Catapults (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, the opening speaker in this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Mair, has filled the foreground with much important detail. I shall confine myself to the background.

Catapults were first established in 2011 with the purpose of fostering industrial research and development and bridging the gap between universities and industry. They were intended to address the fact that Britain had been failing to translate its scientific research into profitable industrial applications. This failure has a long history, which reaches as far back as the end of the 19th century. Then, it was becoming clearly apparent that countries on the European continent were outstripping Britain in industrial innovation. Eyes were turned to Germany in particular, which was experiencing revolutions in the chemical and electrical industries, as well as in heavy industries and steel production. There were social and cultural aspects that accompanied this progress, and it began to be asked what Britain was lacking.

Britain certainly lacked anything to compare to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society that was founded in 1911 as an umbrella organisation to support industrial research and development throughout Germany. Britain at the time was distracted by its imperial and colonial enterprise, which had a far-reaching effect on the national psyche. The esteem in which mid-Victorian engineers and scientists had been held began to be overshadowed by the status accorded to empire builders, who were soldiers, statesmen and colonial administrators. Talented individuals were diverted from trade and industry to serve the colonial enterprise. Nevertheless, there was a non-conformist ethic that sustained technological enterprise and prevailed in the industries of the Midlands and the north well into the 20th century.

The early post-war years saw a reform of the secondary education system in the UK under the Butler Education Act of 1944. The original intention had been to create a tripartite system of grammar schools, secondary technical schools and secondary modern schools. The technical schools were omitted and a gap was created in secondary education which has endured to this day.

A gap opened up in tertiary education when the colleges of advanced technology were freed from local authority control in 1962. Their role had been to pursue industrial research and development. This role went into abeyance when they became universities and began to teach degree courses in imitation of the older universities. The polytechnics and colleges of technology had been serving the interests of business and commerce by teaching commercial and industrial skills. The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 removed them from the control of local authorities and they too were allowed to bid to become universities. There has since been an implosion in the remnants of the further education sector, which has been severely starved of funds. The sector has been unable to invest in order to adapt to the changing demands of industry and the number of students who receive a technical education has fallen drastically.

In the meanwhile, the university sector has grown markedly. The cap on student numbers has been lifted and universities have been allowed to compete among themselves for students. The intellectual demands of a university degree course have been alleviated to cater to a wider ability range, and the research performance of universities shows signs of suffering. Their role in technical education has declined.

There have been increasing demands on universities to fill the gap where industrial research and development have been lacking. A further element has been added to the burden of the audits under which academics are labouring. They are required to demonstrate their research performance under the research excellence framework. Their teaching is monitored under the teaching excellence framework and the National Student Survey. Now, their performance in fostering industrial research and development is being encouraged and monitored under the knowledge exchange framework. They are being asked to fill the gap. These regimes make contradictory demands and ask too much of academics.

It was a consciousness of the gap that exists between academic research and industrial development that led to the establishment of the catapults. They are an increasing number of ad hoc organisations with designated purposes in various areas of industrial technology. The question that has to be asked is whether this is an appropriate and an effective means of satisfying the needs for industrial research and development. The answer that occurs to me is that, given the distorted nature of our educational system, and given the incoherent way in which Britain has organised its applied research, the catapults may be a regrettable necessity.

We can look at other countries to witness better systems. Comparisons, as we have heard, are often made with Germany, where applied industrial research, which is accorded a high status, takes place in the Fraunhofer institutes. These are research establishments spread throughout Germany that focus on different fields of applied science. With some 29,000 employees and with an annual research budget of €2.8 billion, they form the biggest organisation for applied research and development in Europe.

The size of this organisation is roughly equal to that of the Max Planck Society, which supports fundamental research in the natural sciences, the life sciences and social sciences. That organisation was given its present name in 1948. Previously, it had been the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Its research is comparable to that of the UK universities. The superior research performance of British universities compared to their German counterparts may be an illusion, since the research that takes place in the Max Planck institutes and the Fraunhofer institutes is not directly attributed to specific universities. This is despite the fact that many of the researchers have been seconded from universities.

The report of the Science and Technology Committee makes a comparison between the catapults and the Fraunhofer institutes. However, the two networks differ in size by an order of magnitude. A comparison of the funding of industrial research and development in Germany and Britain is difficult to achieve, because of the dispersed and incoherent nature of the activities in Britain. But there can be little doubt that the funding by central government is much greater in Germany than in Britain.

It is only through greatly increased funding and by a fundamental reorganisation that industrial and applied research in Britain could hope to rival that of our European neighbours. I see no reason, for example, why the various public sector research establishments of Britain, which have served us well in the past, should not fall under the same umbrella as the catapults, to allow for a much greater coherence. At present, the catapults appear to be an ad hoc and a small-scale response to an enduring systemic failure in the United Kingdom.