Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witness (Questions 578-579)

MONDAY 17 MARCH 2003

RICHARD LAMBERT

Chairman

  578. Can we start the formal proceedings, and welcome Richard Lambert to our proceedings and say thank you very much for your attendance. As you know, the Committee is looking at the White Paper, but it seemed to us that it would be remiss of us if we did not call you in, because you are undertaking a review, originally for the Treasury but expanded by the Department for Education and Skills, to have a look at a number of issues. Richard, I understand that you would like to have two or three minutes, to open up, and then we will get started on questioning?

  (Mr Lambert) Yes, if that is agreeable to you, Chairman, that will be good. I would like to thank you very much for allowing me to come and explain what I am up to. I would like to say that this project is at a very early stage, and we are in the kind of human sponge mode at the moment, so we are soaking up as much information as we can, and hopefully without any particular preconceptions about what we are doing. As you will see, coming from a standing start, you will find gaps in my knowledge. I hope very much that I will have the chance, perhaps in a few months' time, in June, or sometime like that, to talk again, when we have got in all our evidence and are starting to think things through and forming judgments about what we have learned from this process. Just a background of what we are up to. This review was commissioned by the Government last November and it is couched in a way that we are looking at the question of the university-business relationship from the demand side, so we are interested particularly in the business side of the story, that is our starting-point, and we will be talking to lots of businesses, of all shapes and sizes, in the coming months about how they see these things. And the context is finding examples of good practice that can be heralded, and it is part of the issue of productivity, the question of British productivity, the notion being that great work is done in British universities, but that, relative to some other countries, in the US and other parts of Europe, we are not as great as we might be at transferring that into commercial activity in a creative and dynamic way. So that is what the set of issues is. Our terms of reference tell us that we must look at the benefits of greater collaboration, both inter-institution and across to business. We are looking at the role of RDAs and Sector Skills Councils and regional impact. We are looking at best practice and we will be doing some international models on that, I hope, as well. We are asked to consider how business communicates its skills requirements in the university sector and whether it does a good enough job of that and whether it gets what it is looking for. On the financial side, it is early days to look at the R&D tax credit, but we are asked to look at the R&D tax credit and other financial incentives, whether the form in which public funding is delivered encourages, or not, collaboration with business, we are asked to look at that. And we are asked to look at governance and management questions of the university in this context, in the context of the technology transfer, ideas transfer, to business. So that is what we are up to. We have sent out a lot of letters, to all the institutions and companies you would expect us to send them to, and have asked them to send us replies on various issues, which we can talk about, by Easter; also we are approaching and talking to lots of universities and businesses at the same time. We will get all this stuff back after Easter, digest it, by early summer we will have some preliminary ideas, which we will be discussing with all the parties, including you, I hope, with a view to having something to hand over to the Government I think in October. So that is what we are up to.

  579. Thank you for that. Can I start by asking you, what do you see as the trigger, why you, and why has the Treasury suddenly asked you to do this?
  (Mr Lambert) I think, me, perhaps, because I have spent my life looking at business. I have got a lot of business contacts.


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2003
Prepared 10 July 2003