EU Referendum and EU Reform (EUC Report)

Baroness Neville-Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)]

My Lords, I contribute to this debate as a member of the Science and Technology Committee, which reported on EU membership and UK science. I declare an interest as a member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. I take this opportunity to thank our chairman, the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, for the excellence of his chairmanship, and also thank our committee clerk and advisers for the support that they gave us, which was of the highest quality. As our chairman said, it was not our aim to pronounce on the merits of UK membership from the point of view of UK science—rather, our approach was forensic. Our chairman has laid out our conclusions clearly and cogently, and I am not going to repeat what he has said, or repeat the points of other members of the committee. Instead, I shall try to make a few additional and separate points.

There are many contributors to the debate today and I shall be brief. Before I make a few points that struck me in the course of the committee’s work, I want to say how dismayed and alarmed I am by the way in which the pied pipers of leave are attempting to lead the people of this country into a dark mountain from which we can only emerge reduced and poorer. Pace the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, I see no exhilarating distance in front of us, on that route.

My noble friend Lord Howell made some very pertinent points about how the world is going, and he is quite right about that. He is also quite right to suggest that the change and reform agenda in Europe has a long way to go. But the conclusion that I draw is that we are more likely to see that come about in a form that suits us, and sooner, if we are active from inside the political heart of Europe.

I turn to our report. Hardly surprisingly, we found that the overall picture was not one of unmitigated benefit. As our chairman has said, the biggest complaint was about regulation—not the principle of regulatory harmonisation, which was accepted as being necessary and valuable, but some of the EU regulatory regimes, which have been politically driven, with highly negative results for important things such as genomic science and clinical trials. However, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that we do not contribute sometimes to those outcomes—we do. A credible mechanism for the injection of scientific advice into policy-making in the Commission has at last come about, and that will be a very salutary safeguard, provided that it works well; we have yet to see how effective the scientific advice will be. The European Union is ahead of many member states in doing this—not the UK but many others—and I hope that it will contribute to preventing lobby-driven law-making, particularly in the European Parliament.

The overwhelming weight of witness opinion before us was in support of the value of EU membership to UK science. This positive verdict has, in the last few days, been strongly endorsed by British Nobel Prizewinners. First, the funding coming from EU sources was very highly valued. As other noble Lords have commented, the UK does disproportionately well in getting hold of EU money, and I might add that engineering does particularly well. This country has a history of neglecting engineering—to our cost, I might say—and nearly half the increase in engineering funding has come recently from EU sources. EU funding might not be so important were the UK to put the level of funding into science that our comparators spend. Most countries are increasing their spending on scientific research, but we in the UK are cutting back. We consistently underfund by relevant international standards, so EU money helps to make up a gap that would otherwise be bigger. I would like to see those trends reversed but, in the present state of affairs, it matters to us a great deal that EU money is forthcoming. I do not believe that, were the UK to decide to leave the EU, that gap would be made up by national funding, let alone exceeded. No one before the committee gave any suggestion that EU scientific programmes were in any way misdirected. On the contrary, the general feeling was that they were extremely relevant to the future of big science.

Secondly, the enthusiasm for the scientific network built up and the work done in UK universities as the result of the free flow of scientists from other European countries was very marked. Enriching was the word used. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that the base is the Erasmus programme and students coming to this country for first degrees then stay and do advanced work. Twenty-eight per cent of academic staff in UK universities are non-UK nationals, of whom 16% come from other EU countries, often bringing salary funding with them, which helps our universities, and 60% of the UK’s internationally co-authored papers are with EU partners. That is not an insignificant intellectual and other contribution. Given the high reputation of UK science, it cannot be argued that EU quantity is at the expense of British quality. Something very precious to science in the UK has been built up which has helped to consolidate the leadership we hold. Collaboration is the key to that. I should hate to see it undermined by a sapping of the flow of students and researchers coming from our European neighbours.

Thirdly, our weakness in translational activity and the links between science and business which are so important to innovation showed up in the European story. British business did not respond to the call for evidence and, as our chairman has said, while SMEs evidently value European funding and apply for it, larger British companies do not. Our witness from Siemens commented on this and clearly thought the UK was missing a trick. He is right, so it is doubly important that the Government, in their forthcoming extensive restructuring of UK publicly-funded research and innovation do not mess up the role of Innovate UK. That, however, is a debate for another day.