UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE
To be published as HC 805-ii

House of COMMONS

Oral EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE the

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Committee

PFIZER'S DECISION TO CLOSE ITS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT FACILITY AT SANDWICH

Wednesday 2 March 2011

RT HON DAVID WILLETTS MP, MINISTER OF STATE FOR UNIVERSITIES AND SCIENCE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 120 - 153

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Science and Technology Committee

on Wednesday 2 March 2011

Members present:

Andrew Miller (Chair)

Gavin Barwell

Stephen McPartland

Stephen Metcalfe

Stephen Mosley

Pamela Nash

Graham Stringer

Roger Williams

________________

Examination of Witness

Witness: Rt Hon David Willetts MP, Minister of State for Universities and Science, gave evidence.

Q120 Chair: Minister, we met Pfizer, as I told you when we spoke the other day, and we had a frank exchange with senior management on Monday. In your opinion, was Pfizer’s decision to close the Sandwich site justified?

Mr Willetts: It is, obviously, something we find deeply disappointing, especially as the performance of the researchers at the Sandwich plant over the years had been so excellent. So it certainly came as a blow and a surprise when I learnt this on 24 January. We do understand that changes are going on to the structure of the industry in which they are moving to more arm’s length relationships with contract research organisations. Pfizer had taken a view that they were going to withdraw from some of the areas where their research was focused at Sandwich, notably in allergies and some respiratory problems such as asthma. It is a great pity. There is a fantastic strength in the life sciences industry. What I am trying to do, working flat out on this, is to work with Pfizer on the future of the plant rather than have recriminations with them about the reasons for their decision. I am giving you a wary answer because I am trying to look to the future now and absolutely ensure the best for the people working there and for British life sciences.

Q121 Chair: What did you say to Pfizer when they told you of their decision on 24 January?

Mr Willetts: I know and fully understand that the Committee has an absolutely legitimate interest in the "Who knew what when?" question. So let me be clear that, for the Government, the first we knew of it was at this crucial meeting on 24 January, which was the first visit by the new CEO, Ian Read, who wanted to come in and see us. He came in and dropped this bombshell.

My reaction, immediately, was to ask, "Is there something in our policy framework that you don’t like? Is there a problem in our policies or regulatory regime that is a specific reason for this that we can look at and try to tackle? Is there a problem that we need to address? Why have you done it? Is there anything that we can do to persuade you to change your mind, because we would, absolutely, look at anything that created a problem for you here?" That was the immediate reaction that I had.

They were absolutely explicit that the reason for their decision was not some problem with British Government policy, but it was these two issues: that they were pulling out of certain strands of research, which happened to be strands of research that were being undertaken at Sandwich, and, secondly, there was this wider change in the structure of the industry. We did absolutely ask them, "Is there something else that we can do in life sciences policy or our wider policy that would change your mind?", and the basic answer was no.

Q122 Chair: They did not mention their relationship with the health service in that answer?

Mr Willetts: No. They made it clear to us that the problem was not the British policy environment.

Q123 Chair: There still does seem to be a contradiction about who said what to whom and when it occurred. We are aware of a discussion that took place last July with the Prime Minister when everything was rosy and Sandwich, apparently, had a future. We are aware of a telephone conversation that took place at the end of November with the Prime Minister. It is now very clear from the evidence we heard on Monday that, during November, the Sandwich site had stopped recruiting. In fact it had cancelled some appointments that had been made. Dr McKernan, the head of the Sandwich site, told us that she was involved with the planning stage at that time. Clearly, the company knew, when they spoke to the Prime Minister at the end of November, that the possibility of the Sandwich closure was on the cards. Are you saying, without equivocation, that they did not tell the Prime Minister that piece of information in that phone call?

Mr Willetts: Yes. I am saying that without equivocation. Of course, I was not privy to the phone conversation, but you are quite correct that there was a phone conversation. It was on 29 November when the Prime Minister spoke on the phone to Jeff Kindler. The main purpose of that was to tell Pfizer of the patent box decision, which was, again, part of our strategy of being very positive towards the life sciences industry and encourage more life sciences investment. He spoke to Jeff Kindler then, and there was no suggestion in that conversation of any question mark over the Sandwich operation.

Q124 Chair: Now that you have heard the explanation that we received, are you not a little disappointed, to say the least, that they did not have the good grace to tell the Prime Minister in November?

Mr Willetts: What I cannot answer for is who knew what when within Pfizer and how exactly the corporate decision-taking process worked in Pfizer. I, personally, would speculate, and it is no more than that, that it might have been with Jeff Kindler leaving as CEO and the new CEO arriving that that might itself have led to a subsequent change of approach by Pfizer.

Q125 Chair: But the head of the site stopped recruiting way before that conversation at the end of November.

Mr Willetts: I cannot speak for what was going on within Pfizer. Of course, suspending recruitment is not quite the same as having already taken a secret decision to close the site.

Q126 Chair: She was quite clear. It was not a certainty but it was on the cards by that stage. In those circumstances, are you not a bit disappointed that they were not honest with the Prime Minister?

Mr Willetts: You are assuming that they had already decided to close the site and simply failed to tell the Prime Minister during that phone call.

Q127 Chair: I am not sure why you are defending them, Minister.

Mr Willetts: All I am saying is that I don’t know. I am focused on the future. Of course, the Committee is entirely entitled to ask me what the Government knew and what the Government’s response was. I am very happy to take the Committee through that fully. As to exactly what the decision process was in Pfizer up to their announcement, which was on 1 February, I can’t really give the Committee any authoritative advice on that. I can only tell the Committee what we knew when, and I can tell the Committee that there was this phone call on 29 November. It was for the Prime Minister to communicate about the patent box. He got no suggestion then of any problems at Sandwich.

On 5 December the new CEO was appointed. On 24 January I attended this meeting with the new CEO. I went to it thinking that it was an opportunity to meet the new CEO of a very important company that was crucial in the UK. It was at that meeting that we learnt for the first time of their intention to close Sandwich.

Chair: Many colleagues would like to push this matter, but we need to make progress.

Q128 Stephen Mosley: On 1 February, which was the same day that Pfizer announced it was cutting its R and D budget and also announced that it was closing Sandwich, they also announced that they were repurchasing $5 billion of their own shares. Ian Read said, "We believe that the share repurchases are a prudent use of our capital." Do you think that this demonstrates that Pfizer’s priorities are short-term financial priorities rather than long-term investment in the business?

Mr Willetts: Leading pharmaceutical companies are facing some significant challenges. Notably, they have some maturing products that are coming out of patent protection and they are having to respond to market pressures reflected in their share prices as a result of that. My view is that it is not in the interests of the work force at Sandwich or the life sciences for me to speculate about Pfizer’s internal decisions on their corporate strategy. I am focusing on ensuring that Britain has the best possible environment for an internationally mobile life sciences company so that they carry on wanting to invest here and conduct research here. The company must decide about their own decisions on whether to do corporate share buy-backs or not.

Q129 Stephen Mosley: Okay; perhaps I will phrase it slightly differently. In December, you will remember that we did an investigation into technology innovation centres and we visited Germany. While we were there, speaking to Government, academics and businesses, there was a belief that a recession was the time to invest in R and D and to invest in long-term structures so that when you come out of that recession you are in a position to take advantage of it. Do you think that the decision we have had from Pfizer demonstrates that there is a different attitude in the UK, that we are taking a more short-term attitude, whereas in Germany they might take a more long-term attitude? Is there a gulf between what happens here and in Germany?

Mr Willetts: I think one of our strengths has been the growth of early stage research in this area. Our problem is getting the research into successful business applications. There is a change going on, as we can now see, in the form that the research takes. It is not just Pfizer, but other leading pharmaceutical companies have said to us that the days of the in-house, large scale R and D facility are going. In a different industrial sector, it is the Bell Labs model of where your ideas come from. They are saying to us, increasingly, that they are looking to research happening in universities, perhaps being sponsored by new start-ups. They have contractual relationships, increasingly, with research organisations that might take an idea from a lab.

I accept that there is a change in industrial structure going on where they are cutting back on directly employed in-house research. It would be a great pity if that became a shift to short-termism. They would say that they are just going to be scanning the world and scanning the leading academic researchers-I am sure we have many of those in Britain-to buy or contract from them for future products rather than doing it all in-house. I think we have to be careful of interpreting such a change in industrial structure as somehow just short-termism.

Q130 Stephen Mosley: That is an interesting point because, on the same day that Sandwich got this really bad news, there was a bit of hope for Cambridge, of course, and Pfizer did announce that they were expanding their facilities at Cambridge. One of the reasons they gave was that, "Cambridge is a place where we want to conduct research in the future." They did describe this model that you have just described as one of the reasons that they wanted to move to Cambridge. Do you think that means that, in the future, in the UK, research is going to be increasingly focused on the golden triangle, on Cambridge and that part of the country, and other areas, whether it be Kent, the north-west or Scotland, might suffer because of that?

Mr Willetts: That is one of the crucial questions. This gets to the nub of it. There are certain areas where we have a cluster of what you might call "pure research" facilities, and clearly Cambridge, Oxford and London is one. There are strong clusters elsewhere in the country, notably in the Edinburgh, Glasglow and Strathclyde area. It may be, as we move on to another line of questioning, that that is one of the arguments for the decision on the location of the UKCMRI, in which I know the Committee is also interested. However, it does not follow that there is no future for Sandwich or that Sandwich does notIt have a role.

What you may find, even when the most upstream research is happening at some of these universities, be it contractual research or early stage clinical trials, is that these guys in a lab somewhere have found an interesting compound. They don’t properly understand what it does but they have come up with it. They say, "Let’s take it and see how we can convert it into a drug. Let’s do some first stage clinical trials." There will be several stages of the research and drug development process. I can envisage several stages down the track being conducted by contract research organisations, including, I very much hope, some based in Sandwich.

Q131 Chair: The only worry I have from your response is that, if this is going to become the norm, we need to be concerned about the future, for example, of the AstraZeneca site in Cheshire.

Mr Willetts: You don’t mean Charnwood. Do you mean Loughborough?

Chair: Macclesfield.

Mr Willetts: Of course I recognise that there is a London, Oxford, Cambridge cluster.

Q132 Chair: It is not only about that, but what happens if what you describe as the monolithic Bell-type labs go.

Mr Willetts: It is one of the reasons for the AstraZeneca decision about Charnwood. Although Charnwood is not quite on the same scale as the Sandwich decision, it does raise some very similar issues. Again, the hope will be that we will get some contractual research organisations or other activity at the Charnwood facility as well. I see a challenge for policy, although it is limited. We can’t do everything. If we can see this as a wake-up call and an opportunity for Britain to be the best environment for doing contractually based research, where if you are setting up new CROs or CROs are looking at where to locate themselves, they say, "Britain is the best place where we can take ideas emerging from university research labs, test them, develop them, do the clinical trials and shift them into products, with, perhaps down the track, selling to a pharmaceutical company", if we can make that one of the challenges-and I am willing to take that on as a challenge-then I think it would be great for life sciences in the UK.

Q133 Graham Stringer: Do you have an estimate of the total public sector support for the pharmaceutical industry, RDAs, tax breaks and infrastructure?

Mr Willetts: I certainly don’t have one in my head and I don’t quite know how we would calculate it. Of course, it is a two-way process. We buy drugs off them. The Department of Health is introducing the new value-based pricing. We collect taxes from the pharmaceutical industry and we pay for our medical research. We do not have a figure, I am afraid.

Q134 Graham Stringer: Previous witnesses estimated the direct support at about £2 billion annually. I do not think they were including in that estimate the NHS purchasing drugs because it would be much higher if it was included.

Mr Willetts: So they are including medical research councils.

Q135 Graham Stringer: I think they are including tax breaks, support from RDAs, the building of roads to research facilities, that kind of support.

Mr Willetts: If the Committee wants to send me the estimate or calculation that you are interested in, I am very happy to see if we can confirm it or offer an alternative.

Q136 Graham Stringer: I am surprised, in a sense, that the Government does not know how much support is given to the pharmaceutical industry. That is a bit irresponsible, is it not, in the proper sense of the word, that you don’t know how much taxpayers’ money is going into the pharmaceutical industry? You have told us how it is being supported.

Mr Willetts: We have a science and research budget of £4.6 billion. It is very hard to define what constitutes support. That covers a whole range of research activities. Some of them are of value down the track to the pharmaceutical industry; some aren’t. When you say tax reliefs-

Q137 Graham Stringer: We are talking here about one of the most important strategic industries. It is responsible for a large percentage of private sector research and development, and you are saying that the Government doesn’t know how much support is directly going to that sector. That is extraordinary, Minister.

Mr Willetts: I am not quite sure what your measure of support is. Equally, they support the public finances by paying their taxes.

Q138 Graham Stringer: It is not my measure that is of interest here, is it? It is the Government’s measure. You are telling us that the industry is restructuring. Your phrase was that you want "the best possible environment". That must include some subsidy and some financial support. Yet you are telling us that, in relation to this strategically important industry that is changing, costing us jobs and potentially costing us our position in world pharmacy, you don’t know what support there is.

Mr Willetts: If the Committee wants to provide some kind of definition of what falls within this rather elastic concept of support and what does not, I would be very happy to share with the Committee the calculations that we have.

Q139 Graham Stringer: Let us try from the other side. We recognise that the industry is restructuring. How are the Government going to change their policies? Could you tell us whether, financially, with tax breaks or what other strategic decisions the Government may take to create this new and better environment?

Mr Willetts: We recognise the significance of life sciences. There is a change going on in the structure of the industry. One of the issues that the industry raises with us and which you had a report on only recently, in January is, of course, clinical trials. We do have a concern that it takes far too long to get a clinical trial up and running in the UK. The whole process does seem very cumbersome. It is possible that the EU regulations in this area have been gold-plated in the UK. So the Secretary of State for Health and I are looking at the recent report from the Academy of Medical Sciences as to whether we can do things to speed up clinical trials and remove the regulatory obstacles there. I think that would be a big prize, and that was a very useful report. That is a specific thing we can do.

As I said, when I asked Pfizer this question at our meeting on 24 January, they did not come back with a list of grievances about the UK regime. They did not give that as the reason for their decision.

Q140 Graham Stringer: No, they did not. They said they were restructuring for internal reasons and they did not write out for you or us specific things. I would have expected the Government, having been given that information of the change in structure, to respond. Now, you don’t know how much money is being spent. You are telling this Committee that your only response is to shorten the length of drug trials, which I am sure they would welcome. Is there anything else? Perhaps I can help. Are you going to implement the Cooksey report more quickly than it is being implemented?

Mr Willetts: We are looking at these issues within the framework of the Growth Review. We have had a discussion of life sciences as part of the Growth Review exercise. I must say that clinical trials did come very high up the list as an area where we could change things. Of course, the Government already have introduced the patent box, which gives us first-mover advantage as the first large-scale western economy to offer that.

I would add, thirdly on the list, as part of the ring-fenced science and R and D budget, there is a protected real level of spend by the MRC, helped by its flow of income from its patents. If you put those decisions together, in our first nine months we have introduced a further more generous tax relief. We have given protection to the real terms of the MRC budget, we have given the go-ahead to the UKCMRI, and we are looking at speeding up clinical trials. I think that is a pretty active agenda. If there are other things that this Committee has that we can add to that list of other areas where we need to do more, I will look at them with great interest.

Q141 Roger Williams: I was going to raise the issue of clinical trials but you have covered that a little. When do you anticipate that you will be able to respond to the report by the Academy? On another issue, I am told that, in the NHS, managers have never been given any clear targets for research. "Targets" isn’t the right word now, but whatever it is. That does not seem to be part of their job description or business plan. That might hinder clinical trials as well. I do not know if you are aware of those concerns.

Mr Willetts: On your first question, Mr Williams, I hope we will be able to respond quite soon now. I thought it was a very good report. It is one of the issues that we have gone through in the Growth Review. For the Department of Health there are some particular questions about exactly what kind of structure of regulatory bodies there would be, because the report proposed a single body. I know there are some arguments that you could not quite combine all of the functions in a single body. That is something the Department of Health is looking at the moment.

On your second question, there has been, historically, a problem that the NHS, as a purchaser or consumer, has not linked up as well as it might to the academic medical research community. I might even say there are some who would attribute this historically to the way in which the NHS was constructed in 1948, when the link between universities and medical schools in hospitals was severed as the university system went one way and the hospital system went the other way.

It began under the previous Government. One of the things that we are rather keen to do is to strengthen these connections. I was at Cambridge recently where they are trying to get the Addenbrooke’s Medical School and the excellent medical research that happens in Cambridge more closely connected. So there is more we can do.

The good news is that the NHS R and D budget is substantial and is broadly protected as part of the protection that there is for the NHS budget as a whole. I know that from discussing this matter with the Secretary of State and some of his senior officials, they are very keen on this point of using the R and D budget of the NHS and its capacity more imaginatively.

Q142 Pamela Nash: Minister, in recent years several pharmaceutical companies have acquired their rivals and consolidated. I have experience of this in my constituency with MSD taking over a Merck facility. Also, we have in front of us what has happened recently at Sandwich with Pfizer. In your opinion, was it a mistake to allow this to happen, considering the removal of competition against these large companies and we are now losing thousands of jobs?

Mr Willetts: It would be quite hard for us to have a regulatory regime when we stopped some of these takeovers and mergers, especially as we are talking about what is clearly an international business. There is a limited amount that we as one nation could do when these changes are happening. If we can compare constituency notes, I myself had a Wyeth facility in my constituency distributing drugs, which became last year a Pfizer facility. Of course, we all know the nervousness you have when suddenly there is one of these takeovers and mergers and you wonder what is going to happen to these facilities. It certainly would not be practicable, and I doubt if it would even be desirable, for the UK Government to try to intervene in corporate transactions like that.

Q143 Pamela Nash: In that case, do you think we should expect that other companies will follow suit and close other large facilities in the UK?

Mr Willetts: As I said, there is this change in the structure of the industry going on. It looks as if Charnwood and Sandwich are both examples of that, but we should not think of it as the closure of a facility. I see it as, equally, an opportunity. If we get a grip on this new business model that is emerging, if we provide the right environment for CROs, the fact that the R and D facility is no longer directly owned by a large pharmaceutical company does not mean that the R and D activity there suddenly all comes to a juddering halt.

Q144 Pamela Nash: In that case, in that restructuring, do you think it is fair to ask the taxpayer to foot the bill when these problems have come from the pharmaceutical companies themselves? I am thinking here of the Kent Task Force that has been created to deal with what is happening in Sandwich, but also the creation of UKCMRI, which we will speak about later.

Mr Willetts: When public money is tight, there are limits to what Governments can do, but if there are specific areas, even when money is very tight, where we can promote this shift to the new industrial model by backing it and supporting at the early stages new sectors in medical research, regenerative medicine and stem cells, where we have a fantastic lead at the moment, I am up for the use of public money in those areas at the pre-commercialisation stage. Both through the MRC and the TSB we are backing those new developments with public money. That is the right thing to do because it is not research that corporations themselves will pay for.

Q145 Pamela Nash: To me, that sounds like that is going to give us what the Government policy is in decreasing public sector jobs and increasing private sector jobs, if we are losing this number of private sector jobs in a relatively short period of time but having to pump public money in to create more jobs.

Mr Willetts: I accept that we are seeing a change in these large pharmaceutical companies, and I won’t repeat the reasons for it. I very much hope that we will see new private sector jobs but in an industry with a rather different structure than it has now. I am up for any practical things that we can do to support that change so that Britain remains a world leader in life sciences.

Q146 Stephen McPartland: Minister, in my constituency I have thousands of R and D scientists in a large GSK facility, so I am a bit nervous after comments about the change in model. What do you think Pfizer’s decision about closing Sandwich says about those industries’ ability and willingness to invest in R and D in the UK?

Mr Willetts: I hope and believe that Pfizer will continue to invest in R and D in the UK in some of the other strands of research that were not being conducted all at Sandwich. There is research on pain and its neurological aspects that has already started at Cambridge and which will carry on there, and, as I said, there are these arm’s length relationships with research organisations. I believe that Britain can carry on being one of the world’s most attractive centres for those activities.

Q147 Stephen McPartland: On that point, if GSK are investing and expanding with a biotechnology park at Stevenage, do you think Pfizer are making the excuse that they are moving towards a new model just to extricate themselves from the Sandwich site?

Mr Willetts: There were several factors. I believe there is this change going on in the industry. You are quite right in that it does not mean every single in-house R and D facility is going to close, but, if you put together the AstraZeneca-Charnwood decision and the Pfizer- Sandwich decision, there is something going on. I am sure it was a range of factors. As to the exact weighting, I would not like to say, but I do not think that this is just an elaborate cover for a decision taken for other reasons. I do think something has happened.

Q148 Stephen McPartland: If we accept that there is a new model on "blockbuster" drugs going by the wayside, what are we doing to foster the UK to ensure that we will be able to benefit from those changes?

Mr Willetts: One of the things I pick up from the industry-you are quite right-is that the large-scale blockbuster drug that treats a condition affecting large numbers of people is still their Holy Grail, but their rate of discovery of those drugs may not be so great. There is a lot more interest in what is called "stratified medicine", for more specific conditions, with subsets of the population getting the right dosage and things like that. We are backing stratified medicine. One of the reasons why the clinical trials challenge is so important is that when you have a relatively rare condition in more narrowly defined circumstances, the patients who you need in order to conduct the clinical trial are more geographically dispersed, so you are likely to be dealing with more hospitals. If each one of them has a separate protocol for the research agreement, then that is more hassle. One of the reasons why clinical trials is high on our agenda is that it relates to stratified medicine.

Q149 Stephen McPartland: If we think about the way those drugs are developed, with this new evolving pharmaceutical model and R and D, what work are we doing as a Government to ensure that the regulatory regime evolves with this new model so that we can ensure we are actually at the forefront of being able to be at the centre of future pharmaceutical R and D?

Mr Willetts: The biggest single regulatory issue on our agenda is medical trials. I say this to the Committee as well as to the business community: if there are any specific aspects of our regulatory regime which they would like to see changed as the industry changes, they must tell us. In general, clinical trials is the main one they raised, but, if there are others that you have in mind or that this Committee wants to put to me, I am always open-minded. I am always open for ideas about how we can make Britain a more attractive place for the industry.

Chair: We are running a bit tight.

Q150 Gavin Barwell: I want to finish by asking you some questions about Sandwich and east Kent . What is the Government doing to secure a new future for the site and to assist the people of east Kent who have been affected by this decision?

Mr Willetts: There is very intense activity going on. I have had a series of meetings on this matter since we learned of the decision on 24 January and the announcement on 1 February. There is a lot of interest in the venture capital business community about whether they can invest in particular products emerging at Pfizer and support and financially invest in a CRO. I chaired a brainstorming session between Pfizer and venture capitalists at BIS on 8 February. I have asked leading respected experts in the venture capital industry, including David Cooksey and Hermann Hauser, if they would be willing to advise Pfizer, who suddenly have a queue of people who want to turn to the Sandwich site and perhaps back MBOs and things like that. We have tried to act as a constructive partner in that.

I am also working very closely with Paul Carter, the leader of Kent County Council, whom Vince and I invited to chair the task force. They will be reporting to me in the next few weeks on practical things that they want to do. I have to say that transport links is already quite high on the agenda. Again, we are operating in a regime where money is very tight, but they have certainly signalled the importance of trying to improve transport links if possible.

We are also, wearing the wider life sciences hat, reviewing what this means for the industry as a whole.

Q151 Gavin Barwell: In terms of timing, Chair, I will put the last two questions together. First, what do you expect from Pfizer in terms of going forward on the site? What do you think their obligations are to the site and to the people of east Kent?

Specifically, in relation to the task force, it was announced on 9 February that the report would be ready within 30 days. We are now at 2 March and you said you would get the report in the next few weeks. Can you clarify a bit on timing?

Finally, do you expect taxpayer money to go towards the task force to support the recommendations that come out of it?

Mr Willetts: The exact timing of the report is very much with Paul Carter, but he knows we attach great urgency to it. I hope we will receive it in the next few weeks. I don’t know exactly what the date will be.

I say to Pfizer that it is in everyone’s interest that what they leave behind at Sandwich is a dynamic research centre-somewhere between a campus and a business park-with a range of businesses that are engaged in research and other life science activities. I fully accept that it will be very hard for a place as big as that to be full of people from the life sciences industries, so the task force will also look more widely at other industries. If Pfizer is able, for example, to do some contracts with CROs left at the site-they might find that the funding in those contacts runs down-and if they can support the creation of new businesses on that site by giving them contracts, for example, to conclude the development and trials of products that have already been worked on at the site, that would be very responsible. I pressed them, right back from that first meeting on the 24th, that they should work with us constructively to ensure that there is continuing employment and activity on the site. We are holding them to that.

Q152 Gavin Barwell: And taxpayer funding?

Mr Willetts: You know how tight things are. We will have to see what other specific ideas that the task force comes up with. I can’t make any pledges today.

Q153 Chair: Thank you very much. In order to answer some of Graham’s questions it sounds as though you will have to reach to the chief scientific officer of the Treasury, but we have got to get that post in place first.

Mr Willetts: A very nice point, Chair.