TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

HL Deb 02 December 1964 vol 261 cc1097-176

3.5 p.m.

LORD TODD rose to call attention to the state of technological development in relation to the universities and to industry; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, perhaps I might begin by explaining what I mean by "technology", a word that has been applied with a great number of different meanings. To-day I want to use the word "technology" in what I would call the modern sense; that is to say, I am speaking of the application of the scientific method and the results of scientific research to the solution of industrial problems. The term "technology", as I am going to use it, covers, of course, applied science in general, and in particular it includes engineering. I would ask your Lordships to note at the outset that in certain of its aspects at least it is not, save in its economic objectives, clearly distinguishable from what generally passes for pure science or pure scientific research.

The fact is that in the world to-day a country lives by its technology, by its success in translating the results of scientific research through design and manufacture into products which we can sell in the face of increasingly severe international competition. This is particularly so in a country like our own, which is small in area, which is overpopulated and which has not much in the way of natural resources. We simply cannot live by happily exporting the crops which we grow in our soil or the minerals which happen to lie underneath the soil. Indeed, the situation is rather similar to one which I found myself discussing with the late Sir Henry Tizard just after the war, when he said to me, "We have not got money, so we shall just have to use our brains".

The trouble is that we have not used our brains enough, for technological backwardness is still far too common in many areas of industry in this country. We have to realise that we can keep our place as an industrial Power only by continued technological innovation. I agree that matters are better than they were a few years ago, but the rate of improvement, to my mind, is far too slow. This is a matter in which time is very definitely not on our side. Some other countries seem to innovate more rapidly and more frequently than we do; and one can get witness of that in the remarkable rise in industrial productivity in such countries as Western Germany and Japan. Why is this so, and what can we do about it? These are the questions that I hope we are going to discuss this afternoon.

In speaking about innovation in industry, I know full well, as do other noble Lords, that the barriers to technological innovation in industry are not by any means all scientific or technological: many of the most important are financial or social barriers. Innovation involves capital risk, and firms are not likely to venture their capital without at least reasonable prospect of an adequate return in the relatively short term. Again, innovation is liable to involve what can be awkward change for the individual. Particularly in the old-established, craft-based industries, innovation may affect the internal hierarchy of skills in the industry. It may also affect local social patterns; and for these reasons one finds that it tends to be opposed by workers and management alike. It also calls for first-class management—a matter that has recently been discussed in your Lordships' House, on a Motion introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Alport, when new plans for managerial education were under review.

On that subject, beyond stating that I think management education is important, I will say nothing except that I very much agree with the remarks made at the time by my noble friend Lord Bowden: that we must be very careful, in trying to develop managerial education, that we do not think we can simply lift an institution from the United States or any other country, dump it over here, and expect to get the same results as have been obtained by that institution in the country of its origin. But, in the last analysis, since innovation depends on the application of new or existing scientific knowledge, it seems to me quite obvious that a strong and continuing research and development effort in industry is a necessary prerequisite to it.

Examples of the way in which a continued effort pays off can be seen if one looks at those industries, for example, the chemical industry, or the electronics industry, in which the maintenance of a considerable research and development effort is common. These industries—one might call them the modern, science-based industries—are, of course, industries which live by innovation and are usually thoroughly alert to the possibilities in this respect. It is characteristic of these industries that they have for the most part grown up alongside, and in intimate contact with, the science on which they rest. What is more, they usually have a very strong technical element in their management.

I would not say that everything is perfect in this group of industries. There are still in it firms that ought to do more research and development than they do; some of them are inclined to rest a little too easily on defence contracts. But still, by and large, they are alert to possibilities. Trouble arises in them now and again, of course, when a situation arises in which existing knowledge suggests a possibility of a major advance, possibly in the rather long term, but where to undertake the work necessary would be beyond the resources of, or perhaps too great a capital risk for, any one firm in the industry; or in some cases, as for example the development of new methods of power generation, possibly even for a combination of firms within the industry. In cases like that, I believe that a very good case can be made for Government intervention, because in the national interest the Government can, or ought to, take a longer view of matters than an individual firm can.

It was as far back as 1953 that the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy first proposed the use of development con- tracts in civil industry, yet not very much has happened. To date, the amount that has been done in the way of development contracts in civil industry is small; the sums involved are not large, and there are not many cases. One begins to wonder whether this really is the answer, or whether the trouble is merely that the idea has not been pursued vigorously enough. Similarly, the National Research Development Corporation, which was expected to have a considerable part to play in technological development in industry, has worked extremely hard, but I would not say that it has made an enormous impact.

I was very pleased to see, in a statement made in the other place last week, that the Ministry of Technology and the Government at large propose to make a vigorous effort in the direction of improving technology in industry. But I hope that they have some more ideas than simply development contracts with the National Research Development Corporation. I have for years pushed the idea that it would be well worth while making the experiment, in cases of the type I have mentioned, of the Government taking a share in the equity of an industry: they might, say, form a joint company in which the Government were responsible, as well as the industry itself, for part of the fixed assets. I hope that I am correct in assuming, from a reply made in another place by the Prime Minister yesterday in response to a question, that some such idea is indeed in the Government's mind. I believe that it would be well worth while taking a chance, at least, and trying one or two experiments on this principle of sharing the equity.

The toughest problem, of course, so far as industry is concerned, is not presented by these science-based industries; it is presented by what I call the mature or traditional industries of this country—industries like textiles, shipbuilding, construction, metal shaping, cutting and so on. These are in general, of course, craft-based industries, and in their growth science has played, and I am afraid still is playing, very little part. It is true that there are regular small innovations in these industries, but it is rather striking that where major innovation has occurred in them it has usually come through force majeure from outside, or by actual invasion of the traditional industry by a new science-based industry. The trouble with these industries is that, speaking generally, their management is scientifically weak, and to my mind they employ far too few graduates in research and development. In my view, what we need in a good many of our traditional industries, is a little less emphasis on the shop floor and a little more on the back room. I think that, unless there are very great changes in this respect, they do not have very much future.

How are we going to deal with these industries? Simple development contracts will not get us very far, because as they stand now a good number of the firms in these industries would not be capable of operating a development contract, owing to the fact that they have not the technical strength to do it. I would suggest that we make a very considerable push in the research association movement. I think the idea of the industrial research association is good. We have examples of research associations that have done extremely well, just as we have examples of some that have not done so well. But I think that if the idea were revitalised and pushed forward vigorously it could do something.

For example, the tendency to strive year by year to reduce the Government's contribution to these research associations is not a very good thing. It tends to put them too much at the mercy of the individual firms in the industry which may be rated, at any rate to a considerable extent, as backward. I should like to see these associations built up and given the job of really driving into industry. And when I say "really driving into industry", I am thinking, in particular, of the fact that it must be the object of any industrial research association to get research and development into the individual firms. You cannot get by on research at the centre; it must be done on the periphery. If research associations cannot persuade individual firms in their industries to do research and development themselves, then I believe they will have failed completely.

There is just one final point that I would make about technological development in industry. When I look at the pattern of British industry to-day, what do I see? I see a hard core of old-established, craft-based industries, most of them considerably developed about the time of the first Industrial Revolution early last century, and I see that core overlaid by a motley jumble of newer industries of every type. There is no evidence of conscious planning about the industrial pattern, although I think it is perfectly clear that in a country of our size and resources some conscious planning of our technological effort is necessary. We cannot possibly compete with other countries larger and wealthier than us in every conceivable sphere of activity. If we do, the only result will he that we shall spread our effort thinly all over the place and achieve nothing at all. Surely, we ought to concentrate on really developing those industries where there is a high content of technological skill. In such industries I believe that we can compete easily with the big battalions and we can ensure success. This problem of industrial priorities really is important, and it is high time that we were beginning to think about it; in fact, we need to do more than think about it—we must do something about it.

I was interested when I saw the statement made in another place last week about the Ministry of Technology. After giving a list of ways in which things ought to be done, it was stated, I think towards the end, that a study would be made of those industries suitable for action. I hope that the Ministry of Technology will have the courage to select some industries as suitable for inaction, because I do not believe it is any use, from the point of view of the country, propping up industries that have no real future. On the industrial side of the problem I will say no more. Other noble Lords who are here will speak with more authority on this subject of technology in industry, and with much more practical experience. But one thing is pretty sure: nothing at all is going to happen in industry unless we can provide ourselves with enough scientists and technologists, adequate both in numbers and in quality, to see the job through. This is a problem of education which concerns primarily the universities, but not only the universities; it concerns industry as well.

How does our technological manpower situation look from the standpoint of the much-vaunted 4 per cent. annual increase in productivity? Not too good, I am afraid. The last Report of the Committee on Scientific Manpower, published in 1963, is, to say the least of it, disturbing. I think I am correct in saying that, if the proposals made in the Robbins Report are implemented, the number of university places available in technology is expected to double by around 1970. But even if we allow for the difficulty of making accurate estimates for future demand in manpower, it is still clear from the figures presented by the Committee on Scientific Manpower that there is going to be a very serious shortfall, and particularly in electrical and mechanical engineers.

The situation may even be worse than it looks now, because we should remember that last year there were about 400 unfilled places in technology in the universities and the colleges of advanced technology in this country; and, although final figures are not yet available, I believe it is true that there are unfilled places again this year. My Lords, it is not much good doubling our university places if we do not fill them. On top of this, there is the trouble that there is good evidence to show that the quality of university entrants in technology is, on average, rather lower than the quality of entrants into pure science. Apparently not enough of the brightest children want to study technology; and I am told that, at the same time, study of the arts in the universities is flourishing like the green bay tree.

Somehow or other technology seems to have a pretty poor public image, and something must be done about this if we are going to meet our manpower needs. It is in many ways odd that technology lacks attraction to the young because its study involves just as severe an intellectual discipline as that of pure science. In some ways its study is even more demanding, because, in a way, it is an art as well as a science, and its study involves objectives that bring into consideration economics and human relations—things which are of no moment in pure science at all. One would have thought it should be an exciting study, and that it should lead to a fascinating career, and yet it does not seem to be so in the eyes of the young. The reasons for this, of course, are many and complex. There is a kind ingrained social attitude in the country which thinks of industry as inferior to the professions as a career—and we all know that one of the most difficult and slowest things to change is social attitude.

However, I think that we do not help in the changing of this social attitude by the nomenclature which we employ. I think the application of the term "engineer" to cover everybody from a garage hand to a research technologist does not help matters very much; and I would also say that the use of the term "apprenticeship" to cover the period that a university graduate spends initially in industry certainly does not help to make engineering more attractive to a young man entering university studies. Some say that the trouble lies in the schools, where the children are not encouraged enough to go into technology. I suppose it is true that schoolmasters may often fail to point out as much as they should the technological implications of the science that they are teaching, but I do not believe that very much good would come of increasing the teaching of technology in schools. You cannot apply science until you have some science to apply, so I think the primary job in the schools will remain to teach science.

Quite apart from what the schoolmasters may do in this connection, I think the public media of communication in this country could do a lot more than they have done in the past—the radio, the Press, the television. At present far too often these organisms tend to concentrate on science. They "glamorise" scientific achievements, even going so far as to parade as triumphs of science things such as space ventures, which are essentially triumphs of technology. But the universities themselves are far from blameless in this matter. In too many of them engineering is still a little bit of a poor relation. I believe, too, that there are many young men who begin to find their interest turning to technology during their period at university, and that if it were made, in general, much more easy for a young man who has started in pure science to change over to technology during his course, without trouble and without loss of time, one would find a great many more men doing it. I know the possibility of so doing exists in some places, but in general it is not by any means so easy as it ought to be.

Something else which I think is perhaps equally important, if not more important, is this. Far too little attention has been paid to the development of really strong research schools in technological departments in the universities, and I believe that, until there are such strong research schools generally, technology will continue to lag behind science in its attractiveness. Because it must be remembered that part of the attraction to the young man of the study of a science like, say, my own subject, chemistry, is the glamour of the research which he visibly sees is going on in it and the ready appreciation of the way in which that research influences the development of chemical industry. One must realise that research activity has a glamour, and that is part of the reason for young men following up a subject.

Surely here is something in which the universities, industry and Government can really get together. I would hope that Government, for example, might farm out some really important research to universities, rather than try to pursue it in Government research stations. Government research stations are all very well, but I do not think one should underestimate the Let that if you put out to universities really worthwhile research in the technological field, not only will you attract more people into technology but you might even get the research done a bit better. I say that because I think that what you miss in a Government establishment and what you do not miss in a university is the priceless benefit of having a continued flow of young, fresh minds coming on to a subject—young, fresh minds full of ideas. Some of them are bad ideas, no doubt, but some of them are extremely good; and, on the whole, they will produce more good ideas than much older people will.

So I think Government ought to try to do this, and I think industry itself could help by doing something on these lines. Action of this type, as we know, has paid big dividends in America, and I do not see why it should not do so here. I do not think there is any need to fear that it would necessarily be car- ried to the point at which this contract work—because this is what it would be—would interfere with the basic freedom of universities to pursue research in any direction that they wished. Of course, to do this means that we have got to go a little further in getting the universities and industry together. It means some further lessening of the "ivory tower" attitude in the universities, and, equally, a lessening of the anti-academic attitude which prevails in too many circles in industry. This is a subject in which I know my noble friend Lord Bowden is interested, and I hope he will have something to say on it at a later stage.

Co-operation between our industries and the universities is, I think, needed nowhere more than in the devising of suitable courses of training for engineers and technologists in general. One could say a lot on this subject but I will just take up one basic point. For those who are going to be engaged in research, development or design, I think it is nonsense to suppose that a three-year course at a university from the age of eighteen can possibly give a broad enough grounding in essentials and an opportunity to pursue or even to select a specialised field for study in depth. I think it is equally incorrect to assume that a man, having done that three years, will pick up by his own efforts what he has missed or what he has not covered in those three years during his period of industrial employment. This just does not happen in general.

When one looks around, when one looks at the Continent of Europe, and sees that courses for engineers of five years' duration are common, one perhaps wonders whether we have much room for complacency; because many people, in addition to myself, are worried about the shortness of our engineering courses. This probably accounts for the rash of post-graduate courses that have appeared in the universities up and down the country in recent years. Yet I wonder whether all is well with these postgraduate courses. My impression of a lot of them is that they have a fairly high proportion of Commonwealth students in them and that industry does not seem to be rushing to send its best young men to take these post-graduate courses, Perhaps there is something wrong with the courses; perhaps industry and the universities ought to get together seriously to decide what kind of courses should be done.

But I do not think that is all. I should like to go a little further. I should like to suggest that some university should be bold and say that henceforth five years is going to be the minimum course for an honours degree in engineering. Possibly they might say this should consist of three years at the university, one year in industry and another year back in the university. I put this "sandwich" arrangement in because many of my friends and colleagues in the engineering world emphasise that it is absolutely vital after three years to get the men into industry. They may be right; although I confess I am not so sure. I wonder whether they could not get all they wanted out of doing some work during the university vacations in the earlier part of the course.

I know that chemistry is not the same as engineering, but I am always a little troubled by the fact that fifty years ago, or even more recently, when I was an undergraduate the chemical industry was totally uninterested in people taking post-graduate courses in chemistry. This was a hopeless affair: you did your three years and then went into industry. Industry was the place where you got your training. To-day chemists who are going into industry on the research development side normally have a training at the university which lasts at least six years. They do three years and then another period of post-graduate work. I wonder whether it is possible that the engineering industries are just a little behind in scientific development and that they might perhaps do well to think of proceeding in this direction a little more rapidly.

In view of the remarks I made before in your Lordships' House about technicians, I am not going to enlarge on that aspect of the manpower problem. To-day I hope only to stress again that this is a vital part in the whole question of technological development. Technicians we must have; and we must have them in far greater numbers than now. One of the things that always worried me about the Robbins Report was that, in its implementation, in the pursuit of university status by technical colleges and colleges of advanced technology they may perhaps seek—I am not sure there is not some evidence that some of them are seeking—to ape university courses and to move away from what I consider to be their real duty, the production of these technicians whom we need. I would only say again now that I hope I am wrong in thinking they may be losing sight of their objective; but I am sure I am right in saying that if they do lose sight of their objective they will do this country a very great disservice indeed.

Already, I have taken up quite a lot of your Lordships' time. I should like to make only one further point before I sit down. I think it will be clear to your Lordships, even from what I have said this afternoon, that in my view science and technology are all part of one thing; they are interwoven to such an extent that we cannot make any clear division between them. In the field of research and development in this country we are, I think, at the present moment spending each year about 3 per cent. of our gross national product and our expenditure has been doubling about once every five years since the end of the war. Nor is there any sign that the demands are lessening and that, if they are all met, this rate of increase is going to drop. Yet, of course, it is obvious that it cannot go on for ever. It is perfectly clear that if you keep doubling every five years you will by about the year 2000 be in the ludicrous situation of spending the entire national income each year in research and development.

In other words, we are going to have to make some pretty hard choices in the near future. We are going to have to determine our priorities and to concentrate our main effort on those areas where we are going to get, from the national point of view, the most value for our money. This means that we must have a scientific policy for this country. We must have one scientific policy, not two or three or more scientific policies. I do not believe that we can set up a policy in technology, on the one hand, and in science, on the other. This just does not work. The two are intimately connected, not only in operation but even when we come to consider such a thing as the development of a national manpower policy. Of course, it was for this reason that, as a member of the Trend Committee, I was in favour of the proposal in our report that science and technology should come under the ægis of one Minister. I am not much worried about nomenclature, about whether you call something technology or industrial research and development or what you call it.

There are many different ways in which we can handle this matter. But I am, I confess, just a little worried, and I should like to have a little reassurance on the situation where we now have one Minister responsible for technology, one Minister responsible for science and, somewhere swinging on the outside, a Minister of Aviation, who himself seems to be dealing with a lot of science and technology. I believe that we must have one scientific policy and that we must operate it with vigour.

I hope that the noble Lords, Lord Bowden and Lord Snow, will be able to reassure me on this one point: that there is going to be real co-ordination and real co-operation between these Ministries and with the Department for Economic Affairs in developing a single policy. I say this because in such experience as I have had in Whitehall I have come to distrust coordination which is set up by having a lot of committees on which sit representatives of this body and that body. Too often, it seems to me, representation is carried out by office boys who do not know what is going on. I should like to be assured that we really are going to have co-ordination there. Otherwise, I think the results could be disastrous. One policy, and one policy only, will do, if we are going to study the questions I have mentioned of industrial priorities. To my mind, these questions lie at the heart of our future. I beg to move for Papers.

3.40 p.m.

VISCOUNT CALDECOTE

My Lords, I know that the whole House will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Todd, for initiating this important debate to-day. The noble Lord has put me in a difficult position, in having to follow one so distinguished and experienced in this subject, particularly as this is the first occasion on which I have stood at this Table.

The last few weeks have shown us once again how delicate is the balance of our economy. The whole emphasis over the past few weeks has been on financial problems, but I think it is wise that we should remember the hard and simple fact behind these problems: we do not make enough things and provide suffi- cient services of the required quality and value for money to attract adequate overseas orders. This is a point which has already been well made by the noble Lord, Lord Todd. No doubt, as he said, improved management training, wider education and harder work can improve the situation, but all of them will be of little avail if our scientific knowledge is not made to work efficiently for industry.

I believe that to-day there is little disagreement about the pressing need to harness scientific knowledge and make industry more efficient and produce more competitively. So much has rightly been said about the importance of research and development, particularly of research, that I think perhaps there is some danger of too much attention being given to planting and cultivating the trees of research and some danger that we shall lose sight of the wood of industry, whose health and prosperity is of such prime importance. So, whether we are considering industry entirely on its own or considering Government action in this field, it is of prime importance that we should look at the need for industry to make more and better things to sell.

Surely the use of scientific knowledge in this way is the heart and kernel of technology. It is not by the number of establishments, by the amount of money and by the number of people who are involved, that we should judge the success, but by the results. And this applies just as much to Government as it does to industry. Indeed, when we are embarking on new organisations and on new Ministries, I think it is wise to look carefully at this question. It is equally important that the Ministry of Technology and its establishments should have high productivity or, to use modern jargon, that its cost effectiveness should be high, as it is in a factory in industry.

It is often suggested that there is some fundamental difference between Government and industry in their approach to this problem, but I do not believe that this is true at all in the field of technology. Maybe there is some difference in the balance of importance between long and short term, but in neither Government nor industry is there room for misdirected effort, for resources devoted to work irrelevant to forecasted requirements, or for emotion. Nor is this field one in which scientists should be primarily interested in the extension of knowledge rather than in its application. So, in debating this Motion to-day, and, indeed, in any discussion on the relation of technology to industry, we need to keep clearly in front of us the objective of applying scientific knowledge effectively to promote the prosperity of industry. It is against this background that we should judge the new organisations that are being set up and the Government's policy. We certainly do not want to prejudge this issue. We want to assess it on its merits.

There is no inherent merit in setting up a new Ministry. In industry, when problems of organisation arise, it is often suggested that the best way to solve them is to set up a new company. The first question that should always be asked on these occasions is: what is the new company going to do that cannot be done in some other way? Then it should be asked: how is it going to operate? What will its functions be? And what will be its lines of communication and command? There is no doubt at all of the need for action in this field, but it must be considered action. I think that this is important because, apart from meeting the Government's own requirements, the close association in technology between Government and industry on an appreciable scale is a fairly new development in our type of competitive economy. So this debate to-day, at the formative stage of the new Government's policies, is particularly welcome.

Some people advocate an arms-length approach by the Government to science and technology. They advocate the setting up of largely autonomous organisations under the ægis, it has been said, rather than under the control, of a Minister. Clearly there are many advantages of such an arrangement. There is freedom from short-term political disturbances and interference. There is freedom for the staff to pursue the scientific work which they feel is necessary to meet to-morrow's needs. And there is the ability to cover wide fields of technology of interest to many industries and Government Departments. Such an organisation, I would entirely agree, is admirable for supervising research in academic institutions, for the important job of training scientists in research, for adding to the store of scientific knowledge and for all aspects of long-term research.

But if the emphasis shifts to the application of knowledge, to technology and its relevance to producing new and improved products, I think that there is much less certainty that this is the best way of proceeding. Even the staunchest allies of this system, where the emphasis is on freedom, would admit that it has not all the advantages. For in technology and its application to industry there is the important factor of discipline. Discipline, dictated by the relevance of cost and time scales, becomes of increasing importance.

The real difference between one type of scientific research and the other is not in the complicated arguments between basic, fundamental or academic research and applied research or technology, or whatever we like to call it. It is really between the objectives and the environment in which the work is carried on. Surely this is the real basis of the case for the separation of responsibilities between education and science, on the one hand, and technology and industry, on the other, as is now intended. It is very true, as the noble Lord. Lord Todd, has emphasised, that there is a need for a policy for science and technology. But there is also a need for a policy for technology and industry. And the needs of these two have to be balanced against each other. I should like to examine constructively the proposals that are before us with these objectives and needs in mind.

The statements in another place last week indicate, I think, the very reasonable division, if division there is to be, between the responsibilities of the Secretary of State for Education and Science and the Minister of Technology. As I understand it, the Minister of Technology is to take direct control of many of the industrial establishment of the D.S.I.R., and of N.R.D.C. But it is not at all clear, I think, how it is intended to achieve the right balance between the direction of policy and the scientific freedom that is so essential in many of these establishments.

The recent statement by the Minister of Technology also indicates the close connections with industry which he intends to have. He has set up a very fine Advisory Council, containing eminent industrialists. This, I think, should go a long way to bringing the right policies to bear on the problem. It has also been stated that the Minister of Technology is going to be the sponsor of several important industries. How these industries have been chosen is not at all clear. Why is it that electronics, machine tools and computers have been chosen, and not, for instance, the shipbuilding industry, to which the noble Lord, Lord Todd, has already referred? I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Snow, will be able to tell us something behind the decisions that have been taken.

As regards sponsorship, it is important to be clear what sponsorship means. In my view, it means representing the interests of an industry in the highest policy-making bodies of Government; it means encouraging sound policies in research and development, and co-ordinating industrial and Government action, particularly in exports. It does not, I hope, mean interference with management and direction on the basis of "the man in Whitehall knows best".

THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF TECHNOLOGY (LORD SNOW)

Of course not.

VISCOUNT CALDECOTE

The noble Lord says, "Of course not". I hope that this is true. But the Prime Minister in another place, in a Written Answer, recently gave this reply [OFFICIAL REPORT, Commons, Vol. 702 (No. 21) col. 216]: The Minister of Technology has the general responsibility of guiding and stimulating a major national effort to bring advanced technology and new processes into British industry. The methods employed will include an intensified use of the appropriate Research Stations and of the National Research Development Corporation, civil development contracts and studies to identify particular industries or parts of industries suitable for action. What does "suitable for action" mean? Who will decide what company or industry is "suitable"? What kind of action is envisaged? The noble Lord, Lord Todd, mentioned the important matter of priorities. How are these priorities to be determined in the new set-up with the Ministry of Technolgy? It having been determined, in some way which we have not yet been told, which industries are suitable for action, what action will be taken; and how will the action be taken? Will it be taken by agreement and consultation, or will it be done by direction? If it is to be done by direction, will it be done after public discussion? Will plans be laid before Parliament, so that we may know the kind of action envisaged and the policies from which it will spring?

From a more recent answer of the Prime Minister, to which the noble Lord, Lord Todd, has already referred, it appears that the Government intend to set up Government-owned competition in certain cases. It is often assumed that if some industry or company is failing it can be put right by having more competition. This, in many instances, is quite wrong. In every industry there is, I believe, an optimum level of competition. If already you are past that optimum level of competition, it may well do active harm and damage to institute further competition. It may make too much competition for the supply of skilled labour and the supply of engineers; and it may waste scarce capital resources. So I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Snow, or the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, will be able to assure us that full consultation and consideration will be given to the sort of plans they have in mind, and that this consideration will precede action and not come after it. For so much damage can be done by ill-considered plans in this field.

On the other hand, I am sure everyone in your Lordships' House will agree that there are great opportunities, and that the new Ministry of Technology can do a great deal in the sphere of Government to promote industrial prosperity. It can, for instance, ensure that full weight is given to the needs of an industry by the Government as purchasers. In the computer industry, for example, there are great problems in this country in competing with the American giants in this field. One of the reasons for this is that the great American companies have vast experience, not only in technical design and manufacture of computers, but also in what is called in the trade the software or the peripheral equipment that goes with it. This experience has come, to a large extent, from the huge orders placed by the American Government for computers. If, in this country, when the Government wish to buy a computer for their own purposes, they go abroad because companies abroad have greater experience of manufacture or operating them, we shall never add to the experience of companies in this country, and we shall simply be going down a most unsatisfactory kind of spiral.

Then there is another field of Government policy which is very relevant to this problem, and it is taxation. Much more could be done in this field. I believe it to be the case that the prosperity of the diesel engine industry in this country is largely due to the fact that diesel oil has had a lower tax rate, on the whole, than petrol. This has involved great emphasis being put on the development of efficient diesel engines.

In another field, we hear a lot nowadays about numerically or tape-controlled machine tools. These are in great evidence in the United States. There are far more of them in use in the United States industry than in this country. One of the reasons is that in Government contracts in the United States the cost of purchase of such machines is allowed in the cost of the contract. In this country the machines have to be provided out of private capital. Again, would it not be possible to treat the capital cost of buying such equipment in the same way as we treat research equipment for tax purposes, to enable it to be written off more quickly? These are all aspects which I hope the new Ministry of Technology will study and where they can make a substantial contribution. I hope, also, that they will investigate research and development activities in, for instance, some of the nationalised industries. Perhaps some of their policies are too narrow. They may look only to their own needs and not to the effect of specification which they issue on the needs of the export market.

I greatly welcome the part that I understand the new Ministry is to play in extracting more useful information for industry from defence technology. But this raises the whole question of relations with other Government Departments, such as, for instance, the Ministry of Aviation. What is the relationship going to be between the new Ministry of Technology and the Royal Radar Establishment at Malden, and the Signals Research and Development Establishment at Christchurch? What will its relation be with the Dollis Hill Laboratories of the General Post Office, with the Ministry of Power and with other Service research establishments? There is, for instance, an extremely peculiar situation which seems to have arisen on the Atomic Energy Authority, for it appears that the whole Atomic Energy Authority is coming under the control of the new Ministry of Technology, including, as I understand it, the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Snow, will be able to tell us how this is to be organised.

It seems to me that the position of the new Ministry of Technology is very closely analogous to the position of a central co-ordinating authority for research and development in a big commercial organisation. It will have tremendous problems of communication to ensure that available knowledge is utilised to the full, and to prevent duplication both of current and capital expenditure.

Now these are all clear objectives. But to achieve them, as the noble Lord, Lord Todd, has mentioned, there are going to be great problems of communications and links between the new Ministry and the other Government Departments operating in similar fields. I hope that the noble Lords who are to reply for the Government will be able to indicate to us some of the ways in which these vitally important horizontal links are in fact to be forged, because without them the whole edifice is going to look very stupid in a few months' time. Not least is the important relationship that must exist between the Secretary of State for Education and Science and the new Minister of Technology, so as to provide a coherent policy on science and technology, right across the board, including dealing with the problems of manpower.

In conclusion, may I return to my original point? I hope that we shall concentrate in our discussions, and that noble Lords opposite will concentrate in their plans, on the objective of improving the prosperity of industry and making its products more competitive. I think noble Lords on this side of the House all recognise the sincerity of the Government in this objective. I believe there will be many problems in this new set-up, and I have touched upon one or two. We on this side of the House will judge the new proposals and the action which the Government will take against the background that I have sketched and against this vitally important objective. We may disagree frequently on the ways and means, but the Government can rely on constructive, even if vigorous, criticism. We all believe in the importance of more competitive industry, and we believe in the importance of the contribution that technology can make to it, and the need for wise and effective Government action. So, my Lords, in this vitally important field we will, as I say, look, very carefully, but, I hope. constructively, on everything the Government put before us.

4.3 p.m.

THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF TECHNOLOGY (LORD SNOW)

My Lords, I should like to begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Todd, for introducing this debate, and for making a speech which was nothing if not constructive and friendly. In fact, I may say, with sincerity, that I agree with about 90 per cent. of it, and he could just as well have made it from this place. May I suggest to your Lordships that it is very remarkable that a Master of a Cambridge College should be in that measure of agreement with a former Fellow? Similarly, I deeply welcome the speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Caldecote, which I also thought was extremely friendly across the Floor of this House. I think most of his questions were well placed, and I will do my best to answer most of those which do not impede our freedom of action in the next few months.

May I begin by repeating my kind of Carthage speech? This country has to earn a living. The whole point of our activities is to help it to earn a living. We will do that by every conceivable means which come to our hands; every conceivable idea which floats through our heads. There is no one bright idea which is going to solve this problem—your Lordships can put that right out of your minds. There is no one single nos- trum which is going to solve this country's problems. There are many different things which have to be tackled. We have to tackle those things which come nearest to our attention. But that is not the total answer, even if we are more successful than I think we are likely to be. Therefore, there is no one solution we have to find many. It is for all of us to be part of this enterprise. It is going to be quite difficult; do not let us deceive ourselves about that. But some things can be done. It was because some rather obvious things could be done that the Ministry of Technology was set up.

I will deal here, as I think noble Lords would wish me to, first with that part of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Todd, in which he disagreed with our general policy. All the rest that he said is in fact exactly the stuff of our thinking, and every suggestion he made, I think I can say without exception, is either in the course of what they call in the Civil Service "active study" or, alternatively, already in the course of action. However, the noble Lord disagreed with the separation of the Ministry of Technology from the Ministry of Education and Science. I should like to begin by correcting the kind of misapprehension which I think is not uncommon among noble Lords opposite, and possibly in the country at large—the idea that this was a sudden, bright thought which occurred on October 15 and was done capriciously, without deliberation, and without the taking of such advice as was open to intelligent persons not in the Government. That is the absolute opposite of the truth. In fact, to my certain knowledge, persons not in Government, not in official positions, have been thinking seriously about the whole of this problem of the machinery of government, particularly in its relation to science and technology, for at least the last ten years.

When it became clear that things were going very badly for us technologically in the early 'fifties, a great many persons became preoccupied, sometimes obsessed, with what sensible steps, organisational, scientific and technological, could be taken to help us to put the matter right. There have been many different kinds of model structures of government—I have written several of them myself, so I know. I have certainly changed my mind once or twice on what is the best model of government. It is quite clear that there is no perfect one. Brute reality is too complex to catch in any administrative framework in which we may try to fit it. That is obvious. Any attempt to act upon the directive which we are given, which is to stimulate technology in industry—and this has been obvious enough as an intention for ten years—is bound to impinge to some extent on, not one other Ministry, but at least five or six others. We are clearly concerned on one fringe with the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and we are clearly concerned with the Department of Education and Science, the Ministry of Labour, and the Board of Trade. One imbecile solution would be to have a great omnibus Ministry, including anything where science and technology could conceivably even have a faint part. That is clearly ridiculous.

What else is there? Then you think of what is really the only pair of alternatives. One is to have a sort of global Ministry of Education and Science, with technology added in according to the I.R.D.A. Plan, and the other is the split which, after very long discussion with all kinds of persons, was in fact decided upon. Your Lordships will note that Sir Leon Bagrit, who thinks with us on most of these matters and is in fact intimately in our counsels, produced exactly the same solution in his Reich Lectures. I am not giving away a secret when I state that those Lectures were recorded long before recent Governmental changes. His Ministry of Modernisation was precisely the Ministry which has now been set up.

I agree that the split is quite seriously arguable. In fact, it has been argued here this afternoon. The reasons which finally brought us to thinking that this was the necessary solution were these: first, on the negative side. I am inclined to think that noble Lords who have not actually existed in Government Departments are disposed to believe that all is done if you have one boss; that the whole answer is thereby reached. I assure noble Lords that nothing could be further from the truth. Early in the last war I happened to be a very junior civil servant in a very large Ministry. For a time I was lucky, because I could perform my curious activities under the shelter of my dear old friend Lord Hankey. Then Lord Hankey's influence lapsed and I found myself in the kind of departmental (that is, within one Department) in-fighting, knifing, faction-formation and gang warfare which made me feel: "Good Lord, I might as well be back in Cambridge!" These borderlines between any kind of administrative set-ups are extraordinarily difficult to draw. When you draw them, the rough answer is that with goodwill and common purpose on both sides, whatever the form, then the thing will work. If there is not that goodwill and that common purpose, then, with the best and neatest lines of command in the world, the thing does not go. This I am quite certain is true. Therefore, one super Ministry would have, in fact, almost all the difficulties which noble Lords have raised.

My Lords, the second point was positive, that it seemed to us to be relatively easy, with reasonable sense, to construct links across these Ministries which would, in fact, solve most, though I think not all, of the difficulties raised by the noble Lord, Lord Todd. One, of course, is the device, which the noble Lord dismissed, I think, a little unfairly, of the memberships of common councils, which, if these councils are highly enough placed, can be of great value. But far more important than that is the relationship between Ministers themselves and officials at every level. If at all the operative levels there is agreement, then, in fact, policy can really be decided. Fortunately that agreement exists, and was already known to exist when Ministers were appointed.

Further, a good deal can be done by what in the theatre they call "cross-casting". It may not have escaped your Lordships' notice that the most distinguished scientific mind in the Ministry of Technology is, in fact, a pure scientist and one of world distinction, Professor Blackett. It is true that Professor Blackett has a gift—a gift which made him invaluable in the war, and which this country has not recognised sufficiently—of being able to think of practical problems with a kind of depth of insight known to very few. This saved us many lives and many ships in the last war. That kind of gift he is now applying to what are not dissimilar problems in industry. He is, nevertheless, a mire scientist and it is as such that he is known to the world. On the other hand, by the same process of cross-casting, my noble friend Lord Bowden, who is, of course, the most dis- tinguished technological educator in the country, is sitting in the Ministry of Science, and it was this ingenious crossing which seemed to gentlemen in power to reduce, and to a large extent eliminate, the dangers of the separation of these two ministries.

But, of course, there was an overwhelming reason why the new Ministry should be set up; aid it is simply this. We believe, and I am sure noble Lords opposite believe, that it is passionately necessary to give a new dynamic to industry, a new dynamic to technological innovation in industry. This you will never do, in our judgment, if in fact you just import technology as an important, but still a junior, part to a large omnibus Ministry. If you just put it into a Department of Education and Science then, in fact, you are removing all the imaginative appeal; you are taking away all the power of stimulating the young technologist, which is very important and from which we have had satisfactory results already. And, finally, to take any action at all in matters so vital you must be able to have a Minister with the authority of a major Cabinet Minister doing this and doing nothing else. This seemed to most people concerned, except to certain noble Lords opposite, to the only good, though not a perfect, solution to a tough problem. That is my one point of difference from the noble Lord, Lord Todd. I should now like to say a word or two about what this Ministry is immediately proposing to do and to answer, sometimes by inference, the noble Viscount. Lord Caldecote.

My Lords, the statement of my right honourable friend the Prime Minister has, I think, given noble Lords a pretty fair account of what we are going to do. Rather to my surprise the noble Viscount asked why four particular industries had been singled out for immediate study and attention. I should have thought that that was answered completely by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Todd. For, in fact, these are industries of the most advanced kind, vital in any modern society. If you do not have them in full health, it means that you cannot pretend to be independent in any meaningful sense. That is, no country which does not have a flourishing automation industry, a flourishing electronic industry, a flourishing computer industry and a flourishing machine tool industry can really pretend that it can determine its own future.

I think there is absolutely no question of this technologically. These are going to be what are called, in a rther absurd phrase, some of the greatest points of growth. It is for that simple reason that they were selected, rather than the older, far more backward industries, and we are now studying them with considerable concentration. In fact, we began to study some of them the day after my right honourable friend Mr. Cousins entered office.

My Lords, the means we intend to use should, I think, be obvious enough, certainly to the noble Viscount who has seen very much the same procedure carried out in the defence industries. There are several steps. One is the use of the development contract. This has been done in the defence industry for 20-odd years. The possibility that this is going occasionally to look arbitrary cannot be removed: it has not been removed ever in the defence industry. Where possible, the whole of industry, or large parts of industry, will be there to give us advice We have deliberately set up an exceptionally highly-placed and highly-gifted Advisory Council on Technology to give us advice on just this type of problem. But noble Lords can realise that with any kind of development contract of this kind, ultimately someone has to decide it; and that is what Ministers are for.

The second technique which we propose to use is an intelligent adaptation of Mr. McNamara's purchasing. This Mr. McNamara has done with astonishing ingenuity for a number of years, and the effects on American industry, in fields I know a little about, have been dramatic. We think we may learn a tip or two from the Americans in various kinds of education, but I am not at all sure that we cannot learn even more from them in this type of very hard business. So this use of purchasing power will certainly be one of our major weapons.

The third method we are going to use is rather surprising and very prosaic. It is listening. We propose to listen to everyone who has an idea and who cares to talk to us during whatever period we may be in these positions. We spent the whole of yesterday listening, and the result of that listening, I think, will be a certain number of thousands of pounds to this country. Remember, wisdom does not reside completely, or indeed very largely, in persons in temporary high places. Wisdom goes deep, and it does not belong always to the old. This country is rather bad at technology but it is not at all bad at producing technologists. There is a great deal of restive, impatient talent through the whole of industry, everywhere you like to go. These people have much to tell us. It is for us to listen to them. Certain choices clearly you have to make. But if technology is going to be more than a word we pass about in a debating society, it is by this process of consultation that we are going to get some of our best results.

I should now like to turn to what, in fact, was Lord Todd's third point; that is, the condition of the traditional industries. This, I think, is going to be much tougher; I am sure it is going to be much tougher. With good fortune we may shortly have something to say on the advanced industries. We shall not speak too soon or too much. This does not seem to me to be wise. But I am fairly confident that my right honourable friend Mr. Cousins will be able to say something about the taking of necessary first steps in some more suitable place than this just after Christmas. Then I shall probably nave an opportunity a little later of reporting to your Lordships' House. These steps one can see. One cannot see anything like so easily what we can usefully do with traditional industries.

Some things, again, are obvious; for example, the use of the research associations. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Todd, that there one can produce a real impact if we believe in them and give them a certain amount of encouragement. That they have been very much lacking. But the plight of the traditional industries seems to be linked with a much deeper malaise in this country. That deeper malaise is that we still do not really believe in the technological revolution. A few of us do, but not many. I believe that right through our society it is still regarded as an un- fortunate event which, if we turn our backs, may not really happen. It may not be happening around us. We may still, somehow, in some fantastic fashion, or by English luck, earn a living sonic other way. This is nonsense. But I am fairly sure that this kind of feeling unconsciously afflicts a good deal of our society.

It certainly produces one effect which is serious and at the root of some of our defects and some of our difficulties elsewhere. That is the extremely low status accorded to engineers. Of all countries I know, this country respects engineers the least. If you go to America or Russia or the Continent of Europe a man is very proud to be an engineer, and usually has it on his card. That would not happen here. The same feeling of being an active, useful and valued member of society happens here to a far less extent, and I have no doubt that this is one of the reasons why young men are not attracted to the profession in anything like the numbers we require. It is maddening that in fact at this moment every arts place in every university in this island has been filled—and the figures may be worse than the noble Lord, Lord Todd, quoted—yet hundreds of pure science places and more than that of technological places are left unfilled. This is maddening. If it goes on long enough then all our efforts any bit of ingenuity we may have had, all our complete dedication, are going to get us nowhere.

Society here has got to be worked on. As to how we can work on it I have only a few random ideas. But certainly we have to change the climate of society at least enough to make it give respect and fully embrace those who make the wealth. If we do not do that, then I cannot see how this decline can be stopped. The kind of thing which may be valuable is, I believe, what happened last week. I suspect that the most practical step in the direction in which the noble Lord, Lord Todd, wanted to urge us, and in which I am now trying to urge us, was taken not by the Government but by the Council of the Royal Society. I believe that the Royal Society's saying, "We will give a number of places to technologists each year" will have more effect in getting really good people into technology than anything the Government or industry can do over the next ten years. We must have more devices of this kind.

The climate is stale. We do not realise how stale our climate in relation to technology now is. If we can get only a little wind through it my right honourable friend and I will feel that we have not completely wasted our time.

4.28 p.m.

VISCOUNT MILLS

My Lords, I have listened with the greatest pleasure and interest to the eloquent speech by the noble Lord, Lord Snow. I hope that what he has had to tell your Lordships this afternoon will be justified by events. We have been most fortunate in hearing the noble Lord, Lord Todd, who is of such distinction and of such knowledge, in regard to both technology and the universities, that he is able to give us a very authoritative view on the state of technological development. I am venturing to take part in this debate because I believe that we are in for great changes—great changes in our lives, in our industries, in our country and in the world. I do not go all the way with the noble Lord, Lord Snow, in his view of the traditional industries. I believe that they, too, are conscious of the changes which E re before us.

It has been said that the Roman Empire existed by virtue of the grandest application of technology that the world had seen: its roads, its bridges, its great buildings, its sewers and tunnels, its metallurgy and agriculture. The scientific background was of course supplied by Greece. With the disappearance of the Roman Empire and Greece came the Dark Ages. It was then that we had the gradual lift to better conditions in which scientific discoveries and the related technologies could make their impact on our lives.

I believe that the relative importance of technology and pure science really depends on the social environment during a particular period. I believe we have arrived at a period when industry has to be transformed, and is being transformed, by the application of the great scientific discoveries and technologies which are increasingly at our service. The noble Lord, Lord Todd, gave us a definition of technology, which I might simply state as the scientific study of the practical or industrial arts. This definition is a good one in emphasising the scientific nature of technology, but I think it fails to give a proper realisation, a proper idea, of the dynamic relationship between technology and the pure sciences.

Science and technology are really inter-related. It is easy to illustrate the view that technology is the handmaiden of pure science. The study of astronomy awaited the development of technology for the production of telescopes and, in later years, of radio equipments. Advances in biology and medicine have been conditioned by the technology of microscopes and X-rays. One could go on citing such examples. Conversely, however, the development of technology depends on advances in pure science. The application of X-rays followed the original discovery of Röntgen; the manifold uses of electric power depend on the discoveries of Faraday; the use of radio for communications is based on the work of Maxwell and Hertz. So technology and science are inter-related. The scientist must know something of technology: the technologist must work from a scientific basis.

The late 19th and the early 20th centuries haw a great expansion in the field of pure science. The technology required to make all these discoveries possible was of a limited nature and perhaps relatively unimportant. In the last two or three decades, however, technology has become of greatly increased importance, partly on account of pressure to apply discoveries of the preceding period to practical use, and partly because the experiments required to extend our knowledge of science demand a far greater technological background to carry them out. In many fields of scientific research—for example, the study of the atomic nucleus or the study of controlled thermonuclear reactions—great technological resources are required; so much so that this particular type of research can no longer be conducted, as has traditionally been the case, in the universities, but requires permanently staffed organisations of national and even international size in order to make appreciable progress.

We should therefore envisage the situation in the future whereby a significant and increasing amount of pure research in the physical sciences must be undertaken in permanently staffed laboratories such as those of Government or industry. It can no longer be assumed that researches and progress in pure science can be left to the universities if they have as their primary objective the training of students. It is clear that in the future scientific and technological progress can be considerably assisted by much closer contacts between industry and the universities.

I listened with great attention to what the noble Lord, Lord Todd, had to say about post-graduate studies. I think that an efficient procedure would be to regard technology as a post-graduate study to he conducted in the universities, and for this the new universities evolving from the colleges of advanced technology appear to be especially suitable. If the basic principles of technology of any particular subject were taught as a postgraduate course, this could be extended to research in technological subjects, which could be of great advantage to our industries. The methods and procedures of technological research are identical with those employed in research in pure science. The only difference is the objective—in the second case, to discover new knowledge; in the first case, how and where to apply it.

Technology, however, has another aspect, remote from pure science—namely, the economic aspect. The advances in technology are triggered by a need to satisfy some tangible requirement—instruments for scientific research, a new medium for public entertainment, or a new device for domestic use. These requirements usually have a more immediate economic background than the investigations of pure science. If a sufficiently wide application is foreseen, money and effort are devoted to technological research and development. The technologist, therefore, needs to have some knowledge of industrial economics to appreciate the financial aspects of his work. I should like to emphasise that we in industry require technologists of the same mental calibre as those who now pursue pure science in our universities.

I have been most impressed throughout my business life with the success that we in this country have had in scientific subjects and scientific discoveries. On the other hand, I have been concerned with the technological advances which have been so evident in the United States, and which have kept that country competitive while enjoying high standards of living and leisure. During the next few years I believe that we shall be entering upon an epoch when the day-to-day control of industrial processes, now in the hands of human operators, will be largely the province of electronic machines. The whole of our industry, if it is to be competitive, will need to use such machines. This means, in effect, that applied technology will become basic to the whole of our industrial structure. There are already signs that machines will be constructed which will have the ultimate possibility of carrying out industrial control operations, which now require human supervision, and that in due course this will cause a revolutionary change in the whole pattern of industry.

We in industry know that a considerable effort, mainly financed by Government sources, is employed in the United States of America in this field, whereas the effort of the United Kingdom is small and rather scattered. The whole subject is far too large for any single company, or even for any single research establishment, to handle. It requires massive support from the Government and it is of vital importance, as the noble Lord, Lord Snow, realises, to work out a plan whereby Government and industry can cooperate in this effort, so that the resources of scientific manpower can be most effectively employed. In this country we must export to live and to maintain and improve our standards. We are ahead, I believe, in scientific progress. Our technological advances are essential to keep us competitive in a changing world. I would end by saying that we should not be content to be the Greece to an American Rome.

4.42 p.m.

THE EARL OF HALSBURY

My Lords, in rising to speak to the Motion of my noble friend Lord Todd, I would say that there is one proposition which I believe we all accept. I think it was well put by the noble Lord, Lord Snow, when he referred to the impossibility of a sort of onmium gatherum of interests, ranging from primary education on the one hand to research contracts for industry on the other, all the responsibility of one large, inchoate and heterogeneous Ministry. I believe that is a proposition which we all accept; I certainly accept it. So, somewhere, it must be split. The reason why men of goodwill find it difficult to agree on where the split should be made is simply that there is no natural point indicated for this split. It is, to a very large extent, a matter of opinion and of how one feels. I should myself have preferred to keep science and technology together and accept the split at the point where school passes over into university education. This was the Robbins solution, and it was the one which I preferred. But, for some reason or another, which I never quite understood, a year ago there was a sort of bipartisan stampede away from the conclusions of the Robbins Report, and it is no longer a live issue. Our problem, therefore, is to live with some alternative and get the best out of it by helping it to work.

Dealing with the alternatives, I would say that I never liked the last Government's friendship to wards I.R.D.A., as recommended in the Trend Report. As said in this House before, I thought that the work contemplated for I.R.D.A. was so wide that it should have been a direct Ministerial and not an indirect Ministerial responsibility. The solution of the present Government has resolved my objection to I.R.D.A. by accepting the direct Ministerial responsibility which I advocated for technology, but, of course, a price has had to be paid for it. The advantage of the I.R.D.A. scheme was that I.R.D.A. was ultimately to have been responsible to the Minister of Science, so that it grouped science and technology together. The solution of the present Government has the opposite effect. Technology is given an independent status, which I am sure we all very much welcome, but the homogeneity of science and technology has been split down the middle in consequence. That is the price we have to pay.

I shall not deal with generalities, for I find myself in a very substantial measure of agreement with my noble friend Lord Todd, and I have little to add to what he has said and the warnings he has given. I should like to add point to some of his warnings by quoting from my own experience. First of all, I hope that no attempt will be made to try to draw boundaries between the two Ministries of so precise a nature that their work grinds to a standstill while terms of reference are being debated so as to assign some project or other to one or another of two contestants. I do not want the Civil Service backcloth of the Parliamentary stage to be bulging and thudding with demarcation disputes so as to take the audience's attention off the drama.

The reason I am insistent on this point is that I have some experience in this field. When the Development of Inventions Act was passed, I had the honour to be entrusted with the formative years of the National Research Development Corporation. During my first five years my terms of reference were a very heavy burden to hear, because they tried to discriminate between development, the proper province of the Corporation, and research, which was not its business. This discrimination was impossible. Over and over again the first stage of development discloses research problems which have to be tackled before development can proceed any further. Failing a resolute assault on these, development is blocked. Time and again I found myself trying to concert action with one or another of the Research Councils.

This is the sort of thing that happened. I said to one or another of the Councils, "I propose to support Professor X". "Oh, but that is research", I would be told, "that is our business, not yours". "But it is an important stage in development", I would reply. "Very well, then", the answer came, "as a compromise we will do it if you pay for it". At this point I had to say, "No, I'm sorry, that is not an acceptable corn, promise. Nobody is going to do anything except Professor X. The only thing to do, apart from Professor X's activities, is to pay. If it is ultra vires for me to pay Professor X, it is just as much ultra vires to pay a Research Council". Our terms of reference were concerned not with whom we might pay, but what we might do. After five years of this sort of thing—which did not make the work of the Corporation impossible; but did make the work which we were doing more difficult—we got an amending Act liberalising our terms of reference a little, and thereafter the administration became a lot easier.

If I may borrow a term from engineering technology, I hope that no attempt will be made to specify some sort of push-fit between the terms of references of the two Ministries, so that research is assigned to one and development and technology to the other in an unambiguous sort of way. As the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, is well aware, the trouble with push-fits is that the slightest misalignment causes a seize-up; the terms of reference must provide for a generous overlap to be adjusted at working level as circumstances require. If some pure scientist finds that his work has a technological bearing he must be free to follow it up, because his alone will be the insight and enthusiasm which will follow it up adequately. This means that the funds available for his support must be free for allocation, irrespective of narrowly-drawn terms of reference. Similarly, if a technologist finds himself blocked by some basic gap in knowledge he must he free to adopt the methods of pure science and go and find it. This again means that the funds available for supporting him must be free for allocation and not bound by narrowly-drawn rules governing their use. If these principles were followed, then the new set-up could he workable, though still at a Trice.

I should like to go on with one or two explicit illustrations, and I will take one from computer technology. I have no interest to declare in the computer industry. I am not a director of, or employee in, or consultant to, any firm engaged in the industry. But sixteen years ago I did, as a public servant, under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Mills, whom I am glad to see in his place this afternoon, help him and our colleagues to allocate the funds which made it possible for computer developments to start in this country, and so gave the industry a beginning. For this reason I have, without any interest in it, had a ringside seat at the councils of the industry ever since.

Possibly for this reason I am now Chairman of the D.S.I.R. Committee on Computing Science, and correspondingly concerned with applications for grants for research of special timeliness and promise into what is sometimes called "software". I shall not, of course, discuss these applications in particular terms, as this would be quite out of order. But I think it permissible to say that they are an inextricable mixture of the purely practical and purely theoretical, some of them scientific, some of them technological, though they all come from universities, and I can imagine no basis for dissecting them into their scientific and technological components, for each hears on all. it the industrial and university interests in computers are to be assigned, one to the Ministry of Technology and the other to the Ministry of Education and Science, then the one thing we most need in my opinion—that is to say, unified direction and a national computer policy—will be most difficult to achieve. Either the subject must remain split down the middle, as it were, or we must have an interdepartmental committee or council, or something of that kind, to assign their respective responsibilities to different Ministers of the Crown; and neither of these arrangements is ideal.

As a third illustration I should like to consider the subject of welding. Welding is an almost purely technological subject; a subject where advanced industrial practice is far ahead of education in this particular field. From the educational point of view, welding is still treated as an adjunct to a degree course in metallurgy or engineering, and thought of as some kind of an alternative to riveting. But, from the standpoint of the welding technologist, he has to think in terms of 50 alternative processes of welding, any one of which might be the preferred one to choose in a particular context. Each context needs to be reviewed in terms of design principles appropriate to that particular class of weld. The metallurgy of the weld, the fatigue properties of the weld as opposed to the metal welded. Production engineering, quality control and inspection all come into the subject, and it simply cannot be approached merely as an alternative to riveting.

Provision of the right quality of technological manpower trained in all these subjects must be the province of the Minister for Education and Science. But the technological demands will be voiced through the Ministry of Technology, which will sponsor the British Welding Research Association as one of the industrial research associations which will become its proper responsibility under the proposed arrangements. So once more one foresees the need for some sort of interdepartmental committee to hold the arrangements together and give them a kind of unity.

I do not like this potential proliferation of interdepartmental arrangements. The noble Viscount, Lord Caldecote, asked the rhetorical question: Why is this company necessary? I think he knows as well as I do that the answer often is, to give status to its putative directors. The proliferation of companies and committees has been studied by Professor Parkinson, though whether that belongs to science or technology, I do not know. But I think that these interdepartmental committees are old-fashioned devices based on the concept that interdepartmental matters are second order affairs, small adjustments to solution of problems of primary concern to one or another of two Ministries with a negligible overlap.

In the modern world, my Lords, the heart of many problems lies precisely in the interdepartmental "no-man's land", and our administration ought to reflect it. The work that goes on there does not consist of small adjustments, but often constitutes the kernel of what needs doing. It ought not to be done in shadowy committees, meeting in rooms overdue for decoration, opening out of the "corridors of power". If my noble friend Lord Snow will forgive me when he reads this in Hansard, I cower behind those horrid doors. They need a coat of paint and some windows opening on to the real world.

My Lords, my drawing attention to these difficulties does not mean that they are unresolvable; they only make Government proposals difficult to work; but, given good will, and a lot of hard work on the part of Ministers, they can be made to work. But in bidding farewell to D.S.I.R. (one might almost say that D.S.I.R.'s dies irae has dawned), I think one ought to pay tri jute to the old Department. I am sure that everybody who has ever worked for it, as one of its friendly advisers and helpers from time to time, will, in a way, be sad to see its passing. In any form of corporate reorganisation, division, merger, or whatever it may be, there is always some temporary loss of morale: this is a well recognised sociological phenomenon, none the less real because transient. I hope that Ministers will dc their best to sustain their friends and servants against any sagging of morale as a result of reorganisation. This is part of the price paid for reorganisation. Another part involves cost. If one department is split into two, exactly the same amount of work requires more people to do it. I hope that the price paid in these and other respects that I have mentioned will not be too high.

I should like to close on the same note of warning that I have uttered in every one of our debates on this subject in bygone years. Unless more money is made available, no amount of shifting the departmental furniture around can have the slightest effect. It will all be shadowboxing, as in years gone by, and can but yield a harvest of Dead Sea fruit. If more money is to be spent on science, less money must be spent on something else. Who is going to do without something, and what is he going to do without, in order that scientists can have more to spend—not on themselves, but on the work that they are willing and eager to do for the nation? This is the real essence of the problem facing this Government, as it has faced every Government on every occasion that I have addressed your Lordships' House.

4.58 p.m.

LORD LLEWELYN-DAVIES

My Lords, it is a great pleasure as usual to speak after the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, and I am bound to say that I find myself in very great agreement with many of the things he has said. First, I should like to say that I welcome the action of the Government in setting up the Ministry of Technology. I am no believer in administrative tidiness, and I think that what Lord Halsbury has said about the difficulty of drawing boundary lines is absolutely correct. I think the broad justification for what has been done is the very simple one that, where there is an area which requires immediate and intensive action, it must be singled out and somebody established to cope with it. This evening all I want to do is to call attention to two areas or fields within the broad area of the science-based industries and of technology, which I regard as requiring particular thought and attention from the new Ministry.

The first of these is the field of engineering design. The promotion of research, the advancement of technology, will have its effect on industry, and have its effect on our exports, only if it is transmitted into practice through design. One of the most serious weaknesses in the general technological situation in this country is our failure in design. It is extremely important in the development of our science and technology that we also learn to bridge the gap, both in our education and in the practice of industry, between the thought of the research worker and the action of the designer.

We have had before us the Report of the Fielden Committee, which explores this problem very well; and I was very much struck, when reading that Report, by the evidence given by a Mr. Bosworth, of the General Electric Company, I believe, who pointed out that in industry the function of design had become separated into two different stagings. He said that the first stage tended to be the setting of limits, the specification of the requirements of a product, and that the actual definition of its physical shape, the actual object, was left to another body of men, generally of a lower status in industry, so that the able and brilliant men who had come up through the paths of management and research were concerned with the broad statement of requirements—"the setting of limits", I believe, was the phrase he used—and the translation of that into an actual product was carried out elsewhere by other people. I think that this split or division must be bridged, and I think it is relevant, not merely in the organisation and practice of industry, but also very much in the problem of education.

The noble Lord, Lord Todd, and also the noble Lord, Lord Snow, referred to the alarming shortage of entrants into engineering and technological courses, and this is a matter, obviously, of very grave concern to us all. It is my belief that one of the reasons why these university courses do not attract as many of the right young men as they should is that in this country the national picture of the engineer is divorced from design. This is one of the basic reasons why we do not receive the same intake of really first-rate people into engineering as happens in other countries. If you look to other countries, where the engineer stands higher in public esteem, and where first-rate boys are attracted to engineering, you will find that the idea of the engineer in the public mind is intimately linked with the creative act of making new products in a physical form. I therefore feel that the lesson we have to draw from this is the reintegration of our concept of engineering, both in practice and in education, with the creative act of designing. This is a fundamental point to which I hope the new Ministry will give its attention.

The second matter to which I want to draw attention is one on which I have addressed your Lordships before. It is one of the older industries, the industry of building, and the linked problems with it of architecture and planning. This is an industry which amply or fully illustrates the points made by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, in that it is only partly technological. The new Ministry of Technology has taken over, I believe, the Building Research Station, which is for practical purposes the only research institution engaged in work in this field in Great Britain to-day. This institution is a very fine affair, and is engaged in excellent work. There is only one thing wrong with it: it is far too small and far too poor to compete with the problems with which it is supposed to compete.

I believe I am right in saying that the expenditure of D.S.I.R. through the Building Research Station on research in this area of national interest is about one-tenth that of the expenditure on agricultural research, although the net outputs of the two industries are roughly equal. And, further, that whereas research in other fields has been increasing pari passu with the increase in the national product, in this area it has actually been stationary or slightly falling back. It is therefore abundantly clear that this is an industry which should not be left in those fields recommended by the noble Lord, Lord Todd, as fields for inaction. I know it is not an export industry, but, as has been pointed out in the Report by "Neddy", it is an industry whose failure to increase productivity in the next few years could inhibit the national growth that we need, so that indirectly it appears to me to be as vital as any other.

The problems of this industry, as has been pointed out in the Trend Report, cannot be dissociated from problems in the area of housing, planning and land use. It is not much use mounting a massive Programme of research into the best way of prefabricating houses unless we know the kind of houses we are going to build and where we are going to build them. Therefore, we have here an integrated field which will stretch beyond the boundaries of the present technological interests of the Ministry. This is perhaps underlined by the fact that a Committee set up by the former Government, under the noble Lord, Lord Heyworth, which is looking into the social sciences, is in fact taking evidence and will report on major aspects of housing and planning as well as other social aspects; and clearly we cannot expect the integrated drive which we need in this area of national interest until the Heyworth Committee's Report has been received and digested. But at that point I hope that we shall see the fruitful interaction between the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, and Professor Blacken, who have been so eloquently cast by the noble Lord, Lord Snow, as the Castor and Pollux of science and technology.

5.7 p.m.

LORD PEDDIE: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Todd, deserves the thanks of this House for introducing a subject which is of tremendous importance and significance, not only to industry but to the nation itself. I shall endeavour, so far as possible, in making comment on this subject, not to repeat any of the valuable arguments hat have already been advanced in support of the extension of the application of technology to industry.

I think that every noble Lord who has spoken in this debate has given evidence of the need for more rapid introduction of technology in industry; and there has already Seen an indication that over the past years, and particularly since 1950, the economic growth rate and the growth of productivity per head of the workers is lower in Britain than in any other industrial country. It would be wrong to try to attribute that to any single cause. It would be wrong to attribute it solely to the reluctance on the part of some industrialists to go ahead with greater and faster acceptance of better technological processes; but the absence of emphasis on the introduction of new processes and new technology is perhaps the major reason why Britain lags behind in its productivity rate.

It is essential, however, to emphasise that technology should be expressed in many different forms. Mechanisation, automation, and even work study, have their technological expression; and it it interesting to note, when one surveys the industrial field and examines the extent to which there is an acceptance of new technological processes, the enormous variation (this is a point that I think has been brought out in the debate) between different industries in the speed of introduction of new ideas, and also the variation in the rate of acceptance of new ideas by firms within the same industry. A survey recently undertaken established quite clearly the close correlation which exists between the willing acceptance of new ideas in industry and the profitability of those enterprises. I think that is the most important aspect of any consideration of this matter. Therefore, one factor governing growth is speed in introducing new innovations.

A great deal has been said in the course of this debate about the encouragement of basic research; and I join in urging developments in this direction. But it would be wrong to assume that the whole of our development of technology in this country is dependent solely upon the development of basic research. For instance, when we examine the records of Japan and Germany, we find that their relative expenditure on basic scientific research is far lower than it is in Britain. Yet their application of technology to industry is at a faster rate. They are giving far more consideration to the application of scientific methods than to expenditure upon basic research. Therefore, while basic research is important, the application of science to industry is a matter that requires far greater attention than has yet been given to it.

My Lords, we have in this country at the moment full employment. It is an ideal that has been sought for years, and probably we have got closer to full employment than at any time since the Industrial Revolution. Everyone welcomes it; everyone feels that a policy should be pursued that would retain full employment within industry. Parallel with full employment, we also have pressure for shorter hours. And the combination of those two factors makes it clear that there is little opportunity for productivity growth without a larger working force. There appears to be little opportunity of securing a greater total working force in terms of population.

Increased productivity through increased human effort is possible; but exceedingly slow. I am sure that those of your Lordships who, like myself, have had some experience of the introduction of work-study schemes will know how difficult it is, how tedious it is, how slow and laborious it is, to develop work-study schemes with the hope of improving personal, human productivity. One meets the obstacles of inertia, suspicion, a conservative attitude, sometimes among the employers but frequently among the men themselves.

Therefore, my Lords, the only rapid way of securing a substantial increase in production is by better tools and more efficient machinery. This, of course, demands scientific knowledge and the engineers to apply it. But I would reiterate that there is grave danger in believing that it is only our paucity of scientific knowledge and a shortage of engineering skill that restrict a rapid technological advance. A much more important factor is the willingness and ability on the part of industry to apply even known new technological processes. I believe it is wrong to assume that at any point of time—and this is a mater which the new Ministry must take into consideration—it is advantageous to industrialists to use more expensive machinery. It must be made sufficiently profitable to justify the capital investment.

I was interested in the comments of the noble Viscount, Lord Caldecote, who made reference to the need for the utilisation of taxation processes in order to encourage the development of more and better machinery in industry. It is a pity that the Government of his Party did not always practise, when they were in power, what they preach. Indeed, the record there would indicate a great deal of variation, of "Stop" and "Go", in the policy with regard to encouragement of capital expenditure. Frequently we find in the mind of the industrialist an attitude of consideration of whether marginal efficiency of the capital he contemplates employing is too low to justify investment.

In the United States, with their very high labour costs, the economic advantage of machine introduction becomes perfectly obvious; thousands of individual deci- sions of industrialists result in a far higher investment rate per worker than we find in Britain. Thus, in the United States they benefit from the ascending spiral of greater investment, greater productivity, higher wages for labour and renewed pressure for more and continued investment. But what do we have in Britain: the operation of a vicious circle. Although it is often claimed by industrialists that wages are too high for us to be competitive in the world's markets, yet the benefit of substituting machines for labour is not always sufficient to lead to approval of investment in machines.

My Lords, that is the situation which I believe the new Ministry, which I welcome, will have to tackle. We have the example in this country to-day of the pools promoter being in a better position to use computers than the textile mills are to use new and efficient looms. So long as conditions of that kind are allowed to continue, obviously there will be restriction upon the economic development of the nation. Therefore, I heartily endorse the reference to the question of direction which was made by the noble Lord who introduced the Motion. The new Ministry should have the courage not only to select industries for development but also to restrict those industries that do not make, and are unlikely to make, a contribution to the economic development of the country. A sense of direction, definite direction, in the operation of the new Ministry is of vital importance. Without it they cannot succeed. The basic problem is to increase the profitability of application in those fields where lies the greatest national interest. Indeed, I am told that in Italy, the Italian Government have for some time done a great deal to promote low costs by financing industrial plants in these industries that have a high export record.

Thus I want to give emphasis to the comments I make. Although we are speaking of science and technology, we must remember that there are a combination of economic circumstances that frequently restrict the profitability of technological advance and the acceptance of new technology in particular industries. Therefore, the Government policy is of vital importance. That is why I welcome the coming of this Ministry. It will focus attention upon these basic problems and difficulties which at the present moment appear to restrict the extended application of technology to industry.

But, my Lords, I would emphasise one point: that there is a need to coordinate. I do not think the Ministry of Technology alone will ever have the ability or the means to deal with all the problems that are attendant upon the development of new technological processes. No one Ministry can do it. Let me give one illustration of what I mean—there are many others. The Minister of Labour will shortly, I hope, be introducing in industry a system of redundancy payments for displaced workers. This is very important and it should be universally applied. I personally take pride in seeing two years of negotiations with tie unions in the organisation with which I am associated bearing fruit in a first-class agreement on severance payments. I welcome this because it facilitates the movement of labour. But I also recognise that if the weight of the cost of labour replacement, which obviously redundancy payments will involve, increase I without compensatory factors it would merely add further disability to a e employment of machines. Therefore, it becomes necessary for the Ministry concerned with the encouragement of new technological processes to take into account the many different aspects of the question, scientific, economic and the like.

I am glad that one or two noble Lords this afternoon brought out the necessity of increased co-operation between the different Ministries, not only in terms of research, but also along the lines I have mentioned. I can appreciate that my noble friend Lord Snow, in his brilliant argument in support of the establishment of the new Ministry, was not able to give a detailed statement of its policy in the immediate future. I am quite certain from what he has said that behind the urge that promoted his Ministry lies the determination to deal with some of the problems I have mentioned.

What needs to be done immediately? It is necessary to accelerate the study of the practical application of scientific research. In every debate on this subject, I have listened to in this House in past years there has been a great deal of emphasis upon basic scientific research, This is important, of course; but it is even more important in the short period—and the short period is of vital importance to this country—to give greater attention to the practical application of what we know, and not merely to the study of what we may be able to find out in the years to come.

Secondly, it is necessary to bring the universities closer to industry. I believe that one of the minor reasons why new technical processes are not more welcome is that many of those in management to-day have been brought up in the old school and look with some measure of suspicion upon these new ideas. I hope that in future the recruitment from the universities of management with a new and fresher attitude towards the new techniques will mean a step forward in the more willing acceptance of new technical ideas. I think that this will be increasingly a university responsibility.

I should like the Minister to give some attention now to making available to smaller firms the advantages of technological development. In recent months the organisation with which I am associated have given a great deal of thought to the application of computers to the routine scheduling of vehicles. This is quite a simple matter, but it is one that could mean the saving of thousands of man hours. I believe that it is possible to give smaller concerns the benefits of the computer research that is available to larger ones, and that it is necessary for the Government themselves, through this Ministry, to try to establish a method which will enable medium-sized and even small concerns to take immediate advantage of all that science has to offer to-day. In short, putting it in broad terms, we have to make it more profitable to use the machine.

There is a great deal of fear of the machine, a justifiable one so far as labour is concerned because working people do not need to have long memories to recollect the time when the machine put them out of work. We must have proper assurances that the machine will add to the general wealth of the country, increase living standards, stimulate the demand for more goods and, in the long run, create more employment. But there is still this fear of the machine. Ned Ludd, or the spirit of Ned Ludd, is still alive, and to-day we see him as frequently sitting in the boss's chair as standing at the worker's bench. Therefore, whilst there is a resistance to machines on the part of organised labour in many industries, let us also keep in mind that there is a great deal of resistance, sometimes through ignorance, on the part of the employers themselves.

I echo what has been said by many noble Lords in wishing well to this new Ministry. Difficult though their job will be, there is no doubt that the future prosperity and welfare of the entire nation depends upon the spirit and ability with which this country and our industries are able to take full advantage of the new technological knowledge of to-day.

5.26 p.m.

LORD BALERNO

My Lords, I wish to draw attention to the problems of the education of young persons for technology and engineering. In Scotland a serious development has recently been uncovered and, if it is not checked, it may lead to a grave shortage in the entry to the universities of students to study mathematics, physics and engineering. The noble Lord, Lord Todd, Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde, brought this to our attention in his speech. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, Sir Edward Appleton, has drawn attention to it in these words: Young people are tending not to offer higher mathematics in the Scottish Certificate of Education examination as frequently as they did only a few years ago. The number offering higher mathematics has dropped from 40 per cent. in 1962 to 34 per cent. in this year. In the University of Edinburgh this has resulted in vacant places in science and engineering, for, to quote Sir Edward: not enough qualified young people have chosen to come along to occupy them. The result is that the forecast of the Government's Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, to the effect that by the later 1960s we shall have all the scientists and engineers we need, is most likely to be in error. Nobody seems to be at all clear as to the reason for this turn away from mathematics and science on the part of so many school children. In Scotland, at any rate, this shortage is particularly felt in the engineering profession, where there are complaints of lack of quality as well as of quantity.

One reason may well be the scarcity of jobs in Scotland for scientists and engineers, a point to which some publicity has recently been given. The noble Lords, Lord Todd and Lord Snow, have raised the question of the relative status of the scientist and the engineer. I think that the climate is changing. The noble Lord, Lord Snow, has referred to the recent decision of the Royal Society of London to increase the number of the Fellows they elect each year in order to include many more applied scientists. But why does the Council hesitate to describe them as technologists and engineers? In the U.S.A.—a point to which the noble Viscount, Lord Mills, drew our attention—there are many examples where in universities the technologists and engineers have from their work given real impetus to fundamental scientific discovery.

Then there is another prestige point—the status of the colleges of technology, which, at any rate in Scotland, come under the local education authorities. We must enhance their status so that they are not considered as continuation schools. They must develop a corporate spirit. Let them have blazers and badges. And I beseech the local authorities to appoint as governors men of standing and independence, and to see that the work of governing these colleges is not that of just another committee of already overworked members of the education authority.

The sixth form is remarkably quick to discover which departments at its local university are the most severe in their requirements and examinations. Literally an "old boy" and "old girl" net exists. Joe, who left school two years ago and lives down the road, cannot get through his degree examination in maths., while Bill has "flunked" in what should have been his final year in engineering, and, in consequence, is bereft of his Government grant for the year's repeat—Look at his clothes! Again, it may be that the university entrance examinations are biased against the boy or girl with an aptitude for science. Is the language requirement a hindrance? True, in the Scottish universities the standard for language at the lower level is not very exacting; but it does exact. The technical colleges in Scotland do not have this language requirement, and judging from the figures, which I have been given from Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh, this seems to be no hindrance to success. During the last three years more than 50 per cent. of those who gained the associateship of the College had no language qualifications when they entered, and a proper proportion of them gained first-class and second-class honours. So the language qualification seems unnecessary as an indication of ultimate success in science and engineering. I must declare an interest in this matter and confess that I only gained "A" level in Latin at my third attempt.

Another question: Is the standard required in the English paper too high for those whose natural aptitude is mathematics, thus leading to a disinclination to go to university at till? Nowadays an engineer writes figures but does not write letters; he dictates them. It is quite surprising to find in America so many top executives in industry who seem to be sub-literate, relying on their secretaries, as in the old Country did the Kings and noble Lords of history.

There is also the pint that examiners are not necessarily consistent in their marking of papers, but this hardly applies to the examiners in mathematics and in science. A "borderline" boy is told or discovers that by pertinacity he will strike good luck and get through in history and geography and even Latin, but there is no benefit of the doubt given in failure to solve an equation. On the other hand, in the history paper, which we find discussing the reign of Henry VIII, certain examiners might well give the benefit of the doubt to the boy who comes down heavily in favour of King Henry.

There is also the question of natural (genetic) aptitudes. Are there such animals as natural mathematicians? The opposite, at any rate, seems to be the case, for a paper on entrance requirements which I have recently read says: … candidates who, while gifted academically in other respects, are incapable of profiting from the mathematical/scientific disciplines. Surely the converse of this statement is also true, and that there exist certain young persons with precise minds and a great capacity for mathematics to whom the more philosophic subjects are utterly abhorrent.

It is, however, beyond dispute that the major immediate cause of the trouble is a shortage of good teachers of mathematics in the schools. Mathematics ill taught, or taught in classes that are too large, creates frustration in the boy or girl, with a consequent distaste for the subject. Only the brilliant and bright can survive such teaching conditions. I am informed that Strathclyde University and the Heriot-Watt College, in association with the local teachers' training colleges, have schemes worked out to provide more teachers of mathematics.

My Lords, there are some who attribute this present malaise to the expansion of the universities and technical colleges. The Robbins Report shows clearly that this is not so. The "pool of ability" is, in fact, quite a pond. In Appendix 1 there are some very convincing figures to support the contention that more students need not mean worse students. Nor is there evidence to support the view that more has already meant worse.

To sum up, I would say that the first requirement is to increase the number of teachers of mathematics in the schools. Secondly, we should take a closer look at our system of selection of boys and girls for university education. Some universities use the examination results merely as a sieve, and place greater emphasis on the interview. I wonder whether this is right? Does talent perhaps sometimes leak through the sieve? The present evidence would indicate that quite a lot of potential material is prevented from getting a higher education. To give such young people a higher education might well increase the wastage rate at the universities and colleges—unless the perfect system of selection were discovered. At present the university wastage is of the order of 14 per cent. In technology it is somewhat higher, being around 20 per cent. Compared to other countries, however, these are not high figures, and they can be justified.

My Lords, by accepting the Robbins Report we are committed to producing within sixteen years about 21 times the present number of graduates. But we have no certainty as to the needs of the nation. We are uncertain as to the total number likely to be required, and we have no breakdown into subjects of study. I submit that it is a matter of urgency to set going an investigation and analysis of the national requirements. It is most important to do this in respect of scientists and engineers, but such a survey might with advantage cover a much wider field. At present there is a grave imbalance in these matters. It starts with the boys and girls at school and continues through to what may develop into crucial shortages of those men whose inventiveness and hard work is the very foundation of the national prosperity of this realm.

5.37 p.m.

LORD CHORLEY

My Lords, before the noble Lord makes the official reply from the Opposition I should like to occupy five minutes on a point that seems to me to be important; and it is one that I have made on two previous occasions in these technological debates. On neither occasion, during the Administration of the last Government, did I receive any answer whatever from the Leader of the House. A great deal of lip-service is paid in industry to the need for employing scientists and technologists. I believe it is not so much that there is an absence of employing technologists, as that it has become a sort of—I will not say craze, but a fashion, throughout a great deal of industry to employ technologists and scientists but not to give them anything to get their teeth into.

The noble Lord, Lord Peddie, referred to full employment. A great deal of the full employment we have in this country is not properly full employment at all: it is a sort of under-employment, with men not really pulling their weight, though they are on the pay-roll. There is an extraordinarily interesting article on this subject, which I would commend to your Lordships, in tile current issue of Socialist Commentary.

This problem is even worse in industry in respect of technologists and scientists. I meet a number of these young men. I believe that the turnover is tremendous. May I repeat an instance that I gave on the last occasion when I spoke on this matter? In one of the biggest engineering concerns in the country, which runs a special research section, the turnover in two years was complete in regard to the younger men: every single one of them left because he was "browned off" I mentioned on the last occasion that I had discussed this with the Cavendish Professor at Cambridge, and he told me that his impression was exactly the same as mine. He is a particularly eminent man, in touch with these things in a way that I do not pretend to be, and the fact that this was his impression seemed to me to be of real importance. Yet, I repeat, this point was ignored by the Government spokesman on that occasion.

The question really is how are we to deal with this situation. There is no point in turning out thousands of technologists and getting them jobs in industry, if they are not to be effectively employed there. I think my noble friend Lord Snow touched upon this in his speech, but he certainly did not develop the point. It is obviously very difficult to insist that these people shall be effectively employed. We must, somehow or other, get technologists and engineers into the higher echelons of industry rather than so many of the people who are now recruited because of their family position or, possibly, because they are good accountants, or have a reputation on the financial side, or something of that sort. I believe that Imperial Chemical Industries have been for many years an exception to what I have been saying, because they always have a number of eminent scientists and technologists on their board, and they are able to see that the technologists employed in that great concern are effectively employed. Somehow or other we must get the same sort of spirit and method of doing business into all our industrial concerns.

This is really another aspect of the debate we had two or three weeks ago, about the need for setting up industrial and business colleges. The people who go through these colleges have somehow or other to he infused with the realisation that it is not just a matter of bringing in technologists at lower levels in industry and having them on the weekly pay-roll: they must be employed effectively. I am sure that this is a very important aspect of this matter, and I hope that the noble Lord who is to reply for the Government will he able to throw some light on the method of dealing with it, because I have not been able to find one.

5.43 p.m.

THE EARL OF BESSBOROUGH

My Lords, like other Members of your Lordships' House, I should like to pay a tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Todd, for putting this Motion down on the Order Paper. The noble Lord's long experience and his long service as Chairman of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy make his remarks particularly interesting. I think that, of all the speeches which he has made in this House, this may have been one of the most illuminating, because, being no longer Chairman of the Council, he may have felt able to speak a little more freely than he might have done had he still held that office.

Having learned something over the past year—and it his been a very hard working year, with a great deal of homework—of the subjects about which the noble Lord has spoken, I should like, first of all, to say a word about development contracts which, as I think the noble Lord agreed—and he must know—were proposed as long ago as 1952. But I think he also agrees that they have not so far been very successful in this country. This, I think, is in contrast with the situation in the United States of America, where the development contract is the principal means by which the Government supports research in industry. I must admit that, having been in America quite recently, it would seem to me that the development contracts system works fairly effectively there, and seems to ensure that industry keeps in the forefront research and development. In this country, for example, the Atomic Energy Authority undertakes research on its own. In the United States, the Atomic Energy Commission does not. The A.E.C. is an administrative and executive body only, and the research is wholly undertaken by firms with whom the A.E.C. places its development contracts, with the result that Union Carbide, for instance, is wholly responsible for the operation of the Atomic Energy Commission's main research establishment, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

I am not proposing, any more than any other noble Lords, that we should try to transplant American systems over here. I am merely saying that the development contracts system in America is widespread, although it is true that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration do a certain amount of research of their own, rather as the Atomic Energy Authority does in this country, but not, I think, in so large a proportion. At all events, from what I saw in America I should not like to think that we in this country were rejecting the principle of development contracts altogether, and I think it is clear from Government statements that the Government agree with this. But I should be interested to hear the further views of the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, on this matter.

I suppose the fact that so much research here is already done by what I might describe as para-statal authorities and research councils and research stations supported by Government funds, would make it difficult to switch over to a development contracts system. Several noble Lords, perhaps, know more about this than 1 do, but this is the observation which I have made in comparing the system in America and Britain. Undoubtedly, in America they get industry itself to play a greater and more responsible part in research. I am sure that my noble friends opposite must be giving this matter very careful consideration. I think our own system has worked well in the past and, indeed, our research councils and research associations are envied by many of our American friends. But the evolution in the organisation of science and technology in this country must not stand still, and we must look carefully at every alternative method by which industry can be brought to benefit from the fruits of research.

I am glad to see that, apart from the creation of the new Ministry of Technology, the Government, in their new Science and Technology Bill, follow very much on the lines of the last Government's proposals arising out of the Trend Report. None the less, I think we must keep a close watch on what is happening abroad, not only in America, but also in Germany, where the development contract is also widely used. I would also say that, in considering the work of the new Science Research Council, I hope that full account will be taken of the experience of the National Science Foundation in America, which is so very much concerned with research work in the universities and which also, incidentally, plans to award 50 to 60 Fellowships to senior foreign scientists in the present academic year. I only wish that this country could afford to do the same in reverse.

The noble Lord, Lord Todd, also referred to the activities of the N.R.D.C. which, I think it is true to say, have not been very successful, except on a relatively small scale. In that connection I was interested to look back on the Labour Manifesto, The New Britain, where it said on page 9 that the N.R.D.C. which had been created by the former Labour Government, had already led to scores of new products and processes, of which the hovercraft and the Atlas computer were interesting examples. This seemed to me to be rather a misleading generalisation: "scores of new products and processes." Is a score 20, or does it mean that there were 40 new processes, or what? From my experience, apart from the hovercraft and the Atlas computer (which I think probably originated elsewhere) and a pill which originated with the Medical Research Council—that was "pinched" from the M.R.C.—I do not know that the N.R.D.C. has really done a great deal. But I hope the present Government will be able to put that right. I wanted to make the point that sometimes the Government give us very misleading generalisations.

I also noticed the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Todd, about the research associations. During my year's term of office I visited a considerable number of them, and there is no doubt at all that while some are doing an extremely good job, others have their problems. But, by and large—and this is very much of a generalisation—I think noble Lords will agree that where industry itself gives substantial support to their particular research association, then the climax in which they do their work seems very favourable and the results more successful. The relationship of the research associations with the universities should also, in my view, be further examined. In the case of units of the Medical and Agricultural Research Councils, which I also visited, and which are wholly grant-aided by the Government (they are not co-operative ventures as are the research associations), I got the impression that relations with the universities in most cases were excellent, and especially in those cases where a high percentage of their research was fundamental rather than applied.

I do not think that I could say that there were quite such close relations with the universities in the case of all the research stations of the D.S.I.R. and the research associations, although I can think of one research association which is, in fact, located within a university; and there are others where the links with universities are satisfactory. But I should particularly like to ask the Government this question—and I have given the noble Lord notice of this: what exactly do they propose to do about the research associations? My first question is thus quite a simple one. In a Written Answer given by the Secretary of State for Education and Science in another place on Thursday, November 26, it was not stated which Department would he responsible for them in Parliament. I daresay that it is, in fact, the Ministry of Technology; but that was not stated. Nor is this actually stated in the recently published Science and Technology Bill. However, the noble Lord need not bother to reply later to that question, as he has just indicated that it is Lord Snow's Department that will be responsible for them.

If I may be allowed to do so, I should like to cite another example of experience gained by our American friends. In addition to development contracts, there are other ways, as noble Lords may know, in which industry and the universities maintain close relations in that country. One is by research fellowships in a whole range of post-graduate studies. These fellowships are endowed by industrial firms in the universities themselves. They are widespread in America—more so, I think, than in this country—and there is no doubt that they must pay considerable dividends to the firms concerned.

There are also other interesting situations in American universities. I think, for example, of Stanford University, in which a group of carefully selected industries build their plants in a park around the univerisity to conform (I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Llewelyn-Davies, is here) to certain architectural standards. They are research plants. The universities devise the research courses for post, graduate engineers, for example, and this enables them to keep abreast of the latest developments in their particular speciality. Industry, rather than the universities, supports them, and the courses are in each case tailor-made to suit requirements. The services of the university staff are available in a consultative capacity, and this, of course, is less costly for industry which would otherwise have to hire their services.

Then also, as the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, knows, there are the contracts placed by Government agencies with the universities themselves. An interesting example was cited by the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, in the colour supplement of the Observer this week, in which the Massachusetts Institute of Technology obtained a contract to investigate the problem of transportation in the Boston-Washington corridor. I do not know whether M.I.T. provided a better solution of this problem than our own Road Research Laboratory would have done, but the principle is an interesting one. We must look at what is going on there. As the noble Lord knows about this example I shall be interested in his comments.

I believe that the noble Lord would also agree that it is always worth while to look at what is happening in America. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Snow, is particularly knowledgeable about how the Soviet Union tackle these problems. He did not speak to us about it, but possibly the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, is also familiar with them and will also tell us. I wonder, in fact, how successful the Russians have been. At all events, anything that can be done to bring Government stations, universities and industry even closer together will, I am certain, pay dividends; and in the case of applied research, the more industry feels able to invest in our own research associations, the better. The last Government did all they could to encourage this, especially in those industries made up of relatively small firms which cannot afford to undertake expensive research on their own. One thing that is important is that we should at all costs try to avoid the kind of situation in which, perhaps, American industry takes up a process which has been conceived or evolved in one of our own establishments. I hope that noble Lords opposite will look very carefully at this point, because an unhappy situation could arise.

The public image of technology, a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Todd, is a most important subject, and it was very much the concern of my right honourable friend in another place. Together we did everything possible to encourage the popularisation of mechanical engineering and other technologies, including chemistry and electronics, and those in which there were shortages. The B.B.C. and the Independent Television companies responded enthusiastically to this call, with the result, as was pointed out in your Lordships' House only last week, that a number of programmes, such as "Towards 2000" and many others, have now been produced, and are undoubtedly helping to stress the popular appeal—shall I say, the romance?—in the life and work of a mechanical engineer. I hope that noble Lords opposite will continue to urge the mass media to present engineering problems in reasonably popular form, and also in ways and at times that will enable boys and girls at school to absorb them.

I hope that noble Lords opposite will also agree to encourage professors of engineering at the universities to visit schools more frequently, with the object of stimulating more boys to take up engineering rather than pure science or the arts. I feel sure, too, that the Government will agree that greater efforts should be made to improve the quality of science teaching in schools. In travelling up and down the country over the past year I have frequently stressed these points. Although I have in the past been associated more with the arts than with science and technology, I have during the last year been doing my utmost to combat the snob appeal which is associated with the arts, because, as we all know, we are in this country short of mechanical engineers and certain other technologists which I have mentioned.

When I look at these problems I sometimes feel that the arts are almost a kind of indulgence. I might add that only a small percentage of girls seem to go in for these subjects, although they have an important contribution to make in research establishments and laboratories. I think not only of Madame Curie and of Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkins, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry only the other day, but also of women (there are not many of them) like my great grandmother, Charlotte Guest. She was perhaps the most practical woman of her age and was capable not only of applying science but also of running most efficiently, and in a most enlightened way, a vast industry in South Wales and a firm which provided all the rails for the Trans-Siberian Railway. Women can do it, if they will.

The noble Lord, Lord Todd, also stressed what has been said before in your Lordships' House, that there should be a greater ease of transfer from science to technology in universities. I have raised this point before in other debates. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, is sympathetic to it, and I hope that he will tell us how he can encourage this. The noble Lord, Lord Todd, may yet be right when he says that technological subjects will continue to lack glamour unless strong research schools are developed alongside and within our universities. The whole future of Britain depends on our scientific and technological manpower. It depends, I believe, more upon this than upon anything else. I know this from my visits to the United States, Germany and to Russia. Our own people must all be brought to recognise this fact, and I am sure noble Lords are with me in regard to this.

When I was recently visiting the Manned Spacecraft Centre at Houston in Texas, I also visited Rice University. The noble Lord, Lord Snow, may know it. Rice is now establishing its own Space Science Faculty, and I was glad to read recently that, I think, Bristol University was to set up a similar department. I do not think we should forget space research, even if we cannot afford to indulge in it so extensively as the United States or the U.S.S.R. We have indeed made important contributions; I have quoted them on other occasions. When one goes to America one finds they are more numerous than one thought. There is no doubt, as the noble Lord, Lord Todd, has said to me, that space science greatly appeals to the young. I might add it also appeals to some who are older and yet perhaps young in heart.

Above all, though, I would endorse Lord Todd's plea—this is, of course, a controversial matter—that science and technology are so interwoven that the two should be integrated. I am not necessarily saying how many Ministers there should be. But the two should be integrated. There may be a danger in separation, and there may be a good case for science and technology going to one Minister, rather than two. On the whole, I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, as to exactly where the split should be. I do not think science and technology itself can be split very effectively; there are other points where the split is more effective. At all events, I should like to know from the Government how the new Minister of Technology and the other Ministers associated with him—I gather there are six or seven in all—are going to tackle the problems which we all know exist. How will they get industry to make greater use of research facilities? How will they increase the number of mechanical engineers?

It is all very well to establish a new Department, but what exactly is it going to do? I think several noble Lords—certainly the noble Viscount, Lord Caldecote—referred to an answer given last Thursday by the Prime Minister in another place; he said that the Ministry of Technology had the general responsibility of guiding and stimulating a major national effort to bring advanced technology and new processes into British industry. This is, of course, what we all need, and we have no quarrel with that. He went on, however, to refer to the methods which it was proposed to employ. He said they would include an intensified use of the appropriate research stations and of the N.R.D.C., that civil development contracts would also be used, and—this was the method which mystified me most; this is what Lord Caldecote also quoted—he said the methods would include studies to identify particular industries or parts of industries suitable for action. What action? Does this mean that certain further industries are liable—

LORD SNOW

My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Earl? There is nothing at all sinister in this remark. Parts of industry suitable for action are suitable for development contracts or the absence of development contracts, for the use of purchasing power or the absence of purchasing power, and possibly other devices of the type mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Todd. There is nothing whatever sinister in this remark.

THE EARL OF BESSBOROUGH

I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord for giving me this assurance, because I was looking back at what the Prime Minister said when he was Leader of the Opposition. It was October, 1961, when he said: The N.R.D.C. should have the right in a backward or declining industry to establish publicly-owned or competitive State factories. I am quoting the words precisely, That was what the Prime Minister said in October, 1961; therefore I was in a little doubt when I then read those words on Thursday; I wondered whether the Prime Minister had not also got his former words in his mind when he gave that answer. But I am glad to have that assurance from the noble Lord.

I must say that I was also interested in Clause 5(1)(b) of the Bill on Science and Technology, which states that: The Secretary of State and the Minister may defray out of monies provided by Parliament any expenses which with the consent of the Treasury they may respectively incur: (b) as regards the Minister"— that is, the Minister of Technology— In furthering the practical application of the results of scientific research. How are the Government going to further these practical applications? I should be most interested to hear from the noble Lord on that point.

I will not go into detail in regard to integration between the Council for Scientific Policy and the new Technological Council. It is clear they should be integrated, and I hope there will be cross-representation on them, integrated as the two Ministries, I hope, will be integrated. I think these two Councils should work together, and I hope at least there will some co-ordination. Even so, I am, I am afraid, a little dubious about the whole set-up. Is this a case of streamlining the administration; as the Prime Minister proposed to do, or is it merely a further enlargement of a Socialist bureaucracy? It might, I think, have been possible to have a Council for Scientific Policy and a Technological Council for the proposed Industrial Research Development Authority. But I should like to know how the noble Lord thinks these two Councils will operate under separate Ministers. I should also like to mention the technical information services for industry and the extension of the industrial liaison facilities through the colleges of advanced technology and the technical colleges. Your Lordships may recall that earlier this year I announced in this House the initiation of a scheme for extending these facilities, and I am glad that during the year the scheme has progressed.

As your Lordships know, there are D.S.I.R. branch offices in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Newcastle. Indeed the D.S.I.R. has for many years paid close attention to the means of encouraging industry, and particularly the smaller firms, to utilise as fully as possible the results of research and development. What is to happen to these branch offices? I suppose they will remain under the Department of Technology. I do not want to think of them as the poor relatives of my noble friends. The most effective means of increasing the flow of technical information into such firms has undoubtedly been to arrange visits by these liaison officers. Liaison centres have also been established at certain CATS and technical colleges with officers manning them as members of the staff of the colleges. In their task of keeping industry informed of the many scientific and technical resources which are available to it, these officers draw attention to the facilities of the college. The officers also have limited lecturing commitments in introducing into the appropriate courses some topics related to the objectives of the centres. There are now ten of these centres in England and Wales and a further eleven are being established in accordance with the plans of extension which my right honourable friend and I announced in January.

In addition there are five such centres in Scotland, and there are the four technical regional information service centres which are as far as possible being assimilated into the newer industrial liaison centre scheme. All this is, I think, very promising, and I hope the Government will encourage even further extensions as they become practical, and I should like to know whether they would propose to do that. I think the situation in the CATS and technical colleges is now becoming satisfactory, and I hope also other universities will benefit from these services.

As it is a fairly late hour, I will not burden your Lordships with any further observations, except to repeat what I said in the debate on the Address about the high standing of British science and technology in the world to-day. I stand by the remarks which I made then. I am glad that we have heard again from the noble Lord, Lord Snow, whose admirable maiden speech greatly impressed your Lordships, as also did his speech to-day.

Having, some two months ago spent two hours debating at Rice University in Houston the problems of science and government arising out of the noble Lord's book of that name, and lately having had a conversation with him, I know that these problems are indeed close to his heart, as they are to that of the noble Lord, Lord Bowden. The noble Lord, Lord Snow, made that clear in his speech this afternoon. I am sure that he would not wish your Lordships to judge him purely as a successful novelist, which he undoubtedly is. Like many of your Lordships, I have enjoyed reading his novels and seeing dramatisations of them; but he has considerable academic and industrial experience and I have been equally interested to listen to him on the topics which your Lordships have been debating so ably this afternoon.

I was most interested in the remarks of my noble friend Lord Caldecote, who I hope will forgive me for mentioning him last. It was his maiden speech, too, from this Box, and I think he should be congratulated on what he said. Like my right honourable friend Mr. Marples, who speaks on technology for the Opposition in another place, my noble friend has for some time had practical experience in industry and has been busy running an important section of British business, in a firm with which the noble Lord, Lord Snow, is not, I think, unfamiliar.

It is undoubtedly the practical approach which we need, and that, I may say, is the theme of the Conservative Party. On the other hand, the theme of the present Government seems so often to be purely theoretical. If they try to apply some of their theories in practice we shall certainly jump down their throats; otherwise we shall, I hope, remain friendly. Having also made my first speech from this particular Bench I should like to crave your Lordships' indulgence to say that I believe, with Sir Leon Bagrit, that we should have at the head of affairs science-orientated humanists or, if I might perhaps vary this, humanistically-orientated scientists. I think we may have these. I believe that in considering the state of technical development in this country we should not forget the inspiration which the Arts can give us. The two cultures must not be separated; they must remain, as Leonardo da Vinci kept them, as close as possible together.

6.14 p.m.

LORD BOWDEN

My Lords, this has been a most extraordinarily interesting and memorable debate. I am sure that all your Lordships would wish me to express our thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Todd, for initiating the debate and for the extremely impressive speech which he made. So much of it—in fact, almost all parts of it could, I think, have been equally appropriately made from any of the Benches in this House. It is clear, I think, that we all feel much alike on most of the problems which have been our concern this afternoon. In thanking Lord Todd for the speech that he made, I feel that I should also thank him for the work that he has done during the last twelve years as Chairman of the A.C.S.P., a body which has had a most profound influence on the whole of the scientific policy of this country. The opinions of the A.C.S.P. have, in large measure, been determined by its Chairman, who voiced them for so long in this House and elsewhere. As I have said, we are much of a mind on most of what he said.

I think it is worth while briefly to put our problems into proper perspective. We in this country are in a difficult situation to-day, and it is important to realise just why our situation has in fact eventuated. If I may quote from a celebrated Member of this House, once Prime Minister, Lord Balfour, he said: The educational system of this country is chaotic, is ineffectual, is utterly behind the age. It makes us the laughing stock of every advanced country in Europe and in America. It puts us behind not only our American cousins, but the Germans, the Frenchmen and the Italians. He added: This is an age of modern artillery, and we turn out boys to do battle with it. equipped with the sword and shield of an ancient gladiator. This was the situation which Lord Balfour described after he had left office.

A situation as difficult as that is bound to take a long time to recover from. But there is no doubt at all that at this moment the universities and all that they stand for are tremendously in the public mind. I find from my statisticians that in the last month Her Majesty's Stationery Office has published five volumes containing 1,490 pages, which I am assured weigh no less than 4 lb. 9 oz., about the general problems of the universities and their development. They are in fact greatly in the public mind, and it is important to realise just what we are in process of doing.

I think it fair to say that at this moment the plant (if I can without offence so describe it) of our English universities is probably worth about £300 million all in. I am making no allowance in this figure for an estimated cost of replacing King's College, Cambridge, but £300 million is about the value of our English university buildings and equipment. During the course of the next ten or fifteen years (during which time I presume that the present Government will be in charge of affairs) we shall probably spend about as much again: in other words, the total amount of money to be spent on the universities in the next dozen or so years is about equal to the value of the universities to-day; and in the next ten or fifteen years—again it is impossible to give precise figures—the number of students who go into our universities will be about as many as have gone through all the English universities since the far off days when a few scholars fled from Paris and scaled in the swamps near Oxford.

The English universities are growing as never before. There can be no doubt that, at long last, -heir importance is properly realised. It is only a few years ago since I achieved a certain notoriety, which I have subsequently shuddered at, by pointing out that the Government of that time were spending considerably more on the egg subsidy than on the universities. I am glad to say that this situation has been transformed, and although eggs are costing rather less than they did, the universities are costing four or five times as much as they did in 1957. On the other hand, having said that, I should add that we still have to contend with the problem that, magnificent though these efforts may be, ambitious though our plans may be, we may not necessarily be doing all that we should do.

This poses the extremely important problem to which several noble Lords have referred this afternoon: the difficulty of recruiting as members of the departments of mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering, young men in sufficient numbers. Several noble Lords have already said, quite truly (I have figures with me, but there is no point in reading them now), that there are a large number of vacancies in the departments of science and technology—there are more men in place, but there are more vacancies than there were last year; whereas almost every department of the faculties of arts and classics and of medicine is full and overflowing. This raises a difficult and complex issue—namely, how are we to try to persuade students to read these important subjects?

The situation is in many ways fundamentally unstable, for a perfectly obvious reason. If I may choose mathematics as typifying any subject which may be important, as soon as the demand for mathematicians in industry increases, immediately the better men cease to become schoolmasters and become mathematicians in industry. Immediately, then, the quality of teaching in schools declines; the number of schoolboys coming forward declines; the number of seats in a university department declines, and the situation gets rapidly worse. We have in our present system of education a fundamental instability which tends to exaggerate any deficiency and immediately makes it worse. On the other hand, it would be regarded by everybody, and rightly so, as undesirable that students should be directed to read a particular subject. We have here the fundamental dilemma which besets any academic administrator who is trying to decide how best to organise the English educational machine.

This is not a problem which is unique to this country. It has been intensively studied both in Russia and in America. The techniques which are used for solving it in neither country can be held to be satisfactory, but I should like briefly to describe them to your Lordships, for you may find them interesting. In Russia they have an extremely elaborate system by which they control the expansion of their universities. They have set up a very comprehensive manpower survey organisation, which attempts to predict the demand for different types of scholar for a period of a few years ahead. They have, in fact, a running forecast for five years at a time. I spoke at length with Mr. Rudnev, the Deputy Prime Minister responsible for making this forecast. He frankly admitted that it was virtually impossible to produce reliable figures. It is not possible to decide this even in Russia, a country whose future is more or less internally controlled in the sense that ours is not; for they are not an exporting nation, whereas we are. Furthermore, a system which is adequate for five years hence, may prove to be quite wrong twenty years hence. This they clearly understand. But equally, they clearly understood that to make some attempt to control the entry into universities is far better than to make none; because they may be wrong, but they would not be grotesquely wrong, as we quite easily could be.

Our own universities are expanding according to a process which Lord Robbins in his Report presumed to be the only one we could adopt. Your Lordships may remember that the Robbins Committee decided that it was not possible in this country to predict the demand for different kinds of scholar, so that the only thing to do was to allow students to choose freely which disciplines they wished to study when they arrived in the university.

This idea appears at first sight to be the only equitable, fair and English way: but when one comes to consider its implications it is far less attractive than at first sight appears, because the choice which determines the faculty to which a student ultimately goes in a university is nearly always made when he is about fourteen years of age. Thereafter, it is almost impossible for him to change his direction. So it is almost true to say that the destiny of our universities, their whole expansion programme, and with this the whole destiny of this country, is at this moment in the hands of fourteen-year-old schoolboys. This situation is quite intolerable; but, for all that, it is extremely hard to alter it. All I can attempt to say is that we are doing our best—perhaps the noble Lord who is about to say something does not agree with me.

LORD NEWTON

My Lords, is the noble Lord really saying that the vast majority of undergraduates and students at university decide what disciplines they are going to study at the age of 14? Did I understand the noble Lord aright?

LORD BOWDEN

Yes, you did. They decide which side of the sixth form to go to at that age, and thereafter they are almost irrevocably committed to it. It is extremely hard for a man, who decided to read, say, classics at the age of 14, to switch to mathematics at the age of 17. It is done occasionally, but it is so difficult that this is to all intents and purposes true.

Some of your Lordships may have seen the extremely interesting survey which was recently made by the Institute of Chemical Engineers, who attempted to discover the motives which led people who read chemical engineering to choose that particular subject when they had entered university. It was perfectly obvious that the decisions were made on an extraordinarily arbitrary basis. Occasionally someone happened to know a chemical engineer; sometimes they used a pin; sometimes careers masters helped them a bit. But the final conclusion is that the choice was, as it were, made in a total fog and in a complete absence of understanding of the principles involved, of the probable value of this particular career, of the interest of the subject or of any other significant parameter.

Here we have one of our greatest educational problems. How are we to try to persuade schoolboys to make the proper choice? How far is it proper, reasonable or tolerable that the policy of university expansion should be controlled, directed, or even influenced by the central Government? The universities are very properly extremely jealous of their autonomy: so, of course, they must be. On the other hand, how far can we, at a time when universities are costing something like £200 million a year, at a time when the destiny of the country is firmly in their hands, ignore the responsibilities of deciding, or of helping them to decide, which departments should be increased, and how far, and how much, restriction should be imposed on others?

The Russians, as I have said, make deliberate attempts to do this. There are always more applications for places than there are places to offer them. The total global figure for the various departments is determined centrally and students compete for places in departments of their choice. So there is a certain measure of direction, minimal but to them inescapably necessary.

One of the problems which we must discuss—I hope to discuss this with Vice-Chancellors before long—is how far is it reasonable and possible to make decisions of this kind. But I have to confess that the very best efforts made so far to produce reliable forecasts for manpower have not been by any means complete, and even if we could do it we should not know how to do it as yet. But it is a problem with which in the next few years the Government—any Government—will have to wrestle, and which all universities will have to consider. Once we have a statistical department in the Government capable of making the forecasts, then and only then will it be possible to have some influence on the growth of our great universities.

In America the final choice of subject is not usually made by a student until lie is in his second or third year in the university. Then it is nearly always made under the influence of estimates of the probable value of his degree after he has left the university. The Americans are much more conscious than we are of the cash value of a degree to a graduate and the extent to which he may hope throughout his lifetime to benefit from the qualifications he gets at university. For this reason the choice of the student is directed at least into those professions whose career prospects are good, even if they are not necessarily the careers which are most socially desirable. There is at least no possibility—a possibility which exists in this country—that all graduates should one year turn out to he ecclesiastical historians. Fortunately this has never happened, but in principle it seems only too possible that it might.

We have been told of the extreme difficulty of getting people adequately qualified in mathematics. I should like at this point to pay a warm tribute to the work which is being clone by the Nuffield Foundation and by Professor Thwaites and one or two other people on the development of courses in mathematics. They are improving the system immensely, and I believe that the advent of new teaching in mathematics is going to have an extraordinary and exhilarating effect on what has hitherto been a rather arid subject, and that perhaps the shortage may not last as long as it otherwise might do. I think it quite remarkable that the Nuffield people should have started this enterprise, and although I could not be sure of the figure I think they must have spent the better part of £1 million, all in all, on developing this most important work.

One noble Lord referred to the problem of the illiterate engineer. It is fashionable to denounce engineers who are unable to express themselves in English; but I myself fear far more the man to whom Providence, in its inscrutable wisdom, has denied the gift of understanding, but whom it has endowed with the gift of speech. These are the men who make unsafe designs and then persuade boards of management to put them into production. There is a time when it is more important to be a good professional engineer than necessarily to be a man of two cultures, however desirable this may be.

My Lords, I am afraid that, unless I take an inordinate time this evening, it will not be possible for me to answer all the questions which noble Lords have posed, but I should like to answer just a few of them. One of the problems which the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough, mentioned was that of development contracts. My Lords, these have a most important effect in the American universities. As the noble Earl very rightly said, the Atomic Energy Commission entrusts the greater part of its work to a few firms and to many universities. It is remarkable to think that all the later stages of the rocket which is just now on its way to Mars, and all the equipment in it, were made to designs produced in California at Cal. Tech. The great atomic energy place at Oakridge, as the noble Earl said, is run by a large industrial firm, but Los Alamos is run by the University of California. This idea of entrusting universities with large development contracts for major pieces of Government work is vitally important, and it has been the making of the great American graduate schools.

As I have said in this House before, the most difficult problem of education to-day is not, I submit, in the schools or in the universities as they are normally thought of, but is in the problem, as the Americans phrase it, of turning college graduates into engineers. How do you make a man understand that engineering is more than the stuff you read in books? How do you make him aware of the fact that it is a method of tackling problems; that science is a way of life rather than a body of knowledge? The only way he can do this is by serving his apprenticeship to a real scientist, a real engineer, doing a real piece of research somewhere. The American Government, realising this, have gone to enormous lengths to make sure that almost all the research which they sponsor is in some way associated with the educational process. I believe that this has been the greatest single source of strength and the most important reason for the rapid growth of the great American graduate schools. So far as we are able to do it, I hope that both the Department of Education and Science and the Ministry of Technology will use the same technique over here.

I can assure your Lordships that the two Ministries are as close together as it is possible for any people to be. I would also try to emphasise the fact that it was not possible to have one Ministry coping with everything. When we really came to decide where this indivisible rôle must be divided, we were confronted with a spectrum which extends all the way from the nursery school, through the kindergarten, through the elementary school, through the secondary school, through the grammar school, through the university, through university research, through science, through technology, through development, through the Board of Trade and, finally, to the Treasury. It is inconceivable that any such immense mixture can be assimilated in one Ministry. The division had to be made somewhere. The division was made, perhaps arbitrarily, but it had to be made arbitrarily, and I think it is no worse than any place which has been suggested and is better than any other I can think of.

So, regrettable though it may be that we have had to split, I still think that the split has been made as sensibly as it could have been made, and I believe that it will work. It happens by coinci- dence that it is the very same place that the Russians have chosen to split their own Ministries. They have an Academy of Sciences and they have a Ministry of Technology which is quite separate from it, and they are as much aware as anyone else of the extreme importance, and the great difficulty, of maintaining adequate liaison between the pure and applied sciences.

There are one or two other points which I should like to make, my Lords, before answering the particular speeches that have been made. The first of them is that I would add mine to the many tributes which were paid in this House to the President of the Royal Society on his announcement of the proposed increase in the number of new Fellowships of the Royal Society, to be given to men who have made their name as applied scientists rather than as pure scientists. It is rather interesting that the Americans have found the same problem—it is extraordinary how international these problems are—in giving adequate repute and prestige to engineering these days. They themselves often said that when a rocket gets to the Moon it is a triumph of pure science, but when it fails it is a failure of engineering.

They, too, have attempted to solve the problem which our own Royal Society has been tackling, but they have done it in a slightly different way. They have set up a completely new Academy, an Academy of Engineers, to have the same sort of status as the Academy of Sciences has. Our own academy, if I may so describe the Royal Society, has chosen to enlarge its membership specifically to admit new applied 'scientists. The Royal Charter, with which King Charles II endowed it, required them to investigate the useful arts as well as the sciences.

I hope very much that this idea of the validity of pure and applied science will permeate the whole of society, including our universities. I also hope very much that our universities will associate themselves as closely as possible with local industry, through the industrial liaison officers of whom the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough, spoke, and through their own contacts. I hope very much, too, that English universities will be more liberal than they have been in the past, in permitting. and in fact encouraging, their staff to engage in consulting work for industry. Some universities have done extraordinarily well in this respect, and I think many firms have been very glad, and very generous, too, in the way in which they have welcomed academics to their fellowship, and have allowed them to play their proper part in the development of the industry, which, after all, is really the joint responsibility of the industry itself and of the academic world.

The noble Lord, Lord Todd, referred to the problem of the length of the course for engineers. My Lords, this is a matter which I think is often not properly appreciated. The real length of a course for a graduate engineer is usually six or seven years. He spends three years taking his first degree, then, very frequently, he takes a postgraduate apprenticeship—rather unfortunately so described—which may last for a couple of years; and thereafter he may have at least another year of practical experience—and all this before he becomes a properly chartered engineer. It is important, I think, not to lengthen the course too much. In Holland, it is now seven or eight years, and the Dutch find this very much strain.

In Harvard, not long ago, someone computed the average age of men who leave that University as Ph.Ds. They found that it has increased by an average of about three months a year ever since the war. On the same piece of paper the same statistician plotted the average age of retirement of executives who had been to Harvard, and found that this has dropped by about three years every year since 1950. If one extrapolates these two curves—and many a statistician has very confidently extrapolated far less reliable information than this—one finds that the two curves intersect in the year 1995. I am not sure what one can infer from this, and I cannot believe that the day will ever come when people will graduate from Harvard after they have retired.

One must remember that the business of life is living, and that the educational process should be kept to a minimum so that people can actually go out and do something, in order to make it possible to pay for these enormous universities which are costing us so much. A figure which I got when I was in the States last, which may interest your Lordships, is that it is estimated—heaven knows how!—that, of the total productivity of America, at this moment, about a half may be fairly attributed to the academic world. This is a remarkable statement to make; but not only is it true to say that firms will go and build new factories near to universities, but last year, in California, two firms went and built factories near where it was thought a campus was going to be put, in the confident expectation that the presence of the university would enormously increase their own potential productivity. Those of your Lordships who have ever been to Boston will know of the very large number of industries which have grown up on Route 128, which is a sort of by-pass around Boston, all of which depend on the presence of that very great complex in which I think there are now eleven universities and nearly two-thirds as many undergraduates as there are in the whole of Great Britain.

The importance of universities for the development of industry in America is now so notorious that it is beginning to be a matter of considerable political importance, and those States which have not as yet been fortunate enough to secure a large university within them are beginning to be very restive and to complain to the Federal Government that their own support of the centres of excellence now established is unfair, and they are trying to increase the number of large universities which can have the sort of Federal support which has made the great ones so famous. This, they believe to be important, not merely because of the value they attach to scholarship or to research but because of the immense commercial significance of a university as a centre from which new ideas and new projects can he expected to develop, quite as a matter of course and almost at once. It is this attitude of mind that, above all other things, it seems to me, we must import from America. As I said in this House a fortnight ago, it is far more important to import this than to import business schools. It was this very idea that the university is part of society, that it should study society's problems and should expect to solve them, to the immense benefit of society—an idea long understood in the American universities—which led, among many other things, to the creation of the business schools at an appropriate time.

My Lords, I should now like, very briefly, to pass to some of the points which have been made by noble Lords. I think I have already answered many of them, either directly or indirectly. First of all, the noble Lord, Lord Todd, raised the very general question as to why Germany and Japan are doing so much better than we are. It is remarkable, I think, that Japan has done relatively little pure research. On the other hand, they have always taken the problems of industrial research extremely seriously. For what it is worth, I think I might say that in 1895 the largest school of electrical engineering in which English was spoken was in Tokyo. They have always clearly understood the importance of applied science; and, again, one of the problems which we as a nation have to face is the extent to which we can afford to divert our resources into pure research.

I may say that, during the 1890s, the 1900s and the early part of this century, America did relatively little pure research but relied on Europe for original ideas which were then adapted for commercial use in America at small cost to them. We did the pure research which helped America to become great. I remember after the war talking to American scientists and asking them what they proposed to do as it would no longer be possible for them to depend on Europe for their pure research; and they said, quite simply, that they proposed to go to Europe and buy up all the best scientists they could find—and this they did. America's pre-eminence in research—and let us remind ourselves of this—has occurred only since the war. Until then, America depended entirely on Europe for its original ideas. It is significant that those countries which are increasing their gross national product most rapidly are those which are devoting almost all their efforts in applied research to adapting for production ideas originating elsewhere.

How far can we allow our best brains to be diverted into subjects whose immediate impact on the economy is not sufficiently obvious? This is going to be an extraordinarily difficult and agonising reappraisal, if I may use a phrase which has been used by other people in other places. Clearly, this must be, for the next several years, the major preoccupation of the Department which I have the honour to serve. There is no easy answer. One must not stop pure research. Obviously one must not; it would be impossible even to think of it. On the other hand, one must face the fact that other countries whose wealth is increasing very rapidly are doing much less than we are.

The noble Lord, Lord Todd, referred also to the possibility of using development contracts, and the noble Lords, Lord Snow and Lord Peddie, referred, too, to the same subject. If I may be forgiven. I should like to enlarge very briefly on the work which has been done in America to use the power of Government spending to develop new industrial ideas. The analysis of the defence spending which was made for Mr. McNamara very recently proved, to everyone's astonishment, that, among other things, although the Army bought few machine tools of its own, it was at one stage removed responsible for buying 1,000 million dollars worth every year. They are, therefore, profoundly convinced that the Army is capable of most profoundly influencing the whole machine-tool trade by requiring that those people who, on their behalf, spend 1,000 million dollars a year on machine tools, should do so in an attempt to improve the machine tools as well as just getting the guns and things made for which they were first bought.

McNamara was going to build, I think, nine new hospitals this year, and again he decided that, since this was an immense expenditure likely to have important repercussions on hospitals throughout the whole of the States, he would give two large contracts to universities to decide how best to design hospitals to the specification which the Army was prepared to write. This idea that it is possible to use the Government's purse in an attempt to influence commercial policy is one which is now exercising the Americans very much indeed, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Snow, has said, it is going to concern us, too.

The poor image of technology, and the fact that our 4 per cent. growth rate will not be possible unless we have more engineers, has been touched on by so many speakers that all I can say is that I am afraid it is only too true; and those of your Lordships who ever read the New Scientist will have seen a very significant discussion of the matter by Mr. Holloway, who is in charge of the appointments board in the University of Manchester, who Discusses, with appalling clarity, the almost certain shortfall in engineers and technologists by 1970. One of the more striking points he makes is that it is precisely in those subjects where the need is greatest that it is most difficult, to attract students. This can hardly b credited; but those departments for whose students the demand is not very great, are full, and those departments from which students are enormously in demand, are half-empty. This is one of the great mysteries and great tragedies of many universities, and it is one which particularly affected me when I was in Manchester. We had one or two departments—very unfamiliar ones, very important ones, yet almost wholly neglected by schoolboys.

THE EARL OF BESSBOROUGH

May just ask the noble Lord whether he has any ideas as to how to deal with this problem? Because we recognise it to be so, of course.

LORD BOWDEN

All I can say is that we did our best. We gave lectures to 23,000 schoolboys every year. We went round and saw headmasters; we had conferences with headmasters and careers masters; we wrote articles for all the magazines; and we sent circulars around. We did everything we could; but the situation, despite that, is as bad as I have told you—and it might have been worse if we had not done what we did. But it is extremely difficult. It is in some measure due, I am sure, to the fact that the schoolmasters, and the careers masters in particular, work in a fog. They do not know what departments there are. They have never heard of half of the industries that their students will go to. As the noble Lord, Lord Snow said, there is no simple, single solution. It involves the collaboration of everyone in a position to influence public opinion: industrialists, schoolmasters, headmasters, university professors, Government. The B.B.C. must also play their part if this extraordinarily vexatious problem is to be solved.

The noble Viscount, Lord Caldecote, referred to the importance of Government participation in buying computers, and particularly for developing software. This is well known to us and we are urgently studying what best is to be done. It is fair to say that the use of computers is even more important than their manufacture. We are worse at using them than we are at making them in England.

The importance of technicians was mentioned by several noble Lords, and obviously this is a matter of tremendous importance. I was interested to note Lord Peddie's remarks. Am I being mischievous if I infer from them that the best incentive for rapid automation in factories would be a very rapid rate of increase of wages? Whether "Neddy" will approve this as a suggestion is more than I can say.

The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, pointed out the difficulty of distinguishing between research and development. This difficulty is well known. He and I collaborated once or twice in an attempt to circumvent his terms of reference, and our salvation came only because the Board of Trade, in writing them, followed the Napoleonic dictum that written constitutions should be short and obscure.

My Lords, if I have inadvertently omitted an answer to any of the questions posed by noble Lords, I will take refuge in the fact that I have already spoken for too long on matters immensely complex. I wish there were answers to half of the questions posed. I take comfort from the fact that on both sides of your Lordships' House there is an awareness of the difficulties of the task and of its importance and most important of all, there is the obvious eagerness of every Member of your Lordships' House who spoke today to help in what must inevitably be a joint and national enterprise. Once more I should like to express my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Todd, for introducing this subject to us this afternoon.

6.52 p.m.

LORD TODD

My Lords, we have had an excellent summing-up to this debate, which I found extremely interesting, by the noble Lord, Lord Bowden. It has been a great pleasure to find that not only I but all noble Lords who spoke are very much in agreement about this enormous problem, and all of us will, I am sure, wish to see everything possible done to put things right. We may, of course, have little points of difference here and there. For instance, in his summing up, the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, made reference to my comments about training courses for engineers. I realise that in this country it does, in fact, take six years, if you look at it the way he looks at it. The point that I was raising was whether the particular type of courses we have, three years in the university and then a graduate apprenticeship and what-not, is the best possible arrangement. Should we not have more post-graduate courses in universities rather than relying simply on experience in industry?

LORD BOWDEN

My Lords, I strongly agree about this. I was referring simply to the total time.

LORD TODD

My Lords, I realise this. I think that perhaps a little more pure research is being done in Germany and Japan than the noble Lord gives credit for. They do quite a considerable amount of pure research in some fields, in both countries.

I think the debate has been well summed up, but I should like to make one point. There has been a certain amount of talk on this question of where science and technology should be divided up. It is clear that neither I nor any other noble Lord who spoke would think that a vast omnibus Ministry, with the whole of education, science and technology, would work. We may have slight differences about the precise point of division; but I hope the noble Lord, Lord Snow, did not think that I. or, indeed, other members of the Trend Committee, had suggested that the whole gamut of education, science and technology should be in one Ministry.

LORD SNOW

Oh, no!

LORD TODD

I must say that I was greatly struck by one part of Lord Snow's remarks, when he was telling us about what the Minister of Technology is doing. He told us that the Minister was listening carefully before taking any action. This seems to be a new and revolutionary concept in Government and one which might with great profit be extended to other Departments. As I have said, we have had an extremely interesting debate to-day, and I should like to say how grateful I am personally to all noble Lords who have taken part. With that I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.