A meeting at the Royal Society this week explored the new Government’s departmental reshuffle and what it might mean for science. Is it just internal housekeeping, or a move to put science at the core of government?
Paul Wicks
Two weeks in to the new government and the parts of the civil service with responsibility for science and higher education have undergone a major shake-up.
Gone are the former Department for Trade & Industry and Department for Education and Skills. Three new departments take their place, still sharing the same budget: the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR), the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).
On 10 July, the Royal Society hosted a special meeting of the Foundation for Science and Technology entitled ‘Changes to the Machinery of Government’. The meeting was convened at short notice in order to outline the changes and discuss what the implications might be. Invited guests included representatives from learned societies, think-tanks, industry and government.
Shift of control
Sir Keith O’Nions, Director General for Science and Innovation at DIUS, outlined how the budgets and responsibilities have been reworked.
DIUS is now the body responsible for science and technology across all departments. Financially, DIUS takes charge of the UK’s core science budget (£3.4bn), funding the seven research councils, three national academies, the Science Research Investment Fund, the Higher Education Innovation Fund, and a £6m pot for ‘Science & Society’ public engagement activities.
DIUS also controls the innovation budget (£0.3bn), including the Technology Strategy Board, the National Space Centre, British Standards Institute, UK Intellectual Property Office, the Design Council and NESTA. The remainder of its budget is allocated to the ongoing activities of higher education (£9.4bn) and further education & skills (£5.2bn).
Potential drawbacks?
Phil Willis, Chair of the Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, raised a number of concerns. Most notably that science and industry will be less closely allied without the DTI. He also reiterated a point made by Lord Rees, that the government had missed an opportunity to put the word ‘Science’ into the title of a government department, and suggested that ‘DIUSS’ should be the preferred term.
Willis also highlighted concerns that despite the excellence of the best graduates from research-intensive universities, industry remained worried by the poverty of skills amongst the young workforce more widely.
He painted a picture of Britain performing indifferently compared with nations of similar size and prosperity. Of the top 30 economies, the UK ranks 17th on basic skills and 20th in intermediate skills. One in six British school leavers is functionally illiterate and innumerate.
Brightest of the bright
The final speaker, Lord Broers, Chair of the Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, emphasised the importance of putting scientific discovery to good use. While universities fight hard to maintain their ability to do ‘basic science’, he suggested that it is engineering and application that makes science and innovation valuable to society, not publications. He pointed to fast-developing nations like China, India and Singapore as examples of countries where industry was investing far more in R&D.
Lord Broers felt that the only way for the UK to remain competitive was to capitalise on the ‘brightest of the bright’ of our young scientists; energising researchers by rewarding them appropriately, as has worked successfully for the financial sector. He described the current situation as a pyramid formed by basic science in universities supporting a narrow peak of innovation in industry. Rather, he suggested, it should be UK industry forming a base of applied science, upon which basic research could rest.
Two weeks ago, Gordon Brown wrote a letter to those attending the Parliamentary Links day which stated ‘I want the UK to be the most attractive place in which to do science’; however, more recently in the Commons the statement was that Britain should be ‘one of the best’. The consensus at the meeting was that Britain no longer enjoys a privileged status as an innovator in the world, and if we’re not going to try and be the best, we should pack our things and do something else.