Engineering Biology (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, and all the members of the committee on an excellent report. I very much agree with its key theme of the scale-up challenge, which is one of the big obstacles to turning our great science and innovation into substantial, successful companies. I declare my interests as co-chair of SynBioVen, which invests in a set of synthetic biology companies, and as the newly appointed chair of the Regulatory Innovation Office. I will briefly explain the perspective of the Regulatory Innovation Office on this report, especially focusing on paragraphs 106 to 135, which touch on regulation.

Our job as the Regulatory Innovation Office, reporting to the Minister—who I see in front of me—is to try to ensure that the regulatory regime promotes innovation in new technologies and does not act as a barrier to their use, to try to come up with granular and practical advice, to think not just about regulations but, often, standard setting, which can be even more important in the early stages of a technology—one of the advantages of being so good at science and tech is that we should have a place at global standard-setting meetings—and to be very aware of the importance of public understanding, public engagement and attitudes to risk. The committee had some specific proposals on the regulatory regime, and I will touch briefly on three of them.

First, in paragraph 107 there is a discussion of what one can call only the obscurity and secrecy surrounding the Engineering Biology Regulators Network. There is a moment in the report where Angela McLean, the Chief Scientific Adviser, says that she does not know who is a member of this august network. In the past few months, led by the Minister for Science, that has all changed. We now have public information, which should of course be available, about the members of the Engineering Biology Regulators Network. That is not just a list of names, but a proper account of the 12 key regulators involved and a brief account of what each does in this area, with an email address and a contact address for each one. A start has been made to make the Engineering Biology Regulators Network more publicly accessible, although there is more to do. We do not yet have the coherent taxonomy of what all the different regulatory bodies do that the committee called for, but now that we have this group and it is functioning and publicly known, we can use it as a core network to spread understanding of the different roles of the regulators. There is more to do, but we are making good progress.

Secondly, in that part of the report there was a discussion of the sandbox model for finding exactly how a new technology could be implemented and how the different regulators could impact its development. One regulatory sandbox has now been launched, involving the Food Standards Agency. A sandbox is not a one-day session in a committee trying things out; this is a two-year programme costing £1.6 million focusing on the development of cell-cultured food, particularly meat. This is a real expert exercise engaging with the British start-ups active in this space, finding out exactly what regulatory issues they will face and tackling them as part of the sandbox process. We do not want sandbox reports after which nothing happens. RIO will be involved in this throughout, and there will shortly be an open call for the creation of a second sandbox in engineering biology, and we will see what applications there are. I very much look forward to supporting that.

Thirdly, there is a discussion in the report of regulatory capacity. In the few weeks I have been doing this job, I have already heard almost every regulator say to me, “Of course we would love to do more to promote new technologies, but we are understaffed and under-resourced. If only we had more money, we would be able to do it. Could you help us get more money, please?” We have to be very careful. It is not the job of RIO to go around with an open chequebook writing lots of cheques. We do not have the resource for that, and those are decisions for Ministers.

But there clearly have been specific occasions when we just needed to help build up capability. The Food Standards Agency, which is particularly covered in the report and has matching responsibilities to the EU post Brexit but with 1/10th of the capability, has recently been awarded £1.4 million from the regulatory innovation fund as a one-off payment to boost its capacity in some innovative technologies. So, I assure the committee that, from the specific perspective of the Regulatory Innovation Office, this excellent report is being taken into account and is already influencing the delivery of government policy.

Science and Technology: Economy

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

Quite right. My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman, on her excellent maiden speech; we look forward to many more of her interventions in the House. I also congratulate the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, for such an excellent opening to the debate, displaying his typical enthusiasm and making a subtle case for the hereditary principle.

I should declare my interests, particularly as chair of the UK Space Agency. I am also a member of this club of former Science Ministers, which has been referred to several times. It is great to see the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, in his place; we look forward to his speech. There is a very crude view of the role of the Science Minister: to extract money from the Treasury. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, has a much higher and more strategic view of his role than that, but he nevertheless did very well this week and I join those congratulating him on seeing off what looked like a significant threat.

I congratulate the noble Lord also on the speed with which the funding for science announced yesterday is already moving. There was an announcement of £520 million for the life sciences innovative manufacturing fund; it was up on the Government’s website by midnight, with the first round of applications for grants now open, with a deadline of 30 November. That is an excellent example of moving vigorously in an innovative environment. I hope, in that spirit, that the Minister will commit that the Government will indeed be implementing my proposals on improving the business case process so that it is similarly efficient and fast-moving, rather than cumbersome and bulky. We must not be complacent, however. There are of course challenges to face in the CSR, and we wish the Minister the best on that.

I would like very briefly to put three specific points to the Minister. First, cell and gene therapies are a great British scientific and technological success. However, they are suffering from the very uncertain VAT regime for cell and gene therapies sold to the NHS. HMRC defined these therapies as “work on goods”, apparently on the argument that the cells start from the human body and are eventually returned to the patient’s body and, in the meantime, they have just had a service, rather like a car going into a garage. In some cases, VAT is charged at 20%, which, in turn, affects the NICE calculations of the cost-benefit ratio in these treatments. Sometimes they are exempt. The best way forward would be for all these treatments to be clearly zero-rated and treated consistently.

My second point, if the Minister is able to comment, is that yesterday we also heard in the Statement from the Chancellor very good news on investment in the railway link between Oxford and Cambridge. Progress is gradually being made in the recreation of the old Varsity line, although it is a pity that there is a large housing estate somewhere between Bedford and Cambridge on the route of the original line.

Can the Minister confirm that, with this investment in transport, there will also be a recognition of the value of the Oxford-Cambridge supercluster and an attempt, alongside the claims of many other parts of the UK, to recognise and support that?

Finally, if he were here, I think the noble Lord, Lord Knight, would make an important point about investing in science teaching. The Government make a lot of the 6,500 new teachers. It is equally important and, in some ways, more cost-effective to invest in upskilling and retaining the teachers we have already have. Improving CPD for science teachers, so that they remain up to date, would be of great value.