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The Chairman: I should make it plain that there is an inevitable inter-relationship between clauses in a Bill as complex as this. Hon. Members will find that some amendments that apply to later clauses have been grouped with earlier clauses. It is immediately apparent, for example, that the debate on clause 1 is already touching on matters relating to clause 3. I have no problem with that, providing that members of the Committee understand that we shall debate the issues once, not twice.
9.45 amMr. Boswell: Many of us from all parties will lament the absence of the former hon. Member for the Cities of London and Westminster, now Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, whom my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) and I much enjoyed when we led for our party. In his final years in this place, he would come in to Committees as a Back Bencher and delight them either with cricket stories—on which I did not feel as strongly as him—or with classical references, with which I cannot claim to match him but in which I shared an interest. Germane to our consideration of the arts and humanities research council is the analogy between the ranks of Government Back Benchers attending the Committee and the formation of a Greek hoplite army; tightly grouped, working in a narrow phalanx and, above all, ensuring that nobody steps out of line. With the greatest respect to Ministers and Government Members, the difficulty is that that is a somewhat inflexible procedure. Some may be aware of the analogy of Apamanondus, who was the first Theban general to defeat the Spartans for 400 years. He caused them great distress, and a kind of psychological breakdown, at the battle of Lutra in 371 BC when he manoeuvred by concentrating his forces on the left and broke in to the hoplite formation, which fell down completely. That is the only Brookeism to which I shall treat the Committee this morning. I hope that the Minister will not feel upset if I say that I agree with the clause; I indicated that on Second Reading and I do so again, as it is the right thing to do. I shall say a little about the reservations of my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale, which I share, but the basic decision is right. It is right Column Number: 14 to give the arts and humanities community a pukka research council, both as a matter of status and because it will enable it fully to access resources within the research council net.I have a number of interests in the area. First, I am a humanities person through and through myself. Secondly—somewhat to my surprise, but it is amazing how training transfers—I sat for two years on a science research council in the late 1980s. Thirdly, I was Higher Education Minister when some of these ideas were beginning to be developed. The arts and humanities community's interest then, as now—judging from the briefing that I have seen—was in favour of a full research council. We should not stand in its way. I have been reflecting—although I have not had time to access and check through all the files—on the arguments that were deployed in my time as a Minister for not creating a council. In a sense, the arguments are behind the reservations that my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale has already mentioned, and they are still matters on which Ministers need to reflect. Ministers need to be sensitive in dealing with the humanities in establishing the council. Essentially, the problem is one of scale, and we should consider the characteristics and management of the higher education sector. For example, if we compare the proportion of vice-chancellors who come from a big science background, where they are used to managing substantial research teams and resources, with the proportion that come from an arts or humanities background, we see that there is a strong preponderance in favour of science. Universities clearly require substantial resources to carry out their work—that point may also come up in later debates—and that does not exclude the humanities, which need library facilities, IT support and so forth. However, in a way that is not universally feasible in science, it is possible for a lone scholar to sit in a garret and puzzle a problem of philosophy, ancient history or logic and argue it through with a pen, paper and their own brain. That is the cultural and scale difference between the humanities and the sciences. My hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale has already referred to the second reservation. It concerns the transfer that effectively farms the council off to the Department of Trade and Industry, of which I was not fully aware until I read the small print. If we are going to establish a research council, it would be inappropriate to leave it uniquely under the control of his Department. I notice that the Minister is nodding. The council has to transfer, as it cannot be half one and half the other. There are some important sensitivities, to which the Minister could helpfully respond, about his Department's continuing relations with and interest in the arts and humanities. Indeed, he might want to say something about his relations with the sciences, and I shall return to that later. There are also particular interests among the arts and humanities world from other organisations and bodies that will remain at least under the general sponsorship and encouragement of Column Number: 15 the Department. I am thinking of, for example, the British Academy and the British archaeological schools in Athens and Rome. These are matters in which the Minister and his successors will be taking an interest. We must also consider what is taught in schools, and progression issues. As we are slightly more at leisure this morning, it would be helpful if the Minister commented on those points.The other area that featured in the theology of our decision about 10 years ago when I was Minister not to move to a full-blown research council concerned the future of the dual support funding. As the Minister will know, the funding is divided between the research councils' contracts or grant arrangements for service and the Higher Education Funding Council for England money, which is tied to the research assessment exercise and pays for blue-skies research. Ministers are rightly anxious to defend and maintain that distinction. We must take note, although perhaps in a different context from this morning, that Lord May—a former chief scientist whom I greatly respect—said cheerfully that we could allocate all funding through the research councils, simplify the system and not bother with the HEFCE research funding. That would not be appropriate, but the Minister might want to comment on it. I have several points that I should like to list solely to get them out of the way so that I do not need to intervene on later amendments. First, will the Minister confirm that the charter of the proposed council will provide for an ability to receive and deploy external funds? I remember from my time on a research council that although the prime funding—about 90 per cent.—was through the Government department that became the OST in due course, there was a significant amount of private sector funding. I imagine that the Minister will not want to discourage external funding, whether it is through endowment, commercial contracts, intellectual property or whatever. The second point, which relates to external activities, is probably covered sufficiently by clause 8. I am sure that the Minister will endorse my view that there are important academic linkages. The academic world is not confined to the UK or even parts of the UK, important as some of us think they are; I have a Welsh wife, so I have an interest in those clauses, too. Most academics, particularly in the world of the internet, converse academically, and collaborate and associate themselves with a wide range of scholars and researchers throughout the world. We all want such practices to happen and we do not want them to be in any way inhibited. Clause 8 states that nothing should restrict the activities of the arts and humanities research council to the UK or to any constituent part of the UK. That is a fairly simple and unequivocal statement, but perhaps the Minister can say whether it extends equally to the activities of scholars and researchers who are supported by the council and whether there are inhibitions on that.
Column Number: 16 I shall simply flag up the third point, because it is the subject of a later amendment. It concerns the need to ensure that any legal undertakings that have been concluded by the AHRB, and in particular its obligations to staff, are fully recognised and transferred.When in government, we faced a situation in which the sector wanted a change and there was pressure for an arts and humanities research council. However, 10 years ago, we did not feel that the time was right. Indeed, I have emphasised some of the points that are more than purely theological or organisational. There are points of substance, on which my hon. Friend rightly questioned the Minister and which at least give rise to reservations about rushing into this process. As Sir Humphrey knew, Rome was not built in a day, and it has taken 10 years to get from the laying of the foundations, which I modestly hope I laid, to the fruition of the proposal today. I am conscious that I could have made a cynical response at the time when I laid the foundations. I could have said, ''This is the way to block the proposal off, so that it might never be implemented'', but in fact I am quite happy that it has evolved through the way in which the Arts and Humanities Research Board has communicated with interested persons, developed authority and led the sector, and that the time is right to make this change. I pay tribute to the successive professors who have led the board; Laver, Eastwood and Crossick. I hope that I have not omitted one. There has been good leadership that has operated in a modest but effective way. The time has now come to move on, but we should not neglect the sensitivities. It is particularly important when there is such consensus on moving to this proposal that we do not pretend that there are no problems. We should simply deal with them in a grown-up way. We all need to emphasise the importance of the arts and humanities in their own right. They are not irrelevant to the economic strength of the country. We are strong in many of those fields, and many of us would think it proper that we should be even if there were no economic worth to that. We must ensure that what the Minister is proposing, with an aura of good will on both sides of the Committee and a good deal of pressure to do so, delivers the result that we all want.
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