Department of Trade and Industry

People’s hands must be rather clean. Of course, there are mechanisms for people working in this place, whereby they can filter some of their shares to offshore islands, such as Jersey and Guernsey. I do not think that that is any better, but it is quite legitimate, and if we are opening up transparency in this country, we should look at it carefully. In the case that the hon. Gentleman refers to, the individual did not try to defend the situation as much as the papers attacked him, and other people were defending the Government’s position. The learned societies, too, were far from brilliant. Instant rebuttal was something I grew up with in the Labour party. Peter Mandelson was excellent at it with his team. Instant rebuttal meant 10 or 20 minutes. The Royal Society’s idea of instant rebuttal was a long tome of 50 pages, which took six months to produce—by which time it was too late and the battle was over. So, there were lots of lessons to be learned by different functionaries in the scientific and technological movement in this country. I am not entirely sure that the Science and Technology Committee report—excellent though it is—goes into things in the depth that some of us would like. I know that there was a previous report and that this report moves the debate on, but there should have been a wider examination of the structure of science within Departments. The model that has been put forward is very like the model that we live with, but we could have been a little more radical in looking at the position of Ministers in the new Department. We do not just have one Minister with responsibility for science. There is also a senior Minister, who is in the Cabinet. That is something some of us would have died for: to have at the Cabinet table somebody who can put scientific arguments at first hand, and from the point of a view of a Department that is looking at innovation, higher education and science. I welcome that kind of initiative. The interaction between science and innovation is extremely interesting, and is an area in which we are still learning things. That interaction will take place within the Department. We have seen the first flurry of activity in higher education, with top-up fees and so on. We are all suspicious, but that has been an attempt to address a lingering problem. Things are beginning to happen. I have spent a lot of time listening to people who talk about blue-skies research, and I also talk to bio-entrepreneurs—in fact I presented prizes to some of them last week at Lancaster house. I was really glad when the first person who came up to speak was somebody to whom I had presented a prize the year before, who had set up a small company to make antibodies, outside Cambridge university. It was a spin-out company. Within a year of the conference, he had been bought out by GlaxoSmithKline for something like £1 billion. I am sure that none of us will ever see that kind of activity, but I was glad to hear that young person say that the work that he and his team of 12 had been doing had suddenly blossomed and attracted the interest of GSK. All the other people winning prizes live in the hope that the brilliant scientific ideas and innovations that they come up with will eventually be picked up by bigger companies. That may not be the best model. We might have to look again at smaller companies just developing into medium-size companies. The talent of individuals in this country is second to none, but I am not yet convinced that we have the structures to make sure things happen, although the openings are there for things to move on. We may need a lot more in the UK Trade and Investment area to make sure that those bio-entrepreneurs develop their particular skills. I often ask whether we need a chief scientific adviser. I am always worried that we have been given a set system. Is a one-on-one situation with the Prime Minister, involving direct interaction, the best way to get science across? I am not entirely convinced that that is not just a reaction to a situation. The current chief scientific adviser did a brilliant job—unheralded—with the foot and mouth outbreak when he showed the curves illustrating how it was going to disappear after a period of time. That demonstrated real ingenuity, and it came from a knowledge of the scientific community, who were doing that kind of epidemiological modelling. The new Department has many openings with Ministers and so on. There will be an arena of people in the Cabinet and across Government involved in the whole thing. I always say that a department where people drink coffee together and take part in other activities is where things happen. The success of the Medical Research Council laboratory at Cambridge—where Nobel prizes have been won—was helped by the café on the top floor. People could sit with Crick and Watson and argue and talk to them about research until the cows came home. It was brilliant. I tried to institute something similar in Norwich; I set up a café where people could interact across the boundaries, and forget what they called themselves, whether they were zoologists, botanists or molecular biologists. It was great that they got together and talked in an interdisciplinary way, but as soon as I disappeared the café was closed and people were put back into their silos, and their own professors became the bosses of the coffee club.