My Lords, I support our using our full capabilities across the regions; however, while they should all be represented, we have to be careful in trying to spread everything all over the place. I cite a specific example that has been important to British industry. In the 1960s, several people, including myself and Sir Eric Ash, who was then head of electrical engineering at UCL and went on to be rector of Imperial College, tried to co-ordinate the semiconductor industries in this country. At that time, America also had a problem as it looked like Japan was going to take the semiconductor business, run away with it and leave everybody else behind. In America, Ronald Reagan got together with industry and formed Sematech, in Texas, which sort of saved them. The industries all got together and worked.
When we tried to do it, it was too difficult, because there were efforts in Edinburgh, Southampton, London, Cambridge, Newport and Manchester. Nobody realised that we had to co-ordinate those efforts in a rather tight way that also perhaps meant putting things in one location.
At that time the Belgian Government saw the possibility and a few leaders there, Roger van Overstraeten chief among them, decided that they would have a shot at doing this in Belgium. That institute now has 4,000 people and an annual budget roughly equal to ARIA’s: €600 million. We could have done it. We had more talent at the beginning but we could not get around to facing the fact that in certain instances, proximity is very important if you want to pull off really high-technology advances. Again, this is a world issue. America has had to wake up its industry again and realise that it is not necessarily good for the world for Taiwan and South Korea to dominate; it would be a rather dangerous thing. So I think American industry is going to be reawakened.
I say a word of caution: while we want to draw from all of the regions, we may not be able to do some of the big projects spread out over the regions.
6.30 pm