That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Science and Technology Committee “Science and technology superpower”: more than a slogan? (1st Report, HL Paper 47).
My Lords, I am delighted to introduce for debate this Science and Technology Committee report on the UK as a science and technology superpower. Before I start, I declare my interests as a non-executive director of two UK technology companies: Ceres Power and Frontier IP.
The Science and Technology Committee is highly engaged, and I thank everyone on the committee at the time for their significant contributions to the final report. As ever, huge credit is due to the committee’s staff, our former clerk George Webber, Thomas Hornigold and Cerise Burnett-Stuart, who did so much of the hard work in managing the consultation and the witnesses and in preparing the report.
The committee conducted a broad-ranging inquiry into the UK science and technology ecosystem, centred around the Government’s ambition to make the UK a science superpower by 2030. The inquiry considered: defining UK priorities as part of a science and technology strategy; international aspects of the strategy; the organisational structure of UK science, including the roles of UKRI, government departments, Cabinet sub-committees and the Civil Service; the target to boost R&D spending to 2.4% of GDP; and the role of government as an investor in technology companies.
The inquiry also motivated a shorter follow-up inquiry into the people and skills in STEM, concluding with a letter to Ministers, to which we may also refer in this debate. The inquiry ran from February to July 2022, taking evidence from a wide range of UK and international science policy experts, researchers, public research establishments, universities, private companies, start-ups and technology investors. We also heard from civil servants, chief scientific advisers—including Sir Patrick Vallance and Dame Angela McLean—the chief executive of UKRI, research council heads and Ministers.
I will summarise the key messages from our report. There is a strong consensus that science, technology and innovation have a key role to play in the delivery of economic growth, improved public services and strategic international advantage. It is clear that the UK still has a strong science and technology base to build on. When the report was written, some welcome steps had already been taken, such as setting the 2.4% target, increasing funding for UKRI in government departments and establishing new bodies like the National Science and Technology Council—NSTC—as a sub-committee of the Cabinet, and the Office for Science and Technology Strategy, the OSTS. My apologies in advance for the acronym soup that this speech will now turn into.
However, the report identified many key concerns about the implementation and delivery of a science strategy, many of them familiar—indeed, some we might even call perennial problems. The first that concerned us was that the “science superpower by 2030” slogan was vague and without specific outcomes. We did not know what being a science superpower was intended to feel like. How would it be different?
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate, as it was to be a member of the Science and Technology Committee when we undertook this inquiry. It is a pleasure to follow my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, who eloquently set out the extent of the report’s findings so effectively. I echo her in thanking all the staff of the committee who did such excellent work supporting our inquiry. I declare my technology interests as set out in the register.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, did such an effortless job in covering the ground of the report, I would like to describe how I see our findings in five words. We need all five: clarity; long term; international; investment; and implementation. Perhaps the most powerful phrase of all came from Sir Patrick Vallance when he talked about the need for a laser focus on implementation. If we take those five words—those five pillars—what might that look like in reality?
The noble Baroness, Lady Brown, rightly highlighted the importance of regulation and the Vallance review into regulation in this area. I believe that the positive power that regulation can have to support innovation and technology in this country should not be underestimated for one second. We can look recent examples such as what we with the telecoms industry to regulate to enable mobile telephony in this country and what we did even more recently with the fintech sandbox to effectively enable in a regulatory environment so many scale-ups and start-ups to come through. What is the best measure of success for that regulatory sandbox? It has been replicated in well over 50 jurisdictions around the world. That is the positive potential that we have.
Let us put the “science and technology superpower” phrase to one side for a moment. We have, in truth, a real opportunity in the UK for science, technology and innovation. That comes from the great good fortune of the combination of common law, the financial centre in London, the English language, geography, time zone and many other factors. None of that should in any sense take us into a state of believing that we are a superpower, but we should fully appreciate the possibilities that it gives.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, for her excellent chairmanship of this committee and the work we got through. I also thank the wonderful team behind her. I want to suggest first of all that one of the great risks to the Government is that they start to feel very self-congratulatory. I feel that the idea of the word “superpower” was disastrous. If you talk to average scientists working in laboratories, they were horrified at it because they felt that it was yet again an example of the British Government talking themselves up without any data.
One issue is that we need to have a serious review of our international standing, which would be quite informative. I remember that some years ago, when I was a member of the UKSRC, we spent a lot of time each month looking at that standing at regular stages and trying to work out where we were doing well and where we were doing badly and we reacted in consequence. I do not know whether that still goes on in government, but it is certainly not mentioned in the Nurse review.
We have been talking about pathways to impact for a long time. One problem with impact is just what the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, said: innovation. We should forget about innovation. Innovation is a word that is so easily bandied around. What we are talking about is basic research, because it is the data that we get from basic research, not innovation, which really matters. The fact that we end up trying to suggest that we are going to change our economy with innovation because of the use of science in universities tends to be detrimental. I will come back to that in just a second.
The accent on financial value puts some academics off research. Indeed, I emphasise that the word “innovation” does not ring much with many people. In saying this, I declare my interest in a company called Startransfer, which is looking at some aspects of trying to change embryo culture. It is registered as a company, but nonetheless I still feel that the innovation side is really unimportant. It is the research that we are doing which will be important.
My Lords, it was an honour to be a member of the committee, and I pay tribute to our chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, and our very helpful staff. We heard compelling evidence that, desirable though it may be, the ambition of the UK to become a science superpower is not on track. There is not much time, so I shall just make a few points.
The government response announced that we have reached the target of 2.4% of GDP spent on R&D. However, all our witnesses agreed that we must continue to keep pace with other nations if we are to reach the Government’s goal of becoming a science superpower by 2030. How are the Government tracking what other nations are doing?
Ten months has passed since the publication of the report, and we now have DSIT, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. One of our recommendations was about the Office of Science and Technology, which has not met many times nor produced any major papers. It has now been moved to DSIT and the Secretary of State will decide its remit. Can the Minister tell us when that will be published and how it will interact with the National Science and Technology Council, which I am glad to say has survived the reorganisation?
To achieve the Government’s objective, we need to be open to the brightest and best from abroad, but we have the most expensive and unwieldy visa system among comparable countries, apart from Australia and New Zealand. Additionally, successful applicants and their dependants must pay upfront for health services for the whole period of the visa. This is a substantial disincentive. The Government denied that our system costs more, which is blatantly not true, according to their own table, but said that the immigration system should be paid for by the users and not the taxpayer. We have asked for details of the actual costs attributed to the relevant visas, but these have not been supplied. Is it the case that scientific visa applicants are subsidising other functions of the Home Office?
My Lords, I, too, add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, for her comprehensive and, as usual, well-articulated speech. It is a pity that the Government in their response to the report did not recognise that its recommendations are an excellent blueprint for making the UK a global leader in science and technology. In my brief contribution, I shall focus on one recommendation relating to the need to develop global science partnerships, where the Government have not, as yet, a clear policy, without which their ambition for us to be a science superpower and for the UK to be a global Britain—terms often used by the Government—will not be accomplished.
Superpowers in defence, security and foreign policy use their power for greater influence in the world. That applies equally to countries that are leaders in science and technology, which position themselves to have a greater global impact. Collaboration is at the heart of being a science superpower. Acting in the national interest and for global benefit is not in conflict when it comes to research.
Our membership of the EU’s Horizon programmes allowed us to be one of the world’s leading countries for global partnerships in science and technology. We became the destination of first choice for young, talented, ambitious researchers. Many stayed on, were welcomed and went on to become principal investigators, some even winning prestigious awards, including Nobel prizes. Securing the UK’s research relationship with Europe, as has already been mentioned, is very important, and I hope the Government will pursue that and succeed, but we must also forge new relationships beyond Europe.
Freedom of movement of scientists to the UK, not just from the EU but from the wider world, demonstrated that the UK was open to talent, without barriers or high cost to individuals. Our open border to scientific talent is now closed, driven more by our immigration policy, as described by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, than by our ambition to be a global leader in science. Visas, health premiums and other costs, and now possible restrictions on families being able to accompany, are policies that make the UK seem an unwelcoming and expensive country. As highlighted by many, such as the Wellcome Trust. the ABPI, the Royal Society, et cetera, the UK needs to articulate more clearly its policies of global co-operation that will attract science talent to the UK.
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, for tabling this debate and ably chairing our Select Committee, and to the team supporting it. I declare an interest as a member of the committee, as an adviser to Future Planet Capital, which invests in the UK and global venture ecosystem for innovation, and as an adviser to or being on the board of a number of tech-related start-ups such as Sweetbridge EMEA and Dot Investing.
The report rightly highlights areas where the UK must improve to achieve its ambition of becoming a science and technology superpower, whether you define that in terms of the amount of innovation generated, the number of patents, ideas or even Nobel prizes, the value of ideas commercialised or simply our influence. The report highlights the areas that are key to success: increasing R&D funding; forging closer ties between academia and industry and between different parts of government, industry and academia; changing the way visas are charged for; and supporting start-ups to scale up. But without action, “science and technology superpower” remains merely a slogan. The Government must turn pledges into progress if the UK is to strengthen its position as a global leader in innovation.
However, even if we succeed in these areas, the UK faces structural challenges in the size of its domestic market, in access to capital markets for innovation in the City, in talent, in commercialisation expertise and in other resources, which the report acknowledges by rightly highlighting priority areas that we need to focus on. Our venture ecosystem, while thriving, remains small-scale in global comparison, although there have been laudable recent attempts to ramp this up by working with larger investors such as sovereign wealth and pension funds and insurers.
Our ageing population means taxation policies must account for the needs of tomorrow as well as today if we want sustainable public funding for R&D and education. We must pick our battles in areas where we can differentiate ourselves and lead. Therefore, to get bang for our buck, we should welcome a focus on areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, space and satellite technology, fintech, energy transition technologies such as nuclear, renewables and battery storage, and precision medicine and life sciences.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord. I very much welcome the chance to take part in this debate, not least because I have recently joined the committee. I refer to my entry in the register of interests, but my main declaration is that I have an interest in science—not a financial but a real interest in it.
I congratulate the members of the committee, the chair and the staff on their work on this report. It makes some excellent recommendations, which I support. It takes a long time for Select Committee reports to finally get debated in your Lordships’ House. I would have preferred this debate to take place in the Chamber, thereby exposing more Members to what we are talking about, which would be a very good thing, but it is better than nothing to hold it here. I say to the Minister and the Government Whips: we need more debates about science and not fewer.
I thank all of the outside organisations that took the time to contact me and provide background briefings for today’s debate, including, in no particular order, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society, the Campaign for Science and Engineering—I note its comprehensive report, published by the Foundation for Science and Technology—Cancer Research UK, the Protect Pure Maths campaign, Imperial College and, of course, our own House of Lords Library. With only a few minutes for each Member, there is no way in a million years that I can refer to all the points that have been made, but I want their contributions to be recorded in Hansard.
We hear a lot about the phrase “science superpower” —I first heard it in 2016—but what does it actually mean? We are all familiar with the basic strengths of science in the UK—the oft-cited statistics about the number of research papers in proportion to the population, the excellence of our world-class universities, and so on. We have strengths and, now, strategic objectives in a number of key areas, such as quantum computing, AI, engineering and synthetic biology, semiconductors, future telecoms, life sciences, space and green tech. We know all of that and, yes, the UK does punch above its weight in science, but we need a range of things to fall into place to turn the slogan of a “science superpower” into reality.
My Lords, I am also a new member of the committee—I joined after this inquiry. I declare my unpaid interest as a council member of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This is a vital report, extremely effectively and comprehensively introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown.
In the 2021 integrated review, the Government claimed that so-called “Global Britain” was a science “superpower”. By the time that this apparently once-in-a-generation review had to be refreshed, only two years later, the Government simply said that we had a “strategic advantage” in science and technology, if we specialised—Patrick Vallance had probably corrected the original claim. However, in neither review was the vital Horizon programme even mentioned. Despite scientists urging association, the problem at first was our potentially breaking international law in relation to Northern Ireland. Then it was whether Horizon was value for money; the Prime Minister was apparently sceptical about its value.
The head of one of our higher education institutions told me that before we left Horizon he would get many inquiries about potential collaboration from EU scientists he did not know. Those approaches have completely dried up. Scientists report that they are muddling through, with UKRI temporarily helping to fill gaps, but that is not sustainable long term. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, and the noble Lord, Lord Patel, emphasised, we cannot be a science superpower without that international collaboration. The Royal Society argues that an international approach is vital and that,
“association to Horizon Europe, Euratom, and Copernicus are crucial,”
The Nurse review says that it is “essential” that we rejoin Horizon.
There are many advantages to a multi-country programme over a merely national one. Problems and solutions cross international boundaries—for example, climate change or the pandemic. Funding and access to research infrastructure is increased, with further opportunities to commercialise research. Skills and expertise can be pooled. Can the Minister update us on Horizon and not simply give us warm words, which is what we have been hearing so far?
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Although numerous sectoral strategies exist across government, they did not appear to fit into a clear, prioritised plan. The UK cannot be “world-beating” at everything. We urged clarity about which capabilities the UK wanted to develop domestically and where it would collaborate or access. These debates remain lively, with the announcement of £900 million for exascale computing and the debate over a sovereign AI model, for example. Linked to this was the lack of a joined-up international approach. We cannot be a science superpower in isolation—collaboration and scientific openness are fundamental—but the UK remained out of Horizon Europe, and other changes, such as the reduction in ODA support, high visa costs and complex processes, risk the UK’s reputation as a destination that welcomes top international science talent and as a desirable partner in international collaborations.
On increasing complexity and lack of clarity, the committee felt that bodies like the NSTC and OSTS would provide strategic direction, but their interactions with other key bodies like UKRI were unclear and risked adding to bureaucracy. There has been inconsistency and short-term thinking, which is anathema to R&D and developing new sectors of the economy. This is exemplified by the scrapping of the industrial strategy after just a few years.
There is an urgent need for scientists, technologists and engineers, both trained domestically and welcomed from abroad. There is the challenge of scale-up: although some commercialisation metrics, like numbers of start-ups, are improving, it remains challenging for companies to scale up here, especially for those requiring significant capital investment. The recent comment by Oxford PV’s chief technology officer that the UK was the “least attractive” place to build its new factory for perovskite solar cells is a stark reminder that we continue to see companies built on ground-breaking UK science listing overseas.
As regards engaging the private sector and increasing private sector investment in R&D, a range of areas for policy reform have been identified but details of how this will work—indeed, of how the impact will be different from previous approaches—have not been set out, and the Government’s own role as a direct investor in technologies was also unclear. Disappointingly, the private sector witnesses we heard from indicated that the sector did not feel that it had been engaged in the development of the UK’s science and technology strategy. As inflation worsened during the course of the inquiry, concerns were raised about the cost of conducting research and that R&D budgets may be an easy target for departments and Governments looking to make short-term savings at the expense of long-term prosperity.
Our report made a number of recommendations. We asked for further definition of the science and technology strategy, with specific outcomes in priority areas and, critically, with an implementation plan so that it was about not just targets but action. We wanted the science and technology superpower ambition to be defined with specific metrics and suggested an independent body to monitor progress. We wanted more Cabinet-level agreement and focus on science and technology policy with a Science Minister in Cabinet and more frequent meetings of the NSTC. We wanted to see the UK rebuild its reputation as an international partner, starting with association with Horizon Europe.
We asked for clarity on how the Government were going to use their range of policy levers to stimulate private investment in R&D and more detail how tax credits, pension fund rules and procurement would need to change to support private investment in R&D and especially in scale-up companies. We suggested that reforms could be driven by specific taskforces in each area, headed by clearly accountable individuals, providing a single point of contact for stakeholder engagement. Our people and skills letter focused on four key areas: the domestic skills gap; the precariousness of research careers; visa policy for scientists and STEM workers; and our ability to retain and recruit science teachers and educators.
A great deal has happened in the year or so since this report was published, some of which I am sure some of us would rather forget. However, more positively, this includes the establishment of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the appointment of a Secretary of State for Science. This is a positive development in giving science and technology a strong voice in Cabinet, but cross-departmental co-ordination through NSTC will remain critical. We look forward to hearing more from the Minister at a future appearance before our committee about her role and responsibilities and how the new department will interact with the rest of the science landscape in government and further afield.
The Windsor framework has allowed Horizon Europe negotiations to resume, and the committee urges the Government to associate at the earliest possible opportunity. The Government have published Science and Technology Framework, which sets some key targets and outcomes across 10 different science and technology areas and, although not all of them are measurable metrics, substantially builds on and defines the science and technology superpower agenda, as we urged in our report. We are promised a
“clear action plan for each strand”
by summer 2023, so we look forward to seeing them soon. Given that delivery will be overseen by the NSTC, we also hope to hear that it is meeting more regularly.
Science and Technology Framework also sets out new, if broad, priority areas including quantum, AI, engineering, biology, semiconductors and future telecoms, alongside
“life sciences, space, and green technologies.”
That is a slightly odd mixture of specific technologies and whole industry sectors, but it is a start in defining priorities for the UK. The Government say that DSIT will oversee strategies in each area, with some, like the semiconductor White Paper and AI White Paper, recently published, and associated packages of funding for semiconductors and life sciences announced.
This goes some way towards addressing our concerns that the UK’s science and technology strategy was insufficiently specified, but concerns about the scale of investment remain. For example, the semiconductor strategy announced £1 billion in funding, compared to the US support under the CHIPS Act, which totals some $52 billion, and the EU equivalent, which will amount to about €43 billion. Cambridge-based Arm is still planning to float in the US, despite government efforts. On green technologies, the approximately $400 billion investment under the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and efforts by the EU are driving a step change, which the UK has not yet responded to. It is difficult to see how we can be world beating without at least world-class investment. One has to ask whether the UK may be spreading itself too thinly by trying to compete in all these areas of science and technology. In this context of renewed industrial strategies worldwide, Make UK’s recent criticism of the UK’s lack of a long-term industrial strategy, and hence lack of pull-through for commercialising technologies, echoes the concerns raised in our report.
A further development since our report has been the recalculation of R&D GDP statistics by the ONS. This has increased estimates of R&D spend from 1.7% to 2.4% of GDP. We welcome the Government’s acknowledgement that
“a stronger baseline does not change the underlying rationale for growing investment in R&D”
and urge them to adopt an appropriate new target. A science and technology superpower should spend more than the average OECD country. We welcomed the increase in funding for R&D at the time, and we are pleased to see that it was defended in subsequent Budgets, but double-digit inflation will absorb most of this increase, while high inflation and interest rates may deter business investment in R&D.
The overall landscape of science policy and publicly funded research in the UK is responding to some major recent reviews, including the Grant review into UKRI and the Nurse review into the research and development landscape. Many of the recommendations from the Nurse review echo our own. We look forward to seeing how DSIT, UKRI and the NSTC will drive forward the recommendations from these reviews. It is encouraging to see that some promises of reform of public procurement, regulation for innovation, tax credits and intellectual property are under way. Sir Patrick Vallance’s review of regulation for emerging technologies is a positive development, and we wait to see how its recommendations are implemented.
Overall, there are promising signs that the Government view science and technology policy as a crucial area to get right. We agree that the potential is there, but the scale of the challenge must not be underestimated. Some of the recent changes are encouraging, but there is much more to do across the whole of government. Ensuring that “science and technology superpower” does not become another forgotten Panglossian political slogan will need clear strategy, commitment and co-ordination across government, business engagement, internationally competitive levels of funding and an unrelenting focus on delivery.
I shall finish by asking the Minister three specific questions: first, what is now holding up our association to the Horizon programme and when is this likely to be resolved? Secondly, what has happened to the Office for Science and Technology Strategy in the process of forming the new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology? Thirdly, will the Government be developing a science superpower skills strategy? I beg to move.
What might that look like with a particular sector? AI is much talked of at the moment, but if we can get safe and secure rules, it could enable positive growth in this country. We heard from the Prime Minister only days ago along the lines that if we are to grapple with and solve the problem of AI, we must do this together, not just the companies, but countries. That sounds pretty positively international to me, and that has to be the right approach.
Will the Minister say where specific sectoral strategies, such as the AI strategy, fit into an overall coherent approach across all sectors, all areas and all opportunities, not least, as we have already heard, semi-conductors but quantum and DLT, to name just three? How do we enable all this to fit together? I believe that so much comes down to having innovation right through every Whitehall department, a golden thread of innovation running through every single department. It is that cross-Whitehall working point again. I believe that the difficulty is that we have only ever had cross-Whitehall working twice, once for the Olympic and Paralympic Games and a second time for Covid. It has happened only twice, but look at the results that we had when we got that cross-Whitehall working. We had the very best of our Civil Service and the very best of our state. The possibilities are immense for the United Kingdom but, ultimately, what are science and technology superpowers? They are not nations; rather they are connection, collaboration, coming together and co-creation. That is what we need to be focused on. Tout le monde, if you will. I think we all must will it.
A key question that I want the Minister to answer is about the assessment of a project afterwards. When we talked to the people in charge of UKRI, they talked about the first 20% of grants being awarded. It would be very interesting to know whether those grants are tracked long term, what happens to them and whether they have the pathway to impact that they say they do in the application.
More importantly, I would argue that we are losing a lot of people in research. If 20% of our applications to UKRI are working, that means that 80% of scientists working in really good universities are not getting funded by a key body that is essential to their career. That is a very important consideration for the Government, and it seems to me that, unless we track what happens to the next 20%, the people who do not get a grant, we are failing in our duty to the whole situation.
I remember one of my colleagues who was working in my laboratory for a long time on splice sites, which was not very popular at the time, spending a year doing three different applications, none of which was successful. Eventually, he left without a research grant, and of course he has now retired early. Five or six years later, we are starting to see that the work that he was doing was really brilliant; it is now being recognised internationally, but of course it was never funded. That is important, too.
Finally, we need to be much more aware about UKRI. I did not think that we were doing this at all well, and we did not get the answers that we needed in the committee about researchers getting feedback from the organisation. When I was working in the United States, if you put in for a grant to the American equivalent for health research, you could phone up and get somebody to speak to who would give you some advice about how you might make your project more effective and successful as well as more topical and relevant to what the body was trying to do. We need to do that, and that goes with public engagement, which we have already been through in the previous debate.
The Government rejected our recommendation that health costs could be paid in annual instalments, saying that this would be too onerous for the Home Office and the NHS. It may be too onerous for the Home Office, but it cannot be beyond the capability of the NHS, because it already has to verify the eligibility of foreign visitors to use our health services. Can the Minister justify the Government’s attitude?
The Government want to become a regulatory superpower. The committee accepted that regulation can make countries more attractive to investors by indicating the direction of travel, but companies operating in international markets are concerned about regulatory divergence. We recommended that the Government should work with industry and the research base to identify the areas in which the UK can take a global lead, because deregulation for its own sake will not automatically spur innovation. Apparently, DSIT will be responsible for regulation of AI in a “pro-innovation fashion”. Will the Minister explain how taking a lead on regulation will encourage innovation without the potential downsides of divergence?
Turning to homegrown people and skills, we heard about the lack of routes for technicians, referred to as the gap in the middle. Higher-level apprenticeships can fill the gap. The committee recommended that higher-level apprentices should be given the financial support to enable them to move around the country to find an appropriate place—like university students. The Government’s response mentions a few small bits of support, but they hardly add up to what the committee had in mind. Can the Minister do better?
Finally, if we are to recruit more STEM graduates, we need more specialist teachers. There is a jumble of incentives for IT, chemistry and physics teachers, but nothing for specialist maths teachers, particularly in the light of the Prime Minister’s objective of having all young people study maths until they are 18. You cannot do that without teachers, so can the Minister say how it will be achieved?
Some key principles should guide this policy. The UK must be open, creating an environment where ideas can flourish and talent is welcome, creating a globally connected science community. The UK must build networks around the world and drive the policies that make our country the centre of those networks in a collaborative way. There is a need for more strategic thinking that allows a small country such as the UK to be an important partner in big, global projects. We need to use the UK’s influence for the global good and explore more the soft power of science collaboration. In this respect, stopping the ODA programmes by cutting funds gave completely the wrong message. Building a reputation—the one we had in the not-too-distant past—as the go-to research partners of choice for talented individuals and countries will not only supercharge our domestic research but attract foreign investment and talent.
My time is running out, so I ask the Minister: when will the Government publish a strategy for global partnerships in science and technology and remove current immigration barriers?
The report could have gone further in articulating how the UK can harness its advantages of agility, expertise and a focus on global impact to overcome disadvantages of scale. We showed what is possible by developing a world-class vaccine at record pace. By being more flexible and sandboxing regulations more, attracting capital from overseas and matching it with our own large domestic investment sources, and harnessing government procurement in a smarter way, we can still edge ahead. Our time zone and legal and regulatory systems enable the UK to become a launch pad for new technologies and be a leader that can attract the finance needed to make firms global without their having to shift their base abroad.
It saddens me that we have not sufficiently built on the success of the Vaccine Taskforce led so ably by Kate Bingham, or gone further—simplifying regulation and procurement where we could have to achieve greater freedoms for pioneers and innovators to build world-class supply chains based on science and tech. I ask the Minister what we are doing to build on this success as part of our science superpower strategy. With vision, the right targeted investments and, crucially, the right culture, we can navigate the challenges of size through global leadership in emerging sectors.
In conclusion, while the report highlights actions the Government must take to achieve their bold ambition, the UK must go further in playing to its strengths, particularly by being more nimble and having STEM-savvy, trained regulators and policymakers. By targeting support for sectors where we can differentiate globally, providing access to talent and long-term funding, and enabling an agile approach to regulation and policy-making, the UK can overcome its disadvantages of scale and smaller market to cement its role as a pioneering science and innovation leader on the world stage.
If we match rhetoric with resource, “science and technology superpower” can become more than a slogan, but it will require the right attitude and culture. As it says in Zechariah chapter 4, verse 6:
“Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord Almighty—you will succeed because of my Spirit”.
May the UK have that plucky spirit, which has served it well in the past and can do so again in the future.
Since this report was issued, there have been some important structural changes in the way the Government now approach this. We have the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which gives the Secretary of State a place at the Cabinet table. We had the Nurse review and the welcome step forward in making integrated recommendations for the future of the research landscape. We have an active and assiduous Science Minister, to whom I pay tribute. So we have this organisational structure, but I hope it will last. I recently asked the departed Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, whether it would have helped his job if all these things had been in place when he started. The answer was: yes, it would.
However, we need a sense of commitment and sustained effort. I give the Prime Minister credit for giving every appearance of being committed, but can the Minister tell us how often these Cabinet committees now meet and how often the Prime Minister chairs them? What is the role of the new Chief Scientific Adviser and technology adviser, and how do their respective offices work? If the Minister is able, can he tell us how ARIA is getting on?
In the short time available, I will emphasise one point, on Horizon Europe. Will the UK rejoin it, and when? It would be remiss of me not to mention this, as I have put down Question after Question in the House over almost the last year and a half, and it has been a deeply damaging story, to put it very mildly. If today’s debate can achieve anything, it would be helpful if the Minister could tell us a bit more about what exactly is going on. Are we still negotiating? Are we doing so in good faith, or are our fingers crossed behind our backs in the hope that plan B is perhaps better? Is the row just about different UK and EU assessments about the effect of not being a member for two years? It is not just about the money—it is about the collaboration, contacts and networks, as other Members said. It is not just in Europe that we should collaborate; we signed a memorandum of understanding on science and technology with the United States and, last December, the Government signed an important international science partnership fund in Japan.
Whatever else a “science superpower” may prove to mean, it will definitely involve making sure that the UK is open to worldwide scientific co-operation, making it the most attractive place in which to do science research and then developing and commercialising it for the benefit of the UK and humanity.
Sustained UK support for science remains vital. The report is right to emphasise the need for an industrial strategy. Out of an analysis on the coalition of the strengths and weaknesses of the UK economy came the catapults and, for example, significant investment in the Crick Institute as the largest biomedical centre in Europe. This Government seem strangely proud of not having an industrial strategy, and that just seems bizarre.
When ODA was suddenly cut from 0.7% of GNI to 0.5%, and then focused on supporting refugees, no one in Government seemed aware of how much had gone to supporting research, and it was suddenly removed. Thus investment in the Jenner Institute on the Ebola vaccine helped to pave the way for the Covid vaccine. We did well in this sector due to earlier investment. ODA money, as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, indeed helped to build our international reputation in science.
The Government now talk of,
“shaping the global science and technology landscape through strategic international engagement, diplomacy and partnerships”.
That is double-speak right now. The Royal Society states that, if the UK wants to be a world leader in this area, it also needs to be world-leading in its approach to researcher mobility. The Nurse review points to immigration policy hindering wider objectives for research. Now we hear that masters students should not bring dependants with them. What does that do for our universities, for families and particularly for women?
Therefore, my questions to the Minister in his new department, welcome as it is, are: will it start advocating effectively in Cabinet for those in science and higher education? Should immigration policy remain in the Home Office? What is taking the Government so long to sign up to Horizon, and how will they put right the damage that has already been done?