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The Rt. Hon. Patricia HewittResearch Councils UK Launch |
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| John, thank you very much indeed. A great pleasure to be here.
It's been very clear just talking to the few people whom I've managed to see this evening, that today's Conference has been an enormous success. I can feel the sense of excitement and energy just being in the room this evening. So I'm delighted to be able to join you to formally launch our new venture, Research Councils UK. As John has said, this is all about us working together. I'm very conscious in the Department of Trade and Industry of our role in providing a home, we hope a very effective and welcoming home, to the Office of Science and Technology. We enjoy working very closely with you in translating scientific and technological excellence into commercial and economic success, but also ensuring that we respect and cherish the much broader role of science - that goes of course not just across government but right across our society. Well beyond simply the commercial and economic interests, because what we want to secure from this partnership approach is that we realise the full potential, the enormous potential benefits, that can be ours as a result of scientific endeavour and discovery. And we also want to make sure that we get full value from the pretty considerable investment that we are making in science and engineering and technology. And if I can just say a word about those economic benefits, I recently hosted a seminar at the Department with Professor Michael Porter, who is of course one of the world's leading analysts of competitiveness. He is really building up a mountain of empirical evidence that in the modern knowledge driven economy the most important key to business and for economic success is the ability to innovate in products and in the production process. The ability therefore to connect the science base with industry and with commerce, and that really is central to our ability as a country to deliver prosperity and opportunity for everybody. So we have to keep on top of that agenda and that's why a central part of the review of the Department of Trade and Industry that I recently put in hand was designed to focus on how we capture that advantage to innovation and how we match our world class science base with a much greater demand from our industrial base for the fruits of science and technological research. John has played a crucial role, and let me say thank you to you publicly for that John, in helping us design the new Innovation Group that will be a central part of the new DTI and for which we are currently recruiting a new Director General. But of course, the fruits of science and the fruits of our discoveries, your discoveries, go way beyond simply those economic and commercial benefits, hugely important though they are. I think one of the challenges to all of us in the Research Councils, in Government and more broadly, is to communicate much more effectively with the public about the excitement as well as the potential benefits of science. I don't have to tell anybody here what an enormous challenge this is. We've seen it recently in the nature of public debate. We have a very real challenge in understanding and communicating the nature of risk as well as the nature and implications of scientific uncertainty and I guess everyone in this room has been through those ghastly interviews where you're trying to explain that it is impossible to say that there is no risk or no possibility whatsoever of a possible connection between X and Y. So a huge challenge there, which of course is partly about as I say how we engage and inform the public. I've seen an interesting example recently of this in my own constituency in Leicester where we have the good fortune to have the outstanding space science research capability at the University of Leicester and out of that we have created the new National Space Centre, a leading Millennium Fund project, but of course the original name of that project was the National Space Science Centre. We had to drop the science because the market research showed it was going to be a turn off to the potential visitors. Now the centre is the most enormous success, beating all its visitor projections, bringing the kids in. It's a wonderful example of how to engage people in the excitement of scientific discovery, give them some hands on experience and actually enable them of course to see what the space scientists at the University are doing and that will go into a new phase we hope with the landing of Beagle on Mars, but as I say to do it we had to remove science from the over sell. I remember when David Blunkett and I were at the launch of the Challenger Education Centre at Leicester's National Space Centre and it was riveting to see a group of children from local schools going through this extraordinarily exciting programme, you know where one half of the children are in the space ship and the other half are running the control panel and they stop for the afternoon doing all kinds of very interesting hands on experiments, and at the end of it as part of the process of evaluation they are invited, amongst other things, to say whether they enjoy the science, to which the typical response is "was that science?", because they loved it, but they didn't associate it with their experience of science in the schools. So a serious lesson there about how we translate what you are doing, the science the Research Councils are funding, into a curriculum but also into other experiences and discourse that will really engage with people, infuse them and recruit the next generation of scientists. But there is also a challenge for members of parliament and ministers in understanding scientific debate, and I have the great handicap for the Cabinet Minister responsible for science of not being a scientist myself, but there we are, we all come to it all with a fresh eye. But I am of course, in my role of Cabinet Minister for Science, Chair of the new Cabinet Science Sub-Committee on Science. On a recent visit to Japan, I discovered that what their Prime Minister does with their Cabinet Committee on Science is ensure that at every meeting they have just a brief presentation from one of their leading scientists about a leading edge piece of research, so we are going to do that as part of our own process of ensuring that more ministers from different departments are engaged in understanding some of what's going on at the leading edge and then thinking through the implications of how we better harness scientific knowledge and research and policy making and how we as ministers and politicians better communicate with the public. And of course part of what we are seeking to communicate is the enormous potential benefits that will come from this scientific investment, the way in which for instance the mapping of the human genome will unlock new cures for disease, and I've just been hearing about this wonderful new study that the Medical Research Council and the Department of Health have launched, Biobank, with half-a million volunteers to be recruited, providing a unique capacity, unique in the world, to track DNA, medical records and information about lifestyle and environmental influences and then use that in order to improve public health. The work that's been done in the new technologies to deal with pollution, biotechnology, soil washing and so on, just some of the new technologies that are now beginning to replace the old sort of dig and dump approach to environmental pollution. So hugely important work here, we need to communicate it much better. But before I end let me just underline our commitment as a government to British science. We believe in British science and aren't we right to do so when you realise that the United Kingdom has one per cent of the world's population, we fund nearly five per cent of the world's science, we produce eight per cent of all the world's scientific papers and we get nine per cent of the scientific citations. So it is an extraordinary record of world class achievement and we want to keep it that way. That's why by 2004 the investment that we are making in the science base will have risen by over a billion pounds from 1997 levels and spending in real terms on research will be nearly double what it was in 1986. And of course Gordon Brown announced just in the recent Budget the new R and D tax credit for large companies, building on the support that we're already giving to small companies. Part of that process I was talking about earlier of engaging industry in commercialising the fruits of scientific research. And what we want from that, what you want from that, is world class research. We're doing it already, we want to keep on doing it. We want a highly trained people and at any one time between you you're supporting some 12,000 PhD research students and a similar number of post-doctorate researchers. As I said earlier, we have to keep the recruitment into those disciplines flowing and that means of course not only infusing young people generally, but it does mean making sure that girls as well as boys go into scientific disciplines and that the women we have already with scientific qualifications we bring back into employment, science related employment, much more effectively than we're doing at the moment. And then thirdly of course, we want to see more effective commercialisation and knowledge transfer activities by universities. But we're making good progress there, we've trebled already the rate of spin-outs from our universities, we want to see that continuing to go up. So, on behalf of David Sainsbury and myself, let me thank all of you, the Councils, all their members and chairs, and of course their staff, for the wonderful work that you are already doing. I'm delighted that the Quinquennial Review has been so successful in coming forward with this very sensible building upon the success that you have already achieved rather than as John was describing trying to tear it all up and start all over again. I've no doubt at all that with Research Councils UK you will be able to work together even more effectively than you are doing at the moment, so thank you for everything that you are doing, best of luck in your new partnership and I look forward very much indeed to going on supporting you as you and we continue to keep British science amongst the best in the world. |
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Other speeches by The Rt. Hon. Patricia Hewitt
(the following are available from the archive) |
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