it has gone down from 1.25 per cent of GDP to 1.08 per cent of GDP. The UK as a whole has set its target at 2.5 per cent. The noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, mentioned the role of business R&D, which is real and worrying. He said that when he started as an apprentice with Lucas there were two German firms allied to the work he was doing and that the two German firms have gone on to become multinationals whereas Lucas has disappeared from the scene. That is too often the story in relation to British companies. One of the features of business R&D in the UK is the real role that foreign companies play. In terms of R&D as a whole, it is very disappointing that having set the target of 2.5 per cent, in 2006, we were down to 1.78 per cent of GDP. In Japan, it was 3.4 per cent; in the US, it was 2.66 per cent; and in Germany, it was 2.54 per cent. As a number of noble Lords have mentioned, President Obama has pledged a doubling of public investment in R&D with an injection of $21 billion, which is a huge amount of money. In business, we have no room for complacency. It is vital that we still move forward. It is worth mentioning that although we have 4 per cent of the population of the world, we have 8 per cent of scientific publications and 12 per cent of highly cited publications. In that sense, we produce good science. But we have an ageing population of scientists and very real worries about the number of young people coming forward to study science in our universities. In the past five years, 80 university science departments, mainly in physics and chemistry, have closed. These statistics are very worrying. What are the current proposals? The Government have pledged to continue their investment in science and technology to 2014, carrying through their 10-year investment plan. The Budget promised a further allocation of £750 million into a strategic investment plan to support advanced industrial projects in growth areas. The research councils have been asked to reallocate £106 million of their funding into those same growth areas. Two interesting strands of thought are developing. In February, the Secretary of State, Mr Denham, at the Royal Academy of Engineering, said that, ""of course, any research base which does not include a substantial element of fundamental, curiosity-driven research conducted by researchers who simply want to know, will not be relevant economically in anything but the shortest of terms. Many defining moments in science are the fruits of research started and funded years ago—research which proceeded unevenly and serendipitously over time. So stop such work and we kill the goose that lays the golden egg. (We would kill a lot of other geese who would not lay … at all of course, but knowledge for knowledge’s sake is also … worth having). While the driver of fundamental research is curiosity, we shouldn’t, though, lose interest in its links with economic value. A recent MRC and Wellcome Trust report suggests that the average return on investment from the exploitation of fundamental research is 39p annually for every pound invested from the outset"." That is a very high rate of return, which certainly is worth pursuing. I am somewhat disturbed by the degree to which the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, has suggested that we should now perhaps concentrate on areas where the UK is likely to be number one or number two in 20 years’ time and that there should be a concentration of resources into a number of growth areas. That has been linked with the new industrial strategy that is emerging from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. The strategy talks about ensuring that British science and technology are at the heart of the revolutions in industrial production that we defined in the 20th century, but looking to the future, the strategy identifies the need to pay particular attention to those technological changes that are shaping industries and highlight several sectors, such as low-carbon technologies, digital media, life sciences and advanced manufacturing. What does all this mean? There is talk of a greater concentration of resources. Are we seeking to pick the winner? The Minister indicates that no, we are not. This takes me back to the 1970s and 1980s when I worked in the National Economic Development Office. We firmly denied that we were picking the winners but were scenario-planning and looking at other forms of moving forward. I look back also to the 1990s and the work I did with the Science Policy Research Unit on the UK Foresight programme. How much is the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, using the Foresight unit in his department and the Horizon Scanning Centre to look at areas where there is growth potential? We have established these Foresight facilities and they are very important. I end on a note of warning about trying to identify where we are going to be in 20 years’ time. In the early 1970s, the late Lord Rothschild, who led the job of looking at funding for science and technology, considered the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. In those days it had a budget of around £20 million. He asked why all that money was being spent on advanced molecular biological research and where it would take us. But it was the eve of the revolution in biotechnology and all that has stemmed from it. It is extremely dangerous not to invest in a broad science base from which will come a high rate of return and to identify too narrowly from where the benefits may come.