Office of the Minister for Science

HC Deb 07 December 1959 vol 615 cc41-104

Motion made, and Question proposed, That a sum, not exceeding £4,080, be granted to Her Majesty, to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1960, for the salaries and expenses of the Office of the Minister for Science.

3.50 p.m.

The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Sir Edward Boyle)

This afternoon we are considering in Committee one of the two or three most important subjects that the House will have before it during this Parliament. On this subject depends our ability to earn our living in a competitive world. Furthermore, our scientific and technological effort is very closely bound up with our ability to give aid to emergent countries. Thirdly, our whole culture will. I believe, be impoverished unless as a nation we pay more attention to the rôle of science and technology in a growing industrial economy.

Certainly, I, for one, greatly welcome, as I am sure the whole Committee does, the interest and correspondence which has been encouraged in this subject by the Rede Lecture of Sir Charles Snow recently. I believe that it is fair to say that there is today more public discussion of these highly important issues than ever before.

I shall begin with the question: what should be the attitude of the Government towards the promotion of scientific effort? In this context, it is interesting to see the different ways in which this question has been answered in different parts of the world. In Russia, scientific policy is directed through the Academy, a body which superficially resembles our Royal Society. While we certainly should not underrate the scientific and technological achievements of the Russian Academy, I believe that the Russian system could not possibly be imported into Britain without making British science a political career in a manner which certainly would not be acceptable to the overwhelming majority of British scientists.

In the United States, the Constitution and the division of powers in that country enable Americans to control a great deal of scientific effort within the general structure of the executive Government, but without making it directly responsible to Congress except through the President.

The line of development in Britain has been different from the lines of development in both America and Russia. On the one hand, unlike the Russians, we believe in giving scientists and technologists the maximum degree possible of independence and freedom from political controversy, and, at the same time—this is where we differ from the American approach—we believe, also, in retaining the control of Parliament over finance, and the responsibility of Ministers for the general supervision of policy.

I think that at this stage it would be for the convenience of the Committee if I said a few technical words about the Supplementary Estimate itself. The Committee will have seen that the Vote for the office of Minister for Science, totalling £36,090, represents in very large measure no addition to Government expenditure for the current year, but is simply a switch from previous Votes to a new Vote. The new Vote comprises the cost which remains to the end of the financial year of the staff which previously formed the Atomic Energy Office—and was paid for under a separate Vote—together with the staff previously forming the Lord President's Office, which has hitherto been on the Vote of the Treasury.

The net increase of £4,080 for which we are asking—that is, the actual Supplementary Estimate—is accounted for by two things: first, by the need to make new provision for a Chief Information Officer and supporting staff; and, secondly, by the inclusion and provision of about £2,400 for certain additional staff for the former Lord President's Office, which the Treasury has already approved, but for which there has not been any earlier opportunity to have the necessary provision formally approved by Parliament. That explains the reference on page 12, which hon. Members may have noticed, to the £2,000 which has been advanced from the Civil Contingencies Fund.

Incidentally, if hon. Members are curious about Z.3, on page 13—miscellaneous receipts, £1,200—I have looked into it and can say that the largest amount of the £1,200 is made up of notional payments for the superannuation contributions of members of the Atomic Energy Authority Board, and the smallest amount—too small to be itemised separately—is represented by repayments for private telephone calls.

Having, I hope, explained the technical details of the Estimate to the Committee, I should now like to say a few words about the responsibilities of my noble Friend the Lord Privy Seal as Minister for Science. As the Prime Minister has made clear, the Lord Privy Seal is responsible for a number of bodies which can most conveniently be divided into three groups. First, there is the Atomic Energy Authority. Here, we have a return to the position in Lord Salisbury's day, when the Lord President was responsible for this Authority. This is, in a sense, a reversion to an earlier practice.

Secondly, the Lord Privy Seal is responsible for the four great executive research councils—the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Medical Research Council, the Agricultural Research Council and the Nature Conservancy. Thirdly, my noble Friend is responsible for three highly important advisory bodies: first, the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy with its important offshoot, the Scientific Manpower Committee; secondly, the Overseas Research Council; and, thirdly, the Steering Group for Space Research.

It would not be appropriate for me to go through the work of all these bodies this afternoon, but there are two aspects of my noble Friend's responsibilities to which I specially want to direct the attention of the Committee. First, though my noble Friend's Vote is a small one, and the Supplementary Estimate with which we are concerned today smaller still, none the less the bodies for which my noble Friend is generally responsible account, in total, for a considerable volume of Government expenditure, indeed probably greater than most hon. Members realise.

I will give some figures. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research spent a little under £800,000 in the last year before the war, it was spending £4½ million in 1950–51, the last complete financial year when hon. Members opposite were in office, and the Estimate for the current year is £13¼ million. The corresponding figures for the Medical Research Council are £219,000 in the year before the war, £l¾ million in 1950–51 and £3½ million for the current year. The figures for the Agricultural Research Council are £321,000 for the last year before the war, £2 million in 1950–51 and just under £6 million for the current year. The Atomic Energy Authority was spending £71 million in 1956–57, and the figure for the current year is £92 million, comprising £37 million of capital expenditure and £55 million of current expenditure.

I quote those figures to the Committee for this reason. I am the last person to say that we should be complacent about them in any way, but I do not believe that anyone faced with these figures can argue that the Government have altogether neglected expenditure on research. Nor can anybody claim that the expenditure on research has risen less fast than the national income as a whole.

Mr. Frederick Lee (Newton)

Can the hon. Gentleman give the global sum of Government money—public money—now being spent on research and development for private industry?

Sir Arthur Vere Harvey (Macclesfield)

So that we may follow the debate a little more closely, will my hon. Friend say whether the Lord Privy Seal has any responsibility at all for aviation research?

Sir Edward Boyle

I am coming to aviation research a little later in my speech.

I cannot give the global figure for which the hon. Gentleman the Member for Newton (Mr. Lee) asked, but the last figures I was quoting were for the current financial year, the estimate for 1959–60. I think that these are the latest figures which we can reasonably expect to get.

I should like to say a word on one other aspect of my noble Friend's responsibilities, the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy. This is a body of the very highest importance to the nation as a whole. Incidentally, it has, of course, a very close relationship with the National Development and Research Council. This wholly independent body has always had an independent chairman, ever since it was set up in 1947. It has given advice on a wide range of topics, including a review of national expenditure on science, and has made recommendations from time to time on the supply of scientific manpower. Indeed, its offshoot, the Committee on Scientific Manpower, was the body responsible for the target for doubling the output of scientists and technologists by the end of the next decade, a target very frequently referred to in the House in education and scientific debates.

The present Chairman of the Advisory Council is Sir Alexander Todd, who has held this position for the last seven years. The Deputy Chairman and Chairman of the Committee on Scientific Manpower is Sir Solly Zuckerman, who has only recently been appointed Scientific Adviser to the Minister of Defence. I think that that was a most fortunate appointment. While my noble Friend has no intention of directly interfering with the scientific responsibilities of his colleagues, it will obviously be most valuable to have this link between defence science and the work of the Advisory Council.

There is one other point which I should like to make about the Advisory Council before I leave it. My noble Friend has already asked the Council to advise him on the balance of our national scientific effort, and it is hoped by the Government that this highly important exercise will at any rate be of some assistance in the detection of gaps in our national scientific activities.

For the rest of my time, I should like to say a few words about the personal rôle that my noble Friend will play as Minister for Science. I think that the first point to be clear about is this. My noble Friend will play a rôle which no other Minister in our history has played before. It is quite true that the list of organisations coming under him is the same as the list which formerly came under the Lord President. But this does not mean that there will be no change, because my noble Friend will be full time as Minister for Science in a way which the Lord President never was under the previous arrangement.

It seems to me that this is an absolutely right decision by the Government for a number of reasons. One obvious reason is this: within the four main research councils there are no fewer than 97 research stations and establishments. Secondly, this is a job which requires a very great deal of thought and discussion—for example, with scientists and technologists at universities and elsewhere.

I know that my noble Friend would wish me, on this point, to stress the importance of the universities, and I am very glad to do so, because I think that we should remind ourselves very often that the universities do not exist simply to confer degrees on undergraduates; they also exist to push back the frontiers of knowledge, both pure and applied, and the work of the faculties in all the time pushing backwards the frontiers of knowledge is of incalculable benefit to the country as a whole. My noble Friend attaches great importance to the question of links between the establishments of the research councils, on the one hand, and the universities and technical colleges, on the other, and it will be his aim to make these links and the relationship as fruitful as possible.

I should like to take up this point of where my right hon. Friend's responsibilities fit in with those of other Ministers. Here, I take up the point which my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir A. V. Harvey) made just now. So far as defence research is concerned, the Government have made it plain that the bulk of defence research activities, especially in the field of aircraft, guided weapons, and electronics, will be transferred from the former Minister of Supply to the new Minister of Aviation. My noble Friend the Lord Privy Seal will obviously have very close contact with this work, because he is directly responsible for space research. I can assure him that my noble Friend's contact will be as close as possible.

Then again, it will probably happen that my noble Friend will be able to use the establishments of the research councils to reinforce the work of a number of Ministries, and to give them general guidance and advice in matters of scientific policy. For instance, I am quite sure that nothing but good has flowed from the recommendation of the Lord President's Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, some years ago, that the Executive Departments with scientific interests should all appoint chief scientists. I do not see how Executive Departments with some concern for science can get on without chief scientists any more than we can get on at the Treasury without an Economic Adviser. It is obviously a wise and extremely helpful decision. Some of the establishments of the Research Councils do work of basic importance for particular Government Departments, an obvious and typical case being the work of the Road Research Laboratory.

I have been speaking so far in terms of home Departments, but so far as overseas Departments are concerned a new experiment was started last July by the establishment of an Overseas Research Council, under Dr. Atkin, the Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham University. The object of this body is, as it were, to focus the scientific effort of the United Kingdom to the greatest possible advantage of underdeveloped overseas territories, and especially the newly independent countries of the Commonwealth. In this work, the Overseas Research Council will be able to work closely with the United States. This Council is an important enterprise which has been established with the full co-operation of the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, and the Commonwealth Relations Office. Here is certainly a field where a centrally placed Minister for Science can give significant assistance.

I have left to the end of my speech what many hon. Members on both sides of the Committee will regard as the greatest challenge of all to my noble Friend as Minister for Science. That is how to ensure that the most modern ideas and discoveries in science and technology are effectively and rapidly applied in British industry today. The problem here, surely, is twofold: On the one hand, how best to mobilise the experience and expertise of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which is a direct responsibility of my noble Friend. I am sure that the widest possible exchange of information on technical discoveries is something in itself of very great value. We certainly could not have made the progress in school building which we have made in the last ten years but for this very fruitful exchange of ideas by every possible means.

Secondly we have also to see how best to instil into the whole of British industry, whether the public sector or the private sector, the realisation that no firm can afford to stand still, either in its own interest or in that of the nation.

There is a further point, that the civil science side can learn much from the defence side, for instance in the use of development contracts. The D.S.I.R. is working actively on this idea at the moment. It is my impression—and I speak for a moment as a Birmingham Member of Parliament—that we all tend to underrate the benefits which have flowed to the civil economy as a result of the defence programme. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr. Aubrey Jones) referred to this often when he was Minister of Supply, and I am quite sure that there is a great deal of truth in that point.

We have the general question of how best to apply modern science and technology to industry. It will obviously be a topic of the greatest concern to my noble Friend and I do not believe that there is any short or easy answer to it. It is a matter of making detailed progress along the whole of a very wide front.

In conclusion, science and technology today are not just two subjects among many. Science and technology have always played a greater rôle in human affairs than most historians have recognised. To take one obvious example, one cannot understand mediaeval English history without some technical knowledge of how castles were constructed and the technique of castle guard. It is true throughout the whole of history that science and technology have played a bigger rôle than most of our textbooks suppose.

Today, science and technology enter into nearly every relationship and activity in our national life. There are many spheres in which the Government can help science—in scientific manpower, scientific education, the development of research both at universities and under the Government, the application of science to industry, and, not least, the scientific development of overseas territories.

The Government want to see positive development on many different fronts leading to the permeation of our national life, in all its practical aspects, with the methods and spirit of science. It is in that spirit that I ask the Committee to accept this Supplementary Estimate.

4.12 p.m.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood (Rossendale)

I begin by agreeing with the opening remarks of the Financial Secretary to the Treasury on the importance of this subject. It is probably the most important subject to which the House of Commons will have to pay attention during the life-time of this Parliament, and I therefore regret that on this occasion we should have so short a time to discuss how we are to achieve, within the framework of our constitution, what America and Russia have succeeded in achieving within the framework of theirs.

In contrast with other countries, we have very little time left. If the Government fail to ensure that full advantage is taken of the opportunities which science offers, if they fail to make the Civil Service, industry and the public science-conscious, it may mean economic disaster for the country. It is in that situation, and with, I hope, a proper sense of urgency, that we must review the functions of the Minister for Science.

I have enjoyed and valued the friendship of the noble Lord for many years, and I wish him well in the task which he has undertaken. When I read of his appointment, therefore, I hoped that the Prime Minister had mandated him, in the words of Pope: Go, wondrous creature! Mount where Science guides. … It was not, I think, an unnatural hope, because the noble Lord was previously Lord President of the Council, with a good deal of responsibility for scientific matters, and one would have hoped that with the assumption of his new title his writ would have been extended. The Financial Secretary has made it clear that that is not the case.

The hon. Member quoted the Prime Minister's statement in the House on 30th October, and I will not repeat it, but I should like to take the Committee a stage further and quote what the Prime Minister said in answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mr. Peart) on 3rd November. He was dealing with the arrangements for answering in the House Questions which fall within the responsibility of the Minister for Science. The Prime Minister said: My right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of Health will answer Questions about the Medical Research Council and about radio-biological hazards; my right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture Questions about the Agricultural Research Council—subject to the above—and Nature Conservancy; my right hon. Friend the Minister of Education Questions about atomic energy—subject to the above—the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and general scientific matters; and my right hon. Friend the Minister of Aviation Questions about space research. In each case the Minister will answer 'as representing the Minister for Science.' Where Questions about atomic energy development relate to matters for which some other Minister is responsible, that Minister will, of course, answer them. For instance, Questions about nuclear-powered merchant shipping will normally be answered by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport, and Questions about nuclear power stations by my right hon. Friend the Minister Of Power."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 3rd November, 1959; Vol. 612, c. 856.] From all these words it is difficult not to draw the conclusion that the noble Lord has been "sold a pup". Indeed, there was just a hint of suspicion of this on his part when he met science correspondents on 21st October. I should like to quote to the House what the noble Lord said: I can almost hear the cynical comment, New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large'. The manifesto promise, the new Minister, is just a piece of political window-dressing. Nothing more is to be expected and everything will go on exactly as it was before. I hope and believe this is a mistake, and I would not have accepted the appointment had I believed otherwise. I am certain that the noble Lord would not have accepted the responsibility if that had not been his view at the time, but it is clear that the position has not changed to nearly the extent that the Government wish to suggest. Apart from the addition of responsibility for atomic energy, there is no change in the Lord Privy Seal's position whatever. He has not a single additional power which he had not at the time when he was Lord President of the Council. The Financial Secretary cannot claim that a real difference is made by the fact that the Lord Privy Seal is now to be engaged full-time upon this job. The inference which one must draw from that is that when he was Lord President of the Council the Lord Privy Seal neglected his responsibilities for science in favour of his work as chairman of the Conservative Party, and I am sure that the Financial Secretary does not wish to give that impression.

Let us not forget one significant phrase in the Prime Minister's statement of 30th October, when he used the words, "outside the sphere of defence". The Financial Secretary touched upon that point in his speech. I shall be surprised if the Minister for Science does not reach the conclusion that the preoccupation of our scientists and technologists with defence lies at the very heart of the problem. I am not able to check this figure, but I am told by friends who are scientists that more than half of the scientists and technologists who are engaged in research and development work are at present employed on defence, yet all that sphere of activity falls outside the terms of reference of the Minister for Science.

I must again protest against the division of responsibility inside the House. In the debate on the Atomic Energy Bill, on 18th November, I asked the Minister of Education why he was exercising responsibility for atomic energy. The only reply that he was able to make was that he had had some previous experience of the subject when he was Minister of Works, but that is not an excuse which will wash in the House. It seems to follow from what the right hon. Gentleman said that, whatever Ministry he had gone to, he would still have been speaking on atomic energy. It is ludicrous to suggest that if he had gone to the Colonial Office or the Foreign Office he would still have been answering in the House upon atomic energy. I believe that it is the view of hon. Members on both sides of the Committee that the Minister of Education ought to be sufficiently occupied with the work of his own Department instead of accepting an additional responsibility which will detract him from the very heavy responsibilities which he already bears.

I believe that it is wrong that we should have six Ministers answering for the Minister for Science in the House. We were certainly not given a satisfactory reply by the Financial Secretary on this point They cannot all know fully what is the view of the Minister for Science on the subject which they are covering. I hope that even at this stage the Prime Minister will not close his mind to the possibility of having one Minister responsible in the House, whether it is an Under-Secretary or a Minister of State, who will be here with sole responsibility for dealing with these matters which come within the terms of reference of the Minister for Science.

In one respect I believe that the noble Lord's position is better than it was. I think that he has a more adequate staff than when he was Lord President of the Council. The fact that the atomic energy office has been merged with his own office will mean that he has a more flexible and easily deployed staff at his disposal. When he was Lord President of the Council his senior permanent official was lower in rank than the chief officers in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Medical Research Council and the Agricultural Research Council. Now he has got a Deputy-Secretary at the head of his office and I believe that that represents a step forward.

But I must confess that I am a little worried about the apparent lack of scientific staff in the noble Lord's office. It seems to me that the administrative side is rather over-weighted. The highest-ranking scientific officer he has is a Principal Scientific Officer, which, I understand, is the fourth grade down, and only the third grade from the bottom of the ladder. I tend to agree with the Institution of Professional Civil Servants, which takes the view that the Minister for Science should have on his staff scientists of sufficient standing to carry authority with scientists outside Government circles.

Before we acquiesce in this rather curious new arrangement which the Government have placed before us, we are, I think, entitled to ask a number of questions about the priorities and methods of working of the Minister for Science. I wish to begin by asking a question about the manpower situation which was touched upon by the Financial Secretary. Everyone agrees that the shortage of trained men and women is the most serious obstacle to our technological and scientific advance. As was mentioned by the Financial Secretary the Advisory Council has recommended that we ought to be producing 20,000 scientists and engineers per annum by 1970.

That, of course, is the minimum requirement. It may be that it is an under-estimate, and I understand that it makes no provision whatsoever for scientists and technologists to help in the under-developed areas of the world; yet it is there that the great clash is to be fought, and we have a responsibility to put an end to poverty in those lands which we cannot shrug aside.

I ask the Minister of Education to tell us whether he is satisfied that the target of 20,000 a year will be reached and whether he is satisfied that the target is not too low. It may well be that in the light of reflection a target of 25,000 or 30,000 might seem a more worthwhile figure. If that target should prove larger than is required, it would mean that there was a tremendous accretion of strength to the teaching profession.

That brings me to the second point I wish to make, which consists of four questions to the Minister of Education. I venture to put them now because unless the right hon. Gentleman can give satisfactory answers, I am doubtful whether the Minister for Science will be able to achieve very much. First, I wish to ask how the supply of science teachers is being increased, particularly science teachers for the top forms in girls' schools. What are his plans for developing the teaching of science in primary schools? What efforts are being made to get more women interested in following a scientific or technical career? What steps is he taking to prevent too early and too intensive specialisation and to spread the realisation that the arts and science are complementary to one another?

Thirdly, I believe, that we are entitled to know what further steps the Government will take to encourage and help research. I was interested in the figures given by the Financial Secretary of increased expenditure over the last few years. We welcome this, but we should all like to know rather more from the Minister of Education about what further steps are to be taken. As I understand the position, the University Grants Committee needs more money to support research in the universities. The research councils ought to be able to pay for more research students. The D.S.I.R. ought to be in a position to do more to support research of special importance in the universities. And is not there something to be said for transferring the present functions of the D.S.I.R. in relation to universities to a new research council responsible directly to the Minister for Science? One of the advantages of that would be that the D.S.I.R. would be able to concentrate more on its own stations and the research associations.

My last question to the Government is on the last point which was touched upon by the Financial Secretary. I want to hear more about the way in which the Minister for Science is to co-ordinate the activities of the Government and industry. Clearly, there is at present a great deal of overlapping in research and a consequent waste of manpower. Equally clearly, there are many industries which are neglecting research. I should have thought that at the moment the position of the machine tool industry, in a period of increasing automation, is the sort of thing which ought to be receiving the most urgent attention of the Minister for Science and his colleagues.

There are various ways in which confusion and neglect could be avoided. As the Financial Secretary said, there are no easy answers to these problems, but I should like to bring the attention of the Minister to the recommendation which we on this side of the Committee made in "A New Deal for Science", a policy statement which we issued before the General Election. In order to supervise the application of science in industry we shall set up … a scientific and technical planning board whose task it will be to advise the Government on the direction of industrial research and development, on the awards of research contracts and on the grants to individual firms. I should like the Minister to comment on that suggestion and to tell us whether the Government have any similar proposals of their own to put forward.

The Minister for Science has said that he proposes to rely more on the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy. I was glad to hear the tribute paid by the hon. Baronet to the Council. It is an admirable body and those serving on it deserve our warmest and most grateful thanks. It is a pity that the Minister for Science has so consistently rejected the advice of the Council on the need for a national scientific reference library. Admirable as it is, however, the Council does seem to have defects. It appears to work very slowly, I think largely because of the nature of the men who compose it and the work they do.

There are full meetings of the Council on only six afternoons in the year. No doubt sub-committees meet much more frequently, but I think that when we get a group of high-powered scientists of this kind it is almost inevitable that they should work slowly because of their great and important preoccupation with the tasks on which they are more generally engaged. It may well be that the Council needs a stronger secretariat than it has at present, and I am convinced that it needs an intelligence unit of its own so that information upon which Government policy can be based can be more readily collected.

Finally, I should like to end by quoting with approval a comment by "Geminus" in the New Scientist of 3rd December: … the situation needs the presence of a new kind of political animal—the kind of person who is able to relate matters of scientific policy to wider questions of more orthodox politics. There are a number of such beings on both sides of the Committee and even those of us who are less erudite in these subjects are conscious of the importance of the task. But many of us are doubtful whether the progress made will be impressive.

I suspect that the progress of the noble Lord will be like that of science in "Locksley Hall": Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point. I hope that we are wrong. We hope that the appointment of the noble Lord will produce a scientific revolution and we wish him well. But the Committee will forgive us if we are not over-confident that the machinery proposed in this Supplementary Estimate is adequate for so gigantic and urgent a task.

4.30 p.m.

Sir Arthur Vere Harvey (Macclesfield)

The speech to which we have just listened from the hon. Member for Rossendale (Mr. Greenwood) was, in the main, helpful. The hon. Member referred to his long friendship with the Lord Privy Seal. I am just wondering how that continued after his television broadcast at the opening of the General Election campaign.

Most of us welcome the appointment of the Lord Privy Seal to his new post, because he is certainly an enthusiast, a man with wide political experience and one who, I think, will do a splendid job. We also hope that he will have time to travel, because one of the most important things for the Minister for Science is to get around to see what is going on and to encourage and hear the points of view of universities, colleges and industry as well.

I attach great importance to technical colleges, not just to universities. Over the years Britain has produced men in industry, through night schools and technical colleges, who have emerged as very great men in the scientific sphere. I welcome the fact that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Education is to look after this aspect, because he has had long experience at the Board of Trade and knows the requirements of industry and what it means to Britain to have scientists contributing to our economic future. I feel that it is unfortunate that there is not a spokesman for the Minister for Science in this House. I know that that responsibility is distributed among several Ministers, but it would have been a good thing to have had an Under-Secretary in this House, even if he were slightly underemployed in the early days.

In opening the debate, the Financial Secretary referred to Sir Alexander Todd in general terms. He has been head of the Council for seven years and I am sure he would like to pay tribute to the hard and industrious work put in by Sir Alexander over so many years. It is remarkable that he is able to spare so much time for all the work on which he has been engaged and still to take on further commitments. I have seldom known a man take on so much work and make so great a contribution. I only hope that his health will stand up to these heavy tasks.

My concern in this subject is principally with aviation matters. That is an industry which is being rationalised and rapidly run down through no fault of its own, and certainly through no fault of the Government, but because it has been caught up by world events. We are not alone in this difficulty, for when I was in the United States for a few days, three or four weeks ago, I found from what I read and in discussions with Americans that they are to do what we did two and a half years ago as set out in the Defence White Paper; and they are faced with a much bigger problem.

In this country, we have large Government establishments such as the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, that at Boscombe Down and that at Bedford and many others, and I am not satisfied that in the past there has been sufficient co-ordination between these establishments. I am concerned whether those units can be fully employed in the years to come. There may have to be some rationalisation in the Government establishments for research. I do not mean that we should lessen their importance. but that we should get more out of them.

We should not forget, either, that industry contributes in a large way to research. The contribution made by industry itself is generally underestimated. I should like to see something done by the Minister for Science to see that industry as a whole gets the benefit of individual industrial research. Frequently, that benefit is not passed on. I remember that in the days of the Labour Government millions of pounds were spent on the Brabazon aircraft, at Filton. I did not quibble about that at the time, but the total expenditure was £8 million, £10 million or £11 million. Large runways had to be constructed and, finally, the venture was dropped, I believe under a Conservative Government. I do not think that much gain from all that expenditure was ever passed on to the aircraft industry as a whole.

My quarrel is that these things are kept very much in watertight compartments whereas much more co-ordina- tion is required. Today, at Question Time, the Minister of Aviation referred to a Question by the right hon. Member for Vauxhall (Mr. Strauss) about the Farey Rotodyne. I am told that that venture will cost £6 million to develop. The firm concerned has been on the verge of getting orders from British European Airways for many months now, but nothing definite has happened. B.E.A.C. wants a larger Rotodyne which must be less noisy, but all this will cost a great deal of money and so far as I know the firm concerned is not in a position to meet the cost of £6 million. Here is a case in which there needs to be very close cooperation and a merging of industry and Government Departments with financial help if the Government are satisfied that the venture can earn orders for us from overseas.

There is the same problem with laminar flow and the porous wing of an aircraft, which can save drag of the order of 35 per cent. Much has been done in recent years on this question, but it has not been sufficiently exploited. The same applies to blind landing devices. It is hopeless for this country to try to compete with the United States in all these matters. We have to try to select our priorities within our finances and use our brains and resources on them rather than trying to do everything. Our aviation industry this year will export about £170 million worth of goods, covering airframes and engines. It is a fantastic amount, but it is bound to come down in the next few years unless urgent action is taken.

I am quite satisfied that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Aviation has been doing all he can in the short time in which he has been at the Ministry. My hon. Friend the Financial Secretary said that there will be close co-ordination. It has got to be closer. It is no good two Ministers occasionally having a meeting with one or two permanent civil servants. These things have to be worked out more closely, because far too much is at stake than simply discussing this matter in a few meetings a year.

I wish to ask my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade what is being done about the finances of the Jodrell Bank Experimental Station, which is situated on the fringe of my constituency, Macclesfield. That is a great experiment which has cost an enormous amount of money. It is backed by Manchester University and the Government are participating to a small extent. I believe that £70,000 is owing. During the last few years, but for Jodrell Bank, Britain would not have been in space research at all, but it has put Britain's name all over the world.

I am told that because of the financial straits in which it is placed the establishment is receiving letters from schoolboys in America who are sending dollar bills to contribute towards the cost. With the amount of money spent on scientific development it is a most unsatisfactory state of affairs that all this money should be owing. I should like the Government to step in and put the station on a sound financial basis.

More could be done by the Lord Privy Seal in working closely with the Common Market countries. We want to get closer to them on many matters and I can think of no better approach than that which can be made through science. Much can be done in the aircraft industry and in other industries. I ask that my right hon. Friend shall fully examine this matter to see whether we can work more closely with our friends on the Continent on it. The whole future of this country and our economic prosperity and standard of life depend on the knowledge we can put into the heads of our young people who are coming into industry to design and manufacture the goods we have to export. It is as simple as that.

In spite of all the other advantages America has we have a great advantage in this respect in the boy coming from the technical college at 18 years of age and developing into a great scientist. That is why we were able to invent things like radar, jet engines and penicillin. I wish my right hon. Friend could look into this side of the problem and urge the Government to give their fullest support. I personally take this opportunity of wishing the Minister for Science every success.

4.40 p.m.

Mr. Austen Albu (Edmonton)

We on this side of the Committee are in a great deal of agreement with the extreme good sense of the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Sir A. V. Harvey), particularly in his references to the necessity for a for a Minister in this House able to answer for the Minister for Science, and on the question of greater co-ordination between industry and the Government, and, as I understood him, between firm and firm in industry. There is too much secrecy in this country, and more disclosure generally of the results of research by industrial firms, such as that which takes place in the United States, would be of great advantage. I agree also with the hon. Gentleman's point about co-ordination between the Minister for Science and the Minister of Aviation, and on this matter I shall, in fact, be following him fairly closely in my speech.

I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale (Mr. Greenwood) that this appointment was received with a great deal of scepticism. It is not that scientists do not want us to take a great interest in their affairs, although they do not want control of all research to be centralised by any means. On the other hand, they want to feel that there is a real interest in greater co-ordination. I think that there is a fear that this appointment is merely a piece of window-dressing in order to carry out an electoral promise.

Perhaps I may quote from a recently published book on this subject which is of very great interest. It is the third book published by the Science in Industry Committee and it is called "Science in Industry," by Professors Carter and Williams. They say: We doubt if it can be said that a Government policy on the application of science really exists. The facts on which such a policy should be based have still be be collected and assessed; and this work requires extensive and continuous study by a group containing both scientists and economists. I fully agree with this, and I want to ask the Government whether in fact they will carry it out. There seems to be a slight gleam of hope, because Professor Carter has recently been appointed a member of the Executive Council of D.S.I.R., and I shall be interested to see his influence on the other members of the Council and on Ministers in the carrying out of this proposal. It is a fact that we do want a much greater assessment of the relative advantages of different fields of advance, especially from the economic point of view. The Minister is concerned both with fundamental research and with applied research and the development of new products and processes. It is true that these are not always clearly distinguishable but in fact lie on a continuum stretching from one extreme to the other. I agree with the view of Professors Carter and Williams that the control of basic research should be general and intermittent, and that development should be much more detailed and continuous. With this thought in mind, I support the suggestion made by my hon. Friend, which was included in a statement put out by our party during the General Election, for the separation of support for basic research in the universities and the colleges of technology from the D.S.I.R., putting it under the control of some new research council, and allocating to it adequate funds for the purpose.

Much more money is needed for basic research in this country. It is not only that without basic research and new knowledge the universities and the technical colleges will not flourish, but, as we all know, there have been many discoveries which did not appear to have any practical value at the time, but which turned out in the end to be of very great value. If this were done, the D.S.I.R. could then concentrate on applied research and the development of those projects which are most likely to show an economic return to the nation in a reasonable time. As far as possible—and of course it is not possible to do it entirely—we should separate fundamental research which has no sort of immediate economic value from applied research and development where there are economic objectives in view. It is not true that all scientists—or indeed any scientists; I do not know—object to having a target at which to aim, even an economic target. I remember that some of us recently visited one of the basic research establishments of one of our very large firms in this country. When they set it up, the firm hoped that it would attract outstanding men of science—holders of the Ph.D. and so on—who would be attracted by the idea of uncontrolled research work. In fact they found that most of them preferred to feel that they were making a contribution to the economic objectives of the firm. I do not think that it is a fact that scientists object to having a target to aim at, but there are different kinds of scientists.

Here, it is true, and the hon. Member for Macclesfield referred to it, that perhaps the most important problem which the Minister will have to face in attempting to co-ordinate scientific developments among his colleagues is that of the priorities. We have limited resources, and even if we were to reduce, as I think we should, the enormous amount of our resources going to defence research and development, we should still be faced with a shortage of scientific resources. Should we then concentrate on the new, exciting and very expensive fields of rapid advance, or should we try to spread the use of science among that much too large part of British industry which is clearly—again in the words of Carter and Williams— caught in the net of its own backwardness"? To some extent, we have to do both, but the first of these presents us with very considerable difficulties, to which the hon. Member for Macclesfield referred. First of all, one of the main fields of rapid advance is in aircraft, and this is not under the control of the Minister. We do not know how far there will be co-ordination in the use of resources for this purpose. This will be necessary owing to the very rapid changes that are taking place in the form of the aircraft industry, and it may well be that substantial scientific resources will he made available, or will be required, as the case may be. There must be some co-ordination of the study and availability of those resources which are switchable from one industry to another.

I was told recently at the exhibition of marine-nuclear reactors that the design teams had been able to recruit engineers from the aircraft industry, which was contracting, and that it was quite possible to convert engineers with good basic training from one industry to another. Therefore, the problem of the examination and to some extent the planning of the use of our scientific resources and manpower, must be under one head.

In these expensive fields of nuclear power, space research and supersonic jet aircraft, as the hon. Member for Macclesfield said, we cannot compete with the two giants already in this field, who spend ten times as much on research as we do. In the one case, the country is able to direct its research without any democratic control, while the other country is rich, and has a great surplus of wealth, so that it is able to do much more than we can in these fields.

We have to carve out for ourselves special lines of development and concentrate our resources on those in which we may become supreme. I would also agree that for the larger projects we must co-operate with the countries of Europe, for instance, on the lines of the latest agreement between the Atomic Energy Authority in this country and Euratom. We cannot develop 10, 15 or 20 types of reactors as the Americans can, and we must, therefore, concentrate on the things that we can do best.

There are some fields in which extensive competition can be wasteful, and in fact make development almost impossible. I was interested to read lately that the American aircraft manufacturers have now realised that there cannot be a large number of separate projects for a supersonic jet airliner. The manufacturers are now considering forming a syndicate to develop a single-design project. This is very significant, because if they cannot afford to do it, then we certainly cannot. I have already said that. I believe that we cannot possibly afford to develop a supersonic jet airliner, though whether we might do so in co-operation with other European countries I do not know.

Equally important with these large and expensive projects is the task of spreading the use of scientific methods throughout industry. The President of the Board of Trade has recently emphasised the over-dependence of our exports at present on one or two industries, particularly motor cars, and suggested that we needed to have a wider spread of our exports over a larger number of industries. It is by now a commonplace that the types of industry which are most suitable will be those which manufacture and sell sophisticated products based on research and development. There have been some very alarming reports recently about the backwardness of a number of our industries in the use of scientific methods, particularly machine tools, textile machinery and shipbuilding. Far more money could be spent on research, not only in private industry, but to a large extent in transport and one or two other public industries—another example is the use of our main raw material, coal.

All these industries—machine tools, textile machinery, shipbuilding, railways and, I suppose, coal—employ a quite inadequate number of graduate engineers and scientists. Last year the British machine-tool industry recruited two graduates whereas the German machine-tool industry recruited 500—not five as I was quoted as saying in the House the other day. How can we hope in the future to compete in these fields when the difference in scientific knowledge will be so great? We were able to sell the machines when ordinary standard equipment could be sold. Other countries will make these in the future and, unless we bring about an advance in the whole technique of design and manufacture, we shall inevitably fail. The Minister should not hesitate to use the method of the development contract or to set up research and development companies in industries which have not the scientific resources to undertake new work themselves.

Hon. Members opposite may feel reluctant to have Government interference and possibly Government participation in research and development, and eventually Government participation in the production of prototypes and even of manufacture. But those with any scientific knowledge or knowledge of what is happening in industry know in their heart of hearts that this is being forced inevitably upon them. No doctrinaire views on nationalisation, public ownership or public participation will enable them to escape the dilemma if they want this country to remain in the forefront of industrial nations in the future.

I also ask the Ministers on the Front Bench to convey to their noble Friend my hope that there will be more support for the social sciences. These rapid technical advances create serious social problems, both communal and industrial. We shall not reap full advantage from the new changes in technology if our management methods themselves are not more scientific and if we do not have more research into management methods and structure. It is also very important to study the effects on workers at all levels of industry of the changing requirements in skills and the changing social organisation of our factories arising from these new processes. More research into technical education and methods of industrial training for these new skills will be necessary.

I realise that in many of these fields the Minister for Science is no more than a co-ordinator. It is a great pity that there will be no one in the House of Commons, like a Parliamentary Secretary, who is directly involved in the administration of the Department and so can speak with the voice of the Department. I say this without disrespect to the members of the Treasury Bench, but they will have to act as a sort of post office. The noble Lord will be judged by the degree with which he imbues his colleagues with the need for scientific method and the impetus which he provides, and in particular by the degree with which he imbues the Chancellor of the Exchequer with the necessity for adequate funds both for basic research and for applied research and development.

4.54 p.m.

Mr. Robert Carr (Mitcham)

I certainly wish to extend a general welcome to the appointment of my right hon. and noble Friend as Minister for Science, as does the House of Commons as a whole. As the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu) mentioned, there was a certain amount of criticism in various quarters over the appointment. The hon. Member referred to it having been spoken of as "window dressing". I am not very worried about that, because I cannot see right hon. and noble Friend as a window dresser's dummy. I suspect that we shall certainly have action from him rather than mere posturing and dummy display.

We should welcome the appointment in the form in which it has been made because, while it is obvious that we have doubts about how the work of a Minister for Science should develop in this country, it is better that we should start with his responsibilities not being too specifically laid down. I therefore welcome the fact that there is some vagueness at present about how his responsibilities shall be carried out. This is a beginning, and an important beginning. Equally, I hope that in the months ahead the House of Commons will be critical of how this beginning is turning out, because I feel that this is of such importance to the country's economy that from time to time the House of Commons should give a critical view to the effect which the appointment is having.

It is important that we now have a full time Minister watching this part of our national work and life. I hope that it will be important not only in raising the status and priority of science within the Government's control, which the appointment empowers, but also in providing a senior member of the Government who will weigh up the needs of science, both in research and development. We have never had this before, and it can be of great benefit. I hope that my right hon. and noble Friend will not be just a warden or overlord of scientific institutions, but will regard it as part of his responsibilities to overlook the total volume and direction of scientific work, both research and application. I hope that he will be looking for gaps and thinking of the need for stimulating the filling of those gaps.

As the defence programme changes and perhaps becomes even more specialised, we must guard against the loss of scientific impetus within industry which the old type of defence programme provided. We owe a tremendous lot in industry at the moment to the by-products of research work undertaken in the first place, for purely defence purposes. We shall get that benefit in the future from the very highly technical work now going on in such specialised fields as rocketry and similar abstruse subjects. They use electronics and other important control mechanisms which will also be of importance throughout the whole of industry. There is a danger, however, that the narrowing of our defence research, which, I imagine, will take place in the years ahead, will leave a gap in scientific stimulus which industry as a whole has in the past derived from work undertaken primarily for defence purposes.

I hope, therefore, that one of the things my right hon. and noble Friend will be looking at is the possible need for stimulating research work throughout industry by research contracts. It is too early to lay down what form they should take or in what fields they should be given, but there may well be a big field of work in which we shall fall behind unless there is Government stimulus. We can rely on private industry to undertake the short-term work, but there are longer-term and more uncertain projects which will need Government stimulus.

I realise that hon. Members opposite may take those remarks as being an attack on private enterprise, but it is an attack against which on some other occasion I shall be very prepared to defend it. At the moment, I wish to stress that the need for research contracts is one to which my right hon. and noble Friend will have to give considerable attention in the years ahead.

Mr. Albu

Does the hon. Gentleman think that the research contract method is likely to be of any use to an industry that does not employ scientists or engineers, and has no tradition of scientific research and development?

Mr. Carr

I agree, and, if I may, I shall deal with that point in a moment.

This question of research contracts ties up very closely with what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir A. V. Harvey). I cannot but be disturbed by a fear that there may be too much of a split between defence science and civil science carried out under Government control. I was encouraged to hear what my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary had to say about the links between the Advisory Council and the responsibilities of the Ministry of Aviation, but I cannot help wondering if those links are not rather too vague.

Here, again, it may be too early to pronounce judgment, but the House of Commons should watch closely as this work develops. There is a close link between defence and civil scientific effort, and unless the two are closely co-ordinated, unless there is rationalisation and co-ordination between Service and civil establishments, between Government establishments and private industry, we may get gaps, on the one hand, and wasteful overlapping, on the other. I hope that as the months go by we shall have an assurance that this danger of a split between defence and civil work is being properly looked at.

It is when we come to the application of scientific knowledge and the results of scientific development throughout industry, that my noble Friend has, perhaps, one of his most important and, at the same time, one of his most difficult tasks. As the hon. Member for Edmonton said, it is very difficult to give research contracts to an industry that does not employ scientists. It is, in fact, impossible. That does not worry me so much, because I suspect that the research can be done in other institutions, both in industry and outside it. What does worry me is how we are to get the results of research into industries that employ either not many scientists or none at all. This is not something that any Government can solve by compulsion. We cannot order an industry to take in scientists. If we did, they would probably not be used.

I believe that one of the first needs in British industry is to have some of those who are responsible for its direction able to talk at least some scientific language. For that reason I hope that the new course that is being developed at my own university, Cambridge—which is to be a combination of the scientific and the more general economic course, with a slant on business administration—will be successful.

Those going into industry on the administrative management side of the smaller and medium-sized companies must have some knowledge of science if that sector of industry is ever to make use of scientific knowledge. We simply will not get these scientific methods and techniques applied unless someone at the top of a company ceases to be afraid of science and has some idea of what science, and scientists generally, can provide for his organisation.

We should draw encouragement from the fact that over the last decade there has undoubtedly been a great increase in the recruitment by industry of university graduates. They may not all have been scientifically trained, but the intake of graduates, with their academic training and the width of understanding that that implies, means that we shall have in charge of British industry an increasing number of people who can take the wider view and encourage the development of scientific methods.

For the Government, this is very largely a matter of encouraging the right educational policy, and of seeing, so far as it lies within the power of Government, that universities are providing the right courses for those who may later go into industry; and certainly of seeing that the schools are supplied with an adequate number of science teachers. As has already been pointed out, we shall not increase our understanding and application of science unless we get a fairly rapid increase in the number of science teachers.

That applies particularly to girls' schools. I say that, not because I have great dreams of enormous numbers of women scientists who will be employed in industry, but because it is obvious that it is through the training of more women in this way that we may to a large extent look to increasing the supply of scientifically-trained teachers in our schools.

The Government should also bear in mind that industry needs not only scientists and technologists but technicians and skilled workers. It will be wasteful if we merely increase the numbers of scientists and technologists. The output of the technical colleges is of tremendous importance, and also of great importance is the supply of skilled craftsmen. Here, again, the Government are in an awkward position, because by the common consent of both employers and trade unions the training of craftsmen is a job for industry itself. But I share with many others the fear that industry is not doing that job to anything like a sufficient extent.

It is difficult to see how Government can put this right, but I beg all the Ministers who can to do everything possible to stimulate and encourage industry rapidly to increase the number of apprenticeships it is making available. Unless we get an increase in scientists, technologists, technicians and skilled workers, all the efforts of the scientists, however encouraged by the Minister for Science, will, to some extent, be frustrated.

There are many difficulties and uncertainties to face, and what success we achieve will greatly depend on the reaction of industry itself. I think that we are right in welcoming this appointment since it will increase and concentrate the attention that the Government give in the future to this important matter compared with the attention it has had in the past.

I am afraid that I must couple this general welcome of the appointment with the criticism already voiced of the arrangements that have been made in this House for answering for the Minister for Science. This being a new appointment, I appreciate that it may be difficult to cover this aspect all at once, but I hope that before long the Government will make whatever arrangements may be necessary to have one Minister answering in this House for my noble Friend.

Until that happens, I, for one, will find it difficult to believe that this coordination and concentration of attention that we all want is actually taking place. However, apart from that one specific criticism, I am sure that the Committee is right to welcome this appointment and to support this Supplementary Estimate.

5.10 p.m.

Mr. Arthur Skeffington (Hayes and Harlington)

I am sure that it will be agreed in all quarters of the Committee that this is an occasion of some significance, for whether or not we have, in fact, created a real Minister with power or merely a figurehead is one thing, but undoubtedly this debate marks a step forward in the official recognition of science by the Government. I suppose it can be said that it is one of the few good things that have emerged from the General Election. Certainly both major parties made proposals about the future of science; naturally I think that the proposals made by my party would have been more effective, but at least we now have constitutional recognition of science.

The wonder is perhaps that neither of the parties have moved more quickly in this field than they have. We have only to think of guided missiles and the fight against disease to realise the importance of science today. Even in such humdrum matters as food preservation, much money has been lost to the nation through the need for adequate research. The amount lost was estimated last year as £80 million. That money would have been saved if we had adopted more up-to-date methods of preventing deterioration of food from pests. In matters like the prevention of corrosion the nation spent last year about £100 million which could have been better employed.

I was very interested in what the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Sir A. V. Harvey) said on the Fairey Rotodyne, about which I had a Question down this afternoon. I think the hon. Member was using this case as an illustration of the need for forward planning in scientific research and development in the aircraft industry. He made a fair point in saying that the blame for the fact that this enterprising project is literally grounded should not be placed entirely on the company. True, I think the company might have spoken with a more precise and firm voice on occasions, but it has a fine research team which in this and other cases has produced a revolutionary project. I think, however, that the amount to be spent on development is much too large for this comparatively small concern. Better coordination would have brought out the financial commitments to those in authority, at an earlier stage than has been the case and smoothed the path for the Government and the firm.

I differ from hon. Members opposite in that I think that if the State makes a financial contribution, as it must in this case, it must also have some influence on the policy that is adopted by the firm. We are now in a position in which we are not getting the aircraft which we ought to have had, and which in this case I believe is a world beater. I believe that the team which has produced it may well break up. As I said this afternoon at Question Time, there have been dismissals which have caused great concern in Hayes and to those of us who are interested in the welfare of this industry.

The Financial Secretary, in outlining the proposals this afternoon, was careful to emphasise the limitation of the new office. Indeed, the Lord Privy Seal, the new Minister for Science, was careful to do this in an article which he wrote for Nature on 24th October this year when he said: My authority over the Atomic Energy Authority and the Research Councils is no greater than my predecessors and I had before, and I have no intention of taking away from them the authority which Parliament has given to them, or the freedom which they now enjoy to perform their functions without detailed interference. Precisely what those limitations mean was spelt out by the then Lord President before the election, and it was confirmed in his article on 24th October, to a deputation which he received from the Institution of Professional Civil Servants. On that occasion he said that it was important to remember that the Lord President of the Council was not in the same position towards the research councils as a Minister in charge of a Department. He was not entitled to act as a court of appeal and to substitute his opinion for theirs; his position was rather a supervisory one and his function was to intervene only if the councils seemed to him to be acting perversely.

That is a pretty negative sort of authority. In the light of this spelling out of what appears to be the present position, I hope that we shall hear something more encouraging about the positive functions of the Ministry when the Minister replies to the debate. One can understand the reference to a remark which my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale (Mr. Greenwood) made earlier, New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large. The Lord Privy Seal, summing up his position, said in the article of 24th October: My purpose is to make the voice of science coherent and articulate under Government encouragement, and in one real sense to make science self-governing under Government inspiration. The great advantage of that statement is that one can read into it whatever one likes. Those of us who hope for a positive lead will hope that that is what it means.

A generous tribute was paid by the Financial Secretary to the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, and I am sure that it is shared by all who read its valuable reports. I should like to know whether it would be possible for the Council's report to be presented to Parliament annually so that it may come under Parliamentary scrutiny and obtain the publicity which would result. This would keep the Advisory Council's recommendations in the forefront of public opinion. So often these excellent reports seem to be ignored by everybody until Members put down Questions about them.

I wish to add my voice to all those who have protested about the six Ministers who are to answer in this House for the Minister for Science. In view of the statement that the new Minister wishes, as he said, …to make the voice of science coherent and articulate … it seems very peculiar to employ six Ministers to do that in this House. I should have thought that the Conservative manifesto on this point, to avoid a charge of window dressing, would result in a Parliamentary Secretary being appointed to speak directly for the Minister. With the best will in the world, it is impossible for six people to speak about the Ministry's policy as a whole. I should like to reinforce what has been said in this respect.

Again, one must have regard to the structure of the staff, the details of which are given on page 13 of this Vote. I concede that what is required in this office is not a vast department with a large number of people in it, certainly not at this stage of its development. There should be a small high-powered office in a very pivotal position. There are thirty-nine persons listed as being engaged in this office, of whom I am surprised to find five are doorkeepers. Whether they are employed to open the door for the various Ministers I do not know. There may be some special reason for this, but, in fact, only two are scientific officers. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale pointed out, the most important of these, the principal scientific officer is only equal to an administrative principal.

If we are to have a small office to advise and co-ordinate policy, surely it is necessary to have really top-ranking scientific officers in the Department. There are three other grades above this grade in the staff structure—senior scientific officer, deputy chief scientific officer and chief senior scientific officer. Surely one of these will be required if the office is to do the work that we want it to do. It is necessary not only for the Minister to have at his disposal expert advice, but in the negotiations between this Department and others it is necessary for the Minister's advisers to speak with proper status. With all respect to whoever the eminent individual appointee is to be, unless we have top scientists in the Department doing the job it will obviously not be what is required.

Before I sit down, I wish to refer to the closure of the Microbiological Group of D.S.I.R. about which I have asked Questions. I use it as a convenient illustration because I think it shows the sort of co-ordination needed in the future. On 21st July I asked what was to happen to the invaluable work previously done by the Group and I was told that grants would be available to universities and others. Subsequently, I asked for, and received, a list of projects. Some very interesting work is still being done, but it is clear that there are some gaps.

As far as I know, nothing is being done on sulphur bacteria and on fundamental work on the microbial formation of methane which is of very great importance to animal husbandry, gas in mines, disposal of sewage and a number of things. This is not merely an academic assignment; it impinges on life at a number of points. That work has now stopped. This stoppage is something which I hope the new Ministry will prevent in the future. If vital work is not covered by university or other research grants, I hope the work will be done by D.S.I.R. or some other body.

I am sure that we all wish this new experimental office well. We hope that it will have real powers. It is perhaps appropriate that this innovation was introduced by the Financial Secretary because, even if we get the constitutional position right, it is quite clear that finance and its co-ordination will be very important indeed.

In a debate on science and industry in another place a few months ago it was said that on applied and fundamental research, excluding defence and nuclear physics, Britain was spending between £50 and £60 million a year, whilst for the same type of research the United States was spending about £800 million. I am aware that the United States has a population about three times as large as our own, but the fact is that she is spending sixteen times as much as we are in this direction. The success of the Minister for Science depends not only on the constitution of the Department but also on the powers which he has in relation to the finance. I hope that that will be forthcoming as well.

5.22 p.m.

Mr. Farey-Jones (Watford)

I believe that all of us today must feel rather happy in that this is the first Vote for the Minister for Science. It is rather like attending a christening and making a small present to a child who within a few years will grow up into a giant and have fantastic responsibilities.

I, like other hon. Members, feel very deeply on the point that the Minister for Science replies in another place. As I fundamentally believe that a Department of Science is today a Department of modern opportunity, I believe that without question there should be a spokesman in the House of Commons on all the problems concerned therein. I believe that hon. Members on both sides of the Committee, realising that science has no party and no politics—and this is the feature that I want to discuss this afternoon—must welcome the creation of a Department of Science. But it is no good having a Minister for Science or a Department of Science unless that Minister and that Department have the necessary power to carry out what is urgently required in the scientific field.

It is utterly useless any hon. Member thinking that in the world of 1960 we can any longer afford to keep our secrets to ourselves or not expect that other countries in very considerable groups will form some scheme of dissemination of knowledge either for their own benefit against us or as some kind of guarantee for their own future. After all, we all know that mankind at the present moment is going into a completely new era. Everyone knows that if there were a third world war not only would civilisation itself be destroyed, but even vegetation. Therefore, into the new world into which we are going there is only one hope, that is, the pursuit of complete truth—in other words, science with an inspirational and divine background.

Can we in this country achieve that? Can this Department achieve it? We must hope that it can. This new office has not only to provide intellectual leadership but moral leadership as well. If it is to succeed at all it must provide the canalisation of scientific thought and effort for peaceful purposes and for the edification of all our people in the utilisation of science.

One can ask just a few questions about this matter, about this Minister and about this Department. What is the fundamental problem facing this Department today in regard to the people of this country? The greatest challenge in modern times, as I am sure the Minister of Education will agree when he replies to the debate, is how to make scientific knowledge acceptable to the man in the street. Up to now the man in the street has been afraid of it. He has seen what has happened elsewhere in the world and confidence in the future has not kept pace with his fear.

The world of 1960 offers new avenues of scientific discovery leading to enormous wealth and the widening of our horizons on, above and below the ground, and even below the sea. This is one of the problems that the Department will have to face. One question which comes to my mind is, for instance, which authority or which body will effect the study of cosmic rays which will unquestionably affect the next generation? Which body or which group of bodies in this country will be concerned with interplanetary exploration and research into outer space, to which I referred on a previous occasion in this Chamber?

Even on that issue this country cannot afford to be left behind. We cannot afford to leave to the Soviet Union and the United States of America the whole of inter-planetary exploration, because we dare not be left behind in the field of modern research and knowledge. Why, in fact, could we not have a joint effort by all the three great nations in this sphere? I have asked that question before, and I hope that I shall get some support from hon. Members on that issue.

Another thing I would like to know, for instance, is whether we could not use guided missiles for the forwarding of our mail and freight between London and New York. If scientific research has produced the fantastic knowledge that lies behind guided missiles, that surely is something that could immediately be translated for the common good. After all, what is scientific knowledge for? Is it for the destruction of mankind. or for the cure of medical evils? The question of research into cancer and into isotopes, which can double, treble or quadruple the crops of the backward nations and enable them to be stored, if necessary for 300 years, and kept as fresh at the end as they were at the beginning, are just two of the thousands of questions that the Department will have to solve in the next twenty-five years.

Surely the one thing above all else that is necessary is to have a spokesman for that Department in the House. I do not want to weary the Committee by going through a list of the public authorities and bodies for which the Lord Privy Seal is responsible. All I want to be sure of is that the Lord Privy Seal and this Department will not be held responsible for public bodies over which neither he nor his Department have any control, because that would lead to the utmost confusion, which could never be straightened out in the next ten years.

However we view the future, we know that the forward-looking nations realise, above all else, that scientific knowledge must begin in the primary schools and must continue in the various other schools, right through to the universities. Every opportunity must be provided for the aspiring leaders of the future to acquire the necessary knowledge at the earliest moment. I gladly add my welcome to those which have already been expressed at the creation of this Department, and I wish it and the Minister well.

5.31 p.m.

Mr. Ede (South Shields)

I am somewhat surprised that the creation of this Department has been approved by hon. Members on both sides of the Committee and that no word of warning or criticism has been uttered. Science has at last broken free from the theological impediments which hitherto have been put in its way. It is no longer heretical to make a new scientific pronouncement. Galileo, Newton and Darwin were all denounced as heretics, and even today there are some people who believe that if a person holds the view that Darwin disproves the first few chapters of Genesis he will have a very warm time in the next world.

Now that science has escaped from the theologians it is to be put in bondage by the Treasury. Let us have no doubt what the revolution proposed today means. It is not by accident that the Financial Secretary to the Treasury brings the matter before the Committee. I do not know what the universities of England would have said at the beginning of this century if it had been proposed that they should be given as much State money as they now receive, with promises of greater amounts in the future. It makes me realise how tremendous the revolution is, not merely in this House, but in the future outlook of learned bodies concerned with this matter.

I thought that it was a very interesting quotation which my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (Mr. Skeffington) gave from remarks made by the Lord Privy Seal. Apparently he said: My purpose is to make the voice of science coherent and articulate … under Government inspiration. All I can say is that that marks the death knell of independent scientific research, which is the most valuable form of research. To rely on Government inspiration through the kind of Department described to us by the Financial Secretary, is to show a faith that even the theologians never displayed in their attitude to this matter. I regret to say that I do not believe that State-directed research is going to mean the end of the difficulties which confront this nation.

Mr. Frederick Peart (Workington)

It will be important, though.

Mr. Ede

It may be, but a lot of dangers are very important.

Mr. Maurice Edelman (Coventry, North)

Is my right hon. Friend opposed to the purposeful relation, by the Government. of science to public ends?

Mr. Ede

No. My hon. Friend has uttered a large number of words, every one of which needs to be analysed before an emphatic assent can be given to such a proposition. My hon. Friend and myself would probably have a quite different picture of what those wonderful words convey to our respective minds. I hope my hon. Friend will believe that I have a mind, just as he has.

Mr. Edelman

Having said that, will my right hon. Friend now answer my question?

Mr. Ede

No. I am not going to answer a question phrased in words which can be taken to mean anything the questioner or the person answering likes to make them mean. I should probably arrive at something quite different from my hon. Friend in the end.

I do not believe that we can rely on Government inspiration in this matter. Let us suppose that a certain line of scientific advance happens not to coincide with the view of the Government of the day. Under those circumstances, what is to happen to some of the most promising forms of research which may be in process of being carried out at any given moment? One of the disasters of the first half of this century has been that the individual has tried to keep certain lines of research under his control. Secrecy means that in all the great civilised nations of the world, people are carrying on parallel investigations at the same moment, and still proceeding by way of trial and error.

If we had the scientific spirit of previous ages we should be in a much better position. In those days, when men made certain discoveries, they published them to the world, and so helped each other. Let us consider even so elementary a matter as the discovery of oxygen. Most Englishmen attribute it to Joseph Priestley, but he merely discovered that there was one component of air which sustained life. He did not call it oxygen. He published the results of his researches, however, and this led the great French chemist, Lavoisier, who had almost reached the same point, to push right through and complete the experiment which Priestley had carried on from the beginning.

That sort of thing does not go on now, and I join with the hon. Member for Watford (Mr. Farey-Jones) in the hope that we shall now be able to get back to the old free trade in science, with each nation publishing the results of the researches of its scientists, but not under Government inspiration; indeed, it must sometimes be even against the inspiration of the theologians.

About a year ago, I read an article in an American newspaper complaining about the continued secrecy in America and asking whether America now hopes to keep the Russians from finding out what they already know. It has been the break-through of Russia in this work which, I think, has led to a worsening rather than an improvement of the situation.

When I was in America in 1958, I was astonished at the state of terror there was about the progress made by the Russians in science. We should try to return to the old scientific approach to the problems of the universe. We should arrange that studies are still pursued by scientists working independently, pushing further back—to use the apt phrase of the Financial Secretary—the frontiers of knowledge. After all, that is what scientific effort really is. It is not confined merely to physics but covers the whole range of human knowledge and is best pursued when people who carry it on do so because of their love of the search for truth, not because it suits a particular Government at a particular time to have something in particular investigated.

I have spoken of the dangers which I foresee. It is not to be thought that I do not welcome the recognition by this Committee and by the people of this country of the great place that scientific research and inquiry ought to have in our life. Only just over 100 years ago, Charles Darwin, as a boy at Shrewsbury, was publicly reproved in front of the whole school because, during the vacation, he had done some chemical experiments in a shed under the direction of his brother. In the same school, where it was the custom to give a whole day's holiday to celebrate a First Class, when the first scientific First Class was obtained, Kennedy, the great headmaster, gave only half a day because, he said, "It is only science."

Those of us who have long opposed the predominance of classics in the universities and in our educational life are, in one way, having our revenge today. But we still make a plea that the scientist shall be instructed in the humanities. We must be quite sure today that the classicist has a nodding acquaintance with the science which will so largely shape the world he is to live in.

I realise that what I have said will be very unsatisfactory to the people who concoct questions like the one concocted by my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North (Mr. Edelman)—the kind of question which leads to controversy which will last at least for the next ten years. I believe that the future of the world depends upon the ability of the scientists of all nations to cooperate in pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. In the time of Priestley and his contemporaries, experiments were conducted with apparatus which would, today, be regarded as too dangerous for use in the science forms of a secondary modern school. It was comparatively inexpensive. Modern scientific research requires apparatus so elaborate and expenditure so great that only large financial corporations and the major States can now conduct it. Both insist upon oaths of secrecy from the people employed in the vital parts of the investigations.

The result is, as the hon. Member for Watford said, that people generally fear the advance of science.

Mr. Peart

No, they do not.

Mr. Ede

Yes, they do. Has my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mr. Peart) never heard anybody complain about what may happen if a hydrogen bomb were dropped anywhere near? There is secrecy, and always the hope that, if it came to a showdown, we should be one jump ahead, but with the haunting dread that, on the day, we may be one jump behind, and, behind it all, the certainty that if everyone jumps together the result will be mutual suicide.

Mr. Basil de Ferranti (Morecambe and Lonsdale)

Surely, this is an affair for the politicians, not an affair for science.

Mr. Ede

I was very careful to say that that is the fear of the ordinary man. I am not talking about the fears of the scientists. I was supporting what was said by the hon. Member for Watford. That is the attitude of the ordinary man about what he regards as the most advanced form of science he has to contemplate.

Secrecy, more than anything else, is the great enemy to the progress of science. It is a hindrance to the scientists themselves. It creates in the minds of people the idea that there is some dreadful secret which cannot be revealed to the ordinary man for fear that he might step in and say, "We will not go on with this at all".

We are to have a Ministry for Science. This is a new kind of name to give to a Ministry in this country. The right hon. Gentleman on the Front Bench at the moment is the Minister of Education, not the Minister for Education. We have a Minister of Agriculture, not a Minister for Agriculture, as was demonstrated at Question Time today. I hope that it will remain the Ministry for Science and that its main aim will be to ensure that scientists are free to conduct their own experiments on their own lines and, when they have conducted them, the results will be available not for a limited few but for the whole of mankind so that we may all step forward with confidence into the atomic and scientific age upon which we have entered, able to exploit it for the general advantage not for national or financial ends. If we can do that, this Ministry will have a great future before it. If it provokes Government-inspired research and hinders everything else, the revolution we are inaugurating today will be a disaster, not a blessing.

5.48 p.m.

Mr. David Price (Eastleigh)

To some of the younger of us here who are connected with science, I think that the remarks of the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) appeared to be somewhat confused. I hope that he will put off for another occasion, since I have only a few minutes, the debate which I should like to have with him about the effect of Darwin upon the fallibility of the earlier chapters of Genesis. It would be an interesting argument, and I should like to indulge in it in syllogistic form according to the proper rules of minor logic, since he took issue with his hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North (Mr. Edelman) on the definitions of words.

Also, with great respect to the right hon. Gentleman, I thought that he was talking absolutely arrant rubbish about the Government's rôle in science. Merely because we are setting up a Department for Science, nobody suggests that my noble Friend, my right hon. Friend the Minister of Education or the whole galaxy of my right hon. Friends together with their "shadows" on the Opposition Front Bench will, in fact, conduct scientific research. Of course not.

But, equally, anyone with any experience of scientific research in the modern mixed economy, which I understand both Front Benches now have nodding approval of in spite of certain objections on the right and left of the Gaussian distribution curve—we can use scientific language—there is a rôle for the Government to promote patronage in science.

I see that the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu) is present. His colleagues and my scientific colleagues compete with each other for Government favour and patronage. Surely there is something perfectly honourable in Government patronage. I am sure that the hon. Member for Coventry, North, who takes such an interest in the fine arts and who is himself an adornment to the House, would never be reluctant to accept Government patronage.

The right hon. Member for South Shields took us back to the early debates between Kingsley and Huxley, and, with great respect to him—this may sound the arrogance of a young man—he used completely anachronistic language. Surely all of us welcome the appointment of a Minister for Science. Surely we all agree that he should be a Minister for Science and not a Minister of Science. If he were a Minister of Science that would suggest that all scientific responsibility came under one Department. Surely everyone in the Committee would agree that every Department should be imbued with the scientific spirit.

As I see it, the rôle of my right hon. and noble Friend is to provide, first, the voice of science in the Cabinet, to give science a friend at court, as it were. That is particularly so when it comes to the duties of my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary as the Estimates are being made up. I have never been privy to it—one sees it only from the outside—but I guess that when a Department makes up its Estimates they are always bigger than the Chancellor of the Exchequer wants to spend on them, and they are then taken back and have to be trimmed.

There are then those autumn conferences with my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary and civil servants whisper in the ear of the Minister which item is the most expendable. That, I suspect, is the item called research. The present Minister will not see the results in his term of office. I wonder whether he cares for his successor that much that he wants to do well by him by having a research programme.

I hope that my right hon. and noble Friend will take the long-term view in the Cabinet when the Estimates are being discussed and will be prepared to say, "No, we will not increase this social service this year, which would make us wildly popular with the Opposition, but we will double, treble, indeed quadruple, our expenditure on fundamental research. We will not this year put up the amount of money being spent on playgrounds, but we will increase the amount being spent on space research. This should eventually result in an economy in which it would be possible to have more playgrounds for our children".

Thirdly, I see the rôle of my noble Friend as that of co-ordinator of Government policy, and hon. Members have, from their particular knowledge, already raised cases of lack of co-ordination. In the short time open to me, I will not list them, but I could list many. Fourthly, I see the rôle of my noble Friend in the nation as the public catalyst for scientific effort. Whether he will be a platinum or some other precious metal catalyst is open to the choice of hon. Members. I hope that my noble Friend will attend international scientific conferences and will speak for the nation at them.

Here, I must utter a word of warning. We do not want a Minister for Science who imagines that by virtue of his office he is a sort of amateur scientist. I hope that in the back rooms of the Cabinet my right hon. and noble Friend is not playing with his Lott's chemistry set. In my view, nothing would be more fatal than if my noble Friend started to interfere technically with scientists in their own sphere. It is within the knowledge of the Committee that in the past we have had, for instance, Secretaries of State for War who have had limited military experience and, therefore, imagined that they were better strategists than the joint chiefs of staff. I hope that my right hon. and noble Friend will not fall into that temptation.

I hope that we shall infuse into the Civil Service an understanding of science. One does not want to go to the other extreme and worship science, but an understanding of science is normal for anyone who aspires to be educated in any sense, just as an ability to speak and write one's own language is a reasonable test of whether one is educated. I hope, for instance, that the appointment of a former Ambassador to Washington to head the Atomic Energy Authority—a proper cross-posting—will be reciprocated by a distinguished scientist, say, from the D.S.I.R., being appointed as Ambassador in Washington.

I hope that my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs will be infused by the enthusiasm of my right hon. and noble Friend and will realise that science is changing our world. There is, for example, the greater speed of communication and the new knowledge that is going round the world. I Feel that our debates in this House on foreign affairs often lack someone who can explain a little about how the world is being changed through science. I do not know whether talking about the scientific influence on international affairs makes me a sort of neo-scientific Marxist, but it is very real.

We should remember in our enthusiasm for science that our new knowledge—and I share the enthusiasm of the right hon. Member for South Shields for new knowledge—is itself neutral. It is neither morally good nor bad. It is only good or had as unchanging human nature makes use of it. That is our rôle in this House and, I believe, the fundamental rôle of my right hon. and noble Friend and of his Cabinet colleague—to ensure that new knowledge is used for the benefit and not the destruction of mankind. When one reflects upon the assaults that both the Russians and the Americans are making upon the vacual virginity of the moon, one may reflect, with Tennyson: Hesper—Venus—were we native to that splendour or in Mars We should see the Globe we groan in, fairest of their evening stars. Could we dream of wars and carnage, craft and madness, lust and spite, Roaring London, raving Paris, in that point of peaceful light?

5.58 p.m.

Mr. Frederick Lee (Newton)

I am sorry that the debate is so short. I understand that some time is needed before 7 o'clock for the putting of certain Votes and that the Minister needs about half an hour to wind up the debate. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) said that the great Shrewsbury headmaster Kennedy once said that he devoted half a day to this subject because it was only science. Someone in the Committee has emulated the late lamented Mr. Kennedy in his appreciation of the importance of this subject.

I think that the debate has revealed two schools of thought on the appointment of a Minister for Science. One school looks upon the creation of this Ministry as a mere hang-over from matters which were discussed during the General Election, in which the party opposite made certain suggestions in its manifesto and it now feels that it is necessary to put on a show to substantiate what it said during that period.

The second school that we have heard today goes to the other extreme. It seems to believe that the issue is so important that the success or failure of the Minister will determine the future success or lack of it of British industry. Plainly, the Prime Minister belongs to the latter school, for so serious was he about the appointment that he thought it necessary to divest the noble Lord of such distracting sidelines as the chairmanship of the Tory Party so that he could concentrate on more scientific matters.

As these things are with the noble Lord, the task of having to answer to titles such as Lord Privy Seal, with its somewhat Gilbert and Sullivan flavour, and, at the same time, present himself as Minister for Science, with its atmosphere of spacemen, automation and all that, will certainly require sensitivity in the noble Lord.

Whether or not the Minister can marry those two somewhat distinctive rôles, my hon. Friends at least will agree with the Prime Minister in his reasoning that to expect the Minister for Science to carry on the alternative rôles of chairman of the Tory Party and Minister for Science would have been too incongruous a version of ancient and modern to have had any chance of ringing a bell in any section of society.

I return to a point which has been much canvassed today concerning the arrangements for answering Questions in the House of Commons. I believe that they are quite unsatisfactory. I mean no disrespect to the Minister of Education when I say that he certainly cannot hope to have the necessary qualifications for answering supplementary questions about atomic energy, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and, to quote the Prime Minister on 3rd November, "general scientific matters". The right hon. Gentleman certainly has a vital rôle of his own to play in connection with the production of scientists, technologists and the like without being expected to be able to reply on detailed matters which are, and should be, purely the concern of the Ministry of Science.

I can well understand that when the Written Question appears on the Order Paper the right hon. Gentleman will be given the Written Answer. When, however, hon. Members want to pursue it in supplementary questions, one cannot believe that the right hon. Gentleman will be sufficiently fortified in his knowledge of these subjects to be able to do justice to hon. Members' supplementary questions. Therefore, I agree with hon. Members, on both sides, who have said that we obviously need representation in the House of Commons from the Department for Science. For my part, I regard it as of sufficient importance to merit a Minister of State in the Commons who can cover the whole matter from a Departmental point of view.

If we consider the position of the power programme, the percentage of coal equivalent, for instance, which will be coming from the Atomic Energy Authority is certain to become an ever-increasing proportion of our power requirements. From a reply which I have received from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Power, I understand that by 1965, upwards of 10 million tons of coal equivalent is expected to be coming from the Atomic Energy Authority. We know that the Minister of Power is excluded from the Cabinet. He will now have to learn from the Minister of Education where he, the Minister of Power, fits in the atomic power programme with his own programme of coal, oil and other power supplies. It would almost seem as if this arrangement is designed more to hide the facts than to let the House of Commons get a good inside knowledge of what is going on.

In addition to the vital and important scientific matters covered by Departmental Ministers, I believe that from now on the House will wish to discuss the application of science to a wide range of industries which cannot be covered in any way by departmental Ministers. This is likely to form the basis of many future debates, which, I hope, will not be as restricted as this one, either by the Motion we are discussing or by the time factor. I should have thought that if the House of Commons was to play the important rôle which it should be playing in creating in the country an atmosphere for the discussion of science, we should have a Minister from the Ministry to answer Questions to us. The task cannot simply be handed out to a Minister who happens to be free to do a sort of sideline for which he has no responsibility. That would be to treat the House in a cavalier manner and to confirm that the Government are merely window-dressing instead of getting down to a real job of work in the application of science.

Again, we learn that the Minister of Education will answer Questions concerning D.S.I.R. One of the vital issues which concerns the House of Commons is the unpublished Report of the D.S.I.R. on the machine tool industry. I quote this as an instance of the type of thing we complain about. Does the Minister of Education really feel that, with his natural concentration upon his own job as Minister of Education, he is in any way qualified to argue with Members who feel strongly about the D.S.I.R. Report on machine tools?

The Prime Minister's job is to adapt governmental institutions to the scientific age. Merely to sprinkle jobs among a veritable gaggle of Ministers, none of whom has any particular responsibility, is utterly inadequate for the nature of the problems which he will now see develop.

It is also the case that the financing of scientific activity, both fundamental and applied—the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Sir A. V. Harvey) made this point earlier—is becoming increasingly dependent upon public money. We should, therefore, as a House of Commons, recall that our main function is to demand detailed accountability wherever the spending of great sums of public money is involved.

In saying that, I do not mean that we should, as a House of Commons, seek to impede the rate of growth of science and technology. Indeed, a clear understanding by all of us, no matter on which side of the House we sit, of the need for urgency may well be the best guarantee of progress in the battles that undoubtedly will come with the Treasury on matters of expenditure of this type. It was rather ominous that the Treasury Minister was asked to open this debate today for the Government.

The Advisory Council on Scientific Policy is to play a more important rôle than hitherto. The Minister said to his Press conference on 21st October: I shall endeavour to rely more than ever upon the A.C.S.P. for generalised advice on question, of scientific policy. My purpose is to make the voice of science coherent and articulate under Government encouragement and in one real sense to make science self-governing under Government inspiration. For this purpose a greater use of A.C.S.P. is inevitable. We must remember that the Advisory Council is a purely advisory body. It has no real powers of its own. It will remain to be seen whether this arrangement of a voluntary body without powers can be effective.

I remind hon. Members that, on a great many occasions, the Advisory Council has been turned down repeatedly by the noble Lord on many of its most important recommendations. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale (Mr. Greenwood), in opening the debate from this side of the Committee, reminded us of the suggestion of the Council that a national scientific reference library should be created and that that has been refused. I should have thought that as an earnest of his intention to treat the Advisory Council more seriously, the Minister for Science would now agree that that recommendation was an important one and would accede to it.

The Minister should also be encouraged in his promise to make greater use of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy in one or two ways. For instance, the report of that body has not really received all the publicity which it deserves. We are agreed on both sides of the Committee that we want the nation to be more scientific-minded about all these things, and I would suggest to the right hon. Gentleman that it would be a good thing if the Minister for Science were to present this report itself to Parliament, either with or without commentary of his own. That would ensure that the advice given by this body to the Government would be brought under general parliamentary review. That would be an encouragement, I think, to the members of the Council who do such a good job of work and give of their time and ability.

That report, if it were presented to us, would form the basis in the House for discussion which at present it is not possible for us to have. I hope, then, that the Minister of Education will say, when he replies to the debate, that the Government will be prepared to look at that proposal so that A.C.S.P. can have sufficient weight in the deliberations of Parliament on these very important matters.

We all know of, and, indeed, on many occasions we have debated, the shortage of scientists and technologists. I realise that the Minister of Education comes to his office with a very considerable job of work to do in creating far more opportunities for young men and women to take education in technology, science, and so on. I hope that he will be able to give us tonight some more information on what the position is at the moment.

However, it is not only a question of the numbers of the scientists and technologists we create. That is important, but it is also important that the rôle they play should not merely be a rôle of duplicating one another's work. We know that the efforts of many of them are wasted by duplication. The New Scientist of 22nd October reported that until recently five separate groups of companies interested in atomic energy carried out concurrently expensive research on the form of a large Calder Hall type of power station; they built five sets of similar apparatus and employed five groups of engineers and scientists to carry out experiments the results of which were similar. The same thing has been happening in electronics. A dozen firms employed a team of scientists to work on a transistor design.

It is not a lot of good for the Minister of Education and his colleagues to succeed in the creation of more scientists and technologists if we are to see them wasted by this rather insane duplication of effort on the same sort of thing.

Sir A. V. Harvey

Surely the hon. Gentleman will agree it is not always wasted effort if more than one group or team of scientists approach a problem, and that progress can come out of competition even in the scientific world.

Mr. Lee

I do not know about that. I stick to my point. In a nation in which, we are all agreed, we have a serious shortage of these people, we cannot go on having five teams duplicating one another's efforts to no particular advantage.

I go further. The noble Lord who is now Minister for Science is a lawyer, and I should have thought that one of the things he ought to have been looking at would have been the patent laws. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) was discussing the question of more liberty in the application of the discoveries of science. If we are to have archaic laws which prohibit the use of scientific developments when we have got them we shall be wasting a very great deal of money in producing scientists who have to work in that kind of difficulty.

I believe that the political philosophy of the Government will be something of a stumbling block in trying to get the relationship between the Government and industry right, a point to which many hon. Gentlemen on both sides of the Committee have called attention. I believe that the Minister must establish the principle that where such large amounts of State money are involved in research we have the right to expect the maximum co-operation not only between industry and Government but between the various segments of industry which are benefiting as a result of the investment by the nation of so much of its money. I believe that the granting of Government contracts must take into account the amount of co-operation we get from industry.

Much has been said about the need for regrouping and the co-ordination of the work by the committees the control of which the noble Lord now has. My hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu) was making the point that we really must not spread ourselves too thinly over too wide a range, and that priorities are needed to ensure that we concentrate on the most important things. I believe we should look at certain industries, some industries whose long-term potential is out of all proportion to their present earning capacity—electronics, for instance, in its application to automation, the precision development of metallurgical and similar processes with atomic energy. These things may take a long while to develop, but I believe they are utterly vital for both our export market, and for application in this country if we are to modernise our industries. The application of electronics to automation presents very great technical and economic and social problems, but technically it requires the progressive redesign of machine tools.

I come back to the vital nature of the report we have not heard of D.S.I.R.— I think that the hon. Gentleman the Member for Macclesfield made this point also—that Britain possesses a very great reservoir of technical skill—I should say, pro rata with population, probably the greatest reservoir of any nation in the world. Unless we are to lose much of that skill, in other words, unless it is to be qualitatively under-employed, we must press ahead with the application of science to such key industries as the ones I have mentioned during the last few minutes. When we look at this reservoir of skilled capacity with which we could lead the world, it is disgraceful that we are dependent in a large degree on imports of these very things.

I think, also, that it would be very useful if we could establish the relationship of the Minister for Science with certain of the other Departments which the Prime Minister mentioned in his statement. Some Departments have their scientific staffs. What power of persuasion or of direction will the Minister have or be able to exercise in the event of disagreement if he feels that the efforts of those other Departments are inadequate? Has he any power to say that he feels that they are rather letting down the scientific effort? Can he do anything about it?

The Advisory Council on Scientific Policy has said: If resources were unlimited it would be possible to have very large programmes in both the defence and civil fields. But, in our view, the resources devoted to civil research and development have been, and still are, far too small for a country whose competitive position in world trade is dependent upon the economic developments of new products and new processes and where the achievements of a rising standard of living must depend mainly on our success in increasing the productivity of the labour force. Has the Minister for Science general oversight over the allocation of scarce resources as between civil and military needs? We know that the Minister of Aviation has a big say in military matters, but has the Minister for Science any ability to intervene in these matters especially, as we say, when this may be a problem of our scarce resources being too heavily tipped in the direction of defence, with the result that other matters are falling behind?

In what way would the Minister for Science seek to influence private industrial investment in research and development? This is the nub of so much that we have been arguing today. We know that industry must go on basing itself upon the results of research and the application of that research to its industrial processes, but, again, I insist that there must be some way in which the Minister may have jurisdiction over such industries and, indeed, the power to suggest that some industries may well be failing the nation in refusing to apply methods which are known to be more modern than the ones which they are now using.

The tenth Annual Report of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy estimated that about half the total number of scientists and engineers engaged on research and development were employed on defence work. Sixty per cent. of expenditure on research and development was on defence. Total expenditure on research and development was £300 million in 1955–56, which was the figure on which I questioned the Financial Secretary. That corresponded with l.6 per cent. of the gross national product compared with 1.5 per cent. in the United States. But industry's own expenditure was only £68.5 million or 0.8 per cent. of industrial output as against American industry's 1.9 per cent.

These figures suggest that there is a great deal to be done with private industry if we are to have a commensurate return for the expenditure now entailed. The aircraft industry has a good record and we are seeing the results of a colossal expenditure of public money in this respect. I have a list of industries which I had intended to mention, but I will not do so now because of the time factor. In the aircraft industry the percentage of net output spent on research and development is 35.1 for every 354 people employed. In textiles, it is 1 per cent.; in vehicle manufacture 1.7 per cent.; in metal manufacture 1.9 per cent., and so on. These figures show a remarkable disparity throughout many British industries.

I believe that a report is pending containing more information about this. but I should be surprised if the proportion of national income devoted to research is more than 1 per cent. whereas in the United States 9,000 million dollars is spent on industrial research, or over 2 per cent. of the national income.

The occasion of this debate may well be a new departure in that we are now acknowledging that we are going into the new scientific age. I should like to feel convinced that the Government are serious in what they are doing in the creation of a Minister for Science. At the moment, I do not condemn, because I do not know. I merely say that as yet there is no reason why we should suppose that the Government are as serious about this problem as are many of us on this side of the Committee. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury, in opening the debate, shied off at once when he found himself discussing the relationship of the Government to private industry. But if we are serious about this, political dogma will have to go. If the Government are serious in saying that we shall place at the disposal of an ever-widening field of private enterprise vast sums of public money, we must have a better way of securing accountability to the House of the manner in which the money is expended.

I have already suggested, as have some of my hon. Friends, that one of the ways would be by having in the House a Minister of State belonging to a Ministry for Science to answer Questions. We should also have a far clearer indication of the priorities which the Government will demand of certain industries. If they give us information on those lines we shall, perhaps, have less suspicion that the Government are merely carrying out half-heartedly one or two things which they said in the General Election they would do.

There can be no doubt of the need for an office of the Minister for Science. It should be one of the senior Departments in any Government from now on. It is so important. If we do not develop to the best of our ability scientific research and all the things that make it possible for a great industrial nation to live in the years through which we are now passing, and if the Government cannot convince us that that is being done, we shall have to come back to this subject in a much more destructively critical manner than has been apparent in the debate. I hope that the Government, having considered what has been said today, will agree with many of the suggestions which my right hon. and hon. Friends have made.

6.27 p.m.

The Minister of Education (Sir David Eccles)

Like the hon. Member for Newton (Mr. Lee), I am very sorry that we have not had more time. I know that there are many hon. Members whose advice on the subject would be very valuable, and I hope that they will get another opportunity. The speeches that they have made fully justify the choice of science as a subject for debate by Members of the Opposition. I think that they have demonstrated more clearly than on any occasion I can recall the concern of the House of Commons that British scientific achievements should be outstanding in a world where every nation has entered the race. If I may say so, all the speeches that I have heard were excellent, but I should like especially to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Mr. D. Price), whose speech had an agreeable trace of the fact, as I understand, that he got engaged to be married today.

Science being so universally desired as a promoter of health and wealth and as a saver of labour, all modern Governments are presented with very difficult problems of policy and administration: in short, how to secure the most effective use of our scientists and the material resources they require, either directly where not one but many Government Departments are the users, or indirectly where the Government can influence the use of scientists by outside agencies and private industry. Surely, it is this use of scarce resources which is the central problem for the new Minister for Science.

My noble Friend, I know, will be most encouraged to learn what great importance this Committee attaches to that problem. Indeed, after this debate he can have no doubt that the House of Commons welcomes the Minister for Science, wishes him well, and is therefore rightly concerned that the Minister in another place should be adequately represented in our Chamber.

It is very easy to understand the public's anxiety about the effectiveness of British science and technology. This is something more than a desire to see that our own standard of life rises as quickly as possible. We wish, too, to be in a position to help others to raise their standards, especially in the under-developed countries. We know very well that it will not be possible to tackle their economic and social problems except by the application of science, that this is the only way to narrow the gap between their way of life and ours. Here in the United Kingdom we may have a population of only 50 million, but we have inherited the honours and the responsibilities of a first-class Power, and we have no reason to resign our place to others provided that our skill and inventiveness are trained and employed to the full.

Therefore, this is a very imporant matter for the Government, as has been recognised on both sides of the Committee, and in the all-pervading realm of thought which we call science it is perhaps useful to divide the Government's responsibilities into two parts. First, there is the supply of scientific manpower. It will always be difficult to answer such questions as, have we enough scientists, technologists, technicians and craftsmen in relation to the other professions and occupations? The hon. Member for Rossendale (Mr. Greenwood) asked me if I thought the target of 20,000 scientists and technologists still stood. We shall have to look at it again, but I am glad to say that there seems to be a good chance that we shall hit the target which we set ourselves. As we get farther on, no doubt we shall be able to revise it upwards.

The hon. Gentleman also asked some questions which perhaps provide a good reason why I should reply to the debate. For instance, he asked whether our education system is giving the right training to future scientists and to other grades of scientific manpower. The hon. Gentleman then asked about the supply of science teachers? We have not enough, but the numbers are improving in the grammar and technical schools. The latest figure for graduates in science entering university departments of education is 865 in the year 1959–60, against 639 two years ago. It is not enough, but at any rate we are moving in the right direction. The secondary modern schools are a great worry, because it is especially difficult to provide them with enough science teachers. But we are going to make a special drive in that direction.

The hon. Gentleman also asked whether we are encouraging science in primary schools. The answer is that we certainly are, and the recent book of suggestions to primary school teachers put out by the Ministry has a passage on the teaching of science. This is a subject which grows out of natural history, and of course a great deal can be done by ensuring that the primary school libraries include books dealing with science which are interesting to young children. The idea is to create in them a curiosity and a desire to inquire into natural causes. This we will do.

Of course, we need more women teachers in science. There again the position is a little better, but not as good as we would like. There is something of a vicious circle here: until we get more teachers of science for the sixth forms in the girls' grammar schools, it is not easy to get girls who will train to become teachers. I am hopeful that little by little this will improve.

Then the hon. Gentleman asked about specialisation in the top classes of secondary schools. I ask him to wait for the Crowther Report, which will deal thoroughly with this subject. I fear that if I gave the hon. Gentleman my views tonight I should be anticipating the Council's recommendations. It is important that the curriculum should not get so jammed with new subjects that we lose the proper balance which ought to exist between the two great disciplines.

In the matter of scientific manpower, my noble Friend will collect and coordinate all the relevant views on these controversial issues. He will then place his conclusions before the education departments, the universities, the other scientific bodies, industry and all others who are concerned in this matter. I have no doubt that this will do us all good. Indeed, speaking as Minister of Education for England and Wales, I shall be very glad indeed when my noble Friend's urgent eloquence is ringing in the ears of my Department and of the local authorities who are responsible for the technical colleges.

The other great sector of scientific policy which concerns the Government, and which has been mentioned in the debate, is how best to use the trained manpower and material resources we have available. Here my noble Friend has a responsibility which is as complex as it is important. He will be in a better position than any other Minister or agency to form estimates of our scientific resources and requirements and therefore he will be a most influential counsellor on how best these resources can be used.

My hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir A. V. Harvey) and other speakers today have said that it is not possible for any one nation, however large and advanced it may be, to pursue all possible lines in research and development. For instance, in Russia one finds that the gaps in Soviet production of civilian goods are just as obvious as the successes they have scored in the field of defence. In the United Kingdom we may think that our priorities are better balanced than they are in Russia, but at the same time we are bound to be in front in one direction and behind in another. We have a noble tradition of academic freedom which perhaps gives a somewhat haphazard appearance to the great achievement we have made in pure science and research.

The Liberal Party is not represented here this afternoon, but I thought the right hon. Gentleman the Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) amply stood in its shoes and gave us an excellent and heart-warming speech on the value of academic freedom. We also have a strong belief in freedom of choice for the individual consumer, and that determines to a great extent how much of the application of science shall go to one industry or another. In the export field, it is essential to produce the goods which our overseas customers want to buy.

My noble Friend cannot therefore be a Minister "of" Science; he is not going to give directions where freedom to educate, and freedom to buy and sell, has given such great strength to our economy, on which we must rely as a great exporting nation. He is a Minister "for" Science, by which it should be understood that co-ordination, encouragement and assistance will be the methods he will use. At the same time he has at his elbow a wide variety of agencies through which he can make the influence of the Government felt in the choice of projects for scientific investigation and research. For example, my noble Friend is responsible for the Atomic Energy Authority and for the four great research councils which between them, as the Financial Secretary told the Committee, control the spending of a great deal of public money.

The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, to which reference was made, gives larger numbers of research grants; I think it has made 289 awards this year, to the value of £2¾ million. The D.S.I.R., as well as the N.R.D.C., give development grants. Certainly we have no objection on principle to these agencies giving help in this way. I doubt whether our computers would be as far on as they are if development contracts had not been given by the National Research and Development Corporation.

Research contracts were specially mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham (Mr. Carr), and some hon. Members have asked about the provision of more money for research students. I think that the Government agencies give such grants already. It is a matter of the total funds at their disposal, and the way in which they use them. However, I will bring that point to the attention of my noble Friend.

Mrs. Eirene White (Flint, East)

Can the right hon. Gentleman confirm that in the last year the National Research Development Corporation spent less than £250,000 on development contracts? Is that anything like adequate?

Sir D. Eccles

I saw the work of the Corporation a great deal when I was at the Board of Trade, because it comes under that Department. There has been a slight change in its organisation and it was considering which way to go, but it was given more money by this House and it is now in a position to take on further work. It has practically spent up to the hilt of its previous allocation. The N.R.D.C. and the D.S.I.R. have a joint committee, so that there is no duplication in their work.

There is also the A.C.S.P., to which the hon. Member for Newton referred. Its report is presented to Parliament each year, and one will be presented within a very few days now.

I should like particularly to say a word about the Atomic Energy Authority, because it was mentioned once or twice. At the present time the two main tasks of the Atomic Energy Authority are the development of atomic warheads and the development of reactors for power production. The first is carried out for the Ministry of Aviation and concerns defence and foreign policy. The second brings in a whole number of Departments—the Ministry of Power for electricity, the Ministry of Transport for merchant shipping and the Admiralty for submarines.

The development of these reactors is now so recondite and expensive that it has become an international business, and we in our programme must pay attention, since we are a nation that lives by trade, to the commercial prospects of reactors. That is why we are still waiting to be told by the scientists which form of marine reactor is most likely to be a commercial success.

What I have said about the Atomic Energy Authority shows that the work of the Minister for Science embraces the activities of various Departments. It is therefore a considerable administrative problem to relate my noble Friend's responsibilities to the day-to-day work of the other Departments and also to represent them adequately in the House. I will return to the latter point in a moment after saying a word about another subject which was raised, namely, what my noble Friend intends to do in order to stimulate research in private industry.

I suppose that in that field there is a rough division between industries which are dominated by a few big firms and industries in which the units are many and, on average, small. The aviation industry, the chemical industry and the heavy electrical engineering industry have giant units and very good departments of research and development. On the other hand, we have industries—major industries like agriculture and building—which have never done very much research and where the Government have had to put up most of the money. In the middle we have manufacturing industry, where the pattern is very varied. We have some firms like the Rolls Royce Company, which has no equal in the world in the research and development which it carries out.

At the other end of engineering, we have many thousands of small firms who have neither the manpower nor the cash to do much research. There are also industries such as the machine tool industry where some units are large but where there is a widespread feeling that not enough research has been done.

The machine tool industry has been mentioned, and I should therefore like to explain what is going on. It is commonly said that not enough research is being done. No detailed charges have been laid, but the criticism was very insistent, so the first thing was to find out the facts. The D.S.I.R. was therefore asked to make an inquiry. If the information which it wished to gain was to be complete, it obviously had to be confidential. Accordingly, it secured the full co-operation of forty of the leading firms in the machine tool industry by letting them know that the report of its inquiry would not be published. I know that this does not satisfy some hon. Gentlemen opposite. They would like to have the report published in order to see where, and to what extent, the industry had been backward.

However, that misses the point of our inquiry. Our inquiry was set up so that a Government agency might help the industry by making useful recommendations designed to score further successes in the home market and in exports. We are not interested in just revealing the failures of the past. We are interested in finding out how to do better in the future.

Mr. J. T. Price (Westhoughton)

That does not seem to be a very scientific approach to the question. If we are dealing with science, let us talk in terms of science. If one makes an inquiry about anything, it is obviously an attempt to get at the truth, and if we cannot know what the truth is, how can we make recommendations for improving the situation in the future? Many of us on this side of the Committee are very dissatisfied about the Government's attitude to the machine tool industry.

Sir D. Eccles

When dealing with an individual industry, the information can best be obtained confidentially, since it is necessary to have their co-operation afterwards to put things right. If what hon. Members are interested in is simply putting an industry in the dock, that is something different, and it is not what we were after. The report is now being discussed with the industry, and I can assure the Committee that action is likely to follow.

Mr. Lee

Is not the case rather that because no report has been issued the suspicion is that the report must be bad? If a report could be issued, the right hon. Gentleman might remove that suspicion.

Sir D. Eccles

I hope that hon. Gentlemen opposite will take it from me that the information was collected on an undertaking that it would not be published. If that undertaking had not been given, nothing like so much information would have been collected.

My noble Friend has the D.S.I.R. at his hand in order to discover other gaps where they exist in industry, and he will do this. As the hon. Member for Edmonton said, we are fortunate that Professor Carter has accepted a post on the D.S.I.R. Council. He is a professional economist. He is now, therefore, in charge of the Economic Committee in place of Professor Austin Robinson, and we very much look forward to the results of his work.

I have tried to give some idea of the range of the new Minister's responsibilities. How, then, are these activities, which directly affect so many Departments, to be adequately represented in this House? Almost every Department of State has something to do with science. I mention only the outstanding examples—Defence, Aviation, Board of Trade, Transport. Power. Agriculture, Health and Education.

It seemed to be for the convenience of hon. Members that where a Parliamentary question addressed to the Minister for Science directly concerned a particular Minister, that Minister should give the answer—in other words, the Minister of Aviation for atomic weapons, the Minister of Transport for reactors in merchant ships, the Minister of Power for the electricity programme, and the Minister of Health for all the relations between science and health and so on—and that for matters not clearly the concern of a particular Department the Minister of Education should generally represent the Minister for Science.

I think that the Prime Minister had in mind three reasons for selecting the Minister of Education for this residual duty. The first was that he thought that the House of Commons would wish a member of the Cabinet to represent the Minister for Science. Secondly, my Ministry is responsible for the schools and technical colleges. As we have heard in the debate today in questions addressed to me from the benches opposite, this is a very important part of the whole field of science. Thirdly, when I was Minister of Works, I represented Lord Salisbury, who was then Lord President of the Council and I answered for atomic energy. In those days I had more to answer because it was before the Atomic Energy Authority was set up. I was also answering for the D.S.I.R. and on other scientific questions.

I fully realise that it is a very difficult job to master the business of the Minister for Science and that I may appear to be inadequate. All I can say to the Committee is that I will do my best. I am quite sure that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will study all that has been said in the debate today about the representation of the Minister for Science in this House. It is certainly his desire to provide the House with the best possible means of being apprised of the actions and policies of my noble Friend. I am sure that it will be a great satisfaction to the Prime Minister and my noble Fried to learn from this debate how important the Committee feels the appointment of the new Minister to be. In fact, I think that it has been generally agreed that he has been entrusted with a task of the greatest national importance. I do not think that some of the remarks about my noble Friend will ring very true. I certainly do not think that he is likely to creep—I have watched him for a long time—or to be the subject of window-dressing. I think that my noble Friend can be trusted to act in a vigorous manner.

I hope that the debate has shown that the appointment of a Minister for Science has inevitably created some very awkward administrative problems for the Government. That is inescapable because science is so pervading. None the less, I think that the Committee will agree that administrative difficulties can nearly always be settled with good will and solutions found for all conundrums of interdepartmental responsibility. That we must try to do, and we certainly intend that the new Minister should succeed in his difficult but important task.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved. That a sum, not exceeding £4,080, be granted to Her Majesty, to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1960, for the salaries and expenses of the Office of the Minister for Science.