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Resolved,
That this House believes that a strong and stable economy is the foundation of families' confidence in their own finances; notes that economic stability has delivered low and stable inflation, interest rates have been at their lowest since the 1950s, employment is at a record high and unemployment at its lowest since the 1970s; further notes that as a result households are better able to judge their long-term commitments as macroeconomic stability has reduced the risks to household finances of sudden and sharp rises in interest rates as seen in the past; believes that the Government has tackled the scandals it inherited and created a world leading system of financial regulation allowing people to save with confidence, simplified savings markets allowing people to make informed choices about what and how to save and taken action to tackle financial exclusion; recognises that most household debt remains affordable and that total interest payments are now 7.6 per cent. of disposal income compared with 15 per cent. in 1990; believes the biggest risk to household finances and consumer confidence would be a return to economic instability; and rejects the short-term boom and bust economic policies of the past that saw interest rates hit 15 per cent. and inflation hit 10 per cent. in which circumstances households had to save more to make up for the loss of value of their savings due to inflation and prepare in the event of becoming unemployed.
DELEGATED LEGISLATION
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),
That the draft Rights of Re-entry and Forfeiture (Prescribed Sum and Period) (England) Regulations 2004, which were laid before this House on 7th June, be approved.—[Mr. Ainger.]
Question agreed to.
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Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),
That the draft Stansted Airport Aircraft Movement Limit (Revocation) Order 2004, which was laid before this House on 8th June, be approved.—[Mr. Ainger.]
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): I think the Ayes have it.
Division deferred till Wednesday 7 July, pursuant to Orders [28 June 2001 and 6 November 2003 (Deferred divisions)].
Mr. Mark Prisk (Hertford and Stortford) (Con): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Can you confirm that the motion that was opposed will now be dealt with in a deferred Division? Should it be clearly put on the record that that has occurred only due to vigorous opposition by Conservative Members, while not a single word was heard from the Liberal Democrats?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: The hon. Gentleman knows that that is not a point of order for the Chair, but a means of trying to continue the debate.
Mr. Oliver Heald (North-East Hertfordshire) (Con): Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Is it not the tradition in this place that if a matter is of great importance to a party, its spokesman should attend to deal with it? The Conservative spokesman on aviation is here, but there is no Liberal Democrat; is not that unusual?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I think that the ruling that I gave to the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Prisk) also applies to the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald).
DELEGATED LEGISLATION
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),
That the draft Discharge of Fines by Unpaid Work (Prescribed Hourly Sum) Regulations 2004, which were laid before this House on 10th June, be approved.—[Mr. Ainger.]
Question agreed to.
EUROPEAN COMMUNITY DOCUMENTS
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 119(9) (European Standing Committees),
That this House takes note of the unnumbered Explanatory Memorandum from HM Treasury dated 11th May 2004 relating to the Preliminary Draft General Budget of the European Communities for the financial year 2005; and supports the Government's efforts to maintain budget discipline in the Community.—[Mr. Ainger.]
Question agreed to.
5 Jul 2004 : Column 659
PETITIONS
Finney Green Post Office
10.29 pm
Mr. George Osborne (Tatton) (Con): I wish to present a petition on behalf of Mrs. Barbara Watson and more than 800 residents of Wilmslow and the surrounding area.
The Petitioners declare
That they oppose plans made by Tesco to close the Finney Green post office in the Somerfields shopping centre at Dean row and that they are leading a campaign to keep the post office open.
The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to support the campaign to keep Finney Green post office open by doing all in its power to bring about a review of Tesco's proposals.
And the Petitioners remain, etc.
To lie upon the Table.
Romford Post Offices
10.30 pm
Mr. Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con): I rise on behalf of many constituents in Romford, especially members of the Roman Catholic parish of the church of St. Edward the Confessor, who are appalled by the recent closure, without notice, of the main post office in Romford town centre. Thousands of local people, especially elderly people who depend on the facilities, used the post office. They were shocked when, at the end of March, it suddenly closed without warning. The people of Romford are deeply concerned that, months later, there is no sign of a new post office.
They are also deeply worried about the potential simultaneous loss of many local sub-post offices. Both issues are the subject of many petitions that have been presented to me. I, in turn, intend to present them to the House. The first is the petition of St. Edward's Catholic church and it contains 145 signatures.
To the House of Commons,
The Petition of the congregation of St. Edward's Roman Catholic Church
Declares that Romford's post offices are under threat of closure and that Romford's main post office has already been closed.
The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons do all in its power to keep as many of the local post offices open in Romford as possible and to urge Post Office Ltd. to reopen Romford's main post office without delay.
And the Petitioners remain, etc.
To lie upon the Table.
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Development Sciences Research Council
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Ainger.]
10.32 pm
Mr. Tony McWalter (Hemel Hempstead) (Lab/Co-op): The subject of the debate is the need for a development sciences research council. I shall speak rather quickly because I have a lot to get in.
I begin with a problem, which is somewhat indelicate to state. Human beings have a propensity to defecate in places that are clean and do not bear the signs and smells of others of their species. There are also advantages to performing that bodily function near a running stream. So far, so natural. A tribe of a few hundred souls, camped by a fast-flowing river, might suffer no great disadvantages from what one could describe as natural toilet arrangements. If their neighbours down-river are not too near, or if the river flows fast enough, they might suffer no ill effects. However, if the population increases and inordinate pressure is put on a community's natural infrastructure, there will come a time when the natural arrangements have terrible consequences.
For example, the tribe might need to access ground water. Water gets polluted and water tables can become not a source of life, but agents for blindness and early death. A society caught in transition, clinging to the old ways but under pressure from "progressives" to change, clinging to a set of customs and cleaning rituals that seem no longer effective, might find it difficult indeed to adjust its culture and ways to take account of new knowledge. That applies especially when the new knowledge is scientific in character and describes invisible organisms that have the propensity to threaten life itself.
When those who propound the new knowledge enjoin all the members of the tribe to defecate in the same place, when they then say that the products of the toilet must be collected together and either dried to make biofuel or treated to be spread on fields, and when they are asked to drink only water collected by evaporation on funnel-shaped plastic sheeting, strong cultural resistance is hardly surprising, yet that is the programme that Professor Silas Lwukumba at the Kigali institute of science and technology advocates. I should like much of his work at the institute to receive proper support.
There have been solutions to those problems. Sometimes, tribesmen of the kind that I have described have been commanded or compelled to adopt the ways of their conquerors, but we now live in times in which the abolition of a community's modus vivendi is rightly seen as neither the right nor the prerogative of those with a more scientifically advanced culture. Most of those involved in development issues have given up what might be called the push model. Unfortunately, the pendulum might have swung too far in favour of a pull culture, in which only a tribe that asks for something gets anything at all. In that new, liberal way of dealing with problems, many development workers now claim to work only on problems that the tribe itself specifies as a problem. That cannot be right either. Those who are familiar with western science are often good at knowing the vast variety of resources available to solve problems in the developing world. We acknowledge, of course, that many of those problems are themselves products of inappropriately applied western technology.
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Scientists should not always wait for those in developing countries to specify their problems or to say which of their needs they want to be addressed. Sometimes, western scientists know that there is a problem even when, as with sanitation, the problem consists of certain invisible organisms. I shall give an example of this. I recently returned from Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world. In one area, there is a major problem with ground water, with the chromium level at 16 times the World Health Organisation recommended level, and fluorine at eight times that level. That is a potential problem, in terms of water purification, and a potential opportunity.
For all I know—I am pursuing the matter—a mining engineer might feel that the levels that I have mentioned might be worth an assay. If it turned out that there were local rocks with high levels of chromium, there might lurk in that water impurity a resource that could help that community to move from extreme poverty and starvation towards having an industry and a worthwhile source of income. People who ask those who know no science to decide how their problems should be solved might condemn them never to escape the sentence of extreme poverty and an early death.
We need neither a push model, in which solutions are imposed on people who might not be ready for them, nor a pull model, in which western societies and engineers might decide not to vouchsafe an analysis or a solution until it is asked for. We need a push and pull model—a co-operative model—in which both the community and a helping agency are given a sense of ownership both of the problem and of its solution. Those who recognise that a culture has ways that are conducive to its own immiseration or destruction should work with such groups to evolve new cultural forms that respect the old culture but moderate it so that changes can be introduced that work with the grain of that culture but are more protective of the health and life chances of the members of the tribe.
I am arguing that, in a development context, we need what we might call a push and pull model for intervention. Such a model would bring together experts from very different disciplines to work to push appropriate technologies on to communities at a pace and in a style that identified and worked with the belief systems of the beneficiaries of such new arrangements. In the case that I have mentioned in Rwanda, for example, a push and pull model for development would bring together engineering, philosophy, anthropology, language study and chemistry, among many other disciplines.
How well equipped is the UK to help with push and pull development models? I submit that our own capacity in this regard is weakening, and I shall make some suggestions here about how it might be strengthened. I submit that, in strengthening our own system, we would also be protecting and enhancing our own capacity to retain a healthy economy, although that is not my central concern in this debate. Why is the UK not well positioned to translate our scientific expertise into programmes that will assist the development of poor countries? I have time here to address only two of many weaknesses. First, science in the UK has a bad image. Secondly, our structures are ill equipped to
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translate whatever scientific expertise we do have into projects that will benefit developing countries. My treatment of the bad image will lead to recommendations on our structures.
On that bad image, when the public hear "chemical" as a noun, they are more likely to associate it with "toxic" than with anything positive. Science has a poor profile with many citizens, and if people in the UK see in an article about pollution a picture of a man in a white coat standing beside a river, they are more likely to think of him as a cause of the problem than the person who has the power to solve it.
One key question that we need to address is to what extent scientists address the question of that bad image. In my view, they address it not well at all, yet if one visits a poor country one is struck forcefully by one key difference between such a country and ours: in our country, one is surrounded everywhere by science and the technology derived from it.
In the poor country, 80 per cent. of the population work on the land, but even with that huge effort they are barely able to feed themselves. A store half-full of maize in November will result in death by famine in February. I have seen such stores. Meanwhile, in our country only 3 per cent. of the population need work on the land. With chemical inputs, agricultural knowledge and high-tech machines, they produce enough to feed the rest of us. That leaves the remaining 97 per cent. of the work force to produce a huge range of goods and services for the betterment of quality of life for the population not just of this country, but of countries far beyond its borders.
It seems absurd on the face of it that science and technology should be held in low regard by the hundreds of millions of people who gain so much from them, but in many western countries they are rated so low as to be constantly vilified. Part of the negative picture of science is derived from what it has done to threaten the quality of life rather than improve it. Whether it is the nuclear bomb or the gases in the chambers of the holocaust, most people can think of an example of scientific knowledge turned to terrible, evil account. Whether it is a dam that floods a valley and destroys the livelihood of thousands, pesticides on fruit, experiments on animals or the premature release of genetically modified crops to the environment, most people can cite an example of a scientific technology that discomforts or alarms them.
Those examples stack up to a negative image. The result is that a large majority of young people switch off science—they have no ambition to do it—to the point that our capacity to develop new scientific ideas and technologies is eroded.
My suggestion for what might switch young people back on to science is as follows. Young people are often idealistic and, if they can, they want to help in particular those in the world who face premature death or avoidable painful diseases. Most young people do not consider science as having a positive connection with those goals, yet manifestly it has.
A high capacity to do science or engineering in the UK not only brings the potential security of our being able to make and pay our way in the world in a century that will undoubtedly be characterised by new discoveries, but ensures that we have the capacity to
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help other countries, including some of the poorest in the world, to build their capacity to address the terrible problems that so many of them face.
One suggestion that I have is, in essence, simple: teach youngsters science and technology in the context of how the ideas, techniques, mechanisms and material studies can help radically to improve the quality of life in the poorest parts of the world. We should be making in education explicit connections between science, technology and development, but it is hard to make those connections at present. One major obstacle is the structure of our research councils. I want to suggest how that structure should be changed.
I shall focus the rest of this speech on engineering, because that is an area where, increasingly, our capacity in the UK is being compromised and because engineers have done very little to make any explicit connection between their subject and development issues. Engineering has a research council—the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council—but does it take much interest in development issues? No. Could it take much interest in such issues? Only with difficulty. After all, the job of the research councils is to push back the frontiers of knowledge, and in that cause they allocate grants for research on problems that are at the cutting edge.
An academic in an engineering faculty in a university will develop an interest in development issues at his peril, for the current wisdom is that those who do engineering in developing countries are not so much pushing back the frontiers of knowledge as applying what is known already in a new situation. Applied research is regarded as of lower grade in the university's research assessment exercise—RAE—on the understandable grounds that while many people can apply a known technology to a new situation, it is a rarer gift to be able to develop a new technology in its entirety. The research council, the EPSRC, funds the latter type of projects and not the former.
The matter does not end there. If a university department gets a low RAE score, it gets less money, and its continued activity, even its continued existence, is threatened. Its existence is especially threatened when in addition to a low RAE score, it finds it difficult to attract students, and engineering courses generally do so, not least because, in addition to engineering's image, which I mentioned, it is perceived as needing high mathematical skills, and students notoriously avoid such subjects. Engineering is expensive, because it needs equipment that costs a good deal of money, and often needs considerable space to be housed. If an engineering department did dedicate itself to working on the problems of developing countries, it would also need to conduct its operations both in the UK and in those countries. Once again, those operations would be expensive to the point that it would be difficult to generate the resources to ensure continuing funding.
I can summarise those factors as follows. A university engineering department—I speak with some passion, as my university's civil engineering department has just closed—which decided it wanted to use its expertise especially to address the problems in developing countries would be financially unviable. It would fail to attract EPSRC money, a high RAE score, a sufficient number of students, the space needed for its operations,
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or the necessary funding for travel. In short, such a decision would be suicidal. The wonder is that a few departments still try valiantly to do their best.
The result of these considerations is that engineering departments in universities are rational if they fight shy of being seen as a resource for capacity-building in developing countries. The effect of that, basically, is to connect them to rich countries, which in turn consolidates the perception of engineering as unresponsive to the greatest of human needs—those of the poorest in our globe.
Of course, the engineering profession lacks a voice that might proclaim that the subject does contain idealists who want to use their skills to make the world a better place for the poorest as well as the richest of their fellow human beings. To start with, engineers divide themselves into myriad respective constituencies, so that civil engineers do not talk in the same breath as electronic engineers. The body that one might expect would speak for all engineers, the Royal Academy of Engineering, seems to be dumb on most of these issues. Recently, it has even declined to give evidence to the Science and Technology Committee about development issues on the basis that it "lacks the expertise".
The Royal Academy of Engineering was not always dumb. Its chairman, Alec Broers, said to me today:
"Throughout the 1990s, on behalf of the British Government, we ran the UK secretariat for the UN's International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction"—
supported by the Royal Society—
"which ceased at the end of the decade once the funding from DFID had dried up. In its prime this was a very substantial activity."
DFID has much to answer for. There have been major vacillations in DFID about whether it wanted an infrastructure programme, and it has recently incorporated its engineering division into a policy area that now does not explicitly mention engineering at all. That is not surprising, as, increasingly, its main functions seem to be economic rather than technological.
Why should all this matter? What has been done? And what can be done? It matters because it is a matter of life and death. Only if money is translated into scientific and engineering skills in a push-and-pull model will the welcome, improved financial commitments made by this Government serve to improve life chances. Real material changes in infrastructure benefit the poor—let us consider my Rwandan example—and those changes are not easily translated into a Swiss bank account.
What has been done? It would appear that if anything there has been retrogression rather than progression, despite DIFD's increasing budgets. That is because it lacks a scientific culture. It cannot even decide to have a chief scientist. Its policy echoes that of Churchill, who wanted his scientists on tap but not on top. I want them nearer the top than DIFD's economists would like.
What we must do is ensure that if we can put development sciences on the same level as other studies to try and avoid the problems that come from having research councils that are specialised rather than at least one being explicitly interdepartmental—and there is no more interdepartmental subject than the future of the globe itself—we can give our system an incentive to put people into this area of work. That would mean that
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excellent work in development sciences of any sort would receive the five-star rating that is so essential to continuing departmental funding in our universities. It would also rescue development studies from the clutches of departments of economics. I am not saying that economists do not do valuable work, but the emphasis in DIFD should shift. Scientists should not be constantly consigned to membership rather than leadership of a team.
If my Rwandan sanitation problems were taken seriously, that would bring together experts from every one of the existing research councils—except, perhaps, the particle physics one. What if a team were able to solve such a problem in a way that was eventually adopted so that it became standard, widespread practice in Rwanda? Does anyone seriously think that it would not be a first-rate problem, whose solution would require great intelligence and ingenuity of just the sort that distinguishes the most exceptional achievements in other sciences?
I do not argue for a development sciences research council as a sop, so that those who work in the area might be compared with those who work in particle physics. I make my case because the problems are just as demanding as the problems of particle physics, and those who apply themselves to such problems should achieve appropriate recognition. Co-ordination of knowledge from a number of different areas in the interests and service of mankind is itself a first-rate intellectual challenge.
Those who say in derogatory fashion that in development work we apply known knowledge to a new area are quite wrong. Whenever we bring a body of knowledge to bear on new problems, we are likely to find that the knowledge with which we started is radically deficient, and needs amendment and rethinking. That is just what the best research so often produces. The award of moneys for such a purpose by a development sciences research council would be a powerfully effective use of resources; and, at last, the full range of ethical concerns of scientists and engineers would be manifest.
10.53 pm
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