Science and Technology Superpower (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Grand Committee

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

I express my appreciation to the staff and the leadership of the committee.

British science is in a parlous state. We are in the process of crippling our academic institutions, which have traditionally fostered our scientific discoveries. We are also losing the technological industries that have stimulated our inventiveness. Many are quietly disappearing, if they are not falling into the hands of foreign owners, which is often a prelude to their eventual demise.

During the committee’s inquiry, a plethora of reviews were under way concerning the governance of science and technology in the UK. These included the second review by Paul Nurse of the R&D organisational landscape, the Tickell review into research bureaucracy and the Gluckman review into the research excellence framework, which audits the research activities of universities.

The second Nurse review, which was delivered after the publication of the report of the committee, contains some interesting revelations. The first of these, as other noble Lords have mentioned, is that there has been a systematic underestimation of the percentage of GDP that the UK devotes to research and development. For many years, it was thought to be a mere 1.7%; it now appears that it is close to the OECD average of 2.5%. The second revelation is that the amount of R&D directly sponsored by the UK Government is well below the OECD average and far behind that of most research-intensive nations.

In putting this finding into perspective, it helps to take a long historical view. The country that emerged from the Second World War was endowed with a wealth of government research establishments and with many scientific and technological projects that were supported by the Government. The aviation industry was in receipt of large subventions. It was generating numerous prototypes of advanced military and civil aircraft. To restrain these expenditures became an obsession of the Civil Service. It developed a methodology of project cancellation that became more effective with the passage of time.

The restraint of government expenditure on research and development extended far beyond the aviation industry. It greatly affected Britain’s nuclear power industry, which was brought to a virtual halt. The restraint also affected many of the research establishments that had been supporting industry in both the public and the private sectors. Britain’s computer and telecommunications industries collapsed through a lack of support. This litany can be continued with many other examples. The advent of the Conservative Administration of Margaret Thatcher saw the culmination of this process of governmental disengagement, and there has been no significant re-engagement subsequently.

A truth that the report does not acknowledge sufficiently is that a nation cannot aspire to become a scientific superpower if it lacks a basis of scientific and technological industries that are ready to call upon the skills of the research workers. Britain has a severely attenuated industrial base. The decline of British industry has been a gradual and an inexorable process, to which several factors have contributed. The foremost of these has been the failure of our export industries, for which the persistent overvaluation of our currency has been largely responsible. The resulting balance of payments problems have been addressed by the Government’s encouragement of so-called inward financial investment, which has amounted to the sale of our infrastructure and industries to foreign owners. Among the companies that have been most attractive to foreign investors are those within our high-tech industries.

In the absence of a commercial and an industrial stimulus, British research and innovation is liable to retreat into British universities, which are also in peril. It is a familiar nostrum that, although British universities have been excellent at pure research, they have been less successful at applying it in practical contexts. The blame has tended to fall upon the academics and hardly at all upon industries that might have been their clients. The nostrums of the knowledge exchange framework and the demands for practicality that have arisen within the research excellence framework are a testimony to this tendency.

Universities are now in severe financial straits. Their staff, who have suffered severe erosions of their incomes and growing insecurity of their employment, are frequently on strike. The prospects for British science are poor, at a time when, in consequence of Brexit, many foreign academics have left the country and when senior academics are inclined to discourage their research students from thinking of joining the profession.