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Dr. Bray: The Nobel prize for the discovery of the depletion of ozone in the upper atmosphere went to the Americans rather than to Joe Farman, the British Antarctic Survey scientist. That was perhaps partly due to the fact that Britain did not contribute any of the research infrastructure and the basic observation systems are carried out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to which Joe Farman had only indirect access. The underlying problem is that British scientists do not have the heavyweight back-up of scientists elsewhere in the world.
Mr. Battle: That is a good point and I should like to extend it by mentioning the need to support international collaboration so that our scientists can be at the forefront internationally. I shall return to that issue.
Under this Prime Minister, there have been echoes of the past and of a Government locked into the nostalgia of warm beer and cycling past the village green. Suddenly, however, it seems that the Government have woken up to the information age of the new technologies. I understand that they now have their own world wide web page.
P. J. O'Rourke described modern politics as simply survival and the need to
"sustain an image of competence from one day to the next." We believe that the Government's policy is characterised by that sustenance of the image of competence from one day to the next. Indeed, it sometimes seems that policy is now being decided and changed from one press release to the next.
The 1993 White Paper, "Realising our Potential", was released with great fanfare but the expectations that came with it have not been fulfilled; indeed, they have been
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dashed. The policy potential of the White Paper has not been realised. The Office of Science and Technology has not fulfilled the role that it was established to fulfil--that of co-ordinating departmental research and development across Government. The suggestion that it was simply pushed into the Department of Trade and Industry does not match the foresight or planning prefigured by the Government. It is up to us to get out of the world of press releases and out of this place to see what is happening on the ground. Two months after his appointment as the Cabinet Minister responsible for science, the President of the Board of Trade made his first visit to Keyworth to see the headquarters of the British Geological Survey. I was told that he had been there when, a few days later, I went out with the British Geological Survey on Baildon moor to examine its research methods. It is important that we get out to see what is being done by our research establishments.Sadly, this year for the first time, people were disappointed that not a single Cabinet Minister was present for the British Association for the Advancement of Science's week-long festival in Newcastle, although the Prime Minister was in Newcastle at the time. He turned down a personal invitation to present an award at the ceremony for young European scientists so that he could have a private meeting with party activists instead. It was a surprising move. When asked to explain why he could not be there, or even squeeze in a five-minute photo call, the Prime Minister replied:
"Whether it is a good or bad thing, there are slightly more football supporters in the United Kingdom than there are space scientists."
The comment in The Daily Telegraph was:
"Translation: Short-term considerations are more important than the long- term impact of British research on the national wealth and quality of life."
As much as I love my home team, Leeds United, I do not consider being at its games more important than ensuring that the manufacturing base of Leeds is sustained so that people can afford season tickets in the future.
The Minister for Science and Technology (Mr. Ian Taylor): I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman introduces childish criticisms. He and I were both at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which is the right and proper way of taking seriously its excellent week, and I am sure that he took part in as many experiments with the various children's groups as I did. The remarks that he attributed to the Prime Minister were remarks that I made flippantly. Fortunately, Roger Highfield's subsequent article in The Daily Telegraph would have failed any peer review, so I believe that the hon. Gentleman would not wish to embarrass Roger Highfield further by mentioning that article.
Mr. Battle: I think I can allow the Minister to take his complaints about the press to the appropriate place.
Mr. Frank Dobson (Holborn and St. Pancras): Canada.
Mr. Patrick Thompson: While the hon. Gentleman is dealing with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, will he pay tribute to the work that it and its committees do to improve public understanding of science? They do a great deal in that respect.
Mr. Battle: Absolutely. We can share that view across the Floor of the House.
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I take the Minister's point. It is important that we try to attend and give the British Association for the Advancement of Science all possible support. Its work is excellent.Science week should be extended. Instead of there being a single week celebrating science and technology primarily focused on schools, the whole of commerce and industry should have open days or open weeks throughout the year so that we can better understand what manufacturing engineering and technology is about and can understand more about research and development. We need to extend our vision of the role of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and to do everything possible to support it.
Under the Conservative Government, despite the encomium that we heard from the President of the Board of Trade, there is a feeling that research and development continues to be marginalised and demoted. It is not being pushed further up the political agenda, as he suggested.
Let me reflect on the role of the right hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine), the First Secretary of State, the Deputy Prime Minister, the man noted for his back-of-the-envelope outlines of the future. It seems to me that, on that hot summer's afternoon on 4 July, he had another back-of- the-envelope plan of how the Government should be run. He was to leave the Department of Trade and Industry and move to the Cabinet Office in his new role, but he kicked science behind him. He pushed the Office of Science and Technology back in the opposite direction.
It was as though science and the Office of Science and Technology were an afterthought, a left-over. Where was the planning, the consultation, the involvement of the Department's staff in that sudden transfer of the OST to the DTI, not to mention the appointment of the newly appointed Government chief scientific adviser--whom, incidentally, I welcome to this place and to his post?
There did not appear to be much foresight in that decision. It appeared to be a classic afterthought by the then President of the Board of Trade as he moved into the new role of Deputy Prime Minister.
So what do we get? Science is put into its third Department in as many years under the Government. We have now the fourth science Minister in as many years. That is it--science has become a reject of the new Deputy Prime Minister. Or is it? The President of the Board of Trade told me that he has Cabinet responsibility for science, yet the Deputy Prime Minister tells us that he chairs the Cabinet Committee covering science and that science is now subsumed under the sole heading of competitiveness, along with other disciplines. The White Paper on competitiveness was presented to the House. We had a debate on competitiveness. On the same day, all the technology foresight reports and the "forward look" document, which we welcome and which we would have wished to comment on, were not presented to the House. They were presented in a press conference at 5 o'clock in the Queen Elizabeth centre by the then President of the Board of Trade. In other words, they were subsumed to competition policy. Science was tagged on to the launch of the competitiveness White Paper.
We are left with the lingering question: who ultimately is the Cabinet Minister responsible for science? Or is the President of the Board of Trade in effect another deputy's
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deputy, with which we are becoming so confusingly familiar? I hope that the Minister for Science and Technology will not take offence when I say that I hope that he has not been asked to reply this morning on behalf of the real science Minister, the right hon. Member for Henley.There is confusion about who is responsible at the heart and centre of Government for science policy. It is a shambles of an arrangement. What a way to treat our country's future. No wonder the Save British Science Society has commented:
"A Government with so little regard for the intelligence of the research community shows a stunning lack of true `Foresight'. Many will question whether this is any longer a Government whose words and intentions can be respected."
With the best of respect to the new Ministers, I know, from seeing for myself in perhaps more than 100 visits to research establishments, universities, laboratories and businesses throughout the country in the past nine months, how lacking support and credibility are now in the field of the Government's science, engineering, technology and research and development policies.
Having seen that, I believe that we should be in no doubt of the scale of the science and technology challenges that we must face, and which the Government so manifestly fail to tackle.
Mr. Ian Taylor: The hon. Gentleman makes a big point about that, but I should remind him that the former chief scientific adviser has made very positive remarks about the transfer from the Office of Public Service and Science to the DTI--in his article in The Daily Telegraph of 19 July, not least. The new chief scientific adviser has specifically told me that the transdepartmental responsibilities of the chief scientific adviser have been preserved entirely. Those are two very eminent gentlemen, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman will take that into account.
Mr. Battle: I will take that into account, but it is interesting that their comments come after the event, not before. There were no hints before that that would happen. There were no fliers from the chief scientist at the time suggesting that that was the way forward--and he had ample opportunity.
Mr. Robert Jackson (Wantage): I wish to comment on the remark attributed to the new chief scientific adviser. He, of course, had no experience of the previous system when there was a Cabinet Committee directly concerned with science and technology. That has been abolished. It is difficult to understand how that makes it possible to continue those central co-ordinating arrangements with the same effectiveness as in the past.
Mr. Battle: The hon. Gentleman makes a good argument. I seem to recall that, at the time of the transfer, he made those arguments public. They are welcome.
In a way, the debate is post hoc; it has happened. Nevertheless, we are anxious to draw to the Government's attention the fact that it hardly becomes them to defend the line of careful forethought when a decision is jumped on the whole of Government and Departments on a hot afternoon as a result of a crisis at the highest levels of Government.
Mr. Robert G. Hughes: I am confused by what the hon. Gentleman says. We know that it is Labour policy that the OST should be part of the DTI, and presumably it urged that because that is what it wrote in its documents.
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The hon. Gentleman has bored the Chamber with a long diatribe about the move that has been made by the Government. I have to tell him, as a former junior science Minister, that I believe that it was exactly the right move. It was impossible to determine what was the difference between the technology parts of the DTI that my hon. Friend the Member for Esher (Mr. Taylor) was in charge of and the parts that I was in charge of at the Office of Public Service and Science.It is a welcome move. For once, as the Labour party said it before and it had been thought of in government, the hon. Member for Leeds, West (Mr. Battle) might have welcomed it. That might be more constructive.
Mr. Battle: I am amazed that the former science Minister asks that question, because he gives me the chance to ask him a question. It would be interesting to know what he felt when he stood at that Dispatch Box saying how good the arrangements were, if he now feels that they were all wrong. He never told us that he was greatly unhappy with the OST and he believed that it should be moved to the DTI--and I know that some voices urged him to do that. He held out in the opposite direction.
Dr. Bray: My hon. Friend speaks with great authority about present Labour science policy. The President of the Board of Trade actually quoted from former Labour party policy in the manifesto at the last election, for which I was responsible. It was a highly selective quotation, in which he said that the Department of Trade and Industry was responsible for that area of industrial research. The overall concept of the Office of Science and Technology belonged firmly in the centre of Government. We were rubbished by the Conservative party at the time, only for it to adopt our policy after the election.
Mr. Battle: The document "Pushing Back the Frontiers" was published in 1992. We felt that the Government had stolen our clothes. We suggested the setting up of an office of science and technology within the Cabinet Office, which is precisely what the Government did after the election. We welcomed that because we thought that they had taken our idea.
We should face up to the science and technology challenges of our world in a less complacent manner than we saw from the President of the Board of Trade this morning. Science is becoming increasingly international. There are already 30 million people on the Internet. Within a decade or two there will effectively be a limitless capacity for fibre-optics and we will be capable of transporting the entire contents of the British library in less than a minute.
Scientific research can be accessed from all over the globe. Universities and scientific societies are pioneering new ways of making research internationally available. By the year 2005, 10 million people will be working with computer software in the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development alone. But the danger is that Britain will be left behind as American companies such as Mathwork make all the engineering inroads.
By the year 2010, there will be 2,260 telecommunications satellites in orbit--twice as many as there are now. Today, the Asian Pacific market for chemicals is roughly equal in size to the markets of the European Union and the United States put together. In 25 years the Asian Pacific market could be bigger than both
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put together. There have been new advances, not just in the industry, but in environmental technologies, education and health. Machines, materials, manufacturing and even the concept of transportation are being transformed by continuing advances in micro- processing, wireless networks, high-speed optical networks and artificial intelligence. It is an economy and society in which knowledge will be power; information will be opportunity and technology will make things happen.How does Tory Britain prepare itself for the information age, when even more important than the technologies to communicate knowledge will be the capacity to generate the knowledge in the first place? What characterises the Government's approach to science, as in so many other spheres of policy, is that they cut budgets in the short term--they fragment, marginalise and demote.
Let us compare Britain to our international competitors, as both the OECD report and the International Monetary Fund report spelt out this summer. Let us compare ourselves with America, Japan, Germany and France. The percentage of GDP spent on research and development in Britain is lower than all the others, at 2.19 per cent. The United States spends 2.72 per cent. of its GDP; Japan spends 2.93 per cent. The President suggested that Britain was top of the class in terms of spending on research and development per head of population, but we are bottom of that league. Let us consider the number of people employed in research and development. Europe employs nearly 300,000 more today than in 1981, as does Japan. Germany employs 140,000 more; France employs 50,000 more and Italy 40,000 more. But here in Britain we employ fewer--nearly 40,000 full-time equivalents fewer. British industry is working hard to boost research and development spending after a decline in 1990, when it was down 0.3 per cent. By 1993, it had risen 4.6 per cent. But despite the industry's efforts, Government cuts mean that extra investment in our society is wiped out. There has been a massive shift to part-time researchers on temporary contracts in our society--from 11,500 in 1982 up to 21,500 in 1994. What does that mean? Employees on short-term contracts worry about their next wage rather than the details of the creative research upon which they should be engaged.
The picture is not as rosy as the President of the Board of Trade suggested. The OST budget is projected to shrink by 12 per cent. next year and is being steadily undermined by cuts in research and development spending by other Government Departments. That action comes from a Government who claim in their press releases to be offering a teaspoon of aid through the OST with one hand, yet the fingers of their other hand are around the windpipe as Government Departments cut research and development across the board in health, transportation and the environment.
In the recent "forward look"--the Government's annual science review--total Government spending is projected to fall by 7 per cent. in real terms by 1997. By the financial year 1997-98, spending will be more than £1 billion less than it was in 1986. The worst culprit is the Department of Trade and Industry, where research and development programmes have been slashed by 68 per cent. in four years.
On the very day that the Government announced the White Paper, "Realising our Potential", the DTI, then under the right hon. Member for Henley, slashed
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£40 million from collaborative research programmes. It is no wonder that the scientific world is nervous of the OST's move into the Department of Trade and Industry.This very day, while we are here debating science, the Chancellor is at his Dorneywood retreat, cutting Government departmental budgets. I am in some ways surprised that the President of the Board of Trade is here this morning. I thought that he might be at Dorneywood defending his budget. While we are debating the need for science spending, the Chancellor may be cutting the budget again at Dorneywood. Obviously, we shall have to wait and see, but to cut the science budget in order to deliver tax cuts in the coming Budget must be one of the most short-sighted economic decisions that can be made in our society.
Even industrial renovation research, funded by the DTI, is down from £104 million in 1993 to £85.6 million now. The national space programme has been halved. I hear that the Minister for Science and Technology was at the European Space Agency yesterday. The coded way in which the President of the Board of Trade reported back suggested that we should cut our cloth accordingly. I suspect that the Minister was at the ESA to campaign again for a larger cut--perhaps of 25 per cent. I should like to hear the details of the Minister's argument in Brussels and whether he argued to reduce our commitment to the ESA. I would welcome it if he would give us an answer.
Mr. Ian Taylor: Given the hon. Gentleman's interest in this matter, he will be delighted to congratulate us on our efforts in altering the balance within the ESA budget. There is to be a flat cash arrangement for the next five years of the ESA science budget, capped at a 3 per cent. level of inflation. All the members around the table at the ESA agreed to that. It was a difficult negotiation, but the key point was to preserve the science element. It was clear that if we had not brought that budget under more control than had originally been proposed, other member countries in subsequent years would have tried to take out key platforms from the science activity. I did not wish to do that.
Mr. Battle: I am grateful to the Minister for giving us some hints and I look forward to the details. The Government's record on the ESA is not spectacular. We are not involved in manned flight or telecommunications --we have pulled out from two key areas. We remain in one of the voluntary sectors: earth observation. But even there, if the Minister would care to visit the Meteorological Office, he would discover that we are making cuts. I gather that when the Minister was last at the ESA he sat at a table on which there was a model of the Ariane rocket. He asked why flags of other nations appeared on the rocket, but not the British flag. He was told that it was because we did not make a contribution, and that we could have our flag on the rocket when we made one.
Mr. Taylor: The hon. Gentleman should be properly briefed before he comes to the Dispatch Box. I understand only too well that we are not part of the Ariane infrastructure project. He should wait and see what may happen this afternoon, although the injection of funds is still a matter for further discussion. He should recognise
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that we have been long-term contributors to the Kourou ground station. British companies play a part in the Ariane programme and we should pay tribute to them.Mr. Battle: I am encouraged that, by raising more points, I am forcing the Minister to make more commitments. I am suggesting that it would be very beneficial for our industries if Britain were to be more "solidly at the heart of Europe"--as the phrase goes--in scientific and research and development terms. We have precisely the technologies, back-up technologies and commercial interests that would allow us to make a major contribution. In other words, British investment would pay off back home.
The space programme budget has been halved and, amazingly, the DTI renewable energy budget has been cut by one third. The Government raise value-added tax on fuel and then cut the renewable energy technology budget. Are they so short-sighted, or do they simply want to raise revenue in the short term at any expense?
We are told that the £1.3 billion budget of the OST will be protected when it moves into the DTI, which also has a budget of £1.3 billion--I think that "ring-fenced" was the term used in the press releases. How long will it be before that ring fence becomes a Chinese wall, as the DTI and OST budgets are fused and then cut year after year? That is what we have seen repeatedly in the development of technology and research in recent years.
Perhaps the President of the Board of Trade or the Minister for Science and Technology will deny that the budget of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council is due for a real term cut this year, next year and the year after. Will they deny that there is a growing infrastructure crisis in university laboratories? In the last debate we raised the practical issue of the lack of fume cupboards--a basic support system for chemistry laboratories. Are the Government addressing that problem in any way? No Tory election tax cut is more cynical than one that is financed by undermining new research and development and scientific and technological possibilities. In other words, the Government are cutting our future economic prosperity and our social well-being. That is short-termism with a vengeance.
The Government are addicted to short-termism, and scientific research and development is paying the highest price for that short-term approach. Vital cash is increasingly diverted from the research councils into short-term, headline-catching, acronym-titled competitions that bear all the hallmarks of the right hon. Member for Henley--the competition addict. Some £40 million--which we were told was not new money--was allocated to the technology foresight competition. We were then told that the sum had to be matched by private money or it would not be released.
When the right hon. Gentleman was Secretary of State for the Environment, his Department initiated competitions every day. They proved to be simply a cover for reducing mainstream programming. When private funds do not match the money that is declared available, that sum is cut and less money is spent on the programmes. That has happened every time.
I shall take the Realising our Potential Awards as an example. Applicants must win funding for a project that is original and feasible and they must demonstrate that they have secured at least £25,000 of industrial income. I would argue that the worth of the proposed research is not
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considered properly as, increasingly, the research programmes that win cash are those that have failed on the basis of peer review. As the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Dr. Goodson-Wickes) pointed out in the House on Monday, alpha-rated research projects--that is the highest rating there is--are being passed over because resources have been diverted to less rigorous ROPAs.The chairman of the Medical Research Council's molecules and cells panel has said that the ROPAs have meant that his panel was "boxed into a corner where you had to fund something you didn't want to."
The Government's review of ROPAs, which was published yesterday, reports the research councils' concerns that they are being forced to fund "poor- quality" science. While the concept of ROPAs--to build links between industry and the science base--is good and one that the Labour party supports fully, the practice under the Government belies the intention.
Not only is top-quality research passed over, but the overall thrust of R and D funding is driven into the short term. Researchers cannot find support from industry for longer-term basic research for entirely understandable reasons: firms are unwilling to take the risk of funding research whose applicability is as yet uncertain and whose exclusivity to the funder is unlikely. The result is that funding goes instead to short- term, near-market research. We do not deny that such research is valuable in itself, but it is no substitute for long-term thinking. As the Medical Research Council panel chairman said, ROPAs in their current form have led to
"clinical trial work, not innovative science".
Everywhere one looks, Britain's science base is being threatened by the pressure for near-market research.
I have met many industry representatives and I do not believe that industry wants academia to do its job for it. Industry should not be expected to conduct basic, curiosity-driven, blue-skies research. In the same way, academics should not have to test products. I get a clear message from firms up and down the country: there must be a well-trained and resourced science base from which firms can draw people who are trained to the top of their field and who can be recruited to work to firms' near-market ends. Industry needs excellence and quality in British basic science.
The Labour party's policy is clear. The ROPAs can stay; we welcome them. But quality shall become the criterion. We shall restore a long-term time horizon and ensure that funding structures do not channel research projects short term and purely near market. The Government's failure in the science field is not just about cash; it is also about the abject lack of co- ordinating strategy across the range of Government Departments, research councils and public and private sector research establishments.
The former Defence Minister gave evidence before the Defence and Trade and Industry Select Committees, which met concurrently on 23 May. He was questioned about defence research and the potential for generating new ideas and production. He said that he was keen that the notion of the potential of the defence industry should be extended. However, he did not even mention technology foresight; he seemed totally unaware of the defence aerospace foresight report. He referred to the technology demonstrator programmes, but he did not
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mention the technology foresight report, despite the fact that it had been launched only days earlier in the QEII centre.Despite the Government's claims to the contrary, there is no co-ordination between Departments. Other Departments may not know what the Office of Science and Technology is trying to achieve. For example, the Wellcome Trust has reported that the university dual support system is collapsing because individual research programmes cannot justify the capital expenditure on equipment that the research requires. That is not to say that the research is not needed, the equipment is not necessary or that it will never be used again; there is simply no attempt to link the research between laboratories or Government Departments.
How do the Government think that they can remedy that situation? This morning we heard the new buzz-phrase: "fostering partnerships". That involves establishing networks of support between different branches of research. However, I am not convinced that that is really the Government's approach because, for some strange reason, they seem to be insisting upon privatisation and fragmentation. Their response to the scrutiny of the public research establishments has been to establish a prior options review of all public sector research establishments with a view to pushing them out to the private sector.
Research councils and Government Departments are to be reviewed on a function-by-function basis and analysed for their potential for transfer out of the Government domain and into privatisation. We are entitled to ask what form the privatisation would take. For some weeks the House debated the privatisation of AEA Technology. Hon. Members on that Committee will recall that we asked repeatedly whether AEA Technology would be sold off en bloc or fragmented. We received no response. We fundamentally opposed the Government's strategy because they could not tell us how it will be sold. If it is sold off in fragments, that could undermine and pull apart a critical mass of scientists in a key area. Arguably, clean-up technology is a key area in respect of our environmental needs and should be at the forefront of technology rather than undermined.
Individual functions will be hived off and cherry- picked, tearing down the bridges and links that join research establishments. I visited the Laboratory of the Government Chemist, which is across the green at Teddington from the National Physical Laboratory. The Government are pushing out both those organisations to the private sector in different directions and by different means. Occasionally, however, scientists from the establishments get together and exchange ideas. We should be fostering coming together and development, not atomising and fragmenting, as the Government are by allowing individual functions to be pulled apart. That box or silo thinking pervades much of the Government's action; there is no serious joined-up thinking across Government Departments.
Labour will call off that ideological drive towards the privatisation and fragmentation of public sector research establishments. We realise that the principal aim of science and technology policy is to ensure the creation of effective technology support systems that bridge industry and the science base and build links within the science base to generate interactive scientific expertise.
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We recognise that firms, universities and public research bodies are distinctively different institutions that are adapted to specific purposes, but, just as it would be foolhardy to make academic institutions into commercial ideas factories, so it would be foolhardy to make private firms non-commercial. It is foolhardy to push out Government expertise that has been built up over the years into the private sector to see whether it thrives or dies because we might kill off some of our much-needed expertise that will lead us into the future. The central problem of policy is how to connect and co-ordinate and we do not accept that the Government are moving forward in that strategic direction.The establishment of the foresight panels is welcome, but the weakness in the Government policy is the strategic implementation plans. Where are the responses from other Government Departments? Where are the commitments to carry policy forward throughout the Government? In other words, the economic and social return from scientific research and development is not determined solely by the capacity to develop new products and processes. Equally important is the system of support for diffusing those technologies and the relevant applications.
Throughout history, British scientists are rightly reputed for their brilliance at researching new scientific advances. Science and engineering have been coming together for years, as the new paradigms of computer-aided design demonstrate.
I have to reflect that for some years the Government wrote off manufacturing industry. When the noble Lord Young was Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, he declared that the service sector was all, the manufacturing sector was over and that Britain would thrive if only more people would eat out. I remember it directly because in my city manufacturing was declining from 52 per cent. to 32 per cent. of the manufacturing base. However, there have been welcome and encouraging reports in recent days because of real partnership at local level between chambers of commerce, industry, universities and technology and the engineering initiative in Leeds. Manufacturing is starting to come back and we need a manufacturing base. I welcome the fact that the word "manufacturing" appears in a positive way for the first time in the past 10 or 15 years in a Government publication. The examples of British excellence that result in profitable industry are diminishing. Not only is the basic science capability of Britain to generate such ideas being undermined, but the Government are failing to support industry and academia in their attempts to transfer ideas and technology back and forth. There is a weakness in Government because they are not tying together Government programmes with the outside world and research and investment in industry. Science and technology policy needs genuinely to co-ordinate and encourage the take-up of scientific advances by industry, particularly small and medium-sized firms, where the shortfall is even more marked. As SmithKline Beecham remarked on the technology foresight programme:
"The challenge now is to ensure widespread dissemination and implementation of the Panel findings. This requires a coherent political strategy."
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That is not what we were getting from the Government. It is a view shared by industry throughout the country and by many professional bodies, including the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal Society and the CBI.Partnership across Government and between public and private sectors can happen and under a Labour Government it will. We shall establish an industry-wide advisory council on new technologies, on which management and consumers will have a voice. We shall have a Minister to work with those and other innovations to ensure that we effectively promote change and understand in advance the long-term economic and social implications.
We understand that science and technology policy is central to the economic and social future of our country. Positive support for our manufacturing base needs to be enhanced and support needs to be returned to research into health, education, transport and the environment, which the Government have short-sightedly allowed to deteriorate because such research cannot deliver a short-term immediate cash return.
We shall work for better international collaboration. We shall seek not to isolate Britain in the European Space Agency, jeopardising our capacity to benefit from new advances that the agency makes, but to ensure that research and the work of scientists are supported here and internationally. Nor would we, alone among our competitors, allow the burden of an expected £10 billion increase in subscriptions to CERN to be borne by science expenditure here so that other programmes have to be cut to allow for currency fluctuations. Unless the Government act to deal with the impending international subscriptions crisis, the result will be a halving of resources available to the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council to prepare experiments and use CERN. The Minister may mention that in his reply to the debate.
We shall sort out intellectual property rights and tackle the science switch-off in education between the age of 16 and 18 when students are not taking sciences at a higher level. We will encourage the opening of local science shops to bring scientific understanding within the reach of local communities and we shall ensure that the Office of Science and Technology has a genuine co-ordinating function. We shall pull Departments together in a co-ordinated strategy, breaking down the narrow departmental thinking of the past.
We need a clear Government vision to infuse society with a deeper and broader sense of the vital importance of science, to bring about the long overdue shift from short-term to long-term perspectives on the economic, social and political possibilities of the future. We know from today's debate that the Government are still addicted to the short term. They are incapable of providing a vision and we suspect that science will continue to pay a high price until the election of a Labour Government.
10.59 am
Sir Geoffrey Pattie (Chertsey and Walton): This is an important debate on an important subject. In all the time that I have been in the House, we have never found a way of reconciling the inevitable short notice of Friday business with accepting, at longer notice, invitations to attend functions in our constituencies. The irony is that I have been invited to open a new science and technology
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unit at Heathside secondary school in Weybridge--an excellent institution and the first grant-maintained school in Surrey. The House would expect me to honour that commitment, so I apologise to my hon. Friend the Minister and the House for having to leave this important debate early.I warmly welcome the confirmation by my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade of the continuation of the Select Committee on Science and Technology, which is clear recognition of that Committee's effectiveness under the wise chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Sir G. Shaw).
I will confine my brief remarks to the subject of intellectual property. It is widely agreed in almost every saloon bar in the country that we are good at innovation but not at exploitation. Part of exploitation is the protection of new ideas in the world of intellectual property. Announcing that one is to talk about intellectual property is a way of clearing a room of people quicker than shouting, "Fire!" In these Nolan-obsessed days, I should declare that I speak as the totally honorary and non-remunerated chairman of the Institute for Intellectual Property, which was created a year ago as a reformation of the Common Law Institute for Intellectual Property, known by many people as CLIP, which for 10 years, under the wise guidance of Lord Scarman and the late Stephen Stewart, provided an important focus for intellectual property activities.
The Institute for Intellectual Property continues the excellent research work of its predecessor but also combines a much-needed industry focus by having 10 important UK companies as founder members on its board of governors. The question sometimes asked, although not as often as it should be, is: how important is intellectual property to the United Kingdom? Two studies by CLIP on the economic importance of intellectual property showed that the copyright-based industries accounted for approximately £17 billion or 3.6 per cent. of gross domestic product in 1990, and that they employed more than 800,000 people. The patent-based industries accounted for approximately 2 per cent. of GDP. Both results have been widely accepted as conservative.
The figure resulting from the copyright study was cited by Ministers when presenting the Bill that is now the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. On the best estimates available, the UK is second in the world league table of copyright producers and exporters, and fourth or fifth in the sale of products relying on patent protection. However, it would be dangerous to underestimate the forces that oppose intellectual property. At a national level, the consumer lobby would prefer that the products of the IP industries were either free--for example, by copying films and records off air--or at greatly reduced prices, such as with generic pharmaceuticals. But without intellectual property protection, there may be no videos, records or new drugs, because the companies that produce them could not recoup their substantial and essential investment.
Every democratic Government must be mindful that, for every creator or right owner who has a vote, there are 1,000 consumer votes and that, for every Bill desperately needed to bring and keep intellectual property up to date, a dozen other Bills are politically more important. At the international level, developing countries often resist intellectual property protection on the ground that they need IP-based cultural and technological goods for their
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development but cannot for the time being afford to pay for IP. Piracy, which usually involves copyright or trade markinfringements--or both--is estimated to cost UK businesses more than £1 billion, which is worth at least 100,000 jobs.
Industry competitiveness in the UK will increasingly depend on brain rather than brawn. The successful exploitation of public and private science and technology expenditure demands an effective intellectual regime. Products and services now reach the market place rapidly and are constantly updated. For example, the explosion in multi-media products and services for industry and consumers demand collaboration between creators and innovators in the entertainment, computer and communications industries. That rapid change requires intellectual property regimes to adapt at a similar rate if disputes between collaborators are to be resolved promptly and are not to inhibit progress.
The essence of patent and copyright law is the granting of a monopoly to an individual or a company for a specific period. The House will always be sensitive about monopolies and will not readily relinquish control. Therefore, IP law--except for the implementation of European Union directives under the Single European Act--cannot easily be covered by the secondary legislative process. The law is complex and it is expensive for IP owners to enforce their rights against an infringer. Typically, it costs £50,000 in the county court or at least £250,000, as a starting figure, in the Patents Court, which is a branch of the High Court.
Lord Woolf has produced an interim report on reform of the civil law. Cheap, fast-track litigation and simpler rules of procedure are needed, together with a level playing field in the EU. At present, in many EU countries--but not in the UK--the state subsidises litigation by paying for expert witnesses, which are always an expensive item. If we do not work rapidly to those objectives, litigants will shop around for the best service and disputes will be resolved in Dutch or German courts. That will further damage the UK as a trading centre. The PIMS report "Panorama of EU Industry", which was published last month, concludes, among other things, that innovation and intellectual property are the strongest drivers of competitiveness, leading to a growing market share, value added and more jobs. Intellectual property, however, is valueless without a cheap and efficient means of enforcing rights. We should support Lord Woolf and the patent judges in their efforts to reform and modernise the law. My concern is that the speed of technological change and innovation at which we marvel makes it difficult for the legal framework to keep pace. I am not convinced that the Department of Trade and Industry has adequate resources. If adequate resources and expertise were made available, the Law Commission could keep a watching brief and bring forward proposals when necessary in this crucial part of national activity.
11.8 am
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