Science Research Funding in Universities (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Triesman (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure for me to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley. I have been a follower of hers since we were under- graduates together and she said some very interesting things again today. I declare my interest as a former general secretary of the AUT and a Minister for some time for higher education, attending to issues of quality, and I have various fellowships from UK universities.

I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Patel, on his lucid and accurate introduction to an excellent committee report. Two issues flow from it that I will address briefly. The first, along with the noble Baronesses, Lady Bottomley and Lady Young, is the issue of co-operation. The EU joint research funding programme, Horizon Europe, has been an incredibly important feature of higher education in this country—as its likely successor will be next year. The Government have said frequently that they want to ensure that conditions are right. But I too ask the Minister, what possible reasons could there be not to do it—not to give the universities the confidence that we are not going to be ducking and diving in some kind of ideological thing about this?

It is about the money, of course, but even more it is about collaboration. It is about the culture of friendly co-operation and what I sometimes call the “mood music” of higher education. We are seeing it very strongly at the moment in the work that is being done on Covid-19. The best work is being done when people are working together and not relying on exceptionalism in their own countries. Sir Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, made this very point in articles during the week.

The second issue is of course the issue of funding—alongside the issue of retaining the independence of universities—some of which we committed ourselves to in 1997 in a UNESCO treaty that this country signed. I share with others the view that the Augar terms of reference were too narrow to provide a credible proposition for higher education. Whatever insights there might be into further education, it is a seriously inadequate report. Of course it would be desirable to see a decrease in the grip of student tuition fees on an early working life, and indeed on much of the working life, of people who are in debt. But there are no alternatives being expressed to meet the shortfall. The Science Committee is 100% right about this, and cross-subsidies are a poor model—but the question is bound to arise and I hope that the Minister will answer it. How will we make good these gaps?

The key to the Dearing report was essentially that those who benefit from higher education should contribute. Students benefit and they make a contribution. It is important that they make a similar contribution and that we do not penalise the more expensive subjects such as science, medicine and others. We do not want to disincentivise anybody. The public benefit. We have doctors, nurses and medical specialists—any number of people whom Mariana Mazzucato, in her excellent research work at University College, London, has described as the “significant public investment” in the sorts of specialties that we need.

Business also benefits. I argued with the then Sir Ron Dearing that a hypothecated bond might be a way of looking at another stream of funding for higher education. I understand that the Treasury does not like hypothecated bonds, and Sir Ron made the point that, if it was to be done, we should try to make sure that it was not the Government who did it but the private financial institutions. Be that as it may, the purpose was to create an entirely different stream that had to be applied to higher education.

I conclude by saying that we cannot leave this, I am sad to say, to the vice-chancellors. Their discussions have been very narrow and they have been focused on the competitive interests of their own universities, and that trumps everything else. There has also been a lack of imagination. But we are now in a position where we can look at alternatives, and indeed we must do so.