Budget Resolutions

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my near neighbour, the hon. Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford), although I have to say that I do not find many people on the streets who echo her thanks to her colleagues quite so effusively.

Reading the comments of the OBR, it is hard to come to the conclusion that they are anything other than somewhat gloomy. I would suggest to Conservative Members that just one of the factors may have been the lack of an industrial strategy over the last seven years, so there is some welcome for the fact that we do now have an industrial strategy.

The city I represent has been mentioned many times, and I just want to make a couple of comments, particularly on life sciences. Cambridge has been tremendously successful. I am grateful to Savills for pointing out that, in terms of one measure—global bioscience venture capital funding per capita—Cambridge is streets ahead of all our international competitors and anywhere else in this country. But alongside the success stories that the Government trumpeted when they launched the strategy yesterday, I urge colleagues to look—I do not normally do this—at The Daily Telegraph; a couple of days ago it had a report that Johnson & Johnson, the major American healthcare giant, had pulled out of plans to build a new research and development facility in the UK, just outside Cambridge. It said those plans

“have been put on hold over concerns that the UK is both politically and economically weak while negotiations to leave the European Union are ongoing”,

so there is a mixed picture.

The missing element in all this is the people. The reason why these industries are successful in Cambridge is that people can come and go freely. In the context of Brexit, that will be a real challenge. In every lab I go to, I find people from other parts of the world, but they are leaving, and the next generation is not coming. The industrial strategy has to be seen in that context. What makes people come here? Good schools, but there is nothing in the Budget, as hon. Friends have pointed out, to improve schools, and most of all, there is nothing on housing.

Housing is complicated in Cambridge. The city council is doing a fantastic job; it is trying to build council housing, but it is dogged by Government policy changes. The council bravely bought itself out of the housing revenue account, only for the Government to change the strategy entirely a year later, completely undermining its policies. Yes, lifting the HRA cap would be good, but can we have any faith that that will continue over the next few months and years?

On the Oxford-Milton Keynes-Cambridge arc, it would be good to have more housing there, but look at the details in the Budget Book. There is talk about shifts from section 106 and the community infrastructure levy to a strategic infrastructure tariff. That is very complicated, detailed stuff, mirroring what happens in London. However, the governance arrangements on that arc are not one mayoralty; there is not one, unified structure there. This is complicated stuff, and it will not happen soon. The industrial strategy may be a very glossy, colourful document, but for most people, life is being lived in gritty black and white.

Euratom Membership

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Wednesday 12th July 2017 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen), who I thought spoke with a great depth of knowledge about this subject. For those of us who are not so close to the industry, I will talk about the scientific and some of the legal issues, some of which have already been raised, but there is an elephant in the room: to many of us, it seems as though the debate is being driven by what many of us see as the Prime Minister’s longstanding antipathy towards the European Court of Justice. It seems to me almost like a fetish in some ways, because there has to be some way to resolve disputes. I often look to football for inspiration; most things can be related to football in my view. It needs a referee; people may sometimes feel hard done by, but when there are disputes, there has to be an arbitrator. The Government seem intent on bringing their own referee to the table, instead of playing by the rules. We have to have some way of resolving these issues.

One issue we have already heard about is the possibility of associate membership of Euratom, and we all want to hear much more from the Minister about that. However, if we are going to talk about associate membership, we also need to hear something about whether the Government can provide the same assurances for other areas of crucial scientific research, such as our relationship with the European Research Council, the European Research Area and the Horizon 2020 programme.

Just last week, the Government made an extraordinary policy announcement in the pages of the Financial Times, in which two Secretaries of State recognised the need for us to stay close to European Union regulatory systems in the life sciences sector—an announcement that some of us feel might have been more appropriately made in Parliament first. It is true to say, however, that a direction of travel is emerging on all of these issues, even if the proper destination has not yet been arrived at.