Daresbury (Nuclear Structure Facilities) (Hansard, 11 December 1991)

§ Mr. Chris Butler (Warrington, South)

The former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Finchley (Mrs. Thatcher), visited the Daresbury laboratory in July 1990. Afterwards, she wrote: It was clear that the Laboratory is at the frontiers of research in several fundamental areas, and I do hope that this will receive the international recognition it deserves. Little did she know that, within a few months, the Government—not hers—would rip the heart out of that laboratory by closing the nuclear structure facility, which President Bush's scientific adviser called an absolute leader in nuclear physics. Even Sir Mark Richmond, the axeman himself, called the NSF "a world class facility".

In 1991 prices, the NSF cost £40 million to build. The manpower costs were £70 million and, since 1982, the operating costs are £65 million. The linear acceleratorLINAC—cost a further £3.7 million, making the total taxpayers' investment in the facility £179 million.

Months after the closure decision, the Science and Engineering Research Council issued a report showing how that investment would pay off, but, strangely, the report assumed that the NSF would continue to operate. I suspect that somebody in SERC has a very red face. It was issued in June 1991 and said: The main element in the plan is to maintain the … NSF at the forefront of low-energy nuclear physics worldwide … The NSF has a clear place in the plans of the Nuclear Structure Committee over the next seven to eight years and Daresbury will play a pivotal role in co-ordinating and organising the efforts of the UK community … The mix of people needed may change but they will continue to play an essential part in the UK's programme of nuclear physics research. In November 1990, Sir Mark Richmond opened and commissioned the LINAC with flattering words. Only months later, in February 1991, he announced the possible closure of the NSF. The LINAC was unused and will remain unused. Can it be the same man who is committed to honesty and integrity in public life?

On 8 February, my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Howarth) answered a written question from me, saying: As part of a review of all its future activities, the council decided on 6 February to make plans for the possible closure of the nuclear structure facility. To assist its further consideration of this issue"— that is, possible closure— the council is establishing a study to assess the importance of the nuclear structure science in the context of the council's work as a whole."—[Official Report, 8 February 1991; Vol. 185, c. 257.] Those reporting on the issue—me, the staff at Daresbury and the Institute of Physics—all assumed that that would mean that the NSF would gain a peer review. That would have been the normal scientific practice and the just way to proceed, for a condemned facility—like a condemned man—deserves to be heard. But that promise was broken. Not only was there no peer review, but there was no review of the possibility of keeping the NSF open. Perhaps the authorities feared the result of such a review, but that is not an ethical way to conduct public life.

A review was set up—the Fender committee—whose remit was to consider support for nuclear physics in the 970 light of the closure of the NFS. Herman Feshbach of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was on the committee, said: To make such a decision and follow it up with a review seems a peculiar way of doing business. That is true.

On 24 March 1991, the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology said: It is incomprehensible to us that a whole area of United Kingdom Science should have to be precipitately abandoned as part of a series of crisis measures and we roundly condemn the practices and policies which have put so much at risk—whatever the excuse. On 2 June 1991, giving evidence to the Fender committee, Sir Michael Atiyah, president of the Royal Society, said: There appears to have been little attempt to assess the case for closing NSF against closing some other SERC facility or reducing staff numbers in the (SERC) establishments. No comparison has been made of value-for-money produced by the NSF as opposed to other expensive facilities. As it is, the decision to close the NSF comes across as somewhat arbitrary and high-handed. On 7 July 1991, Fender reported—he broke his remit to criticise the closure decision: Panel members are struck by the widespread international criticism of this decision and the share planning notice given to the community. The panel sympathises with these comments. Feshbach went a little further, and said: There is, in my opinion, no financial constraint that requires the closure of the Nuclear Structure Facility … This is an example of egregious mismanagement … To shut down this successful and relatively inexpensive facility, with its admirable past record and exciting future promise, cannot be justified". Fender recommended that £3.7 million per annum should be added to the nuclear physics programme in order to make it credible. That amount would be enough to continue funding the NSF. Perhaps that is why SERC decided not to accept the verdict of its own committee. It might have been embarrassed at the thought that it had closed a first-class British facility years ahead of its productive life, and may have made no savings and transferred abroad a compartment of excellent British science.

What savings are there likely to be? If the LINAC is not to be thrown away, it will cost £1 million to move, 155 people will be made redundant costing £5 million in redundancy payments, and, as a result, there will be on-going costs of £1 million per year in pension enhancements. If the redundancies had been phased, it would have been possible to save quite a lot of money through the transfer of personnel to other facilities and natural wastage.

The NSF bears a significant share of the overheads of Daresbury laboratory, and £1 million extra per year will have to be shared by the rest of the laboratory facilities. Postgraduates and scientists who use the facility at present will have to be sent abroad, at an extra cost of £600,000 a year. The premature dismantling of the NSF will cost £2 million. That cost would have come eventually, but bringing it forward is a cost in itself. Therefore, we face £8 million of one-off costs of decommissioning, plus extra annual costs of £2.6 million. That underlines the scandal of the misuse of the taxpayer's investment of £179 million. We are being charged for wasting that investment—£8 million up front and £2.6 million per annum thereafter.

The cost of closure could be even higher if the Europeans start to charge for access to their facilities, A 1991 booklet called "An introduction to Daresbury 971 laboratory" mentions a quid pro quo by which foreign scientists would use our facility in exchange for the use of overseas accelerators by United Kingdom scientists. That quid pro quo will have gone. We will be unable to exchange access facilities, because we will not have a facility to extend. This country will continue to expect free access abroad, but I understand that we intend to start charging foreign scientists for access to facilities in other areas of science. The German Ministry of Research and Technology has protested that that breaks the unwritten rules of the scientific community.

If we are forced to pay, there may be no savings at all from this closure. The Minister may say that he will not interfere in the decision of his quango. He may say that he is there to uphold the arm's-length principle. The House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology would disagree. It said: Research councils are now being asked to make choices which are too big to be left to councils alone without political guidance. Ministers should not use the arm's-length principle as an escape clause from their stewardship of public money. In the face of a decision to close years ahead of schedule for paltry real savings a facility in which the taxpayer has invested £179 million and virtually to abolish a whole compartment of world class science in the United Kingdom and saying, "It is not my fault, guy," lacks a certain credibility. I wonder what the Public Accounts Committee will think of that.

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mr. Alan Howarth)

I have listened very carefully to my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington, South (Mr. Butler). He has raised for debate a subject in which, I know, he has been closely involved for many months and on which he has been strenuous in representing the interests of his constituents who work at the Daresbury laboratory.

I was grateful to my hon. Friend for joining me during my visit to the Daresbury laboratory earlier in the year. As well as seeing the nuclear structure facility, the subject of this debate, and talking to some of the staff involved, we visited the synchrotron radiation source and heard about the work of the central computer facility, which are also based at the laboratory. My hon. Friend is right to be proud of the science at Daresbury.

It is right that an hon. Member should make the best possible case for the interests of his constituents. However, the decision by the Science and Engineering Research Council to close the nuclear structure facility at Daresbury in order to concentrate on other areas of scientific research is not one in which it would be right for me or my colleagues in Government to intervene. My hon. Friend has persistently sought, as in this debate, to persuade us to do so, and I have repeatedly explained to him why it would be improper for us to do so.

I shall come to the specific points that my hon. Friend raises in a moment, but first it is important to set this decision in the context of the way in which we organise public expenditure on basic science. I will do so very briefly, as the general principles are well known to the House.

972 Governments of both political complexions have long adhered to the arm's-length principle for public expenditure on science. There is, I think, no serious quarrel that that is the best way to reconcile two considerations: that if basic scientific research is to be done, the taxpayer must make a significant contribution to the cost of it; and the principle that the people best placed to judge how to spend public money for science are the scientists themselves, not the Government. That is why we have research councils, and why my right hon. and learned Friend appoints people of the highest calibre to those councils to make the expert judgments that they do.

I very much regret that my hon. Friend has chosen to cast aspersions on the competence and integrity of Sir Mark Richmond and his colleagues on the council. Such aspersions are wholly unjustified and I hope that my hon. Friend will withdraw them. Moreover, no one could be a more determined advocate for science than Sir Mark, and my hon. Friend would do well to recognise that.

As my hon. Friend knows, I made a point of meeting and hearing the views of, nuclear structure scientists and others who wanted to put their concerns to me. He will recall a meeting in which he introduced me to Professor Twin of Liverpool university. It is right that, as Minister, I should listen to and understand the concerns of scientists and I was pleased to respond to his suggestion.

The decisions that research councils are called on to take are by no means easy ones. In the end, they come down to questions of priorities and this in turn depends on questions of scientific judgments. Science is not, of course, unique in this. In many areas of public provision, we have to ask not only, "Would expenditure on this project in itself be good?" but, "Is this particular project of higher priority than the various other projects in competition with it?" Those who take these decisions, and take them courageously, deserve our respect and support.

In the case of science, there is the added complication that the priorities change over time as new areas of research open up. The more successful we are in science, the less feasible it becomes to support all the work that is possible. That is as true in Japan and the United States and the other leading scientific nations as it is in the United Kingdom. It would be true whatever the level of funding provided.

It is for this reason that the research councils need to take a radical look at their forward programmes from time to time and make a careful reassessment of them against a background of changing scientific opportunities. This is what the Science and Engineering Research Council, under its chairman, Sir Mark Richmond, has been engaged in over the past 12 months or so. I fully support it in this. It has meant some tough decision making and has, inevitably, caused some controversy. I understand that and, equally, I understand the disappointment felt by those whose work is affected. They are entitled to argue strongly for the importance of their areas of research. I would not expect anything else.

Let me move on to the particular case of the nuclear structure facility and some of the points that my hon. Friend made. There are two closely related issues here. First, there is the maintenance by the SERC of a significant piece of scientific equipment—the nuclear structure facility at Daresbury laboratory—used by United Kingdom and also by foreign nuclear structure physics researchers. Secondly, there is the funding by the 973 SERC of programmes of research into nuclear structure physics which, in the absence of the facility at Daresbury, would depend on the use of equipment elsewhere.

The SERC concluded, as part of the wide-ranging review that I have mentioned, that the facility should be closed in 1993, which is earlier than had previously been envisaged. That gave a period of 18 months or so for the rundown to be achieved in an orderly manner. It also, as my hon. Friend will know, allows the SERC to fulfil its agreement with France to develop and run the Eurogam detector in its first stage. That is a gamma ray detection instrument which will operate at Daresbury before moving to the new facility that the French are building at Strasbourg.

My hon. Friend referred to the review of nuclear structure physics commissioned by the SERC from a panel under the chairmanship of Professor Brian Fender, vice-chancellor of Keele university. The purpose of that review was to help the council to reach decisions on the scale of support for nuclear structure physics after the closure of the nuclear structure facility.

My hon. Friend has argued before, and continues to hold the view, that, in setting up this review in the way that it did, the SERC went back on an earlier undertaking to review this area of physics before making a final decision on whether to close the facility. I have checked with the SERC on this and that is not the case. I can only agree that there was indeed some misunderstanding about this at the time; but the SERC clarified the position in a press release of 13 March announcing Professor Fender's review; and indeed Sir Mark Richmond made the position quite clear in a letter in the New Scientist of 27 April responding to one from my hon. Friend. As my hon. Friend has raised the issue again tonight, I must ask him to accept that, while there was some confusion about that at the time, there was no bad faith on the part of the SERC as he has implied.

As I said, the purpose of the Fender review was to inform the discussion within the SERC about the appropriate level of support for that area of science after the closure of the nuclear structure facility. The review 974 made a number of recommendations to the council about what sort of programme would be possible and desirable in the new situation, and the cost.

What such a review did not and could not realistically do, given that it was essentially looking at one area of science, was to make the strategic judgments involved in balancing the importance of nuclear structure physics against other research priorities. That decision had to he for the council itself to make.

The SERC has now considered the Fender recommendations. With the agreement of the chairman of the SERC, I can tell the House that the council has decided to fund a nuclear structure physics programme at a level of some £4 million a year from the financial year 1993–94 through to the end of the current planning period. The SERC will be providing further details of the programme in due course.

My hon. Friend has been critical this evening of the SERC's decisions on the nuclear structure facility. I hope that what I have said will show that here we have a research council doing what it is inescapably necessary to do from time to time and concluding that an area of science now has a lower relative priority than it had in t he past and that it does not believe that the costs of maintaining a particular facility are justifiable when set against the alternative scientific programmes forgone.

The SERC is currently spending some £8 to £9 million a year on nuclear physics and will continue to do so until the closure of the facility in 1993. There will of course be transitional costs associated with the closure itself, as my hon. Friend rightly says. Those include the decommissioning of the facility and possibly some redundancy payments, although the SERC is committed to making every effort to keep compulsory redundancy to the minimum. Beyond that, the SERC will in future be spending some £4 million a year on this subject, with £5 million a year released to other areas of science.

The decisions have undoubtedly been difficult, but they have been based upon scientific judgments and taken by those best placed to take them.