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Support for UK Inventors

It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity of using a short period of the House's time to talk about something that this country is very good at, which is invention and inventors. It has often been said that Britain is brilliant at invention, but it is sometimes said that Britain is not quite so good at the commercialisation of invention. I want to touch on that, but not from the point of view of large industry research and development, or the people engaged in scientific support for industry, but in support of individual inventors, by which I mean the people working in their garden sheds, their garages and their upstairs bedrooms in order to bring an idea they have fostered to the point at which it can become a reality. My interest in this subject was sparked by a visit I made a few weeks ago to an organisation called the south west inventors club, which I strongly recommend. It is a group of inventors, as the name says, from the south-west. They meet to exchange information and support each other; they help each other in the gradual development of their individual projects. When I was invited to go, I did not really know what to expect. I suspected that I would not see the caricature of the lone inventor—the sort of slightly distressed gentleman emerging from a shed with a blackened face and hair awry, or, in short, an eccentric. I knew that these were serious-minded people who were very different from that in their attitude. I was not disappointed. I met a variety of people. Some had a high level of scientific qualification and background; others did not, but had spotted an opportunity that they thought capable of being brought into reality. Some of the things developed in that club—sometimes by my constituents, sometimes not—had already been brought to market. A gentleman had invented a device for fitting to the filler caps of diesel cars to prevent people from inadvertently putting lead-free petrol into the tank. Anyone who has done that knows that it has a disastrous effect on the car and, in due course, on the pocket. The simple device he invented prevented that from happening. Incidentally, it cannot happen the other way around; one cannot put diesel into a lead-free car because the nozzle prevents it being done. I think that that invention is likely to become a big seller and a standard fitting on a lot of cars. I am very pleased that the inventor is a gentleman who lives in Podimore in my constituency. Another gentleman was demonstrating what he called a multi-stride tool, for use by carpenters, fitters and do-it-yourself enthusiasts to ensure the correct fitting of screws, handles and so forth to doors. He had devised it because he had realised that it was a tool that he himself needed. He had then brought it to market, and it is now being sold not just in Britain but in America, in major do-it-yourself stores. He had cracked it: he had reached that point of departure. I recall that some years ago a gentleman from Bower Hinton, also in my constituency, invented a completely new set of spanners. Working on a farm, he too had realised that such an invention was needed. What unites so many inventions is that once we have seen them, we think "How obvious", and wonder why on earth they have not always been there. The answer is that it was necessary for someone to have the necessary spark to invent them. As I have said, I was very impressed by many other inventions that I saw that evening, but I cannot speak about them because the intellectual property rights have not yet been ascertained, and they must therefore remain secret. What I can say is that I witnessed a display of mutual support and mutual giving of information. I also realised that there was a capacity problem, and also a problem with advice and support. I do not have up-to-date figures, but the figures that I have suggest that between 2002 and 2005 the number of patents filed fell from 20,000 to 17,000, which is a 15 per cent. drop. The patents that were filed must have been of better quality, because the number of patents granted increased by more than 13 per cent. Up to a fifth of all the patents filed were granted during that period. A quarter of the applications were made by lone inventors, which means that a large proportion of the inventions were developed not by big business or industry, but by the individual. What problems do inventors face? There is the problem of getting their ideas to the point at which they can be marketed successfully, part of which involves understanding the market itself: understanding what the market wants, and how their ideas fit into what is already there. Another problem is understanding what investors seek from a person whom they do not know and who wants to promote an idea. Inventors also sometimes have problems in filtering their ideas in order to identify the runners and the non-runners. That too may seem obvious, but it is not, and it requires expert help. Inventors often need advice on strategy: on the analysis of the market, competitors, and the skills that are required to enable them to take their inventions to market. Then they hit the big barrier of patenting and the legal issues associated with protecting their intellectual property rights. That involves expense, but it also involves expertise. They must know how to set about the process, and how to protect themselves from the rather better-equipped lawyers acting for businesses that might want to exploit their inventions. Then there is the development of a prototype. That too needs initial investment, which will often be hard to come by. They must get the invention off the drawing board and turn it from something built with string and plasticine into something that can be demonstrated to work, and demonstrated to work to the satisfaction of the partners that they will need in order to proceed. In some parts of the country there is a lack of support schemes, although in other parts there are good ones. The south west inventors club is an example of a good one, but provision is patchy. Support schemes are helpful in several ways, such as in pointing to those who offer genuine help and in warning against those who fraudulently offer support in order to steal ideas. There is also a problem in getting big business interested in the amateur, because it is often not interested. It works by looking at its own products and development streams. If someone has an idea that is of relevance, it can be hard for them to identify who in the corporate structure might listen and be willing at least to take them to the next step. What are the remedies? I do not pretend that I have all the answers, and nor do I pretend that nothing has been done before now to meet some of the demands. I have mentioned inventors clubs; I would like there to be many more of them. They should be promoted. The peer review that is inherent in such clubs' activities is of great benefit, as is the mutual support they offer. Organisations such as Business Link and the regional development agencies must be fully engaged. Business Link is very good in terms of what it makes available online—it has comprehensive website support. In some other areas, too, it provides exactly the sort of help that people need for the initial stages. Again, however, this support is patchy; it is not consistently provided across the country as that very much depends on the enthusiasms of local organisations. I do not think that RDAs do nearly enough on this, however. They do not recognise the huge potential economic benefit in seeing such ideas brought through the stages of development to eventually creating jobs and wealth. RDAs are simply not set up to identify these opportunities, but they should be. The British Library is also enormously valuable in this regard. I was not previously aware of that. Shortly after I discovered that I had secured this debate and it was advertised, I was contacted by the public affairs manager at the British Library, who said, "You do know what we're doing already, don't you?" I am a great fan of the British Library. I visited it to attend an exhibition only a few months ago, and I think it does a great job. In 2006, it set up the British Library business and intellectual property centre, which provides a lot of support to those businesses who can find their way there—that is the critical factor, of course. It says it has welcomed 100,000 businesses since it opened. Interestingly, it also said it had recently experienced a marked increase in the number of people finding their way there, particularly among people who are unemployed. Perhaps one reaction to the recession is that people who have been nursing an ambition for a long time are thinking, "Now is the time. I'm going to do something about this", and they are trying to make use of the support that is on offer. The centre at the British Library offers some of that support, but—and it is a big "but"—it could do more if it had a little more investment and connection with the rest of the country. The British Library is a national resource, but it is in London. It is online, so it is available to everyone via the web, but there is a difference between getting information online and actually going and talking to someone face to face. I therefore wonder whether we need a greater ability to use the facilities of the British Library in other parts of the country in order to provide support. The key issue is so often funding and finding the right business partner—business angel—to take a project forward. I have a pedantic issue with the popular TV series "Dragons' Den"—its name. Dragons do not live in dens; however alliterative that may be, they live in lairs. That puts me off, but it is a very good and entertaining programme, and it provides a real connection between people with money and people with ideas, so that the money supports the ideas. We need more dragons' dens; we need an easily available one in every part of the country, rather than just having a television programme. We need something that puts people with money in contact with people with ideas and enables them to come to local agreements. My final point perhaps deals with a much bigger issue, although I am unsure whether it falls directly within the context of this debate I wonder whether it is time that we should start to think in terms of local—regional—stock exchanges. We are used to the investment money that flows through London, but London is not the country as a whole. I would love to see a stock exchange in Bristol or Bath, in Cardiff and in the cities of the north of England. That would provide the opportunity for local people to invest in local entrepreneurs and provide that sort of funding. This is an idea whose time has perhaps come, and I impress it on the Government as something that should be examined. In summation, I am saying that there are people with great ideas who have a problem: they often face so many barriers in taking those ideas forward to the point at which they go into production and start creating jobs and wealth. A relatively small amount of support, in addition to what is being supplied, could unlock a huge amount of capacity for innovation and invention across the country. I am inviting the Minister to agree with that proposition and to take away the thought that this is something that the Government can usefully do, not just centrally—not just here in the capital—but across the country, so that all those people with their bright ideas in their garden sheds end up with the factories producing the goods, which will help us through the current economic problems and to a much brighter future.