Lords Sitting of 2 March 1977

Preamble
The House met at half-past two of the clock (Prayers having been read earlier at the Judicial Sitting by the Lord Bishop of Derby.):
The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.

STATUTORY INSTRUMENTS: DATE OF ISSUE
Lord JACQUES: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government why Statutory Instruments are not available to the public in advance of the date on which they come into operation, and in particular, why Statutory Instrument No. 2/1977 relating to the maximum retail price of paraffin, which was operative from 8th January 1977, was not received by trade associations until 11th January 1977 so that it was about a week after the operative date when their members received the advice.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, most general Statutory Instruments are brought into operation after, and normally some weeks after, they have been printed and put on sale. The need to ensure the orderly marketing of paraffin means that only two or three days can be allowed between the laying and bringing into operation of paraffin orders. Full details of paraffin price increases are given on the day that the order is laid in a departmental Press notice circulated to the media to ensure wide publicity.
Lord JACQUES: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply. Is he aware that traders cannot take their instructions from the media? They take their instructions from trade associations. Is my noble friend further aware that Statutory Instruments should be received by trade associations at least 14 days in advance of the operative date? This is to allow them time to study the Instrument and to advise their members. Their members have afterwards to instruct their branches as to the effect of the order.
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I should be glad if my noble friend could follow this up.
Lord STRABOLGI: Yes, my Lords, I have a lot of sympathy with what my noble friend has said. The Department of Energy wrote to the trade associations on 6th January before the order came into operation, and the major oil companies also immediately passed the details on to their retailers. A lengthy delay in bringing these particular orders into operation would lead to a run on stocks.
Baroness VICKERS: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether he would agree to support more fully what the noble Lord, Lord Jacques, has said? I happen to be a member of the Statutory Instruments Committee, and all too recently we have had a number of orders brought in without the 21 days' notice. We actually complained about this. This paraffin order is one of those we took up with the Department concerned.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, there are difficulties, but, as I say, it is necessary for these particular orders to be issued within a shorter period than the normal ones. But the Department is entering into talks with the trade associations, and I hope that these are some of the difficulties that can be explored.
Lord CAMPBELL of CROY: My Lords, the noble Lord has said that letters were issued on 6th January, but that gave only two days for the recipients of the letters then to pass the information on. Two days is much too short a time for all the action to be taken. Will the noble Lord treat this as a serious matter, because the price control system is difficult enough for retailers to follow without the problems of hearing of the event only after it has occurred, or being expected to learn of it through the media?
Lord STRABOLGI: Yes, my Lords, I will certainly take note of what the noble Lord has said and pass it on to my right honourable friend.
Lord JACQUES: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that by not passing the information to the media the Department could prevent a run on stocks, but they could nevertheless advise trade associations who have to do the work?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I do not think that the information is passed to the media sufficiently early for there to be a run on stocks, but I will certainly note the point that my noble friend has made.
Lord MACKIE of BENSHIE: My Lords, is the Front Bench aware of the enormous value of gamekeepers turning into poachers?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I certainly know what it is like to be on the receiving end of my noble friend.

ISRAEL: ARAB BOYCOTT AND BRITISH TRADE
2.36 p.m.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what protection is given to British industrial firms and finance houses who engage in business with the State of Israel and are affected by the boycott by Arab countries.
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: My Lords, Her Majesty's Government are opposed to all trade boycotts which lack international support and authority. But it is for individual firms to decide their own attitude to the Arab boycott in the light of their commercial judgment. The advice and assistance of officials at the Department of Trade is available to any British firm which wishes to consult them and any such discussions are always undertaken in strict confidence.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that I regard that Answer as a completely unsatisfactory one? The Government have a responsibility—I affirm this without fear of challenge—to protect British firms against any subversive tactics on behalf of anybody outside this country or within this country. Although I am not blaming my noble friend, because I have no doubt it is a Civil Service reply—certainly it would not be endorsed by a sensible Cabinet—may I ask whether he is aware that the Government must accept the responsibility?
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They cannot leave it to the judgment of firms which have no power to deal with the matter. This is a matter in which the Government must accept responsibility and act accordingly; the sooner they do so the better. Otherwise they ought to say, "We abandon British firms. They can go where they like. We are not concerned". Do not forget that they pay taxes and are entitled to some representation.
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: My Lords, the responsibility of the British Government is to the British people. Our trade figures are such that in the last accounting period we exported to Israel £249 million worth of goods and £2,000 million to the Arab world. We have to balance these factors against any emotional view of the rights and wrongs of the Arab boycott.
Lord BYERS: My Lords, is it not a fact that this is not an emotional view but is a matter of a moral principle which is at stake? Is it not true that in the past Her Majesty's Government have said that they could not take any action in this country until the United States had legislated against the boycott? Now that the United States has legislated against the boycott by means of the Tax Reform Act, and is contemplating stronger measures, is it not time that Her Majesty's Government took really tough action on this matter?
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: My Lords, Her Majesty's Government are aware of the United States legislation and will watch its operation in practice.
Lord BYERS: My Lords, how long have we to wait for action?
Lord JANNER: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that, where other countries have taken a firm stand against the very serious blackmail of those who are imposing that evil boycott, the firms who were threatened with boycott have had that threat removed? Is it not time that we realised that there is such a thing as facing blackmailers in a properand firm manner, which is the only way in which blackmailers can be stopped from continuing with their blackmail?
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: My Lords, it is the attitude of Her Majesty's Government that these factors must be left to the judgment of the individual firms. We do not have the facilities to form judgments for every firm which deals with both the Arab world and Israel; but the fact is that the firms seem to be judging fairly effectively. Our exports to both Israel and to the Arab world are rising.
Lord COLERAINE: My Lords, would not Her Majesty's Government agree that, in the long run, surrender to blackmail never pays?
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: Certainly, my Lords; it never pays, particularly when commercial judgment is used.
Lord SEGAL: My Lords, in giving guidance to any British firms which seek their advice, may I ask my noble friend to say why Her Majesty's Government cannot quote the successful action of the United States Government in breaking this Arab boycott and remind these firms that Arab customers invariably make a bee-line for the Marble Arch branch of Marks and Spencer, a firm which has taken a leading part in breaking this anti-Israel boycott?
Lord SHINWELL: Does my noble friend intend to answer that supplementary question asked by my noble friend Lord Segal?
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: My Lords, it is a little early to judge whether the United States legislation is successful. We must watch what happens.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lord——
Lord JANNER: My Lords, I should like to know——
Several noble Lords: Order!
Lord JANNER: My Lords, with great respect to the House, this is a very important matter which affects the moral standards of our trading.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARY-LEBONE: My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Janner, did not see that another noble Lord was trying to address the House when he rose; the noble Lord,
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Lord Shinwell, who asked the original Question, had risen before he did.
Lord HALE: My Lords, would the Leader of the House permit me——
Several noble Lords: Order!
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, I am not asking for any special privilege, nor am I asking about any particular section of people, nor because I am biased in any way. The British people to whom my noble friend referred expect the Government to protect them, to secure them against subversive tactics, to secure them against terrorism and to secure them against blackmail. What do the Government intend to do? Do they intend to do nothing but merely remain an interested spectator? If so, why ask these British firms to pay tax? Answer that question, and no nonsense about it!
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: My Lords, the British Government are available to give advice and assistance, and that advice and assistance seems to be successful.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, may I ask one more question? My noble friend said that trade with the Arab countries now exceeds the trade with Israel. What moral standard are we adopting when we know that for many years the balance of trade with Israel, so far as we are concerned, has exceeded by far the balance of the whole of the trade with all the Arab States? When are we going to stop utilising subterfuges for expediency instead of concerning ourselves with morality?

PERSONAL STATEMENT
Lord HALE: My Lords, I beg leave of the House very briefly to apologise, as in duty bound, for my failure to be here to put Question No. 2. I had been in the Library for an hour. I did not know that Question No. 1 would not be asked and, what is more—it was entirely my fault—I overlooked the fact that Prayers were not being read this afternoon, so my arrival at 2.31 precisely was too late.
The LORD PRIVY SEAL (Lord Peart): My Lords, I thank my noble friend for those remarks.

AIRCRAFT AND SHIPBUILDING INDUSTRIES BILL
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, with the leave of the House, at a convenient moment after 3.30 p.m. my noble friend the Leader of the House will make a Statement on the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Bill.

HOUSE OF LORDS LIBRARY
2.43 p.m.
Lord PEART: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. The Working Group on the House of Lords' Library was set up last March by my noble friend Lord Shepherd when he was Leader of the House. This Working Group, under the chairmanship of the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, has now produced a detailed and extremely worthwhile report on the future of the Library, and I think it would be in the interests of your Lordships for this report to be made as widely available as possible. I therefore ask the House to agree that it be printed.
I wish to take this opportunity of expressing my warm thanks to the noble Viscount and all the members of the Working Group for the time and hard work they have devoted to this subject. When your Lordships have had an opportunity to read the report I look forward to hearing reactions to it, and there will of course be widespread consultation. If Members of the House feel that it would be a subject suitable for debate, that is a point which can certainly be discussed through the usual channels.
Moved, That the report to the Leader of the House from the Working Group on the House of Lords' Library be printed.—(Lord Peart.)
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARY-LEBONE: My Lords, I rise simply to add the thanks of noble Lords on this side of the House to my noble friend Lord Eccles, and to agree with the Leader of the House that the report should be printed in order that it may be studied by us all.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
2.45 p.m.
Lord KENNET Lord KENNET rose to call attention to the organisation of research and development since the Rothschild Report (Cmnd. 4814); and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, the Motion speaks of the organisation of research and development since the Rothschild Report. That is simply for the sake of convenience because of course that organisation develops organically over the decades and the appearance of one or other report—the Haldane Report, the Rothschild Report and so on—merely punctuates this organic development. However, it seemed to many people that, the Rothschild Report having been published and debated in this House four years ago, and its broad outlines having been adopted and put into operation three years ago, this might be a convenient moment for what I should like to think of as a mid-term discussion.
I shall conclude my remarks today by asking the Government whether they will, about three years from now, have some further inquiry of a wide-ranging nature into the whole matter. If they were to agree that about six years is the right time to allow a new principle to run before examining its effect on the economy and on the world of science, then we could look on today's debate as a half-term discussion, not in depth. The House is fortunate in being about to hear two distinguished maiden speakers this afternoon, the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and the noble Viscount, Lord Sidmouth. Lord Baker's past experience will be of particular and obvious appositeness to the matter in hand.
If one pots the Haldane principle as I have heard it potted, it is easy to trace the history of what has happened since. The Haldane principle one could say was that, since in 1916, at the time of its formulation, scientists were poor, vulnerable little creatures, few in number and liable to instant suppression when their results were inconvenient to the policies of their masters, it was expedient that for self-protection they should be gathered together in huddles, where they could defend one another and grow strong while feeding on their own scientific values, and that after a time they should then be strong enough to sally forth and take up a

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more independent position in the world and act as prime movers instead of vulnerable centres of wisdom in their burrows.
That is, I think, more or less what has happened. During a great part of the history of the Haldane era, the principal huddle was of course in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research; and then the scientists were allowed to break out of that into the Ministries and Departments, though it is not so long ago—in fact, in my days as a junior Minister; only six years ago—that the chief scientists in Departments were commonly not allowed to see the Minister unless they took with them and had beside them an administrator as a nanny. If one looks at it in that way one can see that the Rothschild Report and the customer-contractor principle were not a negation of everything that had gone before, but a natural development. It was time by then, so held Lord Rothschild in his report, to allow the scientists to stand entirely on their own feet and to be placed at the very top of every Ministry in the form of a chief scientist, and to allow those chief scientists, under the Minister alone, to act as direct customers with the contractors who had actually been doing the research around the place for the Government.
It came at the right moment. We must of course remember that all the fuss at the time of the Rothschild Report was about a very small proportion of the money concerned; it was about research council money. We must remember that Government research and development money, including all military research, is only half that spent in the country; we must remember that only 12 per cent. of that half at that time went to the research councils, and we must remember that only one quarter of that 12 per cent., 1½ per cent., of all the money spent in the country, was to be "customerised" according to the Rothschild principle.
I should now like to ask the Government whether this has happened. Has it been done? Has what Lord Rothschild recommended taken place?—namely, that a quarter of 12 per cent. of Government expenditure should be switched from the Department of Education and Science to the executive Ministers. Are they satisfied with the way it has happened
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where it has happened in the case of the three research councils? I shall finish with the research councils soon. We only talk about them so much because the Rothschild Report itself and the Dainton Report gave so much space (to them, and because they are so very visible and so glamorous in a way. Of course, the great bulk of things, both in the Rothschild Report and in life, have been continuing to develop without criticism and without bumps.
There is a common opinion that within the "Rothschilded" sector, as it were, things have worked best with the Agricultural Research Council and least well with the Natural Environment Research Council. I should like to ask the Government whether that is correct. If so, I feel that the reason is obvious: the Agricultural Research Council has only one customer in Whitehall—the Ministry of Agriculture—whereas the Natural Environment Research Council has, I believe, six Ministries as customers. This causes an inevitable increase in paper work, in committee work and in general bureaucracy. As an example; I have heard of a small ten-man research unit with one computer at a provincial university that suffers from no fewer than five Government customers, four Ministries and one research council. No doubt that is an extreme case, but am I right in sensing that it may have been the experience of the Government that the success of "Rothschildisation" has depended on the presence of a single customer or a small number of customers, and that it has been less than a success with a large number of customers?
I should like to leave this part of my discourse with one thought. It is that the industry of Britain which tends to be regarded as a failure story, is not a failure story in general. Only one sector does badly, and that is the engineering-based industry. For instance, the food and drink industry and the petrochemical industry do rather well. Why is it that our old friends the automobile, shipbuilding and aircraft industries, the engineering-based industries generally, do badly? Is there any connection between their relatively poor performance and the way R and D is organised and, if so, I wonder what it is? Perhaps the Government can help us to form thoughts on this.
Still on the research council question, one hears it said that there are staff difficulties and that, with the shifting round of the source of funds and the inevitable imposition of cuts due to the end of the age of rapid economic expansion, there has been a certain amount of difficulty in keeping staff. That is natural enough, but the new customers, and especially the advisory board on the research councils, are accused in some quarters of a simplistic approach to the art of cutting. It is alleged that they simply say, "Well, a cut is a cut", without realising that to impose a cut on a going concern automatically redistributes all the overheads, and that it is not as simple as it looks simply to lop a few million off a flow of money.
Would it be possible to overcome the difficulties that some of the research councils and their dependent institutions are suffering by allowing the research councils to maintain a bank account so that, if they make a saving they can keep it in the bank and if they overdraw they may be allowed to do so without being shot? Is it true that some research councils are allowed to do this and others are not and, if so, why? Would it not also be a help to them in the era of the sharply falling or, to use a euphemism, the sharply fluctuating pound? They send some of their money abroad, for instance, to CERN. The value of what they send abroad and of what it will buy varies. They get money from abroad; the value of what can be bought with the foreign currency in this country in the way of research rises sharply. If they were allowed to bank in an ordinary way, and with moderate freedom, would not this make their life altogether easier? Lastly, would the Government agree with the judgment of one research council boss who said to me that, "Though the present set-up of research councils is not perfect, it is a damned sight better than we had any reason to hope when we saw the Rothschild Report"?
It is said on all sides that everything depends on the merit of the Chief Scientists in the Ministries and on the fact that they must be respected outside the Ministries in the major world of science. One hears it said that the best are excellent, but that a more sensitive definition of
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need is the principal requisite for an improvement in the whole system at the moment. The examples are given of MITI—the Ministry of Trade and Industry—in Japan, and ENA—the École Nationale d' Administration—in France, as the kind of place that can produce even better Chief Scientists than we have now. I endorse the idea that MITI is a good model. I have had the opportunity of looking at it in recent years and it appears to be a miracle of common sense and success.
I am not so sure about ENA. I believe that we should copy the enthusiasm and wholeheartedness of the French in their approach to these matters, but one needs a very thorough knowledge of another country before deciding to translate, word for word, any of its institutions on to our own soil. I agree that we should do something that fits the fabric of our life as well as ENA fits the fabric of French life. But it is very easy—and I would caution the Government against any temptation in this direction—to think that simply because a country is one's nearest neighbour, as France is ours, one can understand it more easily than more distant countries. France is an opaque country, and I myself do not believe that its economy is in for a spectacularly good time in the near future.
Is it true that some Ministries still allow their Chief Scientist to be the executive head of some of their in-house laboratories? If so, does this not annul the whole contractor/customer principle and should it be allowed to continue? Another thing that Lord Rothschild and everybody else have always recommended is the "aeration" of personnel by change, the transfer of people. I believe that this is very good and that we should do more of it. We often think of bringing people from industry and from labs into Whitehall, but I understand that British Oxygen took six officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries temporarily and that two of them stayed for life. This is very good, too. People should flow both ways quite uninhibitedly. There should be more of it. However, what I think is wrong and should be distinguished from this is the possibly excessive movement within the Civil Service, especially among administrators. It sometimes seems to me that as soon as an administrator has found out about his new job

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he is instantly moved on in the interests of a "rounded personality" and "broad career experience". That can be catastrophic—for instance, when the man in charge of the fisheries negotiations is appointed on the day when the negotiations with the Community begin. Such accidents should be avoided.
This debate is of particular interest to this House, I believe, because my noble friend the Leader of the House has among the many hats that he wears two of particular interest. One is that he is the chairman of the Advisory Committee on Applied Research and Development—ACARD—which I shall come to in a moment, and the other is that he is the Minister responsible for the co-ordination of all maritime policy, which is heavily dependent on research.
That brings me to another general point which is a little hard to make and, indeed, I am not sure that I shall succeed in making it. However, I should like to ask whether he is thereby also the chief customer for maritime research. Was it, for instance, any concern of his that accidentally the Government nearly decapitated the hydrographer a few months ago? He was reprieved at the last moment, but because he was no longer of such service to the Ministry of Defence as he had been and because nobody else came to his rescue, he was nearly lost. Is it the duty of my noble friend to see that there are no gaps in research as such, and no gaps in maritime research in particular? If so, could he tell us how he fulfils this function?
I should like to dwell on ACARD for a moment. I believe that it is an intensely useful addition to the battery of committees in the structure. It could indeed be a great white national hope. I hope that my noble friend will tell us his aims with this Committee, of which he is the Sunday go-to-meeting chairman, while the week-day chairman is Sir James Menter of Queen Elizabeth College in London. It is a remarkable body. The chairman of the advisory board on research councils is a member; so is absolutely everybody who ought to be. It is a correctly formed body, though large. Its job is precisely what it says: it brings us closer to the grass-roots of industry in the dissemination of applied research results and the getting done of really practical research.
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There are various questions about it. How is it going to fit with the National Economic Development Organisation and its 40 Working Parties on this and that? How is it going to fit with the National Research and Development Corporation? How is it going to fit with the Central Policy Review Staff? All these frontier questions are interesting. Perhaps we could be told something about them. But it certainly has the potentiality of bringing this country more into line with Japanese and German industrial performance. If it is able to do that, it is worthy of all possible cheers.
It has been put to me—and I quote:
"That the concentration of a good deal of scientific and technological effort on the use of existing plants and assets would be a useful thing."
This ACARD can help to do. "Rather curiously, science can perhaps play a bigger part in this than in total innovation, which is sometimes almost an artistic activity. The big science based companies devote well over half of their technical effort to this matter of constructive improvement. Quite commonly it can raise the output of a given plant to three times its rated level and can have a major effect on the acceptability of products, and indeed this kind of activity has been the main spring of much of the Japanese success." This is the reason for which I wish ACARD such success. Why not give it a journalistic title—call it "Operation Boot Strap", the "Boot Strap Committee"?
Could one go even further? We have a National Physical Laboratory and a National Engineering Laboratory, which everybody knows about. Is that detailed enough? Why do we not get really down close to the coal face at that level also and have a National Car Laboratory, a National Camera Laboratory, a National Watch Laboratory and, of course, a National Ship Laboratory. We could have the other two if we decided that we wanted to go into new fields and beat the Japanese and the Swiss at their own games. I do not see why it should not be done.
My Lords, the national interest in general is sometimes itself a customer, and it may not always be possible to arrive at a true statement of the national interest by listing the many ad hoc

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departmental requirements and needs for research. Whose job it is to scrutinise the entire shopping list of the chief scientific officers and their requirements boards in every Ministry, to make sure that the national interest is truly served by the distribution of demands there, and that the important things are not being left out? There is in the world now an increasing interest in instruments of future oriented research which can serve two purposes. I avoid the word "forecasting" because people too often think that it means extrapolation; of course it means nothing of the kind. As I say, this future oriented research can serve two purposes. First, there is precisely this of research requirement definition. They could help the community of requirements boards of departments in this job, and they could help the corresponding community of requirement boards within industry to do their side of the job.
The second need that such bodies can fulfil is that of what has been called anticipatory democracy, to distinguish it from participatory democracy which we all understand and hope that we have; everybody has a say in what is to be done tomorrow. Anticipatory democracy means that everybody has a say in what is to be done in 30 years' time. In order to give everybody that say, there must be laid before them a spread of possibilities of what might be done in 30 years' time. The technical, scientific and intellectual activity needed to provide the raw materials both for improved requirement choices for research and for improved anticipatory democracy is very often precisely the same. This was what the organs of the European Community had in mind when they asked me three years ago to produce a report called Europe plus Thirty. I was very glad that my late right honourable friend Mr. Crosland in his first and, sadly last, speech to the European Parliament as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, called for immediate action from the Commission on the putting into effect of precisely this type of activity.
There are various projects going on at the moment in this country which one might put under the headline "Britain plus Thirty"; sometimes they are called the "British Brookings Institute"; though I am not sure that Brookings is an exactly
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appropriate model for this country. There are others going forward, consisting of various networks of future oriented studies which might be mounted among interested people and financed by industry, both private and public, but not by the Government, the results of which would be available for political discussion, thereby making for the kind of anticipatory democracy which only research can produce.
I turn now to the international scene. First, let us look at the European Commission because that is the first thing that we see when we look abroad these days, I suppose. Its research programme, pitifully small, is 2 per cent. of all the public civilian money spent on research in the nine countries. If we look at it we see that it consists of JET—the Joint European Torus—we hope, if we get it. Then there is a whole mass of rather small, £10,000 projects, the criteria for the choice of which are not clear.
I have been told the following story about one of the sectoral sub-committees of CREST, the Committee on European Science and Technology Research, which is the inter-Governmental body that agrees on joint programmes.
A form was sent out to member Governments, saying:
"Will you kindly set out in order of preference your priorities for joint research to be conducted under or by the European Commission?"
Of course the British Government official concerned did so, and he expected his reply to be collated with those of other countries, and to be weighted, and some work to be done upon it. He expected to receive the weighted collation of everybody's wishes, and then for there to be a meeting and negotiation based on that worked-out paper. On the contrary, there was no such thing; no paper was received. He went to the meeting, and he found the delegation of another member country—I need not say which—going round saying to everybody: "If you will back our first choice, I will promise to back your second choice. So everybody asked: "What is your first choice?" They said: "We couldn't possibly tell you that until you have given us the undertaking for which we ask."
This is the way that things are too often done. The operations of CREST, the relevant Committee of the European

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Community, are intelligent in theory, distinguishing between the three degrees of Community control over research projects, but they are defective in practice. There is a gap problem. There are many things that are uncovered. There is a duplication problem. It is said that the same type of steel is sometimes tested five times in five different countries They are unable to prevent this. The operations of Directorate General 13, whose job it is not to get the research done but to disseminate the results of the research around the industries of member countries, leave much to be desired. The operations of the advisory committees on programme management of each of the joint research projects are very much hampered by nationalism and by defects in structure.
I wonder whether the Government, instead of yielding to the temptation which I fear they sometimes do—of sitting back and saying, "Oh well, the Commission is hopeless. Let's get on with our own, or let's do it bilaterally. Let's approach some other advanced country, such as Germany or France, and do it separately"—could not help the Commission more in this. Could they not adopt an attitude of offering help in advance so as to prevent the production of policies based on insufficient research, and to prevent, indeed, research proposals based on insufficient preparation? I have in mind, obviously, the recent Common Fisheries Policy, the first drafts of which were beyond belief impracticable. This was based on lack of research, and I think also partly because the member countries, including this one—because we are in a very powerful position on fishing—approached the matter with all our powerful cards close to our chests, hoping to gain advantage thereby only by degrees, rather than helping the Commission immediately to put out a sensible proposal which could be adopted.
May I ask the Government another question. There are many questions, and of course I do not expect answers here and now, but perhaps letters or discussions later. If there is a piece of research which we in this country want to do internationally and it is too big for us to do alone—and there are plenty of such things these days—how do we choose with whom to do it? How do we choose whether to do it with
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the Community in due form and order; or to do it with Germany and France, perhaps opening up through one of the three-times-yearly meetings which the chairman of the Advisory Board on Research Councils has with his French and German (and French and German only) opposite numbers; or to do it with the Americans; or to do it with the Americans and the Russians jointly at the International Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis at Laxenburg, in Austria? Are there criteria for judging this? If so, are the criteria classified? If not, can we hear them? If there are no criteria, ought there not to be criteria? Again, what about the European Science Foundation? Are its laments justified, that it has been set up by all the Governments but not used by them? Do we intend to use it? Does it face the prospect of increased use, or not? There are indeed many questions on the international front. I imagine that the field is moving pretty fast here, and I hope that many noble Lords present will address themselves to the international aspect of these matters.
My Lords, that is all I have to say. I hope that the Government will institute a formal review—I have no suggestions as to its form—in about three years from now. This will be the right moment because by then the transitional fathers, as it were—those who have set up the post-Rothschild system in Whitehall and in the research councils—will have retired, a new generation will be in, and this will be the moment to inquire how things are going. In the meantime, I am sure that the whole House will join me in wishing our Leader good luck with ACARD, the Advisory Committee on Applied Research and Development, which could indeed turn out to be A trump CARD. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.12 p.m.
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, when I started to do the research necessary to address myself to this problem I began to realise what Lord Rothschild meant about customers and contractors, and I found myself in the unhappy position of being a customer with no obvious contractor to do the necessary research through the amount of paper that I felt I ought to read. The

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noble Lord, Lord Kennet, has asked a number of questions. He has asked, I suppose, about a tenth of the number of questions which one might legitimately raise on this whole subject and on the Rothschild Report in particular. The noble Lord the Leader of the House will be very relieved that he has not asked them all, and he will be even more relieved to know that I do not intend to ask a great many others, simply because once you begin you do not know where to stop.
My Lords, this seems to be a good moment to initiate a debate of this kind, for two reasons. First, it particularly behoves us in times of financial stringency to make certain that we really are making the best use of those slender resources that we have available to us for matters like research and development. It is also true, of course, that the Rothschild Report suggests that it would take something like four years for the proposals that he advocated to become effective, and he also suggested that, in any case, very many projects take something like seven years to reach maturity. Therefore, the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, was quite right in saying that we are at the point whereat we can have a look to see to what extent the proposals have indeed been implemented.
I think it is worth reminding ourselves that for 200 years this country has thrived on the skill and the technical ingenuity of our people. This is really what the Industrial Revolution was about. I believe that, as a nation, we still have a belief—and it may be rather a naive belief—that we have a certain special native ability to produce ideas and to develop them through some intuitive inspiration which we are fortunate enough to possess, and that we do this more effectively, or at any rate more economically, on a more cost-effective basis, than some of our competitors. I suspect that this belief does not really make adequate allowance for the enormous, added complexity which is inherent in any contemporary development of a new idea; and I think that if we have learned one thing in recent years it is that we have a lamentable weakness at developing and applying the ideas that we seem to be very good at producing. Indeed, later on this afternoon we shall possibly address ourselves to quite a good example of that.
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My Lords, the matter of Government research and development is a big enough subject itself. But, of course, it is only a part of the whole picture, and I think I am right in saying that it represents only a half of the country's effort. We ought at some time to consider whether the arrangements are adequate for assisting industry and individuals themselves to develop and to market their own ideas. But if we go back to the dreaded word "science", I believe one of our fundamental problems throughout all of this is the difficulty of communications between scientists and those whose main experience may be confined to what is very often called "the school of hard knocks". Partly because of this difficulty of communications it is sometimes rather easier to pinpoint the symptoms of malaise in our efforts than it is to define the fundamental nature of the illness and to suggest a cure.
I should like to give one example of the kind of thing that can so easily happen. What I am going to say is over-simplified and possibly biased, and I hope it will merely illustrate a point. This is a story of our attitude to hovercraft and hydrofoils. The Government, or a quasi-Government organisation, the NRDC, were asked to evaluate and support the hovercraft concept. On the advice of a Government laboratory they took the decision that the hovercraft had great attractions for vessels in rough water, and as a result some kind of a tacit understanding grew up whereby we in this country would concentrate on hovercraft development and would leave hydrofoil development mainly to other nations. The Russians, the Italians and the Germans had already been doing it for some time, and the Americans concentrated on this particular side of this type of development.
There then appeared on the scene a different type of hydrofoil, known as a hydrofin, which claimed that it had particularly useful applications for high-speed vessels in rough water, which was obviously of special interest to this country. Strathclyde University reported favourably on this concept, and the Government, or their agencies, were again asked to support it. They then referred for an assessment back to the same laboratory as had already reported on the hovercraft. This is where the difficulty arises and where politics—not in the sense of Houses

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of Parliament type politics—unfortunately creep in to what ought to be a scientific assessment; because those who were supporting the hydrofin concept are persuaded that the laboratory in question was very unlikely to give a fair trial to this hydrofin concept because they were already wedded to the notion of the hovercraft as being the right route for this country to follow. I do not know whether this is so, but it clearly is undesirable and an unhappy situation that an inventor can get into a kind of "Catch 22" situation where all the references go back to the same group of assessors, or the same individual assessor, already committed to an alternative technology.
I am not trying here to advocate a particular concept at all; I am merely trying to illustrate a danger which is with us. We can see where it could happen again. We are now putting a great deal of our research effort in the renewable sources of energy field into what are commonly known as Salter's Ducks, which is the wave power concept being developed at the University of Edinburgh and mooring a great line of rafts off the West coast of Scotland which would generate large quantities of power. But the difficulty is that once you commit yourself to something like this, there is the temptation to say that no other form of technology is worthy of investigation because this is the line you have decided to pursue.
The noble Lord, Lord Kennet, mentioned the JET project—the Joint European Taurus. Here you are in very large figures on an international basis, but there is also the possibility that you could arrive at fusion power by, I understand, some concentration of lasers, and I should have thought there was a possibility here again that the same assessor might be asked to pass comment on this as had already committed us to the other technology. It is very embarrasing if this person has to make this kind of choice.
Lord WYNNE-JONES: My Lords, the noble Lord has raised an interesting point. I should like to ask him this. If the Government do not refer the two different alternative methods to one laboratory to test, how do they resolve the different reports from two laboratories?
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, I could not agree more with the noble Lord; and, as I said at the beginning, I wish I could suggest some solution to this. It seems to me that the noble Lord is postulating the endless difficulty that all politicians have experienced where two experts give conflicting advice. Therefore you try to refer to one who will arbitrate between the two. We are arguing in a complete circle. What I suppose is conceivably possible is that one might set up some kind of scientific assessment committee which possibly would have a better chance of not feeling itself too wedded or committed to one piece of technology so that it could not give fair consideration to an alternative or competing one. I do not know, but I believe that is a difficulty to which we should address ourselves, and be aware of. The other day a scientist put it to me very well. When you are trying to make these choices, he said, you are faced with the choice of having an assessor who is dispassionate, and therefore almost certainly not competent, or having one who is competent and therefore committed and probably in an entrenched position, which somewhat vitiates his independence of view.
Having said that, I must say also that I am apprehensive about what the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, suggested: that we should proliferate all sorts of specialist laboratories all over this country. I should have preferred not to make our lives more difficult. Let us try to subcontract that kind of work to the universities and other institutions which already exist.
If we look at the Rothschild Report and the results from it, the feed-back that I get is that it is like the curate's egg, good in parts. Lest we should say that it is all good, let me quote from the 10th Report of the Expenditure Committee and their interview of Sir William Pile. He said:
"I have to say, of course, that the great thing about research is that a part of it is rubbish and another part—and I will not be specific about the proportions—leads nowhere and is really rather indifferent. It is, I am afraid, exceptional to find a piece of research that hits the nail on the head and tells you pretty clearly what is wrong or what is happening or what should be done."
From that particular source, this is a discouraging statement. In this large

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tome there are all sorts of little nuggets. The Committee then went on to say:
"We would not want to suggest that there should be any direct interference in the academic freedom of individual research workers"—
and here the words are in heavy type—
"We do believe that more positive information from the Department of Education and Science about potentially important areas of research and useful types of project would be welcomed by the research workers".
This merely indicates that there is a great disparity of view. The noble Lord has already said that a great deal of the Rothschild Report is, in fact, addressed to a rather small part of the total research effort—about one quarter of one half. This has led many other scientists to suggest that the whole exercise has been a waste of time. I do not believe that this is right. I believe, from the happy position of not having had my operations interfered with by having to address myself to the problems raised by the Rothschild Report, that it is right to have had a mind of that kind focussed on these problems and asking us the questions, even if we find ourselves still asking very much the same questions four years later.
It would be fatal also, following a report like this, to fall into the trap of seeking change for the sake of change. This is a very dangerous exercise. If one can be more specific about experience since the report, the feedback I have is that the Agricultural Research Council has been working better than the Medical Research Council area. It is legitimate to ask why this should be so. I suppose one possibility is that the Agricultural Research Council has only one customer in the shape of the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. On the other hand, the Medical Research Council has very many clients spread over a number of the Ministries. I also wonder whether Lord Rothschild was misled by the very high quality of the people he found in these posts at the time when he was writing his report, who were, in fact, perhaps triumphing over a very great and difficult administrative situation, and whether he undervalued, in spite of what he said about individuals, the contributions that these individuals were making.
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It is very clear to me that scientific research must be directed by scientists. If you are going to select a project, you must have a concept of what is likely to be possible. I do not believe this is the proper job for someone of a generalised education, the kind of education received by a civil servant. Furthermore, as the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, has already said, it is fatal that somebody in one of these positions should be shifting his job every two or three years, for it takes a couple of years to learn how the machine works and what your department is doing. Just as you are beginning to get a grasp of the work, you are moved on to another field. I hope that the noble Lord will be able to tell us how he feels that the Chief Scientist and the Controller R and D relationship has worked oat in practice.
Throughout the Rothschild Report there is one conspicuous lack, which is accountability. The noble Lord, Lord Rothschild, was trained in industry and it might be that he assumed that accountability was something that could be accepted as axiomatic. If one is talking about applied research, it implies that there is a product or a definable objective, and it must therefore be possible to monitor the performance against the objective. My understanding is that this is known in the Ministries as Programme Analysis Review, but that they decline to publish the results of their PARs on the grounds of confidentiality.
This leads me to ask the noble Lord whether he agrees that there is perhaps a case for having a chief scientific adviser to the Government—or indeed I might call him the chief scientific auditor—which is advocated in the White Paper. He would advise the Government on whether the inter-departmental balance was right, whether the relationship between one department and another was working out correctly; and he could also monitor the reports received from the individual departments, the PARs which are confidential and cannot be published. He might also publish a report as to the commercial success in developing the results of the R and D which come out of these various departments. A comparison between the commercial success of the Government research establishments and of their industrial counterparts would

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surely be an excellent discipline for the Government. My Lords, this leads me back and feeds the noble Lord, I hope, with a reply in the sense that if we are not going to have a chief scientific adviser, it may well be that this will be the work of his advisory council, ACARD. We shall look forward to hearing whether he thinks that this can meet the case.

AIRCRAFT AND SHIPBUILDING INDUSTRIES BILL
3.32 p.m.
Lord PEART: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt an extremely interesting debate, but we shall return to it later. With the leave of the House, I will now make a Statement on the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Bill. The Statement is as follows:
"In the light of the findings of the Examiners that the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Bill is hybrid, the Government have considered what action should be taken.
"The Government have decided that, in view of the grave industrial consequences of further delay to the Bill, they intend to deal with the situation created by the Examiners' findings on hybridity by proposing Amendments for the deletion of the 12 ship repairing companies listed in Schedule 2 to the Bill.
"Consultations have taken place with the Opposition Parties through the usual channels and the Opposition have agreed that the Bill should now proceed to Royal Assent as a Public Bill in its present form, apart from the deletion of the 12 listed ship repairing companies. It has been agreed that the Bill will receive its Second Reading in this House on Tuesday 8th March, with Committee and remaining stages on 10th March; the Bill will then return to another place for agreement to the necessary Amendments. It has been further agreed that the Bill should proceed to Royal Assent forthwith. I hope that the House will be content to proceed on this basis.
"Ship repairing will remain one of the duties of British shipbuilders. Several of the listed shipbuilding companies have ship repairing operations, and three of the 12 ship repairing companies now
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listed in Schedule 2 are already publicly owned and will be transferred to the Corporation. The Government understand that other privately owned ship repairing companies would wish to be acquired by the Corporation, which will be free and willing to negotiate their acquisition.
"The Government intend that vesting of the aircraft companies will be next month, if this can be achieved, and of shipbuilding companies in the late spring. A Statement on this will be made as soon as possible."
My Lords, that ends the Statement.
3.35 p.m.
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, we on this side of the House welcome this Statement. I should like to congratulate the noble Lord the Leader of the House on finding a way out of an impasse—which I have to say was of the Government's own making—and on ending the uncertainty which has existed for so many months in the industries concerned. This is not the outcome that we would have wished for; we still think that the whole Bill is misconceived. But this course at least represents a belated triumph for what has been called the art of the possible.
The question of hybridity in Schedule 2 was first raised in this House on 28th September, over five months ago. We should not forget that hybridity is not a mere procedural device, but a constitutional means by which Parliament is able, as the Examiners have put it in their report, to protect the individual from the majority, from the power of the State or, if you prefer it, from the power of the Government. So I feel that this decision is something of a triumph for those ship repairers who have taken on the might of the State and won. But they have won through the process of Parliament.
For the future this should be a salutary reminder that Parliament's job is to protect the citizen from his rulers and to safeguard his rights, liberties and livelihood. This should also be a reminder to our critics that this House does have a function. We need a Second Chamber and we have exercised our function well. If there had been no House of Lords it is frightening to think that the hybridity

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in this Bill could never have been examined, let alone proved. Let us remember that.
3.37 p.m.
Lord BYERS: My Lords, although we on these Benches are vigorously opposed to the nationalisation of these two industries, we recognise that in everybody's interest the present uncertainty must be terminated. The course now proposed by the Government is one—and I cannot help saying it—which we have been advocating from these Benches since towards the end of the last Session. We have made this point on numerous occasions; I am only sorry that the Government did not take our advice when we first gave it. As I have already written to the noble Lord the Leader of the House indicating that we would certainly favour this course, we shall of course facilitate the stages of the Bill as proposed by the Government.
Lord PEART: My Lords, I should like to thank both noble Lords for their remarks. We shall have the Second Reading debate of course, and no doubt some of the matters which have been raised now will be discussed then. I am grateful for the approach that both noble Lords have taken.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend to recognise that those of us who have taken part in this controversy do not regard this as a triumph for anybody; it is a victory for common sense. We have to accept some reorganisation of the shipbuilding industry. If it is to be nationalised, we offer our good will. It is going to be highly speculative. We know that there are a great variety of problems. Let us face them and get on with the matter for the sake of British shipbuilding. If we revive the controversy, it will do nobody any good. As a matter of common sense, let us get on with it.
Lord PEART: I am grateful for the remarks of my noble friend. I agree with him that we must now think of the future of our industries.
Lord HARMAR-NICHOLLS: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that it is rather pleasant to find this meeting of minds in trying to deal with what is a
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Parliamentary problem? Am I to understand that the arrangements that have been made by the three Front Benches mean that at this minute the Bill is a hybrid Bill, and that under the Bill the aircraft industry and shipbuilding industry may have rights if the hybridity was carried through its proper channels? Am I to understand that any rights of the shipbuilding and aircraft industries will be taken away from them by this arrangement? Have we been assured that they have no questions they would want to raise under the procedures of the hybrid Bill, if the arrangement now agreed was not being entered into?
Lord PEART: My Lords, a Motion will be moved tomorrow and there will be Amendments to the Bill; but we shall discuss that later.
Lord HANKEY: My Lords, in view of the devastating report of the National Economic Development organisation on the tremendous delays, administrative interference and political interventions which have made the development of our present nationalised industries so very difficult, will the Government take this opportunity to see whether they can arrange a better form of control of the industries now being nationalised so that they may develop in a more rational way?
Lord PEART: My Lords, the noble Lord has raised an interesting question, which has been raised on many other occasions. I shall take note, and discuss it with him.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
3.41 p.m.
Debate resumed.
Viscount THURSO: My Lords, we now return to the rather more rarefied atmosphere of the laboratory. The Rothschild Report was indeed a major report on research and development and your Lordships' House must be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Rennet, for reminding us that this is a good moment to take a look at how this report is affecting our research and development and also the progress of our science and science-based industries.

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I certainly welcome this opportunity to review research and development, as it is working in the country at this moment. Like the noble Lords, Lord Kennet and Lord Strathcona, I feel that I must ask a number of questions. In fact, I may very well confine myself to asking questions, because I feel that we need to look at the operation of the new system under the Rothschild Report. There is so much to find out about how it is working and how we should organise things from now on. Perhaps we might even ask whether it is working as it was intended to work.
Not even the most optimistic jingoist in this country would pretend that all is well with our industry, with our balance of payments, or with the strength of our currency and so on. We must therefore ask ourselves whether our research and development is helping our industry as it should, and whether it is helping our position in the commercial and competitive world. Indeed, there are many similarities between now, in 1977, and then, in 1964, when this whole concept was reviewed. But in those days there was a feeling of disillusionment which perhaps could be summed up by the word "frustration". Nowadays I think that the feeling of disillusionment has reached the stage when it could be described by the word "resentment", because there is indeed a difficulty in motivating people to do anything for the community. There is a very real difficulty in motivating people to take risks and in motivating industry to take advantage of the opportunities which are coming out of our laboratories.
Research and development is the hope for the future in industry: it is on that hope that we must place a great deal of reliance in this country, and it must be given the highest priority and the best of opportunities in the revitalising of our industry and our position in the industrial world. If we cannot motivate industry to accept and use new ideas, we are bound to be falling behind our competitors in the rest of the world, and we are losing a position which we should be able to maintain.
The whole nub of the Rothschild Report was how to get the best out of research and development. The recommendation of the report was that research and development should be placed upon
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a contractual basis. I think that is now accepted by most people to have been a good idea, in spite of the cries of woe and dismay which appeared in letters to The Times from the medical world at the time of the publication of the report. In other words, what is really being asked is that people who are involved in research and development should come down from any ivory towers in which they may be hiding themselves and justify their research so that we cut back waste, duplication, and so on, and economise on the effort we are putting into research by focusing all our efforts upon right objectives.
However, as the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, has said, we must look at the situation now in midterm and ask ourselves whether we are in fact achieving this through the new contractor basis. For example, let us take the Agricultural Research Council. The Council should be approached, say, by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, and suggestions should be made to the Council as to where the money available for research should go. At the moment I am not at all sure that that is happening, and I am not at all sure that we have evidence that the right questions are being asked at the right levels, or, indeed, that the system is being monitored as it should be.
The position of our research and development people seems to be that they are still having to search for objectives. I am slightly worried, because I have a feeling that the effort which is going into "shopping around" for objectives could be better spent in carrying out research. There is a danger that too much effort could be put by laboratories and research councils into looking for objectives and into finding sponsors for schemes which they feel should be investigated. In the end, they may take on too many small schemes and not enough big ones. I believe it was the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, who reminded us that there is less success with many customers than with a few large customers. I think we should carefully examine this aspect of the working of the new scheme, and on this side we should like to have assurances that in fact we are not proliferating small schemes at the expense of good big ones.
It seems to me that one of the most important things to do, if we are to be

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satisfied that the new way of controlling research and development is going to work well, is to monitor its working. Rothschild suggested there should be a chief scientist and a controller of research and development, and I wonder how far this principle has penetrated Government Departments. Is it, indeed, working in every Government Department where research and development should be used, and is being used? Are we, in fact, applying the principle as it was meant to be applied?
At the time, this dual leadership produced in the minds of many the prospect that there might be an impasse owing to disagreement between the two heads of the scientific Departments of the Government, or of a Government Department, and that there might be a need for an arbitrator. My own view is that there is probably more need for a monitor, to see whether they are getting on with the job, than there is to see whether they are frustrating each other in getting on with the schemes which each of them is sponsoring. Perhaps this monitoring of the success of the new approach to research and development could be done through the little "Neddys", giving them perhaps more powers.
There was an article in the Financial Times of 24th November 1975, which suggested that the successful EDCs are those which have identified and diagnosed a specific industrial problem, and have mobilised the necessary resources and enthusiasm inside and outside industry to do something about it. Perhaps if these little "Neddys" were given a more precise role, if they were given clearer responsibilities in this field, they could provide the kind of monitoring which would be helpful. They might even be asked for monthly statements on what they are doing here, and could provide us with the kind of information which we might want to have on how things are going.
Nevertheless, although this country invests just over 2 per cent. of the gross national product in research and development—and in this proportion of investment we are exceeded only by the United States of America—why is it that we are seemingly getting such a low return for our effort? Japan, which has already been referred to in this debate, invests
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half of the equivalent percentage of GNP in research and development and, apparently, her industry gets a more effective return than we do. Perhaps the real question here is one of motivation——
Lord KENNET: My Lords, would the noble Viscount not agree that this is connected with the fact that Japan has a very low defence research budget, and we have a very high one? And if you take the civilian research budget alone, we are behind Germany and France.
Viscount THURSO: My Lords, that may be true. I merely ask the question because these are the figures which I have. I do not have the answer to this one, and I have not been able to split up our investment in research and development precisely enough to be able to see whether the answer which the noble Lord suggests is, in fact, true. I feel, however, that it is worth asking the question and if that is the answer perhaps——
Lord KENNET: My Lords, it is in Tables 314 and 315 of the General Digest of Statistics 1976.
Viscount THURSO: My Lords, the noble Lord has at his fingertips information which I do not possess. There was a report which came out in 1976 by Arthur D. Little, The New Technology-based Firms in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany: A Comparison. This revealed a possible reason why our return from research and development in this country is lower than that in Germany. If an inventor or an entrepreneur decides to market an invention or a new system, after doing some research and development on it, he has to contend with these figures. If he was operating in Germany, given that his total gross income was £236,450, his total income after tax would be £157,683. If he was operating in the United Kingdom, given that his total gross income was the same, he would receive £78,710; in other words, just less than £80,000 difference in return. It is that kind of taxation system on ventures which are dependent upon risk expenditure, which are dependent upon research and development, which are dependent upon casting your bread upon the waters, which not only affects the pocket of an entrepreneur but affects his whole attitude as to whether or not he is willing to take on the

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struggle. Why should he pour money into something and take a risk, no matter how laudable the project, if when he markets it at the end he finds that all return for his effort is disappearing in tax?
The prime concern when we deal with research and development is: how do we motivate good ideas into marketable and successful products which will be of benefit to our society? The end of this report to which I have referred states:
"A tax system which motivates investors and entrepreneurs will mobilise much more technological entrepreneurship than any programme of direct Government assistance."
This is certainly one of the kernels of the problem, one of the problems of how we use the research and development which we get out of our various research councils and research bodies. But I would add to that that we must make certain that we are not losing too much in the effort in which research councils are involved, in looking for sponsors. We must also be careful of not drawing too sharp a line between pure and applied research, because in certain areas the presence of pure research alongside applied research must have value in the fact that the pure scientists and the applied scientists are sharing the same facilities and are exchanging ideas, and there is a contact between the pure side of their sciences and the applied side.
So at this stage I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, for the opportunity which he has given us all to join in examining the working of our research and development since the Rothschild Report, and, like him, I shall await with interest the answers to various questions.
3.58 p.m.
Lord BAKER: My Lords, I rise to address your Lordships' House for the first time, with true diffidence. I ask for your indulgence and not only for today. I have realised with something of a shock, and only in the last fortnight since being introduced into your Lordships' House, that I have absolutely no experience in debate, and this in spite of many years of my working life spent in speaking. Many of them, of course, have been in a lecture theatre with a piece of chalk in my hand and a comforting blackboard behind me on which I could draw if words failed me, but there have also been
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numberless committees and, very often, appearances before the Cambridge Senate House discussion, perhaps the most intimidating and unresponsive audience that one could have. But none of this has been real debate. My fear is that your Lordships' patience will be strained, because I may not be young enough to acquire the new technique quickly.
I have an additional anxiety today. It arises from studying the guide to procedure, which advises that a maiden speech should be short and unprovocative. Brevity is no difficulty, but I have always found it difficult to be constructive and unprovocative, particularly when discussing a subject which has been so much a part of my life: the important subject of the organisation of research and development which the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, has introduced. I am grateful to him, even if he has tempted me to address your Lordships' House at almost an indecently early stage in my apprenticeship.
The safest contribution that I feel I can make to the debate is the very simple one of going to what may be thought of as the lower regions of this problem to find out what research workers feel about the present state of research and development. I have taken the opportunity in recent weeks to consult friends and research workers in universities of various ages and kinds. Perhaps this is the only contribution that I can make, because I must confess that I retired from my university post years before the Rothschild Report appeared. However, I have to declare another interest. I am fortunate enough to be an active member of a research and development team in industry.
When I inquired about the position in Cambridge the first impression was that the introduction of the Rothschild arrangement had made very little change to the physical sciences, and I will confine my remarks to them—mainly to engineering and physics. The new arrangement in no way distorted the overall programme. Physics has remained entirely untouched. The bulk of the contracts coming to Cambridge from Government Departments are in engineering, metallurgy and materials science, and this may not be surprising. They represent about 10 per cent. of the university's outside

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support for research and there has probably been a marginal improvement in the availability of funds.
When I discussed the problem with the individual research workers I found that the position was perhaps not so rosy. There was a distinct feeling that work arising from the Rothschild arrangement meant much unnecessary, irksome bureaucratic interference. The British civil servant appears to demand that the academic should adopt the Civil Service house rules. This may seem trivial, but there were real complaints about what seemed to be unnecessary delays in publication. In fact, the impression I gathered was that the university laboratories felt that they were looked upon as somewhat inferior auxiliaries of the Government Department labs. and that the share of the work that they had been given was almost window-dressing. It was distressing to me to find that these workers preferred to serve American agencies because these minor irritations did not exist there.
Another complaint in engineering was not so much of the Rothschild arrangement but of the effect that it had on the Science Research Council grants, or the procedure for obtaining the grants. There was a strong feeling that since Rothschild a dual standard had arisen as between physics projects and engineering projects. The physics projects were judged solely on their scientific quality. The engineering projects additionally had to satisfy the test: will it be useful? In my opinion, no research should be done in a university engineering department, or any other department for that matter, which is not going to lead to useful results. However, to decide whether a piece of work is going to be useful in industry, particularly if any long-term development is involved, requires a particular skill and an acute judgment which the research workers felt was not always available to the research committee. To me, this seems to be a question of customer quality and judgment, something that I will possibly refer to later.
The engineering department of the University of Warwick was, I found, enthusiastic about what are called CASE awards—Co-operative Awards Science and Engineering. The engineering department
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thought they were so satisfying that they should supersede all others. But of course there were other science departments which did not agree. These awards are given for collaborative work between an industrial firm and a university. Again, success clearly depends upon getting a good marriage, and certainly upon customer quality.
Another interesting contribution from Warwick shows the handicap of success. This was on the computing side. Computing science is a very prospering, growing branch of science and, as we all know, it has been taken up very vigorously in the outside world. The result is that the salaries to the young available in industry are high. This is delightful to hear. On the other hand, it makes it virtually impossible for the universities to recruit research workers in computing science. The grant-giving bodies might take note of this, otherwise the excellent work which the universities have done may not continue so rapidly.
Durham was troubled mainly about research expenditure and the difficulty of obtaining money. I mention this point because it introduces an optimistic note. The economies that Durham have had to apply in the last four or five years have meant that the number of posts they have been able to offer has been smaller than usual. However, the quality of appointments has been extremely high. In the end, therefore, the amount of quality research may not drop. Universities with a more engineering bias, including Salford, were all in a very cheerful mood, and I must admit that from what I was told I gathered that in the last nine years there had been remarkable developments in the liaison between the universities and industry.
My short survey, if one can call it that, has emphasised quality. Your Lordships may think that I did not need to carry out such a survey to emphasise the fact that in the engineering field at least it is quality that we need. The customer/contractor relationship seems to me to be a satisfactory one. It is a natural one for engineers. It must be wonderful to have a wise, sympathetic customer. Looking back on my own past, in both war and peace, I find that many of my customers were fairly unimaginative, to say the least. I hope I am not being provocative

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in making that statement. We need now a body of outstanding customers, leading engineers and industrialists who are sufficiently detached to take a broad, long view so that they can advise the Science Research Council and other Government Departments about what needs to be done, how to build up teams in universities and industry and how to link them together. If we are to have real innovation, research and development cannot be parted.
4.10 p.m.
Lord RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, it is a great pleasure and privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in his maiden speech. I have known of him for many years and we have a definite acquisition in his Lordship. I hope we shall hear from him on many occasions and that he will assist in bailing out those of us who are struggling to get the attention that science and engineering deserve.
I shall take the opportunity on this occasion to go rather beneath, above and beyond the actual terms of the Motion. As my noble friend Lord Kennet said, this is a pretext rather than an attempt to survey or scrutinise, or analyse in detail what has happened since the Rothschild Report. I believe what we are looking at now, as at the time of the Rothschild Report, is the crisis—or apparent crisis, because I do not accept it as a crisis—of the British situation, in the sense that we seem—and I repeat "seem"—to be losing out in many fields in which we once had precedence and priority. To me this is not true. I agree that the situation looks very serious, but we are in fact subject to comparison—and these comparisons, if I may say so to the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, are always invidious. I can take your Lordships right through any number of scientific policy statements by any countries, or analyses of the equivalents of research and development, and always we find we can use them in whatever way we like.
The fact is that we know there is a malaise. It is not a crisis, it is a malaise. Something is wrong in the present British situation, and I think we all acknowledge that if is wrong. I am going to look hard at the nature of this malaise more basically than simply by reference to the Rothschild Report. Alfred North Whitehead said that
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the greatest invention of the 19th century was the invention of the method of invention. I suppose we should now call that R and D—science-based technology. He was saying that the age of the lone inventor was over and that was true even of that archetype of inventors, Thomas Edison, with over 1,000 patents to his name, because he had the hunches, but he also had behind him the mathematicians, physicists and technologists at Menlo Park to make those hunches real. This was the flowering of the age of group research.
Innovation—which we are desperately needing to exploit—depends on the man, the method and the moment. The man may have the intuition, the insight and the shrewd observation; to turn that to practical account he must also have the scientific method to test his hunches and his observations. But the moment is just as important: the coincidence of events, of other discoveries, of new materials and of a felt need. The history of success is that those who seize these opportunities with sound scientific backing and the technical capacity to make them real, steal a march on their competitors and have commercial advantages until the imitators catch up. But basically it depends upon science. That is why I always react—and I am glad that the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, also reacts—to the insistence (if it is an insistence) on the separation (if it is a separation) of science from technology. There is a spectrum: pure or academic science; basic science, which the French call oriented science and the industrialists call speculative science; applied science which is programmed science, and technology which is the transfer of laboratory discoveries to the factory floor. The pure and basic scientists are (if I may use the definition) the "makers-possible"; the applied scientists are the "makers to happen", and the technologists are the "makers to work". But it is a two-way traffic; it is a spectrum from and towards each end.
New possibilities come out of pure research like nuclear energy from the academic pursuit of knowledge of the nature of the atom, or out of basic research. I recall a simple but spectacular example, namely polythene, which was not being sought as a product but which happened as a result of the study of

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organic reactions at high pressure—purely basic research and an exercise in curiosity. Or it can come back from commerce or industry, as specific demands for a new process or a new product. Where they meet is what, in this context, we are calling today R and D, and if the traffic lines are blocked through the failure of the scientists to communicate new possibilities, or the failure of industry to recognise the essential role of the scientist, or the failure of the qualified scientists and engineers—the QSE which is continually referred to in various publications—then profitable opportunities are missed and are lost to competitors who know how to read scientific papers and have the capacity to date that knowledge and to conduct the R and D. That is not true of a great many people in industry, certainly in British industry. We have our ideas—and I am not speaking about patented ideas; we have the intrinsic ideas being developed elsewhere because we ourselves have not had the insight or the foresight to take advantage of them.
We can contrive all kinds of ways of trying to institutionalise those possibilities, whether it is Rothschild or Dainton or the Advisory Council on Applied Research and Development of my noble friend the Leader of the House. We can have all these, and we can think of any number of them; and the more we think of them the more complicated our lives become. My noble friend Lord Kennet, who is conducting the study of Europe plus Thirty, would agree with me when I said, when I was working on global science policy, that it is demonstrably true that in terms of something called science policy the world becomes worse off the more complicated and the more diversified it becomes. In fact we are not talking about science policy in the sense that we are looking to what is possibly ahead; we are reorganising or indemnifying or rejigging what already exists.
I do not want to start another Rothschild, but I think that here we have a situation in which, from the Government standpoint we can sometimes succeed in looking through these various institutions to something which is an artefact of a system which is trying to do the job; but, I say very firmly, we shall be
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driven back all the time to the question of education, the mainspring of it all.
I do not believe that the British have lost that originality which made us preeminent in science when Rutherford could produce 14 Nobel Prize winners from the Cavendish Laboratory; nor the scientific insight which made Fleming, a superb laboratory scientist, recognise the significance of the spore of penicillium on his laboratory culture plate; nor indeed the persistence of Frank Whittle in giving us jet power; nor the initiative we took in disentangling the genetic code in DNA and the molecular biology which accompanied it.
I go about among world scientists who now, as always, recognise our scientific work. We are underestimating it, not they. I certainly do not believe that we lack ingenious and innovative technologists who are conspicuous in areas where they are fully appreciated. That is demonstrable in this country in the chemical industry. No one in the chemical industry gripes about the low standards of their technology. But we hear with a persistence which we cannot ignore that there is by and large an unleavened mass of scientists and engineers in the industrial world, the grey men of science and engineering. Still we know of the unclaimed places in science and engineering faculties of our institutions of higher education. We are told that the reason is lack of financial incentive, that industry does not pay or cannot pay or is not in a position to pay attractive salaries. My Lords, I must say—and I think many of my contemporaries will sympathise—that I find this profoundly ironical because most of my life I have heard how Government research could not compete with the high salaries and glittering prizes offered by industry. I accept the fact that it is so at the moment, but it is a freakish situation. We always looked with envy, when we were looking for the social implications of science, at the industrial laboratories which could buy people who could not be afforded by Governments or indeed the academic world.
I want to ask where is the yeast that is needed for this unleavened mass, this grey world we hear about among these dredged-up people. The people I meet when I go around seem to be relatively intelligent, and yet every report we hear,

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every criticism and complaint from industry is about these inferior scientific products. How are we going to leaven that mass? Where is the inspiration which triggers off originality? There are two factors we are looking for. One is the essential of science, which is curiosity, and the other is the essential of technology and of science, which is originality.
Where are the job satisfactions which once compensated for the not too generous treatment of qualified scientists and engineers? Where did they derive their satisfaction from? First, they stood much higher in the opinion of the people around them than scientists do today. Maybe they had an exaggerated respect, but at least they had a respect and a regard and a justification for self-pride which I do not think at this moment we are according. In the old days, when I had a lot to do with the Association of Scientific Workers, of course there was a gripe about inadequate pay, and we had progressive success in improving salaries. But research people in those days, even if they felt themselves almost Dickensian in terms of their incomes and their treatment, got a tremendous satisfaction out of what they were doing. It was the fun of finding out. Chesterton said something very profound:
"The world will never be short of wonders, but it may be bereft of wonder".
The moment we lose that sense of wonder, the sense of the fun of finding out what it is all about, we have lost a great deal of the inbuilt compensation of science.
Lord DAVIES of LEEK: My Lords, if my noble friend will allow me to intervene for one moment, I am fascinated by and interested in his point about keeping alive this sense of wonder. Those of us who have spent much of our lives in all branches of teaching know that that is one of the things of which some of us today feel bereft. We are surrounded by such wonderful artefacts—television, lasers, et cetera—and we take it all for granted. We need to recapture in our basic education this sense of wonder which the noble Lord has emphasised.
Lord RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, I am always grateful to my noble friend for underscoring something I am saying and which I shall go on to develop. One point I did notice—and I am sure this is
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the experience of all my friends in the scientific world—was that the great scientists such as Rutherford and Gowland Hopkins were boyish in their enthusiasms even in their seventies. They got all the kick they wanted out of what they were doing. The reason was probably that they did not have to attend committees in those days. Indeed when I hear of all the committees and all the organisations we are setting up, including my noble friend's advisory Committee, I think "Who on earth is staying at home and minding the store? Who on earth is doing the research?" We are demanding so much of the creative people that we are now getting to this point.
I think we must go deeper. All great scientists I have known have acknowledged some teacher, some inspirational factor somewhere in their lives, who had applied the flint to the tinder of the young imagination and fired them with enthusiasm, stirred their natural curiosity and encouraged them—not drafted them, like a careers master—to go into science. This seems to me critical, and it is obviously more critical when you get this lack of inspiration in the schools themselves, because that is where it starts. You do not have to tell people where they are going; you fire their imagination, so that they find their own way there and they will be the more secure when they go their own way.
Something which depresses me, and has done so for a number of years, is the fact that in the old days the professors, the famous, eminent scientists, who were the big names on the academic marquee, always made their first charge, their first responsibility, their first-year students. There was the tinder to which they could apply the flint. That was where scientific curiosity was formed. I shall risk a generality, but from considerable observation I would say that nowadays the more eminent the professor of science is, the more time he gives to his final-year and his post-graduate students and the less time he gives to the firing of that imagination which a man of his authority and experience can give to the younger people. At that stage, by the time he gets to them in their final year and post-graduate years, the students have already been single-tracked into over-specialisation, about which we now hear endless complaints.

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By and large we thought that we were producing the specialists which industry was looking for, custom-made for their requirements.
The explanation of the shortfall of qualified scientists and engineers is less a question of prospective earnings, people looking beyond their university to their careers, much less the question of future earnings, than the disenchantment of the young with science and technology itself. It is a sad and desperate situation we are in. They say that science—that is the Bomb to them—has produced the unacceptable risks of our society, and technology is destroying the environment. In the debate on the Rothschild Report itself some of us pointed out that it did not help when it placarded that customer/contractor concept which confirmed the feeling among students drifting away from science that science and technology was just big business, whether it was in Government or elsewhere. The true vocation of science, the fun of finding out, became tarnished.
I deplore, and I hope we all do, the retreat from or the denial of science. As I have told student bodies over and over again, if we think that science and technology are being misused, we must be educated in it in order to do something about it. We cannot form judgments about things that we cannot understand. I do not want to glamorise science. I am simply trying to redeem the whole debate on this issue from its structuralisation, and give it some sense of depth. To glamorise science can be counter-productive, even when students, however original and brilliant, find that a great deal of research is drudgery and that the findings are often trivial. My son, when at Cambridge University, said that he discovered that it was no good going on with nuclear physics when he could not date a girl by saying that he was at the Cavendish Laboratory. We have these vogues, but the fact is that a great deal of the work is drudgery.
None of us can or should suggest that the world owes the scientist a living. I spent a great deal of time trying to bring scientists out of their ivory towers—and I do not want to build ivory towers with moats again. They must earn their keep and contribute to the general well-being and prosperity of the community.
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If scientists are to fulfil any of the hopes as expressed in the Rothschild Report or any other report and if we are to obtain the quality that we so badly need, we must regenerate a sense of purpose which is more than an exhortation about our present economic paralysis—because that one has to spell out quite differently. We must regenerate a sense of purpose which is more than the pay packet, however essential that may be, and put inspiration back into the schools and universities where the students are taught. I shall not deal with any aspects of the report, but I assure my noble friend the Leader of the House that, if the Government want any ideas about what to do with the advisory committee in future most of us could offer them a shopping list which would keep them very busy indeed.
4.32 p.m.
Viscount SIDMOUTH: My Lords, on the first occasion I venture to address this House I stand in need of the customary indulgence, all the more so because I also have to apologise for not having been in my place when the debate started as my car broke down on a particularly busy part of the Embankment. I have been a member of the Agricultural Research Council and am actively engaged in horticulture. Therefore, my remarks will refer specifically to agricultural research as such, although perhaps they may also have some relevance to other types of research. The effect of the Rothschild Report and of the subsequent White Paper has been to direct more attention and more resources towards the applied end of the spectrum. Certainly a high proportion of work commissioned by the sponsoring bodies has come into this area and I believe that that is a good thing. It is possible to be confused by semantics about "basic", "strategic", "applied" and so on, but the real point is that research today, is a continuous and integrated process.
I should like to cite one successful example from my own sphere of interest. Twenty years ago the target of anyone growing tomatoes in heated glass houses was to produce 50 tons to the acre. This was not an easy target to attain even if one had an excellent nursery and first-rate staff. Today the corresponding figure

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is 100 tons to the acre and it is still increasing. That has been brought about by successfully drawing together—this was done mostly at Ministry experimental stations—the work of a number of different disciplines. For example, plant geneticists contributed hybrids which were capable of setting fruit under low light conditions and which also had two or even three-gene resistance to a number of very damaging diseases. On the other hand, we have the biologists, chemists and physiologists who have greatly refined our knowledge of the optimum environment needed by plants in order to produce the best results. Finally, we have some very helpful engineers who have produced controls which enable us to monitor and apply in a very precise and effective manner the various ingedients needed. I am talking of water, heat, nutrients, CO2 and a number of other things. I could cite another example by Agricultural Research Council scientists where there has been a very successful development of biological control of glass-house pests, again by an integrated programme.
I believe that research of the kind in which I am interested is not so much Fleming and penicillin but is more of a Manhattan project. I cited this example deliberately, although it is grossly out of proportion, because it is generally conceded that the United States of America is rather ahead of us in development work. It is true that it needs a rather different approach—more the approach of the entrepreneur—and therefore the kind of development I have in mind lies more on the side of industry than the laboratory. However, the hard fact is that it needs very great resources, often far more resources than that needed by the original basic research.
In our present condition our resources are extremely limited. For that reason I welcome greater concentration on development work, even if it means in the last resort some reduction in the resources devoted to basic research. Great effort should be made to enlist the co-operation of the industry itself—and here I refer to farmers and growers—particularly in extending the excellent work of the experimental stations. Some countries—and in this context Holland and Israel come to mind—have not been at all inhibited in augmenting their own research by reference to that which is
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taking place elsewhere. At top level, science is already a highly international affair and I often feel that eminent scientists are much more truly members of the jet set than those who are referred to in the Press as belonging to that body. I am not sure that this extends as far as it should.
I have in mind in particular workers engaged in development and advisory work. For them the Ministry's Vote seems to be particularly meagre. I urge that it might be increased with great advantage, bearing in mind that at a practical level the process of cross-fertilisation, as it is sometimes referred to, can be particularly fruitful. We have been rather insular in this respect in the past but we should not allow this to inhibit us in the future. I recall visiting Israel some years ago and being impressed by the number of countries that had been visited by the many excellent advisory officers one met in the field. Many had been to Britain because, they said, the British were particularly generous in passing on information.
On the administrative side, I believe that the effect of the Rothschild recommendations has been beneficial, particularly in putting the relationship between the Ministry and the Research Council on a much better footing. A considerable contributory cause of this has been the creation of the Chief Scientist's Department of the Ministry, and what I and many people in the industry feel has been the excellent appointment of the first holder of that post.
In addition, there has been set up a rather elaborate structure known as the Joint Consultative Organisation; and many able people have been involved, and much good work has been done in this context. But I believe it is fair to say that on the whole the net result has been up to now disappointingly meagre. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is that we have been concerned—I speak as a member of one of the boards—up to now with what had been called identifying problems, but at this level (I am talking of the practical level) I believe that problems have an uncomfortable way of identifying themselves. There is great difficulty in deciding priorities as between one project and another, and I do not think that this organisation, as such, is really in any

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position to carry out that function. I think that this is the crux of the whole matter. The resolving of priorities is not really even now on a proper basis.
Sometimes reference is made in a rather crude manner to the value at the farm gate of the product of a particular sector of the industry, but this is, after all, an historical comparison and not one which relates to the future. It also needs refining in that what we are really after is a contribution to the net national product, and therefore the farm gate value of, say, the livestock industry, great though it is, really needs to be adjusted by deducting the very substantial inputs of imported foodstuffs that go to produce that result.
Many scientists, and indeed farmers and growers, tend to fight shy of the dismal science—and I am probably among them—but I believe that in this case there is a pressing need for the setting up of an economic unit which will have the task of assessing the potential of the various projects as they come forward. I am not suggesting at all that it should be the body that decides these questions—as was rightly said earlier on by a noble Lord, this is ultimately decided on the scientific side—but I believe that their advice would be of value to those people who have to decide. This is a difficult subject, but it has been done in other countries and I believe that it can be done here.
4.45 p.m.
Lord WYNNE-JONES: My Lords, we have been extremely fortunate this afternoon in having two maiden speeches which have revealed to us what excellent new recruits we have to your Lordships' House. I was particularly interested in listening to the noble Viscount, Lord Sidmouth. I know nothing about agriculture. Unfortunately, I am not a horticulturist—my garden is always neglected. But listening to him was fascinating, because he gave us exactly the information which those of us who were critical of the Rothschild recommendations required. I personally much favoured the Dainton recommendations rather than the Rothschild recommendations. We were worried because, taking the Agricultural Research Council, I believe I am right in saying that the recommendation
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of Rothschild was that whereas they had previously been spending a sum of the order of £17 million a year, they were only to be allowed to spend £4 million, and the rest of it was to be spent by the Ministry on the basis of this wonderful principle laid down involving a contractor on the one hand and the consumer on the other. But the noble Lord has at least given me a considerable degree of reassurance. He has not made a provocative speech at all. He has made a reassuring speech, and given us valuable information.
The noble Lord, Lord Baker, who fascinated me, as he always does, was extremely provocative, not because he was putting out ideas which demanded an immediate reply, but because they nearly made me break the Rules of the House by getting to my feet and interrupting him to ask a question. The noble Lord has this great facility, which I am sure he will continue to use in your Lordships' House, of stimulating, without at the same time being in the least degree abrasive. We look forward to speeches from both noble Lords in the future.
The subject matter, "Research and development since the Rothschild Report" is a fascinating one, but I could not help feeling, as I listened to the debate, that there are still many people who imagine that research and development are a magic cure for the ills of industry. No one who has taken any part in research and development would for a moment make such a rash and bold claim. That is not the purpose of research and development. In fact, the matter was summed up rather well in the report of the Select Committee on Science and Technology in another place, where they said that research and development cannot be regarded as the engine driving industry. Indeed, research and development are not always necessary to industry. It is perfectly possible to carry on an industry with a minimum of research and development.
I remember years ago I was asked by the old DSIR to be a visitor to the Coal Tar Research Association which had just been set up. The director of that Association told me that when he was appointed he went round to have a look at the various places in the country where coal tar was being distilled. He found

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a little coal tar distillery, I think in County Durham, and it did every conceivable thing wrong. It had no by-product recovery; its distillation was atrocious. Every single thing that it did seemed to be wrong. He came back and thought: "Now I shall be able to write a really good report explaining how they ought to do the job, and make this little firm realise that they will gain enormously through the Research Association". When he looked into it he found that the distillery sold nothing except the pitch residue, which they sold to the county council for the roads. They were such a short distance from the main road that the county council liked to pick it up because they got it for next to nothing. That little distillery made a large profit without any scientific research, and one can be almost certain that scientific research would have ruined it.
It is wrong to imagine that the future our our industry as a whole is linked with research and development; there is no one-to-one correspondence between national prosperity and the percentage of income spent on research and development, and it is stupid to look for one. However, that does not mean that research and development are not highly significant for the development of industry. Nor does it mean that there are not whole industries which could not survive without it. One cannot imagine a pharmaceutical industry which based itself merely on selling Beecham's pills. One cannot imagine running a successful chemical industry without doing research into all the polymers and various products which are used. But when it comes to something like fabricating a boat, one may use modern materials and bonded plastics without having to set up a research laboratory; one can benefit from the research of others and concentrate on building boats. It would be foolish to do otherwise.
Sometimes firms have been forced into research activity. Just after the war, the CBI wrote to firms advising them to do research, and I remember being told by the appointments secretary at the University of Newcastle that there came to him one day a little man—little in the sense that he ran a small business—saying that he wanted a physicist. The secretary of the appointments board asked him why and he replied, "I am told that the physicist is
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the best scientist". Being a physicist himself, the secretary said that he would accept that and asked, "But why do you want him?", to which the little man replied, "I am not sure what we want him to do, but the CBI has written to say that we should take on research people and I want to employ a physicist".
That sort of thing is idiocy in terms of research. It has no sense at all. What makes sense is when one is doing research into fields which are new and where, without research, one will not get anywhere; we would not get nuclear energy or modern aircraft if we refused to spend money on research and development. We could continue to build what Wilbur Wright built, but we could not build a modern aeroplane without doing the necessary research. Nor will we get new fuels without doing the necessary research.
The whole question we are discussing after Rothschild is bound up with considering what we are doing right, what we are doing wrong and what we should be doing better. I do not claim to have the answers, but I would say, as my noble friend Lord Ritchie-Calder said, that we must spend money on education. We will get nowhere unless we do that first. I was therefore glad to find several of the 20-odd recommendations in the Report of the Select Committee from another place on Science and Technology approaching matters in this way. For example, one says:
"The training of engineers and applied scientists suitable for employment in productive industry should be given much higher priority in the Government's educational policy."
Another says:
"The proposals of the Science Research Council for improvements in the training of post-graduates should be pursued with vigour and sufficient earmarked funds should be allocated at the expense, if necessary, of less pressing demands on the higher education sector."
Yet another says:
"Serious consideration should now be given to the introduction of higher maintenance grants for undergraduate and post-graduate students in the applied sciences and engineering."
Those are all important, but I suggest that it is perhaps even more important for the Government not to take the step which they have said they intend to take; that is, to more than treble, I think quadruple, the fees of post-graduate

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students. If we wish to encourage post-graduate work and training, the worst thing we could do is to multiply by four the fees of post-graduate students. It may be said that they will get them back from somewhere, but they will not get them through the ordinary grants system; they will get them only if they are specifically given a grant for research, otherwise they have to pay the fees themselves.
If I were still capable of running a university department, and if I were running one and I got a research grant from, say, industry, and I employed on that grant post-graduate students, I should have to find out of that research grant this quadrupled fee for those students. That is absolutely counter-productive, and for the Government to raise the fees of postgraduate students in such a way is an outrage. If we are discussing what to do in the post-Rothschild period, I would say that for goodness sake let us realise that while research is not a magic cure—it will not do anything in the way of producing overnight a successful industry where one does not exist at present—without putting effort into research the future of this country is bleak.
I hope, therefore, that my noble friend will carry the message to the Cabinet that we in this House consider research to be important; that we consider the Rothschild proposals on the whole to have worked well—I did not think they would but I think that, generally speaking, they have worked well—but that we are alarmed when the Government do not pay enough attention to those factors which make possible the recruitment and proper training of post-graduates.
Baroness GAITSKELL: My Lords, while I sympathise with my noble friend's plea on behalf of students, may I ask him to be more specific about the kind of research we need at this time of economic stringency?
Lord WYNNE-JONES: My Lords, the kind of research we always need is well-conceived research; research that is thought out properly and carried through effectively. That is all I can say. I cannot say what we should research into; if I knew that I would not even have to do the research
5 p.m.
The Earl of SELBORNE: My Lords, I join with others today in congratulating our two maiden speakers. When, after many years of distinguished service, the noble Viscount, Lord Sidmouth, retired from the Agricultural Research Council, I was fortunate enough to be appointed in his place. As a horticulturist—albeit from a different branch of horticulture from the noble Viscount's—I listened with very great interest and sympathy to every word he had to say. We look forward to both noble Lords participating frequently in our debates.
In 1972, when Rothschild was debated and was the subject of considerable correspondence in The Times, as has already been mentioned, the great recurring fear of research workers was that the advent of the customer/contractor principle would lead to a disruption of research programmes. This was particularly so in agriculture, where a very large part of the national research projects was being conducted within the agricultural research service; that is, under the Agricultural Research Council. Probably it was to take the heat out of the situation and to assure the institutes that there was no danger of lack of continuity that a promise was made that, for three years, the transferred funds—that is, funds that would previously have been voted to the Department of Education and Science and which were now to be handed over to the Ministry of Agriculture as the customer in the contractor/customer relationship—would in turn be committed back to the ARC. This certainly helped to take the heat out of the situation. I might add that the second very important measure that was taken very quickly was a particularly wise appointment of a Chief Scientist.
Therefore, it is probably very right, as the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, said, to look now in mid-term or even early on in the Rothschild era at what exactly have been the effects. The three-year period is over so far as the transfer of funds is concerned and the contractor now pays for work done in the Agricultural Research Council. Some 55 per cent. of the work is now sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture. This is indeed a very much higher percentage than is the case in other research councils. Potentially this change from working on funds voted as a grant-in-aid to

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working on a commission and being paid on work done should, and no doubt will, have far-reaching effects. I imagine that it concentrates the mind wonderfully at the research bench to know that one will have to put in a bill at the end and that one will have to show what one has done in order to be paid.
In practice, looking at it from the other end of the spectrum—that is, from the point of view of myself as a farmer or perhaps a food manufacturer who is, after all, the ultimate customer—the farmer will not see, after three years, very many signs of the post-Rothschild era. He will, it is true, have an opportunity, through the Joint Consultative Organisation, at least to influence the choice of priorities. I believe that the noble Viscount, Lord Sidmouth, was correctly rather disparaging about some of the abilities of the decision-making process of the Joint Consultative Organisation. Nevertheless, I should say that this has been an opportunity that has been very much welcomed by industry as a whole—and by that I really mean the farmers and growers—to make its points of view known about what it feels are research priorities, and to know that the various committees will in turn be able to give advice to the sponsors—that is, the two departments of Agriculture and the Agricultural Research Council—is certainly something that has been much appreciated.
To give an example, I belong to the West Sussex Fruit Group and we meet once a year and make quite sure that we tot up a list of things that we think we particularly need on our farms in West Sussex and Hampshire. Although there are many committees through which this information and advice will go, one feels gratified to know that a machinery is available, post-Rothschild, for this to be considered by the sponsors.
The Joint Consultative Organisation has a plethora of expertise within its ranks—farmers, research workers, advisory staff, economists, food manufacturers and administrators. It was given the initial task of reviewing work in progress—national research in agriculture Of course, this was an enormous task and it is not surprising that from these very long deliberations some rather
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disjointed recommendations came forward. After all, it seems only reasonable to say that the more boards and committees are appointed, the more recommendations are likely to be received. I think that this can fairly be said to have happened with the Joint Consultative Organisation. However, the value, which I think should not be underestimated, is that we have now had—I believe for the first time—a thorough review of the work-in-progress, not just in research institutes but also in the Development Service. This is certainly very useful—indeed, I believe one could fairly describe it as a fundamental use to the sponsors when they come to determine priorities in the future.
I imagine that the Joint Consultative Organisation will now pedal back a bit and will be asked by the sponsors to look at the specific areas in which they feel that a change of events, such as, for instance, a fuel crisis or increased progress in mechanisation, requires different priorities. Certainly, I cannot imagine that we on the Joint Consultative Organisation will be asked periodically to review the entire gamut of research.
I feel that there is one irony in the Joint Consultative Organisation and the committees to which one must draw attention. It is that there are so many of them—and very time-consuming they have been for administrative purposes, though this appears to be exactly what Lord Rothschild was seeking to avoid. I believe that in paragraph 24 of the report he refers critically and in his normal strident terms to the committees, groups and boards which the Agricultural Research Council and the other research councils spawn.
The second aspect which the farmer/grower will have noticed and will have welcomed and found most exciting is the increasing use of the multi-disciplinary approach to solving a problem. After all, if a contractor is told, "This is the problem and this is the research project. You put your people in to solve this problem or to work on it", he will have a very clear idea of exactly what he is asked to do. Whereas in the past, one might have had somebody working away in the ivory tower which has been referred to and not having the key to unlock the problem in question, if he is put together with someone from a different discipline

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or, indeed, someone from the Development Service, most exciting things may happen as idea after idea comes out.
To give an example in a rather wider field in agriculture, very remarkable progress has been made in the last two or three years in the application of minimal cultivations and, likewise, in the use of forage maize. It is probably apparent to your Lordships that the face of southern England is changing rapidly as a result of the use of forage maize. The noble Viscount, Lord Sidmouth, referred to integrated biological control.
All these are projects that have benefited very much from having a project team given a specific brief and having a number of people working round it from different angles. I stress that the development service, as so often, has a very important role to play in this and it is very closely tied up with the research content of the work. So, to sum up on the credit side of the work which has emerged since Rothschild, I feel sure that there has been, or there can be now, a coherent national research programme emerging. We now have the information available as to what is in hand and it is being fed into the same computer. Admittedly, like all computers, it does not appear to lend itself very easily to both research and development and I gather that there are still problems in getting all the required information on to the one computer, but it seems to me to be an advantage to have this national research programme available in this form.
Expertise also is now available to research and development. Whether it will be able to help I believe now depends very much on the role that the sponsors allot to the Joint Consultative Organisation. I also think that an important bonus of the post-Rothschild era is that the research worker has an opportunity to feel justified in believing that his work is relevant. After all, if he has been asked and given a brief under the customer/contractor principle for the work, he can be quite sure in his own mind that his work is of relevance to industry. I think that one should also add that those people who find that they have not been commissioned should in no way feel that their work is less important. It simply
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means that their work is less appropriate for sponsorship from the funds transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture.
Perhaps I may now refer to the disadvantages, as I see them, from the farmer's point of view. I think that one must, however, go into the paper work. I do not think that it is so much the research worker on the bench who is aggrieved and aggravated by the amount of work, although I accept that he must have more administrative work than previously; I am quite sure that it is the director of the institute who finds himself getting more and more submerged by administrative burdens. It is not just the customer/contractor relationship which has loaded the administrative content of his work recently; legislation has helped. But no doubt the preparation of commissions, sub-commissions, and now the reviews that are taking place is very time consuming indeed.
It must also be recognised as a disadvantage that this customer/contractor relationship does not easily fit the development service in agriculture. It may fit well to the research, but, as so often, development finds itself coming along behind research and being required to conform to a role that better suits research. After all, in agriculture development is almost always conducted by the Agricultural Development and Advisory Service, and, as that name suggests, the same officer is responsible for statutory controls, development work and advisory work. He comes on to a farm, and he could not tell one at the end of the day necessarily whether he had been giving one advice or helping with the development if, after all, one has a demonstration plot or a trial going on on one's farm.
There are no sharp boundaries here and sometimes the artificial restraint of trying to feed this development work into a project number for the sake of conformity with research is totally artificial and can possibly be most frustrating. But the test for the customer/contractor relationship will be in the future. We obviously do not expect a growth, as we had in the 1950s, in the research service again, but many years, one will assume, of a no growth situation. With regard to implementing the recommendations that are coming forward, I would say to the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, that I certainly

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cannot agree that they are scratching around for advice on what is to be commissioned because I think that the danger is that there are far too many recommendations, which are far too expensive to implement.
Nevertheless, if one is to have an opportunity to switch into new research priorities, this must be done as other research priorities terminate. With fewer new people coming into research because of the lack of growth, it means retraining. Bearing in mind that the agricultural research service, which expanded so greatly during the 1950s, has a heavy imbalance in the 40 and 50 year old age group, this is going to be a very great problem in agriculture. I suspect, although J do not know, it might well be a problem in other research councils. To retrain somebody in his 40s and 50s into possibly a different discipline, and certainly a different aspect of his discipline, will be a very serious problem.
The further problem which faces the agricultural industry is not so much of development, but more of promotion. The agricultural industry—it is a sad fact—is simply not exploiting effectively existing research and development findings. In horticulture the experimental stations run by the Ministry of Agriculture consistently show that they can in many cases get potential yields which are double the national average, and this covers quite a wide range of crops. The National Institute for Research in Dairying would say that if the work on mastitis control, which they have pretty well completed, were to be implemented effectively on the national farm it would go a very long way to paying for the entire research and development budget for agriculture.
So there is a problem here not so much of development but of promotion. How does one get this across? What is stopping farmers from using this very great expertise which is available? It may be lack of capital; it may be lack of confidence; it probably is both. But there are very many other reasons, and it must now be a high priority to identity just what are these restraints and to see how this matter can be dealt with. I hope that it will not be thought that the heavy work that has devolved on boards and committees as a result of Rothschild, to which I have drawn attention, in any way detracts from
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the value that people are putting in to helping the sponsors identify research. I feel very strongly, as indeed I feel is the concensus today, that the customer/contractor relationship has worked, but if, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, this is half time, I think there will be a really hard fought second half.
5.15 p.m.
Lord TEDDER: My Lords, in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Baker, I should add that I, too, miss my blackboard and chalk behind me. I should like particularly to confirm or re-echo all that he had to say about the impact of the Green Paper on physical science at university. I should also like to assure the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder, that in Scotland anyway I still think it is the general tradition that the professor gives the first year lectures. I also wish to support all that the noble Lord, Lord Wynne-Jones, had to say about fees for post-graduates.
In thanking the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, for the opportunity to look back over the five years since those two long afternoons that we spent in this Chamber, I should say that it seems a long time ago. But how interesting it is to read the report of that debate again. However, looking through the vast number of papers that I collected for that debate I find nothing that I said on that occasion which I would wish to retract now. I remain convinced that the customer/contract principle should be applied only to very precise and narrow short-term projects. I also remain convinced that our greatest need is to encourage what Dainton called "strategic" research. I do not however think it is worthwhile to argue again the pros and cons of the Green Paper. A great deal has happened since then, and so many new problems now beset the scientific community that we must not waste our energy on semantics of what is "applied research" and what is "strategic research".
We all realise that the research councils cannot hope completely to escape the cuts in Government spending which the present Government, or indeed any Government, will find necessary to make. We therefore have to make sure that the more limited resources available to support scientific research are spent in the best way possible. It is little more than two

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weeks ago since we were debating in your Lordships' House a Motion put down by the noble Lord, Lord Rochester, concerning the low esteem in which industry was held by many of our students graduating from university. In that debate I made a plea for increased participation by members of industry in the teaching and research carried out at universities. I argued then that it would help to improve the students' view of industry. I argue now that the same course of action would also help to promote good strategic research.
To a large extent research workers develop their ideas through discussion with their colleagues. If the academic world remains divorced from the world of industry, it is hardly surprising that some research products should become rather esoteric and divorced from any immediate practical application. In the debate five years ago I was at pains to emphasise how seldom any of the major advances in applied science originally grew out of any specific pieces of research of the customer/contract type. The big advances so often come from one research worker hearing of the problems of another in a quite different field and realising that the work he is doing may find application in, or possibly even provide a solution to, the problems of his colleagues.
With your Lordships' permission I should like to tell a story told me by my father. During the war the Ministry of Health sent out to North Africa a professor of anatomy—I think that he was only a reader in anatomy at the time—to study the casualties caused by bombing. The professor of anatomy was of course medically qualified, but he had earned his scientific distinction by studying the social behaviour of primates. This biological study had involved him in the extensive use of statistical methods. In order to tackle his problem he sought proper statistical data on the effects of bombing. However he found that the Air Ministry experts on bombing were not in fact using the most appropriate statistical techniques. The studies that my noble friend Lord Zuckerman was able to carry out on the bombing of Pantellerea, and subsequently on the bombing of the transportation system in Italy, had an enormous, and one could perhaps say a decisive effect on the way
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that Allied airpower was used prior to the Normandy landings in 1944.
Now the point of this parable is to emphasise that the really gifted scientist does not have to be an expert in a particular field to make a vital contribution, and even a quite unexceptional scientist can often throw new light on the problems of his colleagues. I want to emphasise again how much can be gained by encouraging better contacts between scientists from industry and scientists from the universities. I am sure that the way to do this is by having industrial scientists as part-time teachers and research workers in universities, and university teachers seconded for short periods into industry. Thus, my first point is that if we are to use the more limited funds now available for research to the maximum profit, we should do all we can to encourage the maximum possible collaboration between university laboratories and industry. The so-called case awards, already referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, developed by the Science Research Council, are one way of developing such collaboration. I am sure we must do all we can to find other ways.
The second point I wish to make, my Lords, is the great danger of laying down principles like the customer contract principle. It is inevitable that the civil servants—who, as noble Lords have already commented, are usually not scientists—who have to administer will regard these principles as fundamental truths which are to be applied across the board. If I may tell a current but cautionary tale which I hope will not be regarded as telling tales out of school, though I shall probably get into trouble for it none the less, just over a year ago the Science Research Council published a report by a Working Party which discussed the future policy of the SRC. The working party made a number of proposals, one of which was that there should be a greater amount of taught course work included in the normal Ph.D course. Indeed, the Working Party went so far as to suggest that the whole of the first year of a three-year research degree should be given over to course work.
At the Royal Institute of Chemistry, a meeting of all the heads of university chemistry departments in the United

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Kingdom discussed this report and, as requested, sent to the SRC their comments on the working party's proposals. The heads of chemistry departments welcomed many of the working party's proposals, but they did not view the introduction of extensive amounts of taught course work as suitable for research students in chemistry. All research students in chemistry get some course work, and indeed a Royal Society report of eight years ago showed that heads of chemistry departments felt that some course work was essential. However, except in certain circumstances where specialist training is required in order to carry out the research, the heads of chemistry departments were unanimous in opposing extensive further introduction of taught class work. Your Lordships can imagine our surprise when, a couple of weeks ago, we received from the secretariat of the chemistry committee of the SRC a letter informing us that, as well as depending on the research productivity of the department, the allocation of quota research awards—and may I explain to noble Lords that that is what we depend on to keep our research going—would also depend on the extent to which the department included taught course work in its Ph.D training.
We subsequently heard that the Science Research Council itself have endorsed the Working Party's proposals, but I am quite sure that such a responsible body would not attempt to dictate to universities a uniform type of training which, though suitable for some branches of science, is totally unsuitable to others. In fact, investigation showed that the chemistry committee, who are primarily responsible for the allocation of research awards in chemistry, have not yet even discussed the matter. In other words, a major change in policy, contrary to the most authoritative advice available, was being implemented, not as the result of decisions made by the appropriate committee but by deductions made by the administrative officials based on principles enunciated by the council itself. I do not wish to appear critical of the officials concerned: what I want to do is to point out the dangers of enunciating principles or of laying down hard and fast guidelines. Different branches of science require different treatment, and at every stage flexibility should be our aim.
I think that many of us scientists reacted adversely, and perhaps over-reacted, to the
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report of the noble Lord, Lord Rothschild, partly because the then Government had announced in advance that they endorsed the customer/contract principle and we were afraid that we would see its blind application in areas of research where it was totally inappropriate. I think events have proved that, though to some extent our fears were justified, certainly our worst fears were unfounded. We talk about scientific research as though it was one complete whole which could be treated in the same manner in all its fields. In practice, what we need is flexibility, and what is suitable for research in astronomy may be quite inappropriate for research in biochemistry. If I may paraphrase my noble friend and monitor, the noble Lord, Lord Todd, speaking in that debate five years ago: What we all want to see and what we all should be trying to get is a real partnership between Government Departments and research councils—a partnership that would be extended to the universities and to industry. My Lords, let us have no more fundamental principles, but let us realise that each branch of science needs to be treated in its own way; and let us have as little direction but as much collaboration as possible—collaboration among the Government, the Departments and the research councils, and, above all, between industry and the universities.
5.26 p.m.
The Earl of SHANNON: My Lords, it is exactly five years, almost to the day, since we last debated this subject. As your Lordships have been reminded, we spent two days on the debate then, and the fact that we are spending only one day today does not mean, I am sure, any diminution in the importance of this subject. We are today indebted to Lord Kennet for this opportunity, and for the opportunity to listen to the two excellent maiden speeches which his Motion has produced. Like the noble Lord who has just sat down, I looked back at that debate and I found that on that occasion I said most of what I would wish to say today. I therefore wish to make only an extremely short intervention this afternoon, and that will be concerned, I admit, with only one narrow and industrially related field.
The principles popularly attributed to Lord Rothschild are not new. For instance, the reasearch associations with

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which I am connected, and which are, if I may point out, the specialist laboratories called for by Lord Kennet (although I must admit to a certain personal grief, as a member of the British Horological Institute, that there is not a watch research association), have operated on what we now popularly call the Rothschild principle for many decades—I think even before the noble Lord, Lord Rothschild, had evinced any interest in science at all. But these principles were eagerly adopted by the then Conservative Government, and fortunately this support was continued by their successors in office. Many of us expressed concern at the time that arrangements in line with these newly-adopted principles were being pushed through with quite undue and unseemly haste. In fact, the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology was at the time constrained to observe
"…the excessive reliance which seems to be being placed on the so far totally untried requirements boards".
These requirements boards, of course, were the means by which it was intended to give implementation to the customer/contractor principle in industrial development.
At the time, Departments, under questioning, admitted that their hope was that each requirements board would gradually evolve its own character. I am afraid that at the time I regarded this as a polite way of saying that nobody as yet had defined in detail the objects of the boards, their terms of reference or their mode of operation. Whether or not this may have been an inauspicious start, there is absolutely no doubt that the result has been a roaring success, certainly in so far as the Department of Industry is concerned. Having said that, I must now embarrassingly declare an interest as being a member of one of those boards.
Particularly appropriate to our present economic situation is the transfer of technology into industry; and it is highly sensible that those bodies which apportion public funds for this purpose should, at least, be partially manned by representatives of the receiving end in order to define the most potentially beneficial areas where the public interest exists and where and how the public contribution, if any, should be made. I should like at this point, quite unreservedly, to pay tribute to
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those civil servants who organise, service and participate in these boards. Not only, poor chaps, have they to overcome their horror at what must for them be the most heinous of crimes, the spending of public money by outsiders—and from their own Department's budget to boot!—but they have done everything to ensure that the whole concept is the success that it is. If the roaring of this success is muted—and it is—it is due to the dampening effect of the comparatively pitiful sums allocated for the purpose. Of course, at the present time of financial stringency the last thing one should do is to plead for more. That is why I have been very careful to use the word "comparable". I will not bore your Lordships with long lists of statistics, but would invite you to consider in general the relative merits of such an area of direct wealth-producing potential against many other areas of interesting, perhaps in some cases satisfying, but all too often non-productive areas of public spending.
The noble Lord, Lord Kennet, in his speech moving this debate mentioned the importance of international implications. In this respect it is interesting to note the outcome of a symposium held in Milan last May which was called at the instigation of Directorate-General XII of the Commission of the European Communities. The outcome was to the effect that the Commission should involve itself very much more closely with innovation in industry throughout the countries of the Nine. The result of this has been the recent decision (and one of the first decisions) of the new Commissioners, Mr. Commissioner Guido Brunner should be what one might call the supremo in this area which had previously been fragmented among Directorates-General III, V, XII and Directorate-General XIII which the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, especially mentioned. I think that Lord Kennet will be very pleased to find that Directorate-General XIII in all probability will be spearheading this activity most effectively.
My Lords, if I might now attempt to offer a small answer to the question of the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, and, in a large way, agreeing with what the noble Lord, Lord Wynne-Jones, has said, it is very interesting to note that those countries which have shown the greatest economic growth in the past few decades

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have been those who did not indulge in large programmes of pure, basic or speculative research—call it what you like—at great expense, but have put their resources into the development and intelligent application of known results into their industries. And the only way in which this can be effectively carried out is to make absolutely certain that there will be a reasonable and worthwhile return not only to the inventor but also to the industrialist who carries out that innovation.
At this point I should like to make reference to, and, I think, applaud, the work of the Science Research Council in that they have recently had far more of an eye to the industrial relevance of the work which they fund. I know that this has not received universal approbation, but it certainly does so from me. One only hopes that this attitude will continue and, if possible, involve industry even more closely in the assessment and the use of the work which the Science Research Council funds. I am not suggesting that pure research should be put into a strait-jacket but only into perspective. I have recently heard it said that pure research must be like a variable wind, pursuing an indefinite course which cannot be predetermined or directed. What can and should be done, however, is to monitor this variable progress and observe into what profitable directions it may be leading.
My Lords, if I may conclude with a recommendation or two for the future, may I suggest that a close link be formed between the research and development community—and, most especially, the development community and the National Economic Development Office. Industrial strategy is the latter's business and they ought to be informed of what is already, or what is imminently, technologically possible. Likewise, if the development community is aware of the direction in which industry is desiring to go, it can bend its efforts most appropriately towards that end.
5.37 p.m.
Lord BOWDEN: My Lords, may I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, for making it possible for us to discuss this subject this afternoon, and may I with all due diffidence add mine to
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the many congratulations extended to our two maiden speakers. I have sat at the feet of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, these 25 or 30 years and I find it extraordinary that I should on this occasion be congratulating him on his making the kind of speech that I have heard him make so often before. I hope he will often attend this House and give us from time to time a steer in the right direction. I am sure that his counsel will be extraordinarily valuable to us.
My Lords, so much has been said this afternoon that it is difficult for me to know where best to begin. I vividly remember the passions aroused by the original proposals of the Rothschild reforms, and when I was preparing for this debate I went around to talk to several people much concerned with the organisation of research in and out of universities and in and out of industry, and I asked what in their opinion was the effect that the Rothschild proposals had had. To my astonishment, I found that nobody could think of anything significant. Many people asked, "What were the reforms?" They all went on to make the same points: that the real problems of research today are produced by the inflation of money, by the shortage of resources and by the financial difficulties in which universities and industry find themselves.
These are dominating people's thoughts, and I doubt very much whether the Rothschild proposals have had any effect commensurate with the anxiety that they provoked at the time. I am sure that the fears that I myself voiced have not been realised; nor, do I think, have the achievements so confidently hoped for by the proponents of the reforms. I think that Rothschild has had far less effect than was hoped for or feared. Rothschild was trying to devise a technique which would improve the way in which this country applied and used its research; and it is to the ideas which were current at the time that we should return.
The reforms which have taken place in the Science Research Council had already been initiated before the Rothschild Report. We have established an Engineering Research Council. This had been proposed before Rothschild. Furthermore, they had already introduced civil servants into the various committees of the Science Research Council in order

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to provide for that body the kind of advice which Rothschild in due course proposed. The system was already working very well. For that reason, the Science Research Council hardly noticed the effect of Rothschild.
The NERC, which has been fairly dramatically affected by Rothschild, has been affected not because of the short-comings of the Committee, but because there has never been anywhere in Government any body capable of giving it reasonable advice or of demanding from it particular solutions to particular problems. The NERC has been embarrassed—and "embarrassed" is the only word to use—by the fact that half a dozen Government Departments, each independently, have made requests of it and between them they are unable to produce any reasonable priority list.
We are still struggling, as we have always struggled, with the problem of making sure that industry progresses and develops along the way which will make the country more prosperous. We still have the same problems that we have always had. Research for production should be done in industrial firms if it is at all possible. It is wrong to expect either a university or a Government research institution of any kind to undertake research work which is going to result in a vendable product on a substantial scale. They cannot do it. Enormous organisations such as ICI have found that it pays to split down research work among relatively small groups and to associate a particular group of research workers with a particular factory where the product is being made. They do this in order to make certain that the work is done efficiently. Our national policy has, in large measure, destroyed the efforts that might otherwise have been made to carry out industrial research on a substantial scale.
I should like to refer to what I regard as the palmier days of academic industrial research, in Manchester in my institution some 40 or 50 years ago. The most distinguished engineer, a designer of rotating machinery in England, was Miles Walker. He was a professor in my institution and at the same time was chief designer for Metropolitan Vickers who made and sold the machines. The research work he did involved his students
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who learned what research was like, in the same way as the medical student, once qualified, learns what medicine is like, by practising it. There is no other way a person can turn himself from a college graduate into a professional. Miles Walker dominated the design of electrical machinery for years. The consequence was that his department was by far the best and most productive in this country. Unfortunately, after he died the tradition could not be sustained. Even more unfortunately, the research department in Metropolitan Vickers, which had 900 people in it at one time, now has only 45, and most of them are curators of a museum of antiquities, a museum of what was once a great research establishment.
It is impossible to describe in detail the financial crises which have befallen what was once the proudest factory in Europe; but it is true to say that the number of employees has dropped from 27,000 to 7,000 in the past 10 years and the whole of its research programme has effectively been scrapped. Opportunities for collaboration between the university and what was at Trafford Park have totally disappeared. This contains a far more serious lesson for us than anything we can learn by contemplating the minor changes in the direction of academic research in so far as it is funded by the various research councils.
We have to make sure that what one can almost call the seamless robe which extends all the way from the original ideas in the minds of the scientist to the development of a product, is never destroyed. The research which led to the invention of Terylene by Doctor Whinfield, cost a few pounds. On the other hand, before ICI were able to make it and sell it, they probably had to spend £20 million on developing it. That is probably an extreme case, but it at least indicates that the development processes are enormously more complicated than research and most of the work must be done in industry.
Our great weakness has been that, by building up the great national research laboratories, we have deprived industry of the opportunity of doing work for itself which it could do much more efficiently and productively. Furthermore, we have never implemented what to me is a much more important document than the

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Rothschild Report. May I remind your Lordships that in 1965 Sir Gordon Sutherland studied the interaction between the universities and the Government research establishments. He recommended that we in England should associate the teaching process with the actual operations of Government research on the largest possible scale, as they have long done in America.
As a result of that report, we were able to appoint the Astronomer Royal in Hurstmonceux, a professor in the University of Sussex. There has been collaboration between Southampton and Farnborough; there has also been collaboration on a small scale between Malvern and Birmingham. In no single case has the collaboration been as intensive as it should be, nor has it been followed through into the industrial world where vendable commodities have to be produced and sold.
We must not allow ourselves to be dominated by the niceties, the almost theological niceties, of the effects of the Rothschild Report. We must concern ourselves far more with the basic problem that British industry is often unable to fund the research that it should carry out. It is often obliged therefore to get research done in a Government establishment. There, in my opinion, except in rare circumstances, it is never done as efficiently or with the same urgent regard to time, which is so important, as it could have been done in industry.
If we can take a particular case, the difference between our atomic energy programme and that of the Canadians is very striking. The Canadians have a small group of people who have produced far more efficient nuclear power stations than we have done. The enormous installation at Pickering near Toronto is still the largest in the world. It is the only example of a nuclear power station which came on stream on schedule, within estimates, and which has worked reliably since it was first switched on.
The reason is basically that the same people who started the research went right through the manufacture and installation, and they have been associated with the project throughout. We in England separate totally the original research, carried out perhaps at Harwell,
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the development, carried out at Risley, and the manufacture which might be carried out anywhere in the country. The failure of the process of handover has been largely responsible for the relative inefficiency, the delays, the extravagance and the growing disappointment in our atomic energy programme.
This is a far more fundamental example of what we might call the customer/contractor principle. If a man knows when he starts on his research that, ten years later, he is going to be responsible for a power station that does not work, this gives him a far greater incentive to efficiency, a far greater idea of the importance of his work, than he would ever get merely by being given a contract to undertake a piece of work on schedule for somebody else who cannot precisely specify it.
For many years we have been carrying out some fundamental research of great significance, but we have never realised that the great wealth of America came before the war to a country which boasted that it relied on Europe for its pure research, bought it from Europe and applied it. It was only after Vannevar Bush wrote a report for President Roosevelt pointing out that in his opinion Europe could never again undertake pure research because it had been devastated by war, that America started to undertake pure research on a large scale. There is no doubt, in my opinion, that the achievements of America in developing ideas should be a lesson to us, and should make us realise that we cannot hope to become wealthy by spending, as we are doing, more research on military operations and on defence, as we have been doing for 20 years or more, than any other country in Europe, and, at the same time, spending less on commercial research than most of them—less on roads, on telephones, on hospitals or on houses. Research into military hardware is no way to make us prosperous. There is no possibility that the Rothschild Report, or any other report, can change the nature of the organisation which produces this devastating and inefficient result.
5.51 p.m.
The Earl of HALSBURY: My Lords, before I come to the subject of the Motion,

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I should like to join with other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, for giving us the opportunity to debate this matter this afternoon, and to add my congratulations to my noble friends Lord Sidmouth and Lord Baker. I, like the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, have also sat at their feet in years gone by, and I am sure that we all look forward to seeing them on many occasions in the future and listening to their wise counsel and advice.
The last time I addressed your Lordships' House on this subject, my views were rather like those which have been expressed this afternoon by the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona. I felt that the Rothschild concepts had ceased from mental strife, his sword had gone to sleep in his hand and he was going home to hang it up on the wall with four-fifths of the job unfinished, and with a non-novel concept launched at the Science Research Councils. That does not mean that I disagree in any way with my noble friend Lord Shannon. I am so glad it has been a success in the context of the Industrial Research Associations. It is exactly what I should have expected.
I also noted with some little nostalgia that this was my swan song on the subject, as I should have completed 20 years' service with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research as a member of its Council and later the Science Research Council; and that I should be put out to grass at the end of the academic year. However, man proposes but God disposes, and when I found myself a free man the Medical Research Council, in the words of the Godfather, "made me an offer I could not refuse". So in the post-Rothschild era I found myself once more swept up into research council affairs.
I do not know what happened to other branches of Government science when the curse of Rothschild descended on them, but in the words of Thomas Ingoldsby, so far as the MRC is concerned:
"Never was heard such a terrible curse!!
But what gave rise
To no little surprise,
Nobody seemed one penny the worse!"
or a penny the better, either, my Lords! The main sufferers were those senior civil servants who got the equivalent of honourable ulcers in shifting the furniture around at the top level. Here I must
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say a word about the effect on our loyal civil servants of asking them to dismantle their bicycle into its component parts and then reassemble it after exchanging the back and front wheels. It is not a useful use of their time to ask them to be the architects of something which represents a distinction without a difference.
The reason why it made so little difference was that part of our quondam residues were handed over to the DHSS by the Treasury, who handed them back to us and said: "Carry on, sergeant-major. You have always done what we wanted: just go on doing it." That was not because the DHSS had no ideas for research, but because the ideas they had were already being implemented. Before the change-over, relations between the Medical Research Council and the DHSS or its predecessors were friendly, informal and elastic. They are still friendly, but are now more formalised and have therefore lost a little of their elasticity. The DHSS are now beginning to generate policies of their own, and that may be a good thing. But the rigidity introduced into the system is simply the price paid for that good thing, if you think it good. All design is a compromise: if you want more of something you have to pay for it with less of something else.
Let me explain what I mean by the element of rigidity and how one manages the finances of a research council. It is rather like banking. Today at 2 o'clock, yesterday's call money was repaid, together with last week's seven-day money, last month's 30-day money and last quarter's 90-day money; and the bank has become more liquid to that extent. It can now re-lend that money, though not necessarily in the pattern which prevailed at the time of its original lendings, and by varying that pattern in terms of its liquidity, the bank helps to manipulate and manage the money market. On the terminal anniversary of any given grant, whether it be a grant of one, two, three, four or five years, the sum of money belonging to this year's vote falls free for redeployment, and the task of the research councils is to manage that situation rather as a bank manages its liquidity, so that it is not cut short at a time when the Government, like the solar sun-spot cycle, is going through one of their periodic phases of economy and retrenchment.

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You do not want to get caught short of redeployable money at that stage. If you do, then you become subject to a device beloved of economists called "the multiplier". The effect is that with a very large amount of fixed expenditure and the modern habit of giving tenure to comparatively young people, it makes them almost unredeployable. I am not at all sure that it is a wise thing to do, but the Government have agreed to do it and that represents a very large fixed charge for our own internal employed people on the Medical Research Council. In fact, only about 35 per cent. of our annual revenues are available for grant, and the effect of that is that if we have, say, a 10 per cent. cut imposed on our overall expenditure, it will be a 30 per cent. cut (with the three-fold multiplier) on the freely redeployable money to keep new projects going. Of course, it is always the new and the exciting that gets nipped in the bud whenever there is a Government economy wave.
"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed ",
to quote Milton. The hungry sheep are the professoriate, who rely on the research councils for the selected component of their research budgets.
Under the old dispensation, we went primarily for a balanced research programme with a high degree of elasticity, so that on a request from a body like the DHSS to change course somewhat, you could do that by a supplementary grant here and a bit of attention to something else there, and the work got done without any very major commitments. But now that we are beginning to get a certain amount of research policy coming through from the DHSS, some of the elasticity goes out of it because they want to be able to see what we are doing for them and, in particular, they come under different pressures from the Department of Education and Science. For example, the current expenditure cut applied by the DES on the Medical Research Council is 0.1 per cent., but on the proportion which comes through the DHSS, it is a cut of 10 per cent.; and that is quite a serious factor. That is because the pressures in the DHSS are different from those in the DES, and ministerial zeal can, of course, have its embarrassments. For instance, we may be asked to put up a permanent establishment to research into something or other that happens
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to be the temporary enthusiasm of somebody or other, and then we are stranded with a fixed commitment for a long time to come.
"You pays your penny and you takes your choice", and we are masters of our own affairs; and, as I have said, all design is a compromise. But if I were asked to sum up the four years' experience of the post-Rothschild era on the Medical Research Council, I think I would say: "The mountain groaned and gave birth to a mouse". In the Latin original, it groaned and gave birth to a "ridiculous mouse ", but I am not going to take things quite that far. I do not think the present situation is ridiculous. It was not one which I particularly wanted to achieve, but we have learned to live with it.
All I can say is that if I had a free choice between the system as it was and the system as it now is, I think I should have preferred to stick with the system as it was, because in relation to the system man can occupy three statuses. He can be its master, its slave or its saboteur. I shall not now deal with the saboteurs, and I shall not deal with the slaves. But if you really know the system, and if you can master it as a skilled rider masters his horse, you can ride it where you want in any direction that you want it to go, because you are the master and the horse is your servant. It is a great mistake to think that if something is not working ideally you have got to shove the furniture around and reorganise everything at the top. The point is to get the people to master the system, and make it go where you want it to go.
6.1 p.m.
Lord PEART: My Lords, may I say to the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, that I listened attentively not only to his humour, but to his wise words. After all, he said, it is not really so bad as it seems. I know that he spoke about a mountain producing a mouse, but I think he exhibited a realistic attitude to what we are debating today. After all, we are debating policy in relation to Rothschild, and we must concentrate our minds on that. This has been a fascinating and, for me, at least, an educative experience. It has been an example of the House of Lords at its best, bringing its all too often unacknowledged expertise to bear on a subject which,

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although vital to this country's future prosperity, is far too infrequently discussed. I know that we have previously had two days of debate, but I am glad that my noble friend Lord Kennet took the initiative here and I think he made a stimulating speech. He asked me a rather long list of questions, which I could not possibly answer in a debate of this kind. I will answer only one. He asked me about my responsibilities in relation to maritime research, and wanted to know whether my new position enabled me to fill the gaps. I would say, Yes, and I hope that in time we shall see the fruits of that. But that is another matter.
We have had excellent contributions from noble Lords with a vast range of experience; from esteemed academic scientists and professors—and, my goodness! I feel very humble, as a former young undergraduate, when I see the array of talent behind me and in front of me; I really shudder—and also, which is more important, from industrialists with a knack for achieving practical results. I am glad that we had contributions from those connected with that great and most efficient industry of ours—agriculture—and there were also two maiden speeches to which I will refer. I was very proud to hear some of the remarks made about agricultural research and the part that it plays in that industry. That is not to forget the speeches from those who may not be specialists. I think of the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder, and I remember years ago—if he will forgive my saying that it was years ago—his great series of articles, and how he tried to educate the British public to the importance of science and its application; and not only the public, but politicians and others, and sometimes even scientists who can get too wrapped up in their own little cocoon, or their ivory tower, pursuing academic interests. So we have had a tremendous debate.
I could go on picking out speeches, but I am happy to add my congratulations to those already given to the noble Viscount, Lord Sidmouth, and the noble Lord, Lord Baker, on their most interesting maiden speeches. As we all know, the noble Lord, Lord Baker, was a distinguished professor in mechanical sciences and head of the department of engineering at Cambridge University. What a delight
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his maiden speech was!—he need not apologise for it—and we shall look forward to hearing him in other debates in this House, not just those on science. I was also glad to hear the noble Viscount, Lord Sidmouth, who succeeded his father. I pay tribute to him. He is interested in science, in agricultural research, but he is also a practical farmer. I am glad that he served on the Agricultural Research Council. It is the best organisation that came out of the Ministry of Agriculture, and I am glad to say that I was the Minister responsible. But I am being rather modest! So I am happy to congratulate both of them on excellent maiden speeches, and I am sure that I echo the views of the whole House.
A number of criticisms have been made of the arrangements for research and development policies, so may I say straight away that the Government remain committed to the customer/contractor principle. Perhaps it would be helpful if I explained the reasoning which led the Government to take this decision, following the Rothschild Report in 1972. The Rothschild Report is sometimes construed—and, indeed, was so construed by many in the debate in this House five years ago—as representing a conflict between the Haldane principle and the customer/contractor principle. I think that this was unfortunate and is, in any case, misconceived.
At the time of the Haldane Committee's Report—and we are now going back a long time—some 50 years ago, scientists were relatively few in number. The Government machine was not well adapted to handle the kinds of advice which scientists and technologists can give; nor was it well equipped to influence the direction of their work. The need to which Haldane addressed himself was the need to get science mobilised and to give it adequate resources so that it might, at some time in the future, play a full part in national affairs. The Haldane principle achieved that aim splendidly. We now have a scientific capability of which we can be proud, and which is, indeed, the envy of many other countries. Let us not be too pessimistic in our comparisons with other countries, in Europe and elsewhere. We have great achievements, although of course we need to improve.

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The need, to which Lord Rothschild addressed himself, is the need to ensure that this scientific capability is deployed in a way and on a timescale such that the nation can derive maximum benefit. That may seem trite. The customer/contractor principle is a device for ensuring, on the one hand, that the science community knows what the Government want to be done, and, on the other hand, that the scientists can tell the Government what is technically possible. What Lord Rothschild wanted to do was to encourage a dialogue between governmental customers and scientific contractors to the mutual benefit of both Government and science. The Government considered this aim both timely and ambitious, and consequently announced that they would adopt the customer/contractor principle. However, the Government stressed that they did not necessarily endorse all of Lord Rothschild's recommendations concerning implementation of the customer/contractor principle.
There has been, in fact, a considerable degree of flexibility in the way specific Departments have responded. Some Departments (such as the Ministry of Defence) were operating the customer/contractor principle well before 1971; others have had more difficulty in establishing appropriate mechanisms. It is perhaps too early to judge how effective some of these are. In debates on this topic, I think we should distinguish clearly between the principle—to which the Government remain firmly committed—and the implementation of that principle where we still have much to learn. I think it would be unfortunate to stimulate a major re-examination or reorganisation of R and D at the moment. Pulling up a plant to have a look at its roots at frequent intervals is not the best way of monitoring its health. A period of stability was promised, and that period should extend for a few years yet.
If I may turn to the research councils, in 1972 much concern was expressed over the consequences of reorganisation on the research councils and their staffs and, in particular, over the result of transferring part of their funds to Departments. In practice, the good judgment and good sense of the customers (departmental chief scientists) and the contractors (the research councils) has meant that the reorganisation has gone relatively smoothly. Where, as in the case of the Agricultural Research
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Council and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food there has been a 1:1 relationship, things have been easiest. Perhaps that is why they have been successful; I do not know. There has been a suggestion that the problem has been quite different from that of other research councils. Elsewhere, however, when a number of Departments are involved as customers, things have been much more difficult.
It is certainly true that there has been an increase in the number of committees, research liaison groups, research requirements boards and so on, and an increase in the amount of paper work. In so far as this has led to a greater understanding on the part of both the customer and contractor of each other's needs and problems, then the benefit has outweighed the cost. Nevertheless, the research councils are concerned at the cost, estimated at about £500,000 a year, which is an unwelcome addition to their commitment at a time of severe pressure on the science budget. Efforts need therefore to be made to keep the cost to a minimum. There is also a loss of scientific activity because scientists have to devote considerable time to justifying their programmes, arranging commissions and holding discussions with the customer Departments. This is necessary work but it can be reduced if progress can be made towards fewer, larger and more long-term commissions.
At the level of the research institute, sudden cuts in spending impose stresses which are sharply increased by the restrictions set by commissioned projects. These seriously reduce the ability of directors to adjust and to manage reduced programmes. Where these involve both departmental and Science Vote funds—for example, the Department of Education and Science—there is a danger that the only available field for economies is in the longer-term, and more basic, work which is not the subject of specific commissions. All research councils have been affected in this way in the past year and there is a continuing need, which the Government accept, to ensure that we do not, in the short term, make cuts which affect the long-term viability of the support for basic, curiosity-orientated science provided by the research councils.
The planning machinery set up by the Advisory Board for the research councils,

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although placed under great strain in this past year, has coped very well with this situation and I should like to pay tribute to their skill and understanding. Lord Rothschild, in his report, laid great stress on the need for discussion and on the fact that creative ideas are at least as likely to originate within the contractor's organisation as among the customers. The debates were given an added edge by the unfortunate necessity to cut public expenditure. I know that several noble Lords have referred to that point—among them the noble Lord, Lord Wynne-Jones, who thought how wrong it was to cut back public expenditure. I am glad, though, that the noble Lord stressed the importance of education, a point which was also taken up by other noble Lords.
We should not forget that during the past four years successive cuts in expenditure have influenced the conduct of research and development more than the administrative changes adopted as a result of Cmnd. 5046, and it would be a grave mistake to ascribe all the difficulties of these years to Lord Rothschild and his principle. Indeed, without these organisational changes things might well have been worse.
It is interesting that a recent French study of the effects of the Rothschild reorganisation, which was by no means uncritical, concluded:
"The customer-contractor principle works"
and
"the co-operation between the scientific bodies, in particular between Ministries and Research Councils, has been improved".
The report also points out that biomedical research in particular has benefited from the greater degree of planning and from the switch, in the distribution of the Science Vote, from big science (which means high energy physics and astronomy) to little science (which seems to refer to everything else).
We should also remember that, in any case, the real test of Government intervention in this area, as was pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, in the House of Lords' debate in 1972, is not,
"the way our Government scientists are managed"
but
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"the choice of the major projects on which they are engaged".
Scientists should become, as Lord Zuckerman suggested,
"an effective part of the policy-making machinery".
I know that there are strong criticisms of the customer/contractor concept but, judged against this latter criterion, I think the establishment of effective Chief Scientists, and their staffs, in Departments represents a significant advance. It could be argued, however, that this by itself is hardly sufficient to meet Lord Zuckerman's point. Indeed one criticism of the way in which Cmnd. 5046 implemented the Rothschild proposals was that it left a "gap in the centre".
Experience has shown that there is some force in this criticism. In a memorandum to the Science Sub-Committee of the Select Committee on Science and Technology my predecessor, my noble friend Lord Shepherd, announced further organisational changes designed, in part, to meet the criticism. One important development was the establishment of a new committee, comprising Departmental Chief Scientists and Permanent Secretaries, under the chairmanship of the Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir John Hunt. The net effect of this is to make the Chief Scientists an even more effective part of the policy-making machinery. In addition, the creation of a Chief Scientist's post in the Central Policy Review Staff has been a further attempt to reinforce the centre. I refer to the appointment of Professor Ashworth.
A second major criticism of the Rothschild proposals has been that they were too much concerned with research and did not take sufficient account of development. Although Government support for basic science is, of course, qualitatively all-important in quantitative terms, it represents only some 15 to 20 per cent, of the total support given by Government to science and technology. It will probably never be possible, in view of the many other factors involved, to tell whether the adoption of the customer/contractor principle has helped in the Government's reaction to this state of affairs.
Since 1972 we have become more conscious of the complexity of the innovation process, which involves far more

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than research and development. We are also more aware of the manifold ways in which Government actions affect it. Most importantly, we are very conscious of the over-riding need to harness the work of Government research establishments to industrial innovation. The operation of the Research Requirements Boards of the Department of Industry and the increase in the commercial use of the facilities, not only at Harwell but also at the National Engineering Laboratory and other Government establishments, represent part of the Government's response to this overriding need.
More recently—and this is a further part of the organisational changes announced by my predecessor—we have set up, under my chairmanship, the new Advisory Council for Applied Research and Development. A number of distinguished and knowledgeable industrialists and others, from outside the Government service, have agreed to serve on this council. I am confident that they will enable us to derive greater benefit from the wealth of scientific and technological expertise which resides not only in the industrial and other research establishments of Government but also in the universities and research associations. Of course, if this expertise is to be fully effective it must be concentrated and selective. The work of the new council must form part of the developing industrial strategy of the country as a whole. Consequently, the work of ACARD, if I may call it that, will be linked closely with the parallel studies being undertaken by the sector Working Parties of the National Economic Development Council. I look forward to a close and fruitful collaboration between these two organisations, the one working, as it were, horizontally, looking at the R and D effort across the whole industrial scene, the other vertically at all aspects of particular sectors.
There is, I think, general agreement that the advisory board for the research councils has played a valuable and helpful role in co-ordinating the efforts of Government Departments, universities and the research councils in support of fundamental science. I hope that ACARD will play a similar role in support of the applied sciences and technology. I know that my noble friend Lord Kennet mentioned the European Economic Community. ACARD will also consider the
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question of our increasing involvement in the EEC. At present, as he probably will know, there is a unit, the Europe Industry and Technology Division in the Department of Trade which co-ordinates the interests of Government Departments in Brussels. The research councils, have, of course, their own channels to Brussels in addition to those provided by Government. I refer, for example, to the European Science Foundation, the Royal Society and other professional bodies such as the Federation of European Biochemical Societies. At official level this all works very well, but, as with anything new, it takes some time for all to get used to the arrangements.
I would not accept the criticism that we do not get our fair share of the EEC R and D budget but, equally, I would accept that we might do more to assist some sections in the United Kingdom community to be more aware of what is going on in Brussels. As I have said, this is one of those broad matters which falls within the terms of reference of ACARD.
It is thus clear that the Government are aware of the continuing need to keep the workings of the Rothschild proposals under review and of the necessity of ensuring that their implementation does not lead to excessive and unnecessary bureaucratic delays and expense. But I think it is also necessary to point out that research and development is inevitably subjected to many stresses and strains. We must resist the temptation to use the customer/contractor principle as a scapegoat.
My Lords, it is already clear that the benefits of the adoption of the principle already outweigh the costs in most areas. As the system becomes better known, and as the dialogue that Rothschild was anxious to foster becomes more established, these benefits will grow and the costs diminish. Even now there is a lot of good work that has happened that would not have happened had it not been for these changes. I will just quote one beneficial example of the working of the customer/contractor principle, namely, the geological work on the United Kingdom Continental Shelf undertaken by the National Environment Research Council.

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Here the current programme undertaken by the Research Council's Institute of Geological Sciences is largely funded by the Department of Energy and it is running at an annual amount of over £2 million. The Department supplements this, when necessary, to enable extra surveys and boreholes to be undertaken and data to be purchased. This year the additional injection of money has been over £1 million. The work has been directed so that it has a close relevance to the problems of hydro-carbon exploration and exploitation, and particularly to the requirements of Government in this field.
This has led to increasingly close collaboration with Government and also with industry which provides valuable raw data, as well as a commercial approach, to the research work to the benefit of all parties. An additional benefit is that the expertise within the Institute of Geological Sciences is, as a consequence, being continually built up in, for example, the fields of seismic interpretation and micro-paleantology; and the other research activities of the Institute have benefited greatly from this aspect of the commissioned programme.
So, to conclude, I will not get myself involved in any controversy over what has been argued about today. I should like just to reiterate what my predecessor said to the Select Committee on Science and Technology last July. He spoke about the need for the Government to keep the working of these arrangements under close review. But we should remember that, although it is nearly five years since the White Paper was published, it is much less than that since the arrangements have been operating. I believe we have had an extremely constructive and stimulating debate. If I have missed the contributions of any noble Lords I shall certainly, where necessary, write to them on any particular point. In my view this has been a very good debate.
6.25 p.m.
Lord KENNET: My Lords, I am sure the House will be extremely grateful to my noble friend the Leader of the House for winding up the debate in so full and helpful a manner. He was right to remind us of the appointment of Professor Ash-worth to the Central Policy Review Staff,
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who in a sense fills the hole in the middle of the doughnut, consisting of a ring of scientific advisers in all Ministries standing in a circle but with a gap in the middle. I hope that between them they will fill it.
As to the French article which came, unlike this House and unlike my noble friend, to the conclusion after only three years that the customer contractor principle works, this was, I believe, an article in the House organ of the DGRST—the Délégation Générale de la Recherche Scientifique et Technologique. Ever since the days when I myself used to follow courses at the Ecole Polytechnique in a borrowed uniform, I have been aware of the oscillation between what Arthur Koestler called "French 'flu" or the Anglo-French love affair, and the opposite—the Anglo-French hatred affair—and it seems to me that at the moment we are heading swiftly towards the phase of the Anglo-French love affair, at least as regards the administration of research and development. I should like just once again to warn against it.
I hardly need to add my own voice to those which have been raised in praise and thanks to the maiden speakers, both practical and both bringing to this House experience from the field we are discussing, than which no sort of speech can be more valuable. This is not the kind of debate where the introducer has to say anything particular in winding up. Therefore, I should like to thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate, and I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

CONCORDE: KENNEDY AIRPORT LANDING RIGHTS
6.27 p.m.
The Earl of KIMBERLEY The Earl of KIMBERLEY rose to ask Her Majesty's Government, in view of President Carter's refusal to intervene with the New York Port Authority about Concorde's landing rights at Kennedy Airport, what action the British and French Governments propose to take. The noble Earl said: My Lords, on 20th January of last year I asked a Question in the following terms, that should the decision go against Concorde landing in New York, would Her Majesty's Government be in complete harmony

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with the French Government as to what they will do? I said that it would be no good shutting the door after the horse had gone. In his reply the noble Lord, Lord Melchett, said:
"My Lords, what happens in the event of what the noble Earl is envisaging is a hypothetical question, and Her Majesty's Government would need very carefully to consider the terms of any refusal which might come from the United States. There has been complete collaboration with the French Government over the presentation of the case for Concorde in the United States, and I certainly expect that very close and complete collaboration to continue."—[Official Report, 20/1/76; col. 350.]
My Lords, it is no longer hypothetical; it is a reality. I understand that M. Cavaille went to Washington last Monday and, in view of—as I like to call it—the "entente Concordiale" that we have between our two countries, one imagines that Her Majesty's Government know why he went, what has happened and what action the French propose to take, and when the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, winds up the debate he may be able to give us some news. I also remember saying in your Lordships' Chamber not all that long ago, when President Carter was only President-elect Carter, that he did not like Concorde then, and he does not seem to have changed his mind very much, alas! So we have the situation, to my humble way of thinking, that in the United States the New York Port Authority are playing a waiting game because they know that the longer they can hold things up the better it will be for them. It may be, with hindsight, that we should have gone to court long ago, but that is cold comfort and does not help us. We have the situation as it is now and that is the one that has to be resolved.
My Lords, what will happen if we fail? We shall have a great many redundancies to start with in BAC at the end of the year, because we cannot sell the remaining five aeroplanes and we cannot possibly lay any more down until we have disposed of those. I should like to quote a paragraph from what the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, said to the Royal Aeronautical Society a few weeks ago. I have asked the noble Lord if I may quote him, and he said he would be happy for me to do so. He was talking about redundancies when another aeroplane was cancelled. The noble Lord said:
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"For example, the argument of certain prominent critics that men made redundant by the TSR 2 cancellation and by the Rolls-Royce rundown were quickly and fully utilised in other manufacturing industries just is not proven. The evidence collected by the Department of Employment and by Professor Wedderburn showed that a substantial proportion of that redundant workforce were lost to the country by emigration, lost to industry altogether, or were employed in less skilled occupations."
My Lords, that may well be the sad tale at BAC.
We have throughout the world people who knock Concorde for environmental reasons, noise, pollution and exhaust. It is of interest to note, as regards noise, that on 28th February the Minister in another place was asked a Question about the 13 noisiest aeroplanes, one each month for the last thirteen months recorded at London Airport. I will tell your Lordships what they were: there were nine Boeing 707s, three Tridents, and two 747s. Concorde was not the noisiest in any month.
Lord BEAUMONT of WHITLEY: My Lords, if the noble Earl will allow me, is it not true that the Question was in fact about infringements? Concorde is excluded from it and Concorde could not have been in the list.
The Earl of KIMBERLEY: My Lords, I have the Hansard here. If your Lord-ships will permit me, I will read the Question:
"Mr. Cope asked the Secretary of State for Trade if he will state, for each month since Concorde entered commercial service, which aircraft types recorded the highest noise level at the Civil Aviation Authority fixed monitoring stations around Heathrow?"—[Official Report, (Commons Written Answer), 28/2/77; col. 89.]
Exhaust smoke today is negligible, and, anyway, if proper noise abatement techniques are used by the air crews, the noise is not that bad. As I live seven miles from Fairford and I see Concorde on average 25 times a week doing circuits and bumps, I think I am in a position to know a little about it.
My Lords, if President Carter wished to, he could exert potent pressure on New York City, whose financial straits I believe make it very dependent on Washington. The Port Authority's excuse for more time to evaluate data is purely a time-wasting thing; in my humble opinion they are playing a waiting game. I should like to ask the noble Lord whether I am

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right in saying that the Port Authority have no right to violate an international treaty obligation of the United States. I should also like to ask him whether or not the Port Authority's action is unconstitutional in interfering with the authority of the Federal Government to conduct foreign relations of the United States.
My Lords, if we have a court case as a result of the decision being postponed yet again on 10th March, or it going against us, or even if we win it, no doubt the loser will appeal to the Supreme Court, and it is possible, I suppose, that during this time Concorde will be completely banned. If we were the loser, we might eventually win. But that again is cold comfort. From what I gather, there are one or two slightly encouraging facts. There is a lobby growing in New York among industrialists, labour leaders, and even local residents, who want Concorde because they are beginning to lose business.
My Lords, the reason for my Question is because New York is the key to the commerical success of Concorde. I will, before I finish, slightly deviate, because there is a possible alternative to which I should like to refer later, but without New York, or the alternative, we will not sell and we will not lease the other five aircraft. I would also ask the noble Lord whether he has any news of any agreement between Her Majesty's Government and the French Government about leasing the remaining five aircraft. If the worst happens, we shall not build any more and the existing aircraft will, therefore, never be improved; it will never be upgraded. Therefore, we will not get an improved range; we will not get an improved payload, and the aircraft will not become any quieter. As a result, we shall have thrown £650 million-odd down the drain in this country, and even worse, at the end of this year, 1,500 more BAC workers will probably be made redundant.
May I ask the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, whether he has any further news of what I believe was referred to as the "back stairs deal" which was a deal supposedly of the United States Department of Transportation funding an expensive new highway on New York's West Side if Governor Carey instructed the Port
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Authority to go ahead and admit Concorde. Do they know through the grapevine whether Governor Carey is accepting this?
So, my Lords, what can we do? There appear to me three possibilities: one, litigation; two, the Bermuda Agreement; three, trade. Litigation, as I have already mentioned, I am sure we would win, but it would take a very long time, and perhaps one or two other United States airports would jump on the bandwaggon. Some want it; some do not. The longer it goes on, the longer the Port Authority of New York will be pleased. With regard to the Bermuda Agreement, in renegotiating this agreement no doubt pressure could be brought to bear, but it would be protracted, and it could well complicate other important matters and issues.
So I come to trade. There is a long shot here, as they say in racing parlance. Although, as I think noble Lords know, I am a very keen supporter of British aviation in all its forms, and I would welcome the fact that the Nimrod should be the early warning aeroplane chosen, I would put this idea to the noble Lord. If by chance the Nimrod was not to be gone ahead with, and as a result NATO agree to buy Boeing AWACs, I believe that our share of this is not inconsiderable; it will be about 18 per cent. of a very large total, and I believe the figure quoted is round about £260 million. If AWACs Boeings were bought for NATO, there is a vast amount of work and employment in refurbishing these aircraft. I was going to humbly suggest that possibly this work could go to Hawker Siddeley instead of BAC; and BAC could then build another 10 or 15 Concordes.
My Lords, you may look at me as if I have gone mad. My idea would be that if NATO wants Boeings we pay for the Boeings with Concordes instead of money. Let us go back to the days of barter. Let the United States Government have the equivalent value in Concorde and let them sort out the New York Port Authority. Let them lease the Concordes to Pan American, TWA, Braniff, National, and let President Carter have one for his shuttle diplomacy. I mentioned this the other day to the Secretary of State for Defence. He was not very keen on it, but I give it to your Lordships for consideration, to mull over.

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I come to the trade figures again. In 1976, I believe that we exported £2,448.8 million worth of goods to the United States and in turn we received £3,044.3 million. Therefore, I reckon that this figure is very nearly £600 million in our favour. Alas! I have not been able to ascertain the exact figures from France, but I gather that they are very much in the same proportion and therefore favourable to France. May I suggest that perhaps we lessen our mutual trade with the United States and buy whatever remaining items we need elsewhere in the world.
It may be of interest to noble Lords who have not seen the tape that about an hour ago the British Parliamentary Concorde Group wrote to the Secretary of State for Trade asking him to withdraw air traffic rights between Britain and New York. They are also urging their French counterparts to do the same. My original Question on 20th January 1976 was:
"To ask Her Majesty's Government whether, in the event of Concorde being refused landing rights in New York and Washington as a result of the current Federal Government inquiry, they will, in concert with the French Government, take steps to restrict in a similar manner the operations of Pan Am and TWA at Paris and London Airports."
The noble Lord, Lord Melchett, said:
"My Lords, we had a fair hearing in Washington and put forward a strong case. I do not therefore expect the decision to go against Concorde's entry into the United States."—[Official Report, 20/1/76; cols. 349–350.]
That is the present situation.
I turn to my alternative to New York. Let British Airways open up the routes through the Pacific to Japan and Australia. In the next few weeks British Airways will have five Concordes and nowhere for most of them to go. Let the rest of the world see Concorde. If British Airways says that there are range problems, let BAC carry out the modifications which will improve the range and payload, because they are not that expensive. Noble Lords may well find that in a short while if New York did not have Concorde it would be begging us to come. If the decision goes against us on 10th March, will the Government please consider my worldwide suggestion? I look forward to hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, what counter-proposals Her Majesty's Government have, because otherwise I fear that we shall be back to square one when I asked the same Question in
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your Lordships' House in January last year. Once before I said:
"Let us use the mailed fist in the velvet glove."
I suggest that we take the gloves off and use the mailed fist.
6.44 p.m.
Lord BOYD-CARPENTER: My Lords, as my release from the inhibitions which the shade of the first Viscount Addison imposed on the holders of public appointments is less than 48 hours old, I have an embarrassing feeling almost of quasi-virginity on rising to address your Lord-ships' House. However, during my own period of enforced silence on this subject I have greatly admired the determination and pertinacity with which the noble Earl has pursued, in this House and elsewhere, the important cause of the proper exploitation of this supreme example of Anglo-French technology. I share his enthusiasm. Perhaps I am bound to do so because in one way or another I have been very closely connected with this aircraft since its inception.
I was, indeed, a member of the Cabinet which in 1962 approved the original proposal and I think, with the possible exception of the noble Viscount, Lord Amory, I am the only person in this House today who shares that responsibility. As I am a rule-abiding person, I cannot tell your Lordships the cost of that development, but I have had the experience of being chairman of the Public Accounts Committee in another place for six years and have dealt with the costs of this aircraft. More recently I have been associated with its coming into service, and 15 months ago I had the great privilege of handing its certificate of airworthiness to that very great man, Sir George Edwards, to whom this country owes such an enormous debt.
The important point in this issue is that the route, London to New York—or, of course, Paris to New York—is the route for which this aircraft was designed. It is the route for which this aircraft is, if I may use the expression, "a natural". It is the right stage length and it is a route that has sufficient traffics of the high-powered, high-calibre type of passenger whom this aircraft is designed to carry. It is not too much to say that many of us hold the view that its ultimate success or failure depends on its being able to

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operate on this route. However, I hope that we shall not allow the strong feelings which I have, and which many noble Lords and others outside have, on this issue to push us into either of two mistakes.
It would be a mistake to make this a cause of anti-Americanism. I happen to share the great doctrine which Sir Winston Churchill put forward to the effect that it was upon Anglo-American friendship that the survival of the civilised world depends. Our friendship with the United States is too deep and too important to be affected by this. Nor would it be right to criticise the aviation authorities of the United States. On the contrary, the FAA has gone, as the Americans might themselves phrase it, beyond the line of duty in being helpful over the introduction of Concorde. It has helped enormously on the technical side, in the provision of proper air traffic controlled routes and has, indeed, made available the only international airport that it owns and operates, that of Dulles outside Washington. It certainly is not to blame.
The responsibility rests firmly on the political Luddites of the State of New York, with those of the State of New Jersey trotting along behind them, as they apparently so often do. The indefensible nature of the attitude which those two States, which control the New York Port Authority, have adopted can be demonstrated by the massive and fair decision which the former American Secretary of Transportation, Mr. Secretary Coleman, published a year ago. Your Lordships will recall that Mr. Secretary Coleman held a long public inquiry into Concorde. At the end of the day he delivered an intellectually impressive, fair and well-reasoned statement—such as one would expect from a lawyer and statesman of his calibre. I want to quote two extracts. On pages 13 and 19 he fairly states that he accepts the judgment of the administrator of the FAA that Concorde is fully up to United States safety standards. On page 58 on the noise issue he says that it would only make a marginally incremental impact at JFK, which are the initials used in the United States for Kennedy Airport. There, the highest responsible authority at the time in the United States has come out quite plainly that, both on safety and on noise, Concorde is acceptable.
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What then should Her Majesty's Government do? This, of course, is a matter for them and I can only make a suggestion. As the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, knows, discussions are taking place at present with the American aviation authorities on the renewal of the Bermuda Agreement—the air service agreement operating between the two countries. It would seem reasonable in those discussions to suggest to the Americans that if they are unable or unwilling—whichever it may be—to implement the existing agreement, it would be a waste of time to negotiate a further one with them. If they say that they are unable to do so, then they are unable to discharge the international obligations of the United States, which is an absurdity. If my dog bites the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, it would not be a sufficient defence on my part that I could not control or manage the dog. It is for the United States authorities to exert their authority as the body responsible for the international relations of the United States. In these same negotiations they are seeking the continuation of privileges very valuable to United States' aviation. I need only refer to the so-called fifth freedom rights through London—and they exercise them also through Paris—which are of great value to United States' aviation.
I hope that these discussions will come to a fruitful conclusion, but I suggest to Her Majesty's Government that it would be artificial and foolish to exclude from discussion during these negotiations an issue which involves the implementation by the United States of her current international obligations. I cannot help but think that, given the basic fair-mindedness of the American people and public, given the facts on the vital issues of safety and of noise, and that their own former Secretary for Transportation has come down in Concorde's favour, a firm line by Her Majesty's Government in standing on the rights of the United Kingdom might well be fruitful.
I share the noble Earl's doubts about plunging into litigation in the United States. The possibilities of delay in the United States legal system are absolutely unlimited. I cannot help but feel that if we leave it to that, the aircraft will probably be obsolete before the proceedings have reached their final determination on the seventh or eighth appeal to the final court.

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This is an international obligation. This is a matter of great importance to ourselves and our French friends. I beg the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, to take heed of these considerations. I do not ask him to say much tonight. I know enough of international negotiations to know that it is sometimes unwise to disclose the line one is going to take in advance and in public. However, I hope that Her Majesty's Government will be firm to the point of obstinacy in pursuing the exercise of our rights to develop an aircraft which is a great triumph of our technology and in which, as the noble Earl reminded us, many hundreds of millions of pounds of British taxpayers' money have been sunk and on whose continued construction and success the work of many skilled men absolutely depends.
6.53 p.m.
Lord BEAUMONT of WHITLEY: My Lords, I know that I deprecate as much as any of your Lordships the tendency to turn Unstarred Questions into a mini-debate. My excuse for speaking tonight is that I was so provoked by, I think, the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull—if it was not him, I beg his pardon—who said the other day, "I am sure that all noble Lords in this House feel the same way on this subject." Well, my Lords, they do not. There are quite a number of us who feel in a very different way, and since, by our silence, it is apparently being accepted that we do not exist, I think it is right that the other point of view should be put.
I hope that the answer that the Government will give is that they are going to do absolutely nothing about this. It is doubtful indeed—in fact, I think it is more than doubtful—whether there are any treaty rights to enforce. Noble Lords will be well aware that the whole matter depends on the question as to whether at a given time supersonic aircraft produce the same amount of noise and the same amount of trouble, the same aggravation, as subsonic aircraft. Mr. Kaufman obviously thought when he gave evidence to that effect in Washington, that "at that time" referred to 1962, when the agreement was made. It has now been conclusively proved by reference to the IATA bulletin that it did not; it referred to the time when supersonic aircraft were brought in. Therefore it is very doubtful whether we can rely on that agreement.
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It is quite certain that we are debarred from doing so, because Mr. Kaufman said on the same occasion:
"No international agreement will be violated if our case was turned down."
I think what he said then with reference to the Secretary for Transport must also be true for any action taken by the Port of New York Authority.
Even if they were in a position to do anything legally or morally, which I do not think they are, I do not believe that they should. Concorde is a very noisy brute. However much you juggle with it, the noise is intolerable. We obviously differ as to the reliability, if I may put it that way—and I mean no aspersion by that—of the figures which the noble Earl gave in his speech. I have it on good authority that the figures and quotations were compiled from a list which did not include the Concorde figures, and therefore they are misleading. Maybe the Minister will be in a position to answer that point later. If not, I suggest that we put down a Question for Written Answer and get the facts, because obviously this is important.
Concorde is a noisy brute. It so happened that I was being interviewed just before the beginning of this debate by a young lady in the Peers' guest room about something completely different—the honesty of politicians. I said that I had to speak in this debate. She said, "What about?" I said, "Concorde". She said, "What are you going to say?" I said, "I think I am going to be the only person against it". She said, "Thank God! I live at Hampton Court, and we have it". I said, "Well, tell me what it is really like". She is not a member of any pressure group, she just lives there; but she said, "It is terrible. You cannot do anything when it passes. The baby wakes up. You cannot hear yourself on the telephone, even if your telephone is in the middle of the house". I said, "Is it really worse than other aeroplanes?" She said, "Much worse. It is terrible".
We can juggle the evidence, I suppose; we can produce evidence against each other for as long as we like. I think it is unarguable that it is a very noisy brute. What is more, it eats fuel and it burns money. It can never fly at a profit, and it should be scrapped. Actually it is a beautiful machine, so maybe we ought to

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put it in public parks as good modern sculpture, but it is no use for anything else. We are told that the Americans may be merely waiting until Concorde collapses to build their own supersonic aircraft. It may be true. If they are fools enough to do so—I hope that they are not—then let them do so, and let us stop them landing their supersonic planes here until they have decent and controllable noise levels; and the expense of course in that case is theirs and not ours.
We are told that the spin-off from technology is very valuable. Well, for £1,200 million you can get a great many pounds worth of spin-off. It is £650 million, is it not? £1,300 million altogether for Europe. I am a good European, so I think in European terms. We are told that we must help it and keep it because of employment. No one can rightly contemplate great unemployment or causing it. But for how long must we go on before we learn that you do not in the long run improve employment or the economy, or get anything right, if you pay people a lot of money to dig a hole in the ground and fill it up again, particularly if while they are doing it they are kept warm by burning £5 notes in valuable petrol, which is what this all boils down to.
What we have to do is to get the economy and the employment in this country at the right level, making things that people want and need, instead of making what they do not want and then propose to swap them for weapons and systems which I suspect we do not want ourselves.
We are told that Mark II may be better because Mark IIs are always better than Mark Is, and we cannot have Mark II until we have had Mark I. That may be so. But this is a crazy world. We land men on the moon and build supersonic aircraft, but we cannot even house the homeless in our own country, let alone deal with such matters as the slums of Calcutta and India. Technology has become our master rather than our servant. Indeed, I am glad to say that through the inexorable nature of the progress that we are making in our expenditure of fuel and resources on these useless objects, the time has come to call a halt. Captain Ludd was a very much misunderstood man. I hope the Minister
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will do absolutely nothing to see that Concorde goes where it is not wanted, and, if he does, I hope the Americans take not a bit of notice.
7 p.m.
Lord ORR-EWING: My Lords, I should be delighted to deal with every point made by the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, but if I did I should be venturing far beyond the patience of noble Lords in a short debate on a Starred Question. My only regret is that while the noble Lord may not have many allies in this House, he has many in the media and I strongly suspect that tomorrow morning any publicity given to this debate will be about almost exactly what he said with nothing about the constructive points which so many others have contributed.
Lord BEAUMONT of WHITLEY: I hope so, my Lords.
Lord ORR-EWING: Very well, my Lords; but there is another view. In any event, one always gets more publicity if one kicks the ball into one's own goal than if one kicks it into the opponent's; perhaps we could put a star against the noble Lord's speech to signify just that.
I wish to deal with two points tonight. First, I think there is now ground for much stronger coercion on the United States Government to help to honour the international treaty obligations which they have undertaken, as my noble friend Lord Boyd-Carpenter pointed out. He speaks with tremendous authority on this subject and I endorse everything he said, and I have a few other suggestions to make. As a secondary point, I wish to draw attention to the feeling I have that some people in British Airways are not out to make a real financial success of Concorde; they do not seem to have the same dedication shown by Air France and the French Government.
At present the United Kingdom and the United States are renegotiating the Bermuda Agreement, and this is not a simple matter. The basic treaty as it stands is that there should be two United States airlines on the North Atlantic route, Pan-Am and TWA, and two British airlines, which were originally British Airways and British Caledonian; then the

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licence was withdrawn and British Caledonian fell out, and a great deal of negotiation is going on. Of course the equation is further complicated in view of the judgment about Laker Airways, as to whether they will come in and take the second one.
Bermuda does not concern itself with the types of aircraft; the treaty does not say whether they are supersonic or non-supersonic. That is a matter for other people and not for the Bermuda Agreement. At the moment the Bermuda Agreement is so complicated with so many different factors that it has not proved to be totally effective, as Lord Boyd-Carpenter pointed out. What is the point in tying up the time of a great many people in negotiation when a Port Authority can nullify anything signed in an international agreement? I urge that these negotiations be put on one side until the matter of Concorde and of traffic in and out of New York is clarified.
The United States Federal Aviation Authority draws up regulations. Under Part 36 of its regulations it lays down noise regulations that currently apply to aircraft which were first certificated after a certain date. They do not apply therefore to Concorde, to the VC10s or to the noisy 707s. Thus, it is not on a question of environmental noise that that was cleared by Secretary of Transport Coleman in his report. Experience from the noise point of view at Dulles suggests—and it is endorsed also from London Airport—that the noise is nothing like as great as the public were led to expect and that it really is not objectionable. I have travelled in Concorde, I have been underneath Concorde and I have had a transatlantic trip in the aircraft, and I can say nothing but good about the passenger appeal of the aircraft.
Let us be honest. I suspect that the New York Port Authority's pressure comes from a whole host of lobbies. Of course there are the environmentalists, but I have a feeling that at least two fingers in the pie are Pan-Am and TWA, and a third could well be that the United States aircraft constructors are vitally interested in the matter. One has only to look at recent history to see how they have been able to press their case in all parts of the world and the methods they have used to realise their extremely commercial and competitive spirit. It
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is only when they are going to be hurt in competition for sales and traffic that they become most difficult and most voracious. Here there are certainly pressure groups operating and it seems surprising that these pressure groups, through the New York Port Authority, can actually cause the United States to break an international treaty which was drawn up in good faith between our two countries.
If an announcement on 10th March is favourable and Concorde is allowed to go into New York, then many thousands, perhaps millions, of people in this country and France will be thankful. Honour will have prevailed because an international treaty will have been complied with. I urge the Government to take two steps. First, as I suggested earlier, they should suspend the Bermuda negotiations until the matter is clear—until it is shown that international agreements can be honoured by the United States and not frustrated by a Port Authority. Secondly, should we perhaps not consider the landing rights in this country for Pan-Am and TWA?
Consider the pressure on London Airport. I was there this evening and I am pleased to say that I arrived on time, but as one watches the stream of aircraft coming in and leaving one realises now that we do not have a third London Airport and the degree of traffic intensity which is building up there. I suggest that it would make sense, at least for a while, if those two airlines used Gatwick. There are those who would go further and suggest that they use Prestwick. I would not go as far as that; the Scot. Nats. would no doubt benefit from such a suggestion. At any rate, I suggest that perhaps those two airlines should use Gatwick, especially during the summer, when there is such a great pressure of traffic. It is one of our accredited international London airports and there would be no hardship for them to use Gatwick; many of us have used it on many occasions. I suggest that a diversion of that sort would be quicker and far more effective than a long-drawn-out legal battle, which could be spun out until the cows come home and Concorde is totally redundant and out of date. Incidentally, it might be rather cheaper, too.
Are British Airways poised to take advantage if we obtain the honourable and right solution? In addition to the London—Washington route and the

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London—New York route there may be opened up very soon—if, as I hope, the Government are pressing this matter—the London—Australia route. I believe it would be of tremendous benefit to all of us who have to go to the Far East and Australia on business. My fear is that, if this comes about, British Airways will not be poised to take advantage of it.
For two decades there has been a strong lobby in what was then BOAC and what is now British Airways, which has championed the purchase of United States rather than British aircraft. Perhaps the classic case was the VC.10, when the Government of the day—they were a Conservative Government—were urged to cancel the VC.l0s, break them up and allow them to buy 707s. In the end of course the airline were shown to have got the equation wrong. It turned out that the VC.10 was far more attractive to the travelling public and many of my American friends chose, and still do when they have an opportunity, to travel by super VC.10 rather than by other aircraft across the Atlantic. The load factor was so great—I think it was 84 per cent. in one year against the low 60's per cent. for the American equivalent—that the costing estimates were totally incorrect and vast profits, not losses, were made by British Airways from the operation of the VC.10. I believe that when the true story of that aircraft comes to be written, and the various pressures which led to the sawing up of four aircraft which were partially built at a cost to the taxpayers indirectly of about £2 million, it will make rather sad reading.
I seem to detect these pro- and anti-Concorde lobbies in different groups within British Airways. At the end of 1973 BOAC were pressing the then Minister, who was Mr. Michael Heseltine, for a subsidy to operate Concorde; and, I think rightly, he resisted. When Mr. Wedgwood Benn took over that responsibility within a few weeks he circulated a memorandum, which I think was not very fully thought out at ministerial level, forecasting from his advisers that there would be a substantial operating loss on Concorde. British Airways immediately "upped" the figure and suggested that the loss would be even greater.
I believe that British Airways are due to publish their results in three months' time
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in June 1977 and that they may be tempted again to show that the operating loss on Concorde is very serious, and therefore not only justify those who have been against Concorde but all those who asked for a subsidy earlier on. But, if that happens, it will not be a true judgment of Concorde, because at present British Airways are operating Concorde for something like 1½ hours a day. It is not conceivably possible for any aircraft, let alone a sophisticated supersonic aircraft, to be economically viably operated for 1½ hours a day. I would comment, though I know there are other reasons, that Air France manage to operate their Concordes at many times that figure each day.
So I hope that when British Airways publish their figures they will not be another group to knock Concorde, because I believe that it is not a true representation of how good and how commercially advantageous that aircraft can be when we clear operations for some more routes. I know that British Airways have had difficulties in training their crews, and I am told that, if we are cleared to Australia tomorrow, it may be many months and perhaps even years before British Airways can take advantage of opening that route. It would be very sad, after we have been so patient, after we have negotiated and after we have been as friendly and co-operative as possible with the U.S.A., if we were not able to grasp the opportunities that this fine aircraft can give and the potential for further development of this aircraft which I believe would be of tremendous benefit to all those associated with and working in the aerospace industry.
7.12 p.m.
Earl GREY: My Lords, there have been continual arguments and disagreements over the introduction of Concorde. Many of the arguments are concerned with the environment. This problem has affected us for many years and, unfortunately, will do so for many more, especially in other fields such as pollution and the dumping of highly dangerous chemicals in the sea. However, the fact is that Concorde has been built and is now in service. Over £700 million has been spent on its development and Concorde looks as though it is here to stay. Britain has often led the world in the air industry in both commercial and military uses—an

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achievement we should be proud of. Concorde is proving its success in design and service on the routes which it is at present operating. Technically, it has given excellent reliability and has been integrated into existing traffic without any hitches. British Airways set a number of objectives in order to make Concorde a reliable proposition. Among those objectives is a quest for the right route pattern, maximum punctuality and reliability, and the right departure and arrival times for the target business market.
The Concorde enterprise is running at a loss but that is due to the fact that the aircraft is doing about one hour's work a day when, to break even, it must do at least 7½ hours a day—about the same as the 747 or any other large passenger jet in operation. New York is the business centre of the Western world and time is money. I believe that New York will need Concorde as London does, and that once it is in operation the advantages will be greatly appreciated. The Washington run has been a big success. British Airways have already sold 90 per cent. of the available seats. Passengers using this route prefer Concorde despite the fact that they may have to transfer at both ends of the journey. The London/Bahrein route is also doing better than British Airways expected, and Philippine Airlines and others are interested if they are able to operate in and out of London. If the London/Australia route is opened up, the time will be cut from 24 to 13 hours.
With reference to the noise factor, British Airways are continually looking into this problem and the noise measured in Washington has been within the levels predicted by the Coleman decision. If the load factor can be above 60 per cent., British Airways and Air France are confident that Concorde can make money. Since World War II, British Airways have had some notable firsts. Britain led with the Comet in 1952, and in 1957 was first with the long-range jet/prop airliner, the Britannia. Now Britain, with France, will, if Concorde is sold to the major airlines, lead the world in the supersonic field.
7.16 p.m.
The Earl of KINNOULL: My Lords, I rise, as others have done, to support the noble Earl, Lord Kimberley. I am sure that the House owes the noble Earl
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a great debt for the persistent, well-informed and enthusiastic questions that he always asks on Concorde. The noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, flattered me in saying that I was the reason for his interruption. I must say that I have never before heard such a moving and eloquent speech by the noble Lord based on such uninformed information. If someone were rude enough to say to me that the noble Lord had been talking rubbish, I should find it very difficult to disagree with that person. The noble Lord desscribed Concorde as a noisy brute, thirsty and useless. What a tribute to the thousands of French and British people who have worked for something like 15 years on the development and production of Concorde so that now we see it flying! What a tribute to what many of us regard as a national pride and what we consider to be the envy of the world!
Despite the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, and his merry band of pollutionists; despite their concentration of wrath upon Concorde—without a bleep against the 200 flights a day by supersonic military aircraft across America—some might say that they should concentrate much more on the safeguarding of the sea from the all too frequent oil tanker collisions. I am sure that would receive far greater support than the argument that the pollutionists always put forward against Concorde.
Most of us feel that Concorde stands for a supreme achievement, for national pride and, above all, for the inventiveness and skill of the aircraft industries of Britain and France. It also stands for a massive cost of taxpayers' money. On the very threshold of success, are we to stand by and, as the noble Earl, Lord Kimberley, has said, allow this great achievement to wither away? Are we to allow the possibility of the American industry picking up the pieces in a few years' time? I believe that it would be national madness not to support those who strive to see the Concorde service straddling the world.
Undoubtedly, New York is a vital step in the Concorde route. We have now seen eight months for the New York Port Authority to study the evidence, which, I understand, has been gained entirely from the Washington experience. I believe that it would be helfpul if the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, could tell us tonight what he knows about the Washington

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experience. Does it point to a massive disruption beyond the reasonable sufferings that any person who works or lives close to an airport must expect? Will the two to four Concorde flights a day that are due to enter Kennedy Airport, if they are allowed, wreck the delicate peacefulness that now surrounds Kennedy Airport? Of course they will not. This delay and procrastination by the New York Port Authority has a distinctly hollow ring and I am not sure that the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, for all his genuine size, did not rattle a bit tonight as well.
I hope, and I am sure that our Government and the French Government hope, that on 10th March reason will prevail. It will be a very unhappy case indeed if British Airways and Air France have to resort to the courts. But whatever happens, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, will emphasise tonight the Government's total determination to support Concorde and its entry on to the world airline routes.
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, always comes briefed to the eyebrows on any subject for which he has to answer, and I hope that he will not mind my stepping a little outside the threshold of the Kennedy Airport runways to ask a few questions on Concorde. What alternative, for instance, have British Airways been pursuing in the other East coast airports of America? Are British Airways pursuing actively enough and urgently enough the question of landing rights in Canada?
Perhaps the most important point that I should like to put to the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, is the very important question about improving the operational characteristics of Concorde. I understand that in one or two areas the limitations are of a marginal character and could be overcome by relatively inexpensive modifications. Can the noble Lord say tonight what is being done to increase, for instance, the thrust of the present engines? Is it not true that for a quite limited expenditure improvements could be made to the trailing edges of the wing, and a modification to the leading edge of the fin? There could also be, I understand, important improvements by detailed changes of the air intake. One estimate is that on a critical sector to Austrialia over 2,000 lbs. extra
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payload can be gained by this comparatively inexpensive work on the intake. This will mean some extra funding of course, and I should like to ask the noble Lord whether this funding is available.
There is also the possibility of improving the contingency rating on take-off, which would make the aircraft even more attractive in hot temperatures. The funding needed here, I understand, is no more than half a million pounds for retrofit, and even smaller sums for new aircraft. Can we be given an assurance that the aircraft will not be limited in this important operational characteristic which entails such a small funding expenditure?
Lastly, my Lords, I understand that a very considerable improvement could be obtained in both noise and range by a modified wing. If the lift-drag ratio could be improved, then not inconsiderable gains could be made, I understand, on both the noise and the range. I understand that in the region of £60 million is required, and for some reason the French Exchequer would be responsible for the greater part of this sum, if it were agreed to. Can we be given a guarantee that this money will be forthcoming?
All these questions on the modification of Concorde are of particular significance when one realises that the production line at Filton is almost at an end. The modification work to the existing aircraft is now perhaps the only alternative left for the Government to keep the Concorde division together, waiting over this critical period while Concorde goes more fully into service and the potential buyers see the importance of buying Concorde.
7.24 p.m.
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, having unfortunately missed the opportunity to put my Question earlier this afternoon, for which I owe the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, an apology, I feel that I must intervene briefly to support my noble friend Lord Boyd-Carpenter and welcome him back from his enforced vow of silence, which he has fulfilled in such a distinguished and authoritative manner. He has put forward some suggested negotiating counters for the current Bermuda Agreement renegotiation, without having to resort to some of the more extravagant stratagems so robustly advocated by the noble Earl,

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Lord Kimberley. Of course I cannot resist saying how the Liberals have demonstrated this evening what a wide divergence of opinion is covered by the mantle of their Party label, but I would not want anyone to be under any misapprehension as to on which side we from these Benches will wish to place our support. I can only say to the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, in, I hope, the kindest possible way, that he reminds me rather of the old cartoon of the wife and husband arguing, and the wife is saying, "My mind is made up. For goodness sake! don't confuse me with facts."
I admit that if we were about to embark on this project knowing what in fact it has cost, I daresay we would not do it. But the important point is that we have done it; we have spent the money. We have bitten on the bullet that we will probably not recover the investment we have made, and now we have to get on and live with that situation and try to make the best of it. Nothing we can say here will alter that. That is a straight statement of fact.
The noble Earl, Lord Grey, pointed out the fact that we have already spent the money, and a number of noble Lords have said that we need to give the aeroplane an opportunity and a fair test to demonstrate what it can do when it is allowed to do what it was designed to do. A number of noble Lords have also pointed out the effect of the route negotiations on the accounting so far as British Airways are concerned.
So it seems to me that we find ourselves in the rather remarkable position that on the North Atlantic routes British Airways are making the running at both ends of the market. On the one hand, we have the supersonic service; on the other, we have the Laker Skytrain for which we are now, I hope, committed to fight. So I hope that the noble Lord will be able to tell us, without being carried away by any misplaced jingoism over extravagance, that the Government will pull no punches in supporting the negotiations for the proper and the appropriate rights for both Concorde and the Laker Skytrain.
7.28 p.m.
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: My Lords, like other noble Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Kimberley, and
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to other noble Lords who have spoken, for the concern they have expressed about the delay to Concorde serving New York. I should like to join the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, in expressing my pleasure upon hearing the noble Lord, Lord Boyd-Carpenter, speaking as a free man. I am looking forward both to agreeing with him and disagreeing with him in the future.
I and Her Majesty's Government fully share the concern expressed by noble Lords tonight. First, I should like to explain the position about President Carter's statement. He has stated clearly that he supports the proposal for the 16-month trial of Concorde on the terms originally proposed by former Secretary Coleman. The President has also said that he sees this as a continuing process involving his Government and the Governments of the United Kingdom and France, which should be allowed to proceed. That is a firm and positive statement. I believe that the authorities in New York will want to give all due weight to such a statement from their President. But the President's statement has also pointed out that he cannot direct the Port of New York Authority or the Governor of the State of New York to reach a particular decision on Concorde. This is clearly one of the rights of a federal system.
The essential difficulty with which we are faced is that the United States Government have said one thing but the New York authorities have still to allow that decision to be put into effect. I wish to make it absolutely clear that the Government regard this as a matter of the greatest possible concern. The Government are now carefully considering President Carter's statement, and are in close touch with the French Government on this matter. But the immediate issue is when the Port of New York Authority will take their decision, and what that decision will be. The House can be assured that we are taking all the steps open to us—"all" is a big word—to persuade the Port Authority to take the right decision.
I understand that the Port of New York Authority are due to consider Concorde at their next meeting on the 10th March. They have announced that they intend to do so, and I believe that we

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and the French have every right to expect a decision to be taken at long last at that meeting on the 10th March. But the House will be aware that the Prime Minister will be in Washington on that day holding his first meeting with President Carter. I have no doubt that he will be considering whether to speak to the President about Concorde if the Port Authority's decision that day is not fully satisfactory, or if it is postponed yet again. I am sure that we can leave it to him to take whatever action seems appropriate at the time.
I must emphasise that, in the Government's view, the Port Authority can only take a decision to allow Concorde in. The main reasons for this are as follows. First, as I have said, President Carter himself has made it clear that he considers the Concorde trial at Kennedy should be allowed to start. Second, the New York authorities have all the information they need; and I shall return to this point in a moment. Third, as I shall also explain, it is being demonstrated by measurements of Concorde during its operations to Washington that our predictions on Concorde noise are correct. Fourth, New York has a lot to gain from Concorde services to Europe, and I shall be referring to some of the many organisations in New York who have announced their support for Concorde. Fifth, in addition, there would be strong resentment in this country and in France if New York was to continue to deny access to Concorde. It would be difficult to explain to the many thousands who have contributed their skill and labour to this aircraft, and to all those who want to see this product of British and French technology succeed, how even a limited trial period could not be tried. The unfairness of such an action is not what we expect from our friends in the United States.
It has often been pointed out that New York is the key to the success of the Concorde project. Noble Lords do not need to be reminded that this is so. Not only is it the most important route on which British Airways and Air France want to operate Concorde; it is also the key to the future exploitation of Concorde by other airlines. Although I hope that Concordes will be used by airlines that do not operate to New York, it must be remembered that some of the airlines
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interested in the aircraft will want to use it on the New York route. Since noble Lords have asked about the position on sales, I can say that the manufacturers, in conjunction with the two Governments, are continuing their efforts to find customers for the five unsold Concordes. Proposals, mainly for lease, have been put to a number of interested airlines, and arrangements for further discussions with them are in hand, but the House will obviously not expect me to discuss the position reached in these negotiations. I have referred to leasing. I should explain that the policy issues involved in various forms of leasing are currently being examined by the British and French Governments.
To return to New York, the House may not be aware of the volume of support for Concorde that has already been expressed in New York. Many important organisations representing labour, the business world and many other interests have come out in favour of the aircraft. I wish to mention in particular the New York Labor Council, representing more than 1 million members. Other bodies are the Association for a Better New York and the New York Chamber of Commerce and Industry. I must also mention the Long Island Association for Commerce and Industry, a very significant body to have on our side in view of the situation of Kennedy Airport in Long Island and the feelings of communities there about aircraft noise. The common theme expressed by these organisations is that New York needs the Concorde services to Europe and will benefit from them, and that the aircraft should be given a trial.
Let me now turn to the British Government's position. I want to make clear three points, and they are: first, whatever noble Lords may say, we have treaty rights that entitle British Airways to operate Concorde to New York; second, the air service agreements between the United States and Britain and France, which lay down what requirements airlines and aircraft must fulfil before they are allowed to operate, have been complied with completely; and, third, the Port of New York Authority do not have the powers to prevent British Airways Concordes being operated into New York under our treaty rights.
It is worth recalling the exceptional efforts that we and the French have put

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into demonstrating to the United States, both to the Government and to the people, that Concorde will really not cause damage, and that it should be allowed in. We have gone to considerable lengths to make sure that all those in the United States concerned about their environment, and in particular those living close to Kennedy and to the Washington airport, understand that Concorde will really have a negligible effect on them. The major step in this direction was to secure the decision from the then Secretary for Transportation, Mr. Coleman, that Concorde services to both New York and Washington should be allowed for 16-month trial periods. This was the outcome of one of the most extensive investigations of the possible effect on the environment of a federal decision that has ever been carried out in the United States. The Governments of Britain and France, the Concorde manufacturers and the airlines, complied fully with the requirements of United States law in this regard, although they made it clear at the outset that their co-operation was without prejudice to their treaty rights. Since the 24th May 1976, Concorde has been operating to Washington; it has been flying full on most occasions and the noise it has produced has been demonstrated by the United States authorities themselves to be within the predictions that we made. These predictions, on which Mr. Coleman based his decision, have now been confirmed by nine months' actual experience. I hope that that meets the point made by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull.
I should in passing mention the Press articles referred to in the debate that have appeared in New York and London and are based on a report by our own Civil Aviation Authority on the first eight months of Concorde operations at Heathrow. When I say "in the debate", of course the debate is going on outside this House as well as within it. These articles were highly misleading, and I am glad to say that the New York Post has already published another report to put the record straight. In fact, as the Civil Aviation Authority report itself shows, there have been fewer than four complaints each time Concorde has taken off or landed at Heathrow, and the reaction to Concorde there has been well below the forecasts made by its critics. It is quite untrue to allege that Concorde is by far the noisiest
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aircraft at Heathrow. There have been many occasions, as noble Lords have pointed out, when other aircraft have been noisier.
Since Mr. Coleman's decision, we have taken care that the Port of New York Authority have been given all the information that they want. We have co-operated in all the investigations carried out in the United States. Here and in France the New York authorities have been given all the data and facilities for which they have asked. We have waited patiently for several months following the end of this six-month period over which they announced last March that they wanted to assess Concorde before taking their decision. We have also designed and demonstrated a take-off procedure to ensure that Concorde will comply with the Kennedy noise limits. This procedure was fully tested at Casablanca in December 1974, and satisfied the safety authorities in the United States as well as in Britain and France. A full report was presented to New York. They had been invited to take part in these trials themselves, but did not do so.
My conclusion, with which I am sure the House will agree, is that the validity of our data on Concorde, and hence the environmental predictions for New York on which the trial period was recommended, have been fully confirmed. The Government are confident that Concorde will comply with the Kennedy noise limits as they are currently applied to other aircraft. For these reasons, I am convinced that the only fair decision for New York to take is to let Concorde start its trial there and thus demonstrate that it will have little impact on local people.
We therefore look to the port authority to take this decision on 10th March so that the airlines can get down to their arrangements for an early start of commercial services. But if the decision on 10th March is negative, or if it is postponed yet again, I must make it clear that we will regard it as quite unjustifiable and as a serious step. The airlines will have to press ahead with their action in the courts to challenge the port authority's powers to take such a decision. The court hearing of this suit has already been postponed three times so that the port authority would have the further time that they had asked to complete their assessment of all the data. We have gone along with yet

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another postponement so that the decision can be taken on 10th March. It was right to agree to another postponement in view of the firm statement by President Carter that New York should allow Concorde in. But we cannot be patient indefinitely and we have decided, in agreement with our French friends, that the court hearing cannot be postponed any longer. I understand that it has now been fixed for mid-March.
But, my Lords, the legal path is not the best way in which to resolve this question. That is the view of noble Lords who have spoken tonight. We have done everything reasonable—perhaps more—to enable New York to reach their own decision without having to provoke an argument in the courts or between Governments. This is a matter which should be decided on its merits and I hope I have demonstrated that the merits of the case are all in favour of allowing Concorde to operate. If, nevertheless, New York turns Concorde down, we should have to consider very carefully all the implications for us. Clearly, the delay is costing the airlines a good deal of money. I have already pointed out that it is also seriously damaging to Concorde sales and future prospects. The Government hope very strongly that such unnecessary damage to our interest and to Anglo/American relations can be avoided. That is the view of Her Majesty's Government on the subject. I hope that it is clear cut and not fudged.
May I make one final point in answer to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull? I cannot answer all his questions, but if he will look up an Answer that I gave to a Starred Question about a month ago, he will find that money has been approved for the improvement of the operational characteristics of Concorde both in service and in production, and that these improvements are going ahead.
Lord ORR-EWING: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, could he specially report to higher authority the point made by my noble friend Lord Boyd-Carpenter, with all his knowledge, about suspending the Bermuda negotiations until this matter has been clarified? There is no merit in going on with it until this particular point is resolved.
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: My Lords, my right honourable friend will obviously pay attention to informed opinion such as that expressed by the noble Lord, with his years of responsibility in this matter.