10 NOVEMBER 2003

LORD SAINSBURY OF TURVILLE, PROFESSOR SIR DAVID KING AND DR JOHN TAYLOR

  Chairman: Thank you, Lord Sainsbury, John Taylor and David King, for coming along today. I am well aware that there are probably going to be divisions in the Lords as well as the Commons and the large ensemble behind you will have to take it as not being impolite; we are doing our duty. We wanted to take up some of the issues today that we pick up from practitioners in science up and down the country, the issues the Committee has raised in its reports, but also talking in various meetings in places up and down the country. I wanted to start off with the Lambert and Innovation Reviews.

  Q1  Chairman: We were expecting the Lambert and Innovation Reviews over the summer and they were delayed.

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: Yes. We had thought late summer would be the period for producing both of these. In the event, they both proved more complicated, particularly the Innovation Review, because it involved other government departments and policies which go across government. Getting agreement on these is more difficult than just working with the parameters of a department. In terms of the ability of the whole of government to make a real impact on the innovation agenda, it is very important that we do have this cross-government look at things. When it comes out, which will be probably within this month, I hope you will see that it has been time well spent.

  Q2  Chairman: Will it be in time for the higher education debate which is rumoured to be soon after the Queen's Speech, which brings up aspects of higher education and its interaction with the innovative process? It would seem a shame if the Lambert Report was not part of that debate, would it not?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: I am not quite certain of the exact timing of it. Clearly, it does relate to that and it has important aspects for that, ideally.

  Q3  Chairman: You would have hoped it was here before the Queen's Speech? Higher education is not just about top-up fees, or is it?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: You would have to tell me that. I think it is going to be about almost exactly the same period. On the current plans, it will be late November.

  Q4  Chairman: There are an awful lot of inter-related reviews floating about at the moment. We have the Lambert, Innovation, Research Assessment, Dual Support, Teaching Funding, Research, Funding Method. Do we need this many? Can we not put them all together in any way?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: It is clear that they interrelate a great deal. We have a ministerial committee looking at this which will pull together all these reports because they do interact to a very great extent. It is probably right to do the different reviews but when you come to make decisions on them you need to pull them all together and look at it in an interrelated way.

  Q5  Chairman: You are saying that is being done?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: That is being done.

  Q6  Chairman: An issue that is enjoined at the minute is the new HEFCE funding proposals, the cost weightings for teaching different subjects. Is this an issue within your remit or is it the Minister for Education's remit, because they are complaining out there that they are going to get fewer subjects because of the new weighting formula.

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: That is very firmly part of DfES's responsibility.

  Q7  Chairman: You have no input into that whatsoever?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: No formal input, no. These are things that are discussed but it is straightforwardly a DfES and HEFCE responsibility.

  Q8  Chairman: The next question is about top-up fees. Do you see them having an influence on the sciences? The higher education spokesperson said once on Radio 4 that he could foresee that physics might have to charge less than mediaeval history, let us say, because that would entice people from all sorts of backgrounds to get in. Do you agree with that principle? Do you think that is the way to get people to do physics?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: There are two different issues. One is you need to make certain that universities can cover their costs of doing a subject. The second question is to what extent the scale of the fees will alter people's desire to do it. These two decisions get interrelated. You cannot say, from the university's point of view, "We will charge virtually nothing" because you need to get people in. Universities are going to have to make some difficult decisions on this and it is going to be very important that they do not take a short term view about it.

  Q9  Chairman: Are you signed up to the government policy on higher education fees in terms of developing the sciences in this country? Can you foresee the sciences suffering at all?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: No. They are likely to benefit because having the sciences properly funded has to be a major concern of any Science Minister.

  Q10  Chairman: Are you a Richard Sykes fan, £17,000 a course or 3,000 or 2,000? Where do you sit on that? The more the better, or what?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: I am not in the best position to make those decisions.

  Q11  Chairman: Surely you have to have, as spokesperson for science, some view on this about the development of sciences in an education paper which might become policy, which can influence the number of people going into the sciences?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: Yes, the particular situation of individual subjects is going to be to some extent within the remit of universities to make decisions. There is the overall policy which I think is right. Within that, it seems to me, it is for universities to make decisions.

  Q12  Chairman: You are happy to leave it to individual universities like Imperial, charging 10,000 and another one charging 3,000 for a very similar course?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: If they are very similar courses, you will not be able to charge that kind of differential.

  Q13  Mr McWalter: I think it is astonishingly laid back. I really do. You said in your response to us about closure of science and engineering departments in recent years, "Oh well, the biggest problem in recruitment on science and engineering courses and subsequent closure of university departments is lack of demand from potential students." It seems to me astonishing that you do not feel there is any way in which you can have some input in changing that. In my local university, which was founded as a polytechnic, as a national centre of excellence for engineering, civil engineering has shut; chemistry has shut; maths can only be done as a service course; physics can only be done because it ties in with astronomy and people like doing astronomy. There is carnage all over the system. My colleague from Salford University has seen his chemistry department shut. Meanwhile, we have 700 students doing business studies and almost none of them has gained as much as a bean in `O' level maths. Demand means low cost courses where students believe there is a very low probability of failure and they have no conception of the kind of benefits that they could get and give to the rest of society if they have a talent but have not done science courses. Meanwhile, you are sitting there saying that it is just a matter of demand. Market forces. That is what you believe in, is it?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: If you think I was being complacent, I think that is to misrepresent my position. I think this is very concerning. It is not concerning about the total number of people doing science, but within science there is this bias which I think is very serious. It seems to me the way we have to change that is by changing people's approach to those particular subjects. It is not that people are not going into scientific subjects; it is that they are going into particular areas of scientific research and what we have to do is change their view of the important subjects to go into.

  Q14  Mr McWalter: You could offer subsidies; you could offer scholarships; you could offer a dynamic way of linking in the financing system with the skills that society demands. None of this is happening. It is not just with sciences. We are not getting social workers either because that is not so well remunerated as business. Is there not a role here for government to be much more proactive about these matters?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: It is not in our gift to say what the salaries of people are going to be. As a whole, engineers and scientists have rather good salaries. There is a big communication exercise in making certain that those areas which are essentially physics, chemistry and maths are seen by young people to be more exciting and relevant than they are today. We have lots of people going into biology and IT. Why? They are going in because they see those as being the exciting subjects of the future. I think there are equally exciting things going on in the physical sciences and in chemistry. We have the whole development of speciality chemicals. We have nanotechnology. We have a whole series of very exciting subjects and we fail to generate excitement about those.

  Q15  Mr McWalter: You do not need to tell me this stuff is exciting, relevant or important. You have a system in which each university takes its own decisions. Each university looks at the fact that some courses are very low cost indeed and they can pile the students very high and sell them very cheap. The result of that is that the subjects where they cannot pile people so high and where there is a higher probability of failing to graduate—taking a maths degree is a tough business; you might fail it. You will not fail business studies, or you are unlikely to—and as a result people are voting that way. They want to be a graduate first and worry about the discipline afterwards. Each university takes a decision and the result of that is that the whole system is leading to an utter lack of capacity. You say you will keep that under review. How are you going to keep it under review?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: We are probably producing the highest number of science and engineering graduates, other than France, in terms of the number of scientists and engineers with first degrees. It is not simply that we are not producing enough scientists and engineers. It is the balance of this. I cannot see any value or merit in trying to say to universities, "You have to run courses in which you are not getting people to do it." In terms of the powers of the government to do that, they are extremely limited. How can we hold universities responsible for their finances if we start telling them they have to run courses where there are not individuals there? The thing that drives it has to be what the young people want to do.

  Mr McWalter: Film studies. Thank you.

  Q16  Chairman: SPRU at Sussex have come out recently with an examination of the results of greater selectivity and concentration of research. There was a group from Leeds as well, I seem to remember. They have said it will not result in economies of scale and it will not serve our science base very well. It will all be concentrated in the south of England and excellence will concentrate in certain places. Does that worry you? Does it give you heartache? Universities UK have said that too. They are concerned about hiving off a research concentration into certain universities.

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: If you look back over the last 10 or even 20 years, you will see that in terms of where the research money goes there has been a fairly steady increase in the amount that goes to the top universities. That is not a question of policy decision; that is a question of what happens if you just accumulate all the decisions made by the research councils. I suspect that reflects some underlying economies which do come from the big research based universities and the fact that it is much easier to do multidisciplinary research with very good people in those settings. I think there is going to be some concentration taking place. The extent to which that is a concentration in the south east of England I am not quite as certain about as other people. If you go round the country, you will find that the top 25 universities have something like 75% of research money. There is one of each of those universities in every region in the country. If you go to the north east, for example, it is not at all clear to me that the universities we have in the north east are not of a very high standard and quite able to hold their own in this world, as indeed in the north west.

  Q17  Dr Murrison: The GM debate has come up for a fair amount of criticism, I think it is probably fair to say. I wonder what learning points you have derived from the way in which the GM debate has been conducted?

  Lord Sainsbury of Turville: I am not allowed to speak about GM.

  Professor Sir David King: Can I broaden the question to include the strategy unit strand, the GM science review strand and the GM debate?

  Q18  Dr Murrison: I would rather you just talked about GM.

  Professor Sir David King: Each of these is a strand of the GM—

  Dr Murrison: Yes, but if you could keep it fairly focused I would be grateful.

  Q19  Chairman: Answer in your own way, Professor.

  Professor Sir David King: I would find it very difficult to comment on the value of the GM debate without also commenting on the other two. It is critically important to see that the GM debate was a part of a bigger process. We have conducted through the GM science review what many people around the world are writing to me and saying was a unique kind of review. We have broken new ground in doing that. We managed to have a broad range of scientific opinions. As a matter of fact, today I have just been charing another seven hour session of that panel. We managed to use that broad range of opinions to bring the best science to bear to questions raised in the public debate. From the public debate side, the core Willburn report was produced which generated about 19 cogent and coherent questions. We addressed each one of those questions in that report. If you ask me do I think that was valuable, I think it was invaluable as a way of informing government. I do think this government is now better informed as a result of those three strands than any other government in the world currently on these issues.