Annual Student Presentations Ceremony of the Engineering Development Trust’s “Year in Industry” – 6 September 2006
Minister for Defence Procurement, Lord Drayson, addresses the Engineering Development Trust
Lord Drayson
I hope you enjoyed your year with industry and are enjoying today. I am delighted to be here with you as I feel I am among kindred spirits. Because I am, like many of you, an engineer, and like others here I have a passion for science.
I well understand the joys and pains of being an engineering undergraduate, as many of you will soon be. I read production engineering at Aston University. Then I trained as a manufacturing engineer at the Rover production plant in Longbridge, before going back to university to do a PhD in robotics.
After that I went into business in biotechnology, working in the food industry before starting up my own pharmaceuticals business, Powderject, which pioneered needfree injection and DNA vaccines as it grew over 10 years to become the world’s 6th largest vaccine company. In 2003 I sold the company for over £½ billion. Since then I have focused on politics – particularly policies affecting business and science. And since May last year I have been a Minister in the government responsible for defence equipment and defence research.
So as an engineer I have had a full and varied career, in research, as an entrepreneur and as a politician. I have enjoyed every minute of it. I think that from your presentations, you have enjoyed, at least some of, the time you have already had out in the work place - really making a difference.
That is why when I was asked last year by the Prime Minister to be the Defence Procurement Minister, I jumped at the chance. My job is “Engineer Heaven” – overseeing £3.3bn worth of new equipment purchases last year and a research programme of £450M.
That means being responsible for the acquisition of everything from the huge new aircraft carriers we are building to making sure our soldiers, sailors and airmen can see and fight at night.
We have a wonderful engineering heritage in this country. And Defence has played a big part in it. Examples of past British military innovations that have proved decisive in battle roll off the tongue – the tank in World War One, radar and the bouncing bomb in World War 2, the Harrier Jump Jet in the Falklands. Other military technology has become commonplace in the civil world – ultrasound scans for pregnant women were developed from Naval Sonar.
When I joined the MOD I was amazed at the range and scale of engineering and scientific excellence that I found. The determination to find technological solutions to the problems our Armed Forces face on the battlefield today and tomorrow. Stealth aircraft, stealth frigates, unmanned aerial vehicles - that can beam images in real time to operators on a different continent. Some of the gadgets being developed would not be out of place in a James Bond film. In fact I would not be surprised to find Q himself working for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratories.
It is impossible not to be staggered by the scale and complexity of some of the engineering tasks. To take one example – the new Astute Class submarines being built for the Navy. Nuclear powered, with state of the art propulsion, detection and weapons technology, these are impressive beasts. As long as a football pitch, wide as a tennis court, and weighing as much as 1,000 typical family saloons – ASTUTE will give our forces an incredibly powerful and hard hitting weapon platform. It is impossible not to be in awe of the engineers and scientists who design and build them. Can you image how testing, how rewarding, how interesting that must be?
We engineers are a unique lot. Where others see insurmountable obstacles, we see a challenge. Where others take no for an answer we don’t. We inherit an engineering culture that goes back to the Norman Conquest. Did you know that when the Norman forces crossed the channel in 1066 they brought with them prefabricated forts that could be quickly erected on an earth mound?
And it is this same sense of engineering innovation that is so important today to allow our Armed Forces to do the difficult and often dangerous tasks on our behalf as a force for good around the world.
Let me say a bit more about that because events in Iraq and now Afghanistan are scarcely out of the news. The reason we are there - in both cases – is to allow the elected governments to rebuild their countries. This cannot be done without secure and stable conditions in which to supply water and build schools, roads and hospitals. I regard our role in these places as a kind of “muscular international development” and we work very closely with our colleagues in DFiD. They cannot carry out their important work in conditions of lawlessness and disorder.
Engineers, military and civilian, play an important part in this work, as they did in the Balkans before – helping to get power stations up and running, repairing oil refineries in Iraq so that its economy can begin to get back on its feet; helping to make people’s life a little bit easier and better.
To give some more examples, in Kenya our military engineers are training the Kenyan armed forces in mine disposal techniques. In Congo two years ago, we sent out 70 Royal Engineers as part of an EU force to build a runway at Bunia, to give humanitarian agencies and peacekeeping forces access to an area long ravaged by conflict. In northern Ghana we have recently completed freshwater pipelines to two remote villages.
The challenge for all of us involved in defence – whether in the Civil Service, in the Armed Forces, or in business – is to find the very best scientists and engineers to work on technological solutions for tomorrow’s threats and challenges.
There will never be stage when we can say ‘Modernisation complete – job done’. We are continually looking for ways to enable the Forces to their job more quickly, more efficiently, more accurately and – very importantly – with greater safety to their own lives. So we will always need good, bright and highly motivated engineers.
That is why we sponsor undergraduates on certain engineering and science courses –at Loughborough, University College London, Aston, Newcastle and Southampton universities.
And just as these are internationally recognised centres of scientific and engineering excellence, so we have our own – Fort Halstead, Porton Down, and Shrivenham, for example.
The world, as they say, is a big place – full of opportunities for promising and ambitious scientists and engineers – opportunities all as exciting as those that faced Brunel, Watt and Fleming before you. I urge you to go out and find them. And I hope that some – if not all of you – might find them in Defence.
