Lords Sitting of 21 November 1984

Preamble
The House met at half-past two of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells.

Message from the Queen
Lord Maclean: My Lords, I have the honour to present to your Lordships a Message from Her Majesty the Queen, signed by her own hand. The Message is as follows:
"I have received with great satisfaction the loyal and dutiful expression of your thanks for the Speech with which I opened the present Session of Parliament".

NHS Management: Griffiths Report
Lord Hunter of Newington: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make a statement about the Griffiths Report on management in the NHS.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Security (Lord Glenarthur): My Lords, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Social Services gave a full statement of the Government's objectives for management of the Health Service in a written reply in another place on 4th June. At the same time he issued guidance to health authorities on implementing the recommendations of the Management Inquiry Report. Good progress is being made in carrying forward the changes required, including the appointment of general managers.
Lord Hunter of Newington: My Lords, in thanking the Minister for that reply may I ask him whether he is aware of the great deal of concern there has been over the fact that during this last period the chairman of the management board in the Department of Health and Social Security has not been in post? Is the Minister also aware that the districts are concerned about the future and their reorganising? They have no real guidance about the general management. Particularly concerned in these matters are the clinical managers who have run their own department since the initiation of the National Health Service.
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, so far as the chairman of the National Health Service management board in the DHSS is concerned, it is important to fill this post with the right person. That is more important than to make the appointment quickly because, as the noble
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Lord realises, the appointment is a crucial one. It requires a rare mixture of quality and experience. It has certainly taken longer than we had hoped to make the appointment. However, good progress has been made in implementing other aspects of the Griffiths Report, despite the delay in appointing the chairman of the board itself. So far as clinicians are concerned, I was surprised to hear what the noble Lord said. Of course, clinicians will play a very important role. They do now, but they will play an even more important role in future. I think that their particular use will be felt not just at regional and district level, but also when it comes to the appointment of general managers for units.
Lord Molloy: My Lords, is the noble Lord prepared to accept that since the period he mentioned there is now grave apprehension and consternation among all levels of staff within the National Health Service? Rather than have the Government, of all people, issue a form of diktat, will the Minister be prepared to consider with his right honourable friend in another place whether perhaps, together with the British Medical Association (who are willing), the Confederation of Health Service Employees (who are willing), and the Royal College of Nursing (who are willing), discussions could now be held on what has happened so far, so that some of the ructions that are expected in future could be avoided?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, the ructions to which the noble Lord refers are not nearly so serious as he seems to think they are. My right honourable friend is in touch with all the bodies to which the noble Lord refers.
Baroness Robson of Kiddington: My Lords, will the noble Lord please inform me on what criteria the unanimously approved appointment of an administrator in the West Midlands was turned down by the Department of Health and Social Security; whether East Anglia have yet appointed their administrator; and how many regions have appointed their district administrators?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I certainly cannot give the noble Baroness information about the specific appointment to which she referred. However, among regional general managers appointed so far there are an ex-regional medical officer, an ex-regional nursing officer and two former treasurers. Of the 38 district general managers who have been appointed, one is a former district treasurer and three come from outside the health service altogether. So the situation is not as bad as some people think it is.
Lord Kilmarnock: My Lords, will the noble Lord say, in answer to Lord Hunter's question, why there is such delay in finding a chairman for this very important post? Will he tell us whether he does not foresee some conflict of interest between the accountability of consultants to district general managers and their professional accountability outside?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, as I said in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Hunter's earlier question, the important thing is to obtain the right person for the

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job. Without that, the whole scheme would probably founder. In any case, appointments at this level are made by the Prime Minister. I understand the selection process is not yet complete, but we certainly hope that an appointment will be made soon.
With regard to the noble Lord's second question—that is to say, about the conflict of interest—the guidance circular, with which the noble Lord will be familiar, made clear that authorities must make proper provision to continue to receive authoritative professional advice. It is for authorities to formulate their own proposals, which will then be scrutinised by Ministers.
Lord Ennals: My Lords, may I put one or two questions to the Minister? First, will the Minister confirm that the advertisement for the chairman of the board nationally first appeared on 30th April? Does the Minister not feel that seven months is an extraordinarily long time in order to find the right person? Would it not have been easier for the whole operation to have been carried out at regional and district level after the national appointment had been made? Finally, will he say whether he thinks it is a good thing that the Secretary of State should interfere too much in the regional appointments? Do not the regional people know best? In how many cases has the Secretary of State called in short lists that have been drawn up by the regions?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, the noble Lord quotes 30th April. I am afraid that I do not have with me the exact date when the appointment was advertised, but it must have been round about then. The reason is exactly the same as the one I gave just now to the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock. People who possess the quality that this responsibility requires do not come easily and it is absolutely essential that we get the right person. As I explained, it was perhaps unfortunate that the delay has been so long but it was necessary in this particular case. As I said, the appointments are made by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister. The noble Lord asked another supplementary question. Perhaps he will repeat, it, and then I can answer him.
Lord Ennals: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for what he said in response to my first question. My second question related to regional appointments and to whether it was wise that the Secretary of State should become involved in them. Is it not best that they should be made by the regions themselves? In how many cases has the Secretary of State called in a short list to seek to add names to it?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I cannot give the noble Lord a figure off the top of my head. Of course, Ministers remain ultimately responsible for the management and efficiency of the health service centrally and that is why it is important for Ministers to scrutinise many of these appointments.
Lord Winstanley: My Lords, are the Government not starting at the wrong end with these appointments? Is the noble Lord aware that noble Lords on these Benches are broadly in favour of the principle of
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named individuals being given specific management responsibilities for specific areas of the service? Does he agree that for them to be of benefit to the consumer—that is, the patient—these people must operate as close to the grass roots as possible? Therefore, it is much more important for managers to be appointed at district level rather than in the regions.
Lord Glenarthur: No, my Lords, I would not agree with the noble Lord. The cascade principle of appointing regional managers, to be followed by general managers, to be followed in turn by district general managers (of which many appointments are now under way), ultimately to be followed by the appointment of general managers for units, is the way that we should go. It is clear from discussions that we have had with regional health authority chairmen that they prefer that way, too.
Baroness Masham of Ilton: My Lords, may I ask the Minister whether he is aware that the appointment of general managers is a sensitive matter within health authorities? When they are all appointed, will the Government do as much as possible to encourage all sections of the health service to work in harmony for the good of patients?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, I think that the noble Baroness is absolutely right. It is a sensitive matter, because it involves a fairly substantial difference, and, I am quite sure, it is one in the right direction. I entirely agree with her that everything ought to be done to promote harmony within the service.
Baroness Faithfull: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend the Minister whether it is the intention of Her Majesty's Government to appoint at any rate to some of the managerial posts people from outside the service? If so, are the salaries comparable to make it worth while for businessmen to apply for such posts?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, it is very much a matter for them to decide whether the salaries are comparable. There are those who have come from outside, and I shall be happy to let my noble friend have the figures.
Lord Wells-Pestell: My Lords, if the chairman of a board has yet to be appointed, who in fact approves or vets the appointments made at regional level?
Lord Glenarthur: My Lords, the appointment of regional general managers is for regions and for my right honourable friend the Secretary of State.

Schools' Inspectorate: Independence
2.46 p.m.
Baroness David: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they intend Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Schools to remain independent.
The Earl of Swinton: Yes, my Lords.
Baroness David: My Lords, I should like to thank the Minister for that encouraging and unqualified reply. Is he aware that Mr. Stuart Sexton, a special adviser to the Secretary of State, is reported as wanting to reconsider the criteria on which HMI worked to make a link between spending and educational quality? Is that not in danger of infringing HMI independence? Can the Minister give us an assurance that HMI annual reports on the effects of local authority expenditure policies on educational provision will continue to be published annually and without interference from Ministers?
The Earl of Swinton: Yes, my Lords, I can certainly give an assurance on the latter point. In fact it was this Government who ensured that those reports were published, and the Government intend to go on doing so.
Lord Glenamara: My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that in view of the rather alarming statement by the Minister's special adviser, his reply today will give a great deal of satisfaction to many of us who are concerned about the quality of education? Is he also aware that there is a great deal to be said for keeping the present arrangement whereby inspectors are appointed, each one by name by the Queen in Council, and the inspectorate remains independent of the DES but close enough to it to give advice on educational matters which would otherwise be lacking?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, I am delighted to give comfort to the noble Lord, and indeed to the noble Baroness, in what I have said today.
Baroness Lockwood: My Lords, in view of the very real disquiet that has been aroused by the criticisms of the inspectorate, will the Minister ask his right honourable friend whether he is prepared to make the same unequivocal reply which has just been given to this House but in a much fuller and more public way so that it may be generally appreciated and understood by all in education?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, I understand that my right honourable friend did just that in a debate in the other place the other day.
Baroness David: My Lords, as we are having such an encouraging time, can the Minister further assure us that HMI reports on individual schools and authorities will continue to be published, in spite of opposition from Conservative chairmen and members of education committees, one of whom is quoted in The Times Educational Supplement as saying:
"To report on a school or college is one thing. To define a link between education and spending is quite another … HMI are simply not qualified to do what they are setting out to do"?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, I do not know honestly how many more commitments I can give. As I said before, this Government introduced the publication of HMI reports and I think it is something in which we can take great pride. We intend to go on seeing that this happens.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that in the Queen's Speech there was a firm
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pledge to raise educational standards during this coming Session? Would he agree that the existence of an independent inspectorate and a very strong inspectorate is absolutely essential if this is to be achieved? Can he say whether the inspectorate is to be increased in order to achieve this higher standard?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord about a strong and independent inspectorate, but I am afraid I have no details about the numbers of inspectors. If the noble Lord puts down a Question on that, I should be delighted to answer it.

A-Level Courses: Girls' Studies
2.51 p.m.
Lord Gainford: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether, in the light of reports that only 6.8 per cent. of girl students opt for A-level physics, they are satisfied that this untapped reservoir of talent in the country's educational system is likely to be properly exploited in the foreseeable future.
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, the Government are anxious to encourage more girls to pursue studies in mathematics and the physical sciences. These subjects are key areas in terms of employment opportunities and preparation for new technological skills. I am glad to say that participation by girls in post-16 mathematics and physical science courses is already growing. We shall continue to do what we can to stimulate that growth.
Lord Gainford: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that encouraging Answer. Has he any information, please, on how many girls receive encouragement to follow careers as technicians in industry and on the importance of such work for translating policy into fact?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, the Government are conscious that many job opportunities will be in science and the new technologies, and in this context noble Lords will no doubt be aware of the Equal Opportunity Commission's current campaign, supported by the Government and the Manpower Services Commission, to encourage girls into science and engineering careers. In fact, this is the 1984 Women into Science and Engineering Year.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, can the Minister say what research has been conducted into the reasons why girls do not opt for mathematics and the physical sciences at A-level, and in particular can he say whether there are any differences between single-sex and co-educational schools in this respect? Does he think there is any truth in the allegation which has been made in some quarters that because more teenage boys tend aggressively to demand the attention of teachers, they tend to get an unfair share of the attention of the teachers in laboratory work? If that is one of the

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reasons why girls are discouraged, could not advice be given to teachers on the means of correcting that imbalance?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, yes; there have already been two research projects on Girls into Science and Technology and Girls and Technology Education. These have helped to identify ways in which curriculum content and planning in schools and the organisation of the option system often fail to meet the needs of girls in science. Particular attention needs to be given to the style and methods of teaching, to the curriculum content, to timetabling arrangements, and finally, but most importantly, to careers advice.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, would the Minister agree that his reply is slightly complacent, in view of the very low percentage of girls in fact taking these subjects? Would he tell us what steps are being taken to follow up the researches? It is all very well to have a research programme, but I should like to ask whether anybody is doing anything as a result. It has been shown that some influences in the schools are adverse to girls taking these subjects. Finally, would the Government consider taking positive action to increase the number of women physicists, as is permitted under Sections 47 and 48 of the Sex Discrimination Act?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, my original reply was not meant to be complacent; it was supposed to be encouraging, which I hope it was. Yes, there are a number of practical measures that we can take to try to increase the number of girls studying A-level physics. One thing we must do is to increase the number of girls studying science before they reach 16. The Government have already made clear their view that all pupils, including all girls, should be properly introduced to science in the primary school and should continue to study a broad programme of science throughout the first five years of secondary education. There are a number of other measures, such as in-service courses for teachers of these particular subjects and the introduction of computers into schools. These are among a number of things that we are doing to try to help with this problem.
Viscount St. Davids: My Lords, would not the noble Earl agree that among the various wastes now taking place the greatest of all is that of intelligent women who are not at present being trained to the extent that they could be or employed to the extent that they could be? Is this not a particular point of priority where heavy pressure should now be put, as well as a direction in which Her Majesty's Government should indeed be moving?
The Earl of Swinton: Yes, my Lords; and my experience of intelligent women is that they tend to take their own line of country and you cannot coerce them into doing otherwise.
Lord Beloff: My Lords, would the noble Earl the Minister agree that, in the light of the fact to which the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, referred—that there is statistical evidence that girls are keener to take these
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subjects and do better in them in single-sex schools—it would be a good idea to encourage local authorities to preserve single-sex schools where they exist and, subject to resources, to introduce new ones?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, I think I shall have to write to my noble friend about that. I have no statistics on single or multi-sex schools.
Lord Ardwick: My Lords, can the noble Earl assure us that there is no longer a shortage of teachers capable of taking physics and mathematics at sixth-form level in girls' schools?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, again, as I said, I am not sure of the difference between girls'-only schools and schools for both boys and girls. We are endeavouring to bring teachers up to a higher standard than that at which some of them are at this moment.
Lord Ardwick: My Lords, will the noble Earl perhaps write to me about this? This was a particular difficulty in girls' schools. It may have been cleared up now, but I doubt it.
The Earl of Swinton: Yes, my Lords, I shall certainly write to the noble Lord.
Baroness Fisher of Rednal: My Lords, to us on these Benches it seems rather complacent that the noble Earl gives us all nice answers to the questions. But we have student unrest thoughout the country because of the cut-backs and non-availability of places. Would not the noble Earl agree that today the demonstrations throughout the country are showing quite clearly that the students themselves are not getting enough grants? How on earth are we going to fill the places for girls and boys in science if we have to have these continual cuts?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, I think that is a very different question. If the noble Baroness wishes to put down a Question on those lines, I shall be delighted to answer it.
Baroness Lockwood: My Lords, if I can now get my question in, I should like to ask the Minister whether he would not agree that it is much better to tackle the problem within the context of the existing schools, along the lines that the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has suggested? Would not that be the best line of attack in the first place—meeting long-term problems? But would the noble Earl the Minister indicate whether in order to overcome short-term problems the Government have any intention of providing special facilities for the conversion of girls with A-levels in arts subjects to take them over into the science and technological subjects?
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, I should have thought that was very much a question for individual establishments and the way that they are run. I would agree with the noble Baroness that the way through must be first of all to encourage them to start studying science from an early age. Then, it is to be hoped, they will go into that branch of learning.

District Salmon Fishery Boards (Scotland) Bill [H.L.]
Viscount Thurso: My Lords, I beg to introduce a Bill to promote the establishment of district salmon fishery boards in areas of Scotland where none presently exists; to enable the amalgamation of district salmon fishery boards; to extend the franchise for, and membership of, district salmon fishery boards; and for connected purposes. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read a first time.—(Viscount Thurso.)
On Question, Bill read a first time, and to be printed.

Privileges: Select Committee
The Chairman of Committees (Lord Aberdare): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That, in accordance with Standing Order 73, a Select Committee for Privileges be appointed; and that, as proposed by the Committee of Selection, the following Lords, together with the Chairman of Committees and any four Lords of appeal, be named of the committee:—

Beswick, L.

Caccia, L.

Campbell of Alloway, L.

Cledwyn of Penrhos, L.

Denham, L.

Diamond, L.

Ferrers, E.

Glenamara, L.

Hylton-Foster, B.

Ponsonby of Shulbrede, L.

St. Aldwyn, E.

Seear, B.

Shackleton, L.

Whitelaw, V. (L. President)

Wigoder, L.

—(Lord Aberdare.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

The Research Councils
3 p.m.
Lord Sherfield Lord Sherfield rose to call attention to the work of the research councils and the resources available to them; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. Some of your Lordships may recall that earlier in the year I moved a Motion calling attention to the first joint report of the Associated Board for the Research Councils and the Advisory Committee on Applied Research and Development. We had a wide-ranging debate which was wound up in a very encouraging and positive way by the noble Viscount the Leader of the House. When the question of moving the present Motion arose, I thought at first that it might be premature to revert to an aspect (although a very vital
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aspect) of this broad subject, until I found that the debate had taken place over nine months ago—a sufficient period of gestation for Government policies as well as for human beings.
I sense a continuing feeling of unease and concern in many quarters at the direction which our policies for science are taking and, in the context of this Motion, especially but not exclusively, our policies for basic and strategic research, for they and applied science are coming closer together in many respects. The number and standing of noble Lords taking part in this debate is eloquent testimony to this concern.
The recent annual reports of the MRC, the AFRC and the SERC emphasise their particular anxieties. There is the report of the Scientific Policy Research Unit of Sussex University, with its gloomy conclusions. There was even a recent "Horizon" television programme, which some of your Lordships may have seen.
The research council system as it exists today has evolved in a pretty haphazard way. I shall not attempt to deal with the position of any individual council. Among the speakers today are many noble Lords who will speak with an authority which I do not command. But it may be helpful if, by way of introduction, I remind your Lordships briefly of how we came to the system as we find it today, and then make one or two general observations on which I hope the Minister will comment when he comes to reply.
I shall not waste your Lordships' time on the situation as it existed in the 1950s and early 1960s. This, as your Lordships will recall, consisted of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and three research councils working under the aegis of the Lord President of the Council, assisted by an Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, and. from 1964 onwards, by a Chief Scientific Adviser. But three points are to be noted about this system. First, science policy was represented at a high level in the Cabinet. Secondly, a distinction was made at the outset between research done and sponsored in departments and that done in the DSIR and research councils. And, thirdly, defence research and development remained in the first category, which emphasised its separation from civil science. This has been a continuing cause for concern and I shall return to it later.
A change at the top was made in 1959 when a Ministry for Science was set up under the present noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, and the Atomic Energy Authority was added to the birds under his wing. This arrangement worked rather well, but in 1964 a committee was set up under the noble Lord, Lord Trend, to review the whole organisation of civil science. The committee recommended, first, that the Ministry for Science should be abolished and that basic science should be brigaded with education in a single Ministry; and, secondly, that the DSIR should be abolished and its functions distributed. Thus, the Science Research Council would take over the funding of graduate places in universities in physics and astronomy; and NERC would take over the Nature Conservancy, the Geographical Survey and other work. Thirdly, the Council for Scientific Policy would be abolished and an advisory board for the research councils would be set up to oversee the work of the research councils and to advise the Secretary of State

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for Education and Science on the distribution of the science budget. Fourthly, the committee recommended the establishment of an industrial research development authority to deal with applied science.
When the Labour Government of 1965 came to implement this report, they accepted the recommendations on the organisation of basic research, but rejected the recommendation on the applied side and shovelled this increasingly vital activity, with the National Physical Laboratory, the National Engineering Laboratory and other functions of the DSIR, into the capacious maw of the Ministry of Technology—that monstrous bureaucracy so ineptly inaugurated by Messrs. Wedgwood Benn, Cousins and Snow.
Although we are principally concerned today with basic and strategic research, I venture to comment that, in spite of the valiant efforts of ACARD and the sponsorship of the DTI, the organisation of applied science has never fully recovered from the rejection of the recommendations of the noble Lord, Lord Trend, on the applied side.
Next, in 1971, came the Rothschild Report, which led to the development and definition of what came to be called the "customer/contractor" arrangements. And finally, after a number of intermediate reports which I need not mention, in 1981 came the report of your Lordships' Select Committee on Science and Government. The Government, while accepting the main thrust of the report, and adopting some of the recommendations in a different form, rejected a number of others. I shall not rehearse the story today, but I shall refer to one or two of the recommendations towards the end of my speech. However, 1981 was also the year of the cuts in higher education, and the year when the science budget—which in the 1960s and the 1970s was increasing at varying rates year on year—was, in effect, frozen. This had unfortunate consequences on the resources available to the research councils, and to these I shall now turn.
The resources rest on a tripod, the three legs of which are the science budget, commissioned research and the operation of the dual support system. The science budget, from which the research councils receive their grants in aid, was, according to the original Government position, to be maintained at a constant level in real terms. I do not know whether the Government would now claim that this has been the case; I think that they would not do so, but perhaps the Minister will express a view on the matter.
In 1983 the Advisory Board for Research Councils put forward a powerful case for an increase in the science budget, which was turned down by the Government. This was, in fact, a major rebuff. Moreover, the councils, with their reduced income, are faced with constantly rising costs—for example, for superannuation and pensions and for salary levels usually above the 3 per cent. allowed for in Treasury forecasts—a situation which I regret to say I understand is called "de-indexation".
The budget for 1985–86 was announced in another place on 12th November. As I understand it, increases over the draft budget have been announced in three areas: restructuring of the research councils, the
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financing of research projects and, in the university context, the equipment grant. There seems to have been no new money provided, the increases apparently having been made possible by a decrease in student support grants. I ask the noble Earl the Minister to enlarge on this statement. In the context of the need, the increases seem to be at the margin. I cannot truthfully say that I think that they go to the root of the problem. Nevertheless, in my view, the Secretary of State is to be congratulated on having had, in a hostile environment and at the cost of incurring considerable odium in some quarters, the courage to dip into his own budget and take three steps back from the brink.
Nowadays the Treasury enforces cuts by the imposition of cash limits. I have no objection to that policy. Indeed, when I was at the Treasury I was inclined to be critical of some of my colleagues who endeavoured to double guess the expert departments in their own expertise. Clever though my colleagues undoubtedly were, I did not think that that was a very sensible or profitable approach, and I was even then inclined to the policy of telling applicants how much money was available and letting them decide on its distribution.
However, there is a corollary to that. Some Minister or agency, other than the Treasury, should monitor the long-term effects—both political and economic—of the cash limits policy. Further, the Treasury imposes these limits on individual departments and organisations, thus reducing the flexibility of the system as a whole and the possibility of redistributing resources through virement to which—in my day at any rate—the Treasury were in any case very much opposed.
The second leg of the tripod is commissioned research, mainly from departments under the Rothschild criteria. But, as was demonstrated by Sir Ronald Mason's Report on Commissioned Research, which was published a year ago, this system has not worked as intended. Moreover, and perhaps more seriously, the general cuts have led to a reduction in the amount of research commissioned in the past two years. Indeed, it has fallen sharply—in the case of NERC by 30 per cent. in a year.
The success of the Rothschild system was, in a nutshell, dependent on strengthening the science component in the commissioning departments, and this has not happened. No provision has been included—as was intended—for strategic research in the contracts; and the bureaucracy of the commissioning arrangements has not been demonstrated to be cost-effective. I ask the Minister to tell your Lordships what action has been taken to meet these and other criticisms in the Mason report and to follow its recommendations.
The third leg of the tripod is the dual support system, by which the University Grants Committee finances the research infrastructure in the universities—that is, the salaries of the staff and the equipment of the laboratories—and the research councils provide earmarked funds for particular research projects in the expectation that the work will be carried out in a well-found university department. This expectation can no longer be relied upon owing to the cuts in the UGC grants. This has meant that the

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research councils have had to devote a higher proportion of the funds available to them to shoring up the other half of the system. The £10 million now added to the equipment grant of the UGC is a step towards meeting a very large shortfall indeed which has built up over recent years.
A wag put the situation to me the other day as follows: university research was cut off at the knee, thus unbalancing the system; the research councils were then similarly treated, which helped to restore the balance, though at a level considerably nearer the ground, thus bringing to mind the lines from the Ballad of Chevy Chase:
"For Witherington"—
and for Witherington your Lordships may substitute any research laboratory or council of your choice—
"For Witherington I needs must wail
as one in doleful dumps,
For when his legs were smitten off
he fought upon his stumps".
But, seriously, the tripod has become destabilised. The science budget leg has been reduced in real terms; the Rothschild leg is not working properly, with commissioned research sharply down; and the dual support system is crumbling.
How have the research councils dealt with this situation? They are redeploying their resources to the best of their ability. Since 1981 they have in any case been evolving with the times. Thus, the SRC have turned into the SERC; the ARC have turned into the AFRC; and the Social Science Research Council have turned into the Economic and Social Research Council—all denoting a change of emphasis in their research objectives and priorities.
The councils are of two kinds: the first typified by the SERC, which are mainly grant-giving; the second by the AFRC and the MRC, which mainly run institutes. It is obvious that it is much easier to cut grants than to close institutes. There is mounting evidence that on the research grant side an increasing number of high grade graduate students are being turned away and that others do not think it worthwhile applying. There are of course no grounds for suggesting that every research institute should be a permanent fixture, and it may well be that some research projects are allowed to continue for too long. However, the closing process costs money, reduces the funds available from the science budget, interrupts research programmes and lowers morale. The bad effects may be short-term, but in many advanced technological fields time is of the essence. The additional grant by the Government to meet restructuring of costs seems to be designed to meet this problem, at least in part. This running down process is taking place at a time when our main industrial competitors are gradually increasing their expenditure on basic research.
Members of your Lordships' Select Committee on Science and Technology, during a recent visit to Washington, were made aware of the extent to which President Reagan has increased the United States budget for basic research. In Japan we met the members of the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Councillors, the upper house of the Diet. We were told that in the opinion of that
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committee Japan was not devoting sufficient resources to basic research.
Comparisons with other countries as regards effort in this field are made, which show that the United Kingdom comes out quite well. But these usually include the Ministry of Defence "spend" on research and development, which, if I am not mistaken, is over 50 per cent. of the total. A very high proportion of this goes on development; for example, of new weapons. If this is subtracted, as it should be, from the total, the comparison with other countries as regards expenditure on basic research puts us in a very much worse light. Moreover, the report of the Science Policy Unit of the University of Sussex, to which I referred earlier, has measured a decline in basic research in the United Kingdom. If the Minister has seen this report, I should very much like to know what he thinks about it.
I must briefly mention the international dimension, and our membership of collaborative scientific organisations like CERN and the European Space Agency. This is managed by one or more research councils, and it involves the consideration of foreign, and particularly of European, policy. I have not the time to expand on this today but it is a factor of great importance requiring special and probably separate treatment and finance, and it might form the subject of another debate in due course.
Who, I wonder, spoke up for science and technology in the recent Star Chamber? I expect the answer will be that it was the Secretary of State for Education and Science, but I venture to make three observations here. First, the science function in the department is minimal in relation to its other responsibilities. In his statement about expenditure on science and education in another place on 12th November the first 21 paragraphs dealt with education, and only the 22nd dealt with science.
The staff dealing with science in the department is relatively very small. The noble Lord, Lord Young of Graffham, told us forcefully last week that the efficiency of an organisation is not to be measured by the number of its staff, and I heartily agree with him; but there is such a thing as a critical mass, and I suggest that the staff in the department, however able, is still sub-critical.
Thirdly, there is no scientific adviser in the department. Your Select Committee recommended that the chairman of the ABRC should be invited to perform for the department more of the functions—and I emphasise "more of the functions"—of a scientific adviser in another department, but this was turned down by the Government on the grounds that it would detract from his independence. But would it? I think it was rather a specious objection.
Anyhow, it was with this and other considerations in mind that your Select Committee recommended in 1981 that there should be not a Minister for, or of, Science and Technology, but a Cabinet Minister designated to speak for science and technology in addition to his other responsibilities, advised by a Government chief scientist and a council of science and technology covering both basic science and its

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applications. This was rejected by the Government, but I still think that there is much to be said for it.
For example, the Minister would be able, as I suggested earlier, to monitor the long-term effects of the cash limits imposed over the whole field of activity. Secondly, I believe that the received doctrine is that departmental organisation is vertical and the research council organisation is horizontal. In a horizontal organisation, especially when money is tight, there are bound to be disagreements between departments and councils which the ABRC may have difficulty in resolving but which a Minister, assisted by a council, would be able to settle. I have little expectation that the Minister will tell us today that the Government have changed their mind. But, let me say that in the meantime the ABRC/ACARD interlocking arrangement is, I believe, working as well as can be expected.
I conclude by asking the Minister two broad questions. First of all, are the Government fully conscious of the disquiet and anxiety at the decline in Government support for basic and strategic science; and, if so, do they regard it as being without justification? Secondly, it seems to me that the policy of the Government in regard to science and technology is running fundamentally counter to their main and wholly admirable objective of restoring and improving our industrial performance and our competitiveness as a trading nation. Indeed, it is, I suggest, actually undermining that central policy. We are falling behind in basic and applied research at a time when, to meet the objectives, and in order to catch up with the competition, we ought to be increasing it. Are the Government aware of that fundamental inconsistency? My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.27 p.m.
Lord Walston: My Lords, we are doubly in the debt of the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield: first, for enabling your Lordships to discuss this vitally important subject and to listen in the course of the debate to many distinguished scientists and others with great experience on these matters; and, secondly, for the masterly way in which he has introduced the subject, running briefly but fully through the earlier history of scientific research in this country, then bringing us to the present situation, and finally making some pertinent suggestions for improving the situation. I am sure that I am only expressing the views of all your Lordships in thanking the noble Lord for what he has done.
There is general agreement that since the end of the last war we have experienced in this country a decline in our traditional industries: in heavy engineering, in shipbuilding, in textiles, and in matters of that sort. At the same time—and this is generally accepted—there has been a general decline, a relative decline, in total industrial production, and above all in our share of world trade.
The only reason why our balance of payments is not in serious difficulties today, and why sterling retains the low level that it does instead of sinking still lower, is because of North Sea oil. But North Sea oil, as we know full well, is a diminishing asset. Most experts tell us—and I have no reason to disbelieve them—that by the turn of the century, at the latest, the production of
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North Sea oil will have peaked and will be starting to decline. When that happens the strain on our balance of payments, the strain on sterling, the cost of our imports, is going to rise in a truly terrifying manner unless we are able to develop alternative means of production and of export.
The noble Earl, Lord Stockton, reminded us last week that we are now entering, in a new industrial revolution, the age of high technology, and we must consider where we should look in order to redress the imbalance which will otherwise arise when our oil supplies start to diminish. We must concentrate on developing all our industries based on high technology and building up an export trade and a productive capacity that will ensure that we at least retain our present position in the economic world, and I would hope improve it still further.
What are we doing in order to bring this about? We start, of course, with an enormous advantage. We have in this country magnificent places of learning—old places, new places, departments of scientific research of all kinds—which are second to none in the world, and we have teachers who are able to attract young men from all over the world to share their experiences and to profit from what they have to tell them. This is based, of course, on an age-old tradition, a tradition stemming from Newton, from Rutherford, from J. J. Thomson and very many others. The father of the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, was one of the great pioneers in this respect. So we do have these enormous advantages over any other country in the world.
But on this foundation that we have, we are not building—we are not building as we should. The noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, mentioned the report of the team from Sussex University Science Policy Research Unit, and it does give some very disturbing facts. It says, for instance, that it is in the strategically important areas such as applied and solid state physics, metallergy, optics, analytical and physical chemistry, polymers and chemical engineering, that our decline has been most marked, and it goes on to point out, as the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, just touched on, that, compared with our other industrial rivals, particularly the United States, Japan and West Germany, we are lagging far behind. They all spend 50 per cent. more than we do on science and on engineering research. Now that is a very frightening situation. Why is it taking place now?
Well, of course, the short answer is shortage of money. Industry here is notoriously reluctant to spend on R & D compared, for instance, with the United States, Japan or West Germany, as I have said, and perhaps it is an indication of that that the only regret I have about this debate is that there are few, if any, noble Lords from industry who are speaking in it today. Is that—I hope it is not—an indication of the lack of interest of the industrialists of this country in this subject?
It is not only industry which is dragging its feet. The Government are beset by financial stringency.
Lord Shackleton: My Lords, if I may interrupt the noble Lord, I can in fact count nine noble Lords who are heavily involved in industry taking part in the debate.
Lord Walston: My Lords, I am very glad to be corrected by my noble friend and I hope that they will make it very clear to us that they at least, so far as their own industries are concerned, are doing all that is necessary to promote industrial research in their particular field.
However, it is with the Government side of the matter in particular that I am concerned, and one is tempted to ask why, after five years in office, we are still suffering so much from financial stringency that we are not able to afford the money which is necessary for this type of enormously valuable and essential work. But I shall forbear from asking that question because I do not want to bring party politics into a debate which transcends in importance anything of that kind. There can, though, be no getting away from the fact that the financial stringency argument, while it is not actually killing the goose that lays the golden egg, is undoubtedly so starving it that it can only produce a fraction of the eggs of which it is capable, and those eggs take far longer than the nine months of gestation to which the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, referred.
My only personal experience in these matters is with agricultural research, and I hope your Lordships will bear with me if I point out some of the effects that these cuts are having on agricultural research, though I am sure that the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, will go into this with far more knowledge and detail than I can.
In the 'thirties, my Lords, in the days when there was plenty of food in the world—at least so far as we were concerned—and there was no question of food shortages, we spent a considerable amount of money for those days on agricultural research. And not only on agricultural research, but on basic research which, so far as could be told at the time it was started, had no bearing whatsoever on agriculture. I am thinking, in particular, of the Low Temperature Research Laboratory in Cambridge and the work that it did then, which made possible the freezing of semen. This was developed by that very great practical scientist, Dr. Hammond, and his colleagues, in Cambridge between the wars and led to artificial insemination. As a result of the low temperature research work, the work of Hammond has been able to have a far greater impact than it could possibly have had otherwise. Also, the types of selective herbicide which are now universally used to such very great effect throughout agriculture—which we shall be discussing in rather more detail tomorrow afternoon—stem from basic work which was carried out in this country in the 'thirties, and my goodness they were of value to us in the years immediately following upon the war when food was really short.
Now, in cash terms, as I understand it, the funds of the Agricultural and Food Research Council are static, but we must not forget that, to their activities, the letter F has been added. Quite rightly, they now have to concern themselves with research relating to food and not to agriculture alone. They also have, quite rightly, to pay more attention to environmental questions, which are becoming increasingly important, and, of course, there is money to be paid out for redundancies in many of their research institutes. So, while it may be possible from the book-keeping point of view to say that there has been no
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reduction in the amount of money that they have, in point of fact, so far as the institutes themselves are concerned, the reductions are very significant.
Now may I ask your Lordships to look for a moment with me at the work done by the Institute of Animal Physiology, also near Cambridge? In passing, it is worth mentioning that it is because of the original basic research done there many years ago that kidney transplants became possible and, from that, all the other types of transplant about which we read so much in the newspapers today. That is the type of interlocking research—the result of basic research—which cannot be foreseen at the time. But, although in some ways it may be said—I know that some rival institutes say this—that the Institute of Animal Physiology has got off relatively lightly, this year it has had to make enforced savings of £400,000 as a result of reduced cash limits. It succeeded in doing this only by freezing vacancies, and by some redundancies. Next year it expects cash limits to be at least £200,000 short of the sum needed to continue its existing reduced programme, and there is a likelihood of still further cuts in the years to come.
It is hardly surprising that it is now scarcely possible for it to plan new research enterprises or to recruit well-qualified staff to tenured posts. The effect of that on the whole of agricultural production, and possibly on other forms of activity, including medical research, is quite impossible to quantify.
The other Cambridge research institute with which I have close connections is the Plant Breeding Institute. Here, for instance, in the current year 1984–85 it has had a cash reduction of £120,000. In 1985–86 this will probably be of the order of £160,000, and it may well be that in the subsequent year that cut will increase to £250,000. All these are very significant sums in the budgets of relatively modest institutes—institutes which are making a very real contribution to the economic welfare of one particular industry, albeit a very important industry. They have had to meet these cuts by, for example, abandoning work on the genetic engineering of certain types of wheat which would make them resistant to aphid infection—a very important factor which would reduce costs and, incidentally, reduce the use of herbicides—where great advance has already been made. That is one of the areas which has been singled out for cuts. There has also been a serious number of staff redundancies.
These are the things which are happening in just two institutes. But more important than the actual cuts in the work is the effect on morale. There is now far less security than there was; there are far more redundancies; and there is a squeeze on necessary equipment. Your Lordships can well understand the almost impossible task that is imposed on the directors of these institutes—directors who are primarily scientists, and extremely distinguished scientists—when they have to spend so much of their time not only effecting these cuts but in trying to keep up the morale of the staff as a result of the cuts. And there is always the question: "Where will the axe fall next? Will it be in the department in which I work? Will I find myself without a job?" So it is no wonder that many of the best young scientists are not looking for work in this country, but are looking for work

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overseas, particularly in the United States, and that the middle aged scientists, who are still relatively footloose, are tempted by offers coming from overseas, particularly offers to those who have already made their reputation.
Just one final word. There is no hard and fast link between basic and applied research. Applied research cannot prosper without basic research, and it is impossible to tell what basic research will be useful and what will not. They are completely interwined, and any attempt to cut the one but maintain the other is bound to fail. If we are to meet the challenge of the coming years, if we are to preserve the value of sterling, if we are to maintain a healthy balance of payments, we must build on the industries of high technology and on our great scientific tradition, and we must not starve those centres of research either of funds or of the top quality scientists who work in them.
3.45 p.m.
Earl Jellicoe: My Lords, I should like straightaway to get an expression of gratitude and a declaration of interest off my chest, as well as an apology. I am afraid that as a result of a very long-standing engagement I am unable perforce to attend for the whole of this debate, which is on a subject of great interest to me. Perhaps I should add the avowal that the occasion for my enforced absence happens to be the unveiling of a remarkable portrait delineating the remarkably handsome features of a Member of your Lordships' House. Modesty compels me not to reveal his identity.
We are all grateful for the gift to this House of the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield. We should be particularly grateful to the noble Lord, a mentor of mine at one time, for focusing our attention on the growing erosion of the science base in this country and on the grave position with which the research councils are faced at the present time. On these matters the noble Lord brings to our discussions a marvellous wealth of experience, as demonstrated this afternoon in his wide-ranging, powerful and pungent speech.
I am by nature a sedentary gentleman, but I get around the world a bit these days as chairman of an organisation called the British Overseas Trade Board. Time and time again it is borne in upon me that our ability to earn our keep in a very competitive world, our ability to pay our way in the world through our exports, depends in very large measure on those of our industries and those of our companies which have a high scientific and technological content. That is the point which the noble Lord, Lord Walston, has just made. But first-class technology calls for a first-class scientific base, and without that base we shall not be able to hold our place in the manufacturing and exporting sun.
However, it is as chairman of one of the research councils, the Medical Research Council, that I wish to make a modest contribution to the debate. It is as such that I declare my particular interest, and I propose stringently and strictly to restrict my comments to that particular research council. As a result of that, my remarks will be niggling and microscopic, but perhaps for that reason illustrative, because I am only too well aware that the stresses and strains with which we are
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faced at present in the Medical Research Council are not unique to that council. They are common to them all, and to some of them in perhaps an even more accentuated form.
The prospects for medical research in this country (and there are noble Lords who will be speaking after me who know a great deal more about this subject)—an area in which Britain has made a proud contribution to the alleviation of human suffering—should be very bright. In the past year, for example, we have been able to take important initiatives in four important areas, establishing new programmes in neurobiology, in psychiatry, in tuberculosis and, not least, in that hitherto unduly neglected, rather mundane, area of medical research; namely, dentistry.
There are other, rather extraordinary possibilities almost within our grasp, possibilities which could bring great benefit to the health and therefore the economy of our nation. Moreover, for reasons which I do not fully understand, we are at present faced with an unusually high degree of really first-class, alpha applications for grants for medical research within the university world. Our ability to implement, to give effect to, these opportunities depends upon cash—and spare cash is just what we lack.
That may sound a rather curious statement from the chairman of a council with a budget funded from the science Vote which comes to the not inconsiderable sum of around £120 million a year. Yet despite good housekeeping—and I can vouch for the good housekeeping—the MRC's room for manoeuvre is desperately limited these days. Many of our commitments are necessarily medium or longer term. For example, let us take out-house research: as the grants to universities terminate, the money is recycled into new grants; but the resulting cash is insufficient to meet all the good applications for good, new work. Or take in-house research. Even if we close research council units in which the council employs its own staff—and we have closed 20 units in the past eight years; we are not very static about this—the money derived from these closures flows slowly to us because of the commitments to existing staff.
Again, in medical science, as in other branches of science, the sophistication and the cost of equipment is rising explosively. Thus, even in good times our margin for manoeuvre—for new initiatives—is limited. But these are hard times and we have already suffered a serious reduction in our income, and we are perhaps facing a further reduction. It is true that our grant-in-aid for the present year was more than for the past year, but only in false cash terms. Given inflation, this has meant a significant reduction in our budget in real terms. Moreover, a number of extraordinary items of expenditure—rather exceptional—beyond our control, have further reduced our disposable income, and by a substantial amount. I shall not worry your Lordships with all the details of these abnormal—apparently quite trivial—cuts in expenditure. Like most matters of budgeting, they are incredibly boring.
They relate, however, to four areas. First, salary increases following a university pay award well in excess of the Government's cash limits; secondly, an increase in our superannuation contributions—a demand on us which came out of the blue following a

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recommendation from the Government Actuary, which was no doubt accurate. Thirdly, a loss relating to what is politely called "rounding down" in our grant-in-aid by a kindly sponsoring department; and last but by no means least, increases in our subscriptions to certain international bodies—for example, the quite excellent International Agency for Cancer Research—resulting in large part from exchange fluctuations over which we, let alone the Treasury, have but little control. Be that as it may, these cuts, together with a cut in real income, mean that our already marginal room for manoeuvre has been virtually eroded.
Not only is the council's ability to fund new work now in question but, even worse, our capacity adequately to meet our existing commitments is now very much in doubt. For example, the council have been forced to impose an overall cut of over 21 per cent. in the running expenses of our units. We have also been unable to support over half of the top class, alpha, high-scoring applications for long-term grant support. What worries me—and what I think should worry all of us who have the future of medical research, and all research, in this country at heart—is that while the present prospect is stark and difficult, the future could well become grimmer still. This is because for us, at least, the advisory board for the research councils has imposed fines—the polite term is so-called levies—of an additional £1 million and £2 million in our grant-in-aid for the next two years. These sound small sums, but when your margin of manoeuvre is limited they are very significant. Those fines have been imposed on us to help bail out other research councils which perhaps find themselves in an even more invidious position.
Let me make one point clear. I am not criticising the advisory board. It is an admirable institution with an admirable chairman. I do not dissent from what the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, said about the higher organisation of science and the science Vote. What I am trying to focus on—admittedly, through a very narrow lens—is the now pretty critical situation for scientific research in the country as a whole.
I should like to illustrate that situation—again on a narrow, microscopic front—by mentioning some of the stark expedients which have been forced upon this particular research council, the Medical Research Council. In the coming year we shall be cutting in half our normal provision for capital equipment. We shall be severely curtailing our capital building budget. We shall be reducing by 25 per cent. and by 7.5 per cent., respectively, the support which we give for long-term grants and shorter project grants to the universities. That is serious enough. It is even more serious given the cuts in the University Grants Committee support for university research in recent years. Those are two legs, the second leg of which the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, spoke.
Finally—and no less serious—this year we have been forced to make a reduction of about a third in the number of training awards which we make to the university sector. If this goes on we shall be faced with a situation in which our ability to exploit new opportunities in medical research will be hamstrung by a shortage of trained workers. It is precisely the
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situation with which this country is faced at the present time in information technology. It seems to me cavalier needlessly to incur it in medical research.
The Earl of Longford: My Lords, may I ask the noble Earl (whose speech interested me greatly) whether there is any strong reason presented for these cuts which are being imposed?
Earl Jellicoe: My Lords, I think that it is some of these Tibetan philosophies which have something to do with it—which a noble Earl spoke to your Lordships about not long ago. But they come from a desire—and a desire with which I align myself—to curtail so far as it is possible Government expenditure. That is the simple reason. I greatly hope that the gravity of the situation will be matched by a response from the Government. It would be churlish not to mention small mercies like the recently announced decision to increase the science Vote by £14 million; and in this context I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, in the tribute that he paid to the Secretary of State for Education and Science. It was deserved because it was a difficult and brave decision. I note that £6 million of this Vote is to go towards major restructuring. Therefore, may I ask my noble friend who will be replying whether this gets SERC and the MRC off the levy hook next year and beyond that? As for the future, I urge the Government to build these additional funds into the science Vote baseline and to do all that they can to ensure stability for basic scientific research—stability in real terms.
In addition, there are a couple of shorter-term, circumscribed, microscopic palliatives which I should like to suggest to my noble friend. They are palliatives which at least give additional first-aid and a little bit more room for manoeuvre, certainly to one research council. For example, the Treasury in their benevolent way could help to fund the MRC pension scheme as they have helped in the past.
Secondly, the Government could revert to the original position with respect to the funding of international medical research organisations whereby items outside a particular research council's control, such as inflation or the exchange rate, do not cut into and emasculate councils' budgets. Thirdly, I would repeat this point. The Government could relieve the MRC and the Science and Engineering Research Council of the levies imposed upon them for the next two years in order to help out some other research councils—admirable bodies—in their even greater difficulties. It seems quite wrong in principle——
Lord Shackleton: My Lords, could the noble Earl possibly put a figure on these additional grants for funding that he would like to see given by the Government? I admire his optimism; and of course his reference to "restructuring" is only a polite word for cuts and redundancies.
Earl Jellicoe: My Lords, I am always very polite. I find it terribly difficult to retain figures in my elderly head, but I would assure noble Lords that the funds which I am referring to are microscopic. In the foreword to the latest report of the Medical Research Council, Sir James Gowans, the Deputy Chairman

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and Secretary, and I stated unequivocably—and I quote our words—that,
"in medical research, the science base of the United Kingdom is in danger of being severely damaged".
We did not use those words lightly: nor were we just referring to the ability in this country to produce Nobel prize-winners in this field of research, as we have done in the past. I am proud that my particular council has in one particular laboratory—the molecular biology laboratory at Cambridge—no fewer than six Nobel prize-winners. I do not think there is any laboratory in the world which can equal that, and I think it is a just cause for national pride.
But we had other things in mind. We had in mind the great opportunities now before this country for medical research. I shall cite just two almost random examples. There is, for example, the money required to fund new research in the fascinating, opening and expanding field of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging—a field in which we are still world leaders and from which a large commercial dividend stands to be won. But this will need money. There are, not least, the great possibilities opening up for us in transferring our accumulated experience in molecular biology, where again Britain is in the world lead, directly into the clinical and medical sphere, and particularly in the field of preventative medicine. And money for that, too, is needed—not vast sums.
But Sir James Gowans and I had more homely fields also in mind. For example, absence from work due to sickness robs this country of some 150 million man days of productivity each year. There is also the cost of caring for the 700,000 people—a formidable and frightening number—in this country who suffer from senile dementia, which amounts to over half a billion pounds. These two are areas where the MRC needs more cash for its continued attack upon these problems. The danger to the future of medical research in this country is now, I believe, real, and so are the glittering opportunities. I would express, in conclusion, the very strong hope that the Government will continue to ponder very hard indeed both the dangers and the opportunities.
4.4 p.m.
Lord Gregson: My Lords, may I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, for introducing this timely debate this afternoon. As a contribution to this debate, I should like to say something about the importance of the work of the Science and Engineering Research Council; but before I do so I want to say a few words about the problems which set the scene and underline the significance of this research council. I doubt whether there is anyone in the House this afternoon who is not aware that last year we went into negative balance of trade in manufactured goods for the first time in recorded history. But I wonder how many of your Lordships are aware of the alarming rate of change from positive balance to negative balance. In 1981 we had a positive balance of £5 billion; in 1982 we had a positive balance of £2 billion; and in 1983, a negative balance of £2 billion. So far this year, including the third quarter, we have already recorded a negative balance of £3 billion, and the third quarter,
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if projected at an annualised rate, is running presently at a negative balance of £5 billion.
For a nation that has to import one-third of its food and nearly all its raw materials, that is a very unsatisfactory state indeed. In normal circumstances that would spell bankruptcy, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer would be drafting his letter of intent to the IMF, pleading with them to bail us out, and we would all be suffering a drastically reduced standard of living. But this is not so. As the noble Lord, Lord Walston, has pointed out, we are awash with North Sea oil: £20 billion sterling of it per annum at present market prices. It is like a thumping big win on Ernie but, like wins on Ernie, it does not last for ever and in the next few years North Sea oil will peak out. Of course it will not disappear overnight and we shall certainly be dragging the dregs out of the North Sea well into the twenty-first century. But that top slice, which presently balances our books in terms of overseas trade and which is the surplus over our own requirements that we presently sell around the world for dollars—and very useful dollars they are—is the bit that disappears first and probably it will all have gone by the early 1990s.
I will readily admit to being a pessimist in this circumstance, but I should like briefly to comment on what the optimists claim. First, they claim that we are in a post-Industrial Revolution decline and that the service sector will take over from the manufacturing sector. I would suggest to your Lordships that this is rubbish. For the service sector to take over the role of our manufacturing industry we in this country would have to provide half the services of the whole of the Western world. It is just not credible, and I wish that people who keep repeating this nonsense would really have a good look at the facts.
Secondly, it is suggested that the dividends and interest of the millions which the institutions have invested abroad instead of in British industry will somehow replace the bonanza of North Sea oil. The increase expected (according to the Bank of England) in dividends and interest between now and the early 1990s is approximately an additional £2 billion. That does not seem to me to equate either to the £10 billion credited to North Sea oil sales abroad, or to the £10 billion lost in trade in the manufacturing sector. In any case, I wonder how many of those marvellous investments, in view of the world debt crisis, will turn out to be bad debts rather than good dividends.
But it is the third claim of the optimists that worries me most. This claim is that as North Sea oil runs out, the value of the pound will collapse, our goods will become more competitive on the world markets and we shall restore our balance of payments position. Well, we currently have an outstanding example—an experiment to prove the rule—in that the pound has halved in value against the dollar. The pound has dropped against the dollar more than any other of the principal currencies in the Western world. So to the Americans our goods are now incredibly cheap, and the Americans, because of the strong dollar, are sucking in imports at an unbelievable rate. This year they are heading for a trade deficit of 130 billion dollars, which makes ours look like village post office economics. But are they sucking in imports of British goods? The answer to that is, yes, but at a much lower

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rate than our principal competitors. Great Britain has increased its trade in its principal market, where we have a common language, at less than half the rate of our continental competitors and a quarter of the rate of the Japanese.
If one looks at the areas where our exports are increasing, one has only to walk round the shops in America to see woollen goods, fine china and the occasional Jaguar, which left the drawing board 20 years ago. We are not exporting to America goods with a high technological content. I believe that this in itself spells danger. I believe that as a nation we are becoming technologically obsolescent: a creeping disease that is so insidious that when you are living in it you hardly notice that it is happening, but for those looking at us from outside it is becoming only too apparent.
The Cabinet Office last year published a joint report on research and development which points out the importance of high value-added manufactures to the United Kingdom, but they go on to say that over a wide range of products the unit value of United Kingdom exports is now less than that of the corresponding imports, and there are whole sectors of products based on high technology which are now wholly or substantially met by imports. If we are to stop this creeping malady, there can be no question but that we have to increase basic research, applied research, product development and the supply of well-trained, capable people to support a campaign to recover the ground that we have lost, which is turning us into a technologically obsolescent nation. This drive to regain our lost place in the world's trade of manufactured goods starts with basic and applied research. That is why the work of the Science and Engineering Research Council is of such great fundamental importance to the future economic well-being of this nation.
Furthermore, it is quite impossible to have centres of educational excellence without underlying centres of research excellence. There is no way you can attract people to universities of quality to teach our future scientists and technologists, who will prevent this country from sinking into an economic abyss when North Sea oil starts to decline, without a research base of recognised international excellence. It really is totally illogical to be cutting or restricting our basic research in science and engineering when our trading partners are providing a dramatic increase in order to cancel out Great Britain in the world trade market.
It is a nonsense to send the seed corn of the future to the miller to pay for the tax cuts of today. It simply must not be allowed to happen. Any Government which do so will be condemned in history for evermore.
4.13 p.m.
Lord Swann: My Lords, I hope that I, too, may be forgiven if I leave this interesting and important debate before the end, but I have a long-standing and inescapable engagement in a good cause. As a natural scientist, or perhaps in honesty I should say once a natural scientist, as well as once a member of two of the scientific research councils, I first thought of talking about the areas I know most of; but I guessed, correctly, that there would be no shortage of noble
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Lords who would say all that I could, and say it better. I therefore decided that I would talk about that least favoured, and in some quarters decidedly least loved, of the research council quintet; namely, the ESRC, or, to give it its current full name, the Economic and Social Research Council. I also want to talk about the ESRC for another reason, namely, that in the last 15 years I have become increasingly involved in complex social problems, where good research leading to an understanding of the problems is sorely needed by society.
My first encounter with that sort of problem was at the BBC. It involved, among others, someone I used to meet there from time to time, Mrs. Whitehouse. She and her colleagues feel, as do many others, that television violence, whether as fictional violence or simply the news coverage of violence, goes on to cause real violence. It was an accusation which troubled me and the board of governors, and no doubt it continues to do so. We looked at such research evidence as there was—some of it good, some of it not good—and the foremost conclusion that one could scarcely fail to reach was (and I suspect still is) that violence has no single cause and is a very complex social problem that is far from being disentangled. In all probability its causes are a complex of social attitudes on the part of those who resort to violence, together with a complex of attitudes and behaviour on the part of those against whom violence is directed.
One would be bold and unwise to say that television has no effect, but my guess, for what it is worth—and much more research is needed—is that television's effect is only part of the wider effect on society of swift modern communications, which include, of course, radio, the press, the telephone and quick travel. Nowadays, in contrast to 100 years ago, we all know what other people, miles away, are thinking and doing and getting away with. But, of course, the reaction is equally speeded up. I doubt whether the present widespread revulsion against pithead violence, for instance, would by now have built up to the level that it has were it not for modern communications.
My second encounter with a complex social problem was when I took on, after leaving the BBC, the chairmanship of a research institution, the Technical Change Centre, as it is called, financed in part by one of the large charitable research trusts and in part by two of the research councils. Its concern, briefly, is to investigate why Britain has, with rather few exceptions, fallen so far behind in adopting the new technologies. As the Wall Street Journal concluded not long ago in a rather brutal survey:
"No European country ranks as the leading source in any technological area. In most fields the top European country—usually West Germany—ranks as a distant third. All other European countries virtually cease to register as widely recognised sources of technology leadership".
This is not the moment to talk about the research that the Technical Change Centre has done in its, so far, three years, though I believe it has been valuable. But, just as with violence on the BBC, it leaves me in no doubt that we are dealing once again with a very complex problem where there is no single solution, and there are certainly no simple solutions.
The universities are often enough blamed for the innovative inadequacies of British industry—it is a

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point of view I am sure we shall hear more of this afternoon—and as an erstwhile vice-chancellor I cannot but regret that British universities have been very slow in building links with industry, even though they have moved a long way in recent years. In the last resort, however, universities are not companies and they do not have the resources to carry their research, be it pure or applied, very far into the stage of development. And they most certainly have no direct influence when it comes to taking the crucial managerial and financial decisions that a company has to take if it is to embrace the new technologies upon which national wealth now depends.
Why, then, has Britain made such a poor showing? The reasons can only be complex and must lie deep in the attitudes and capacities of management, and in the attitudes of workforces. It is this web of interrelated factors that the Technical Change Centre is trying to unravel in a variety of ways. Once again the roots are multi-causal, complex and ill-understood. As I found myself commenting in the foreword to our last annual report:
"The problems are not so much scientific and technological as human, centring in a variety of ways round the economic and social. It is ironic, therefore, and not always fair, that these disciplines, which are so crucial to our industrial well-being, have acquired in some circles a rather poor image".
It is in a quite different area, however, that I have had to look most closely at research in the social sciences. A few years back I took over the chairmanship of a Government committee on the educational needs of Britain's ethnic minorities. It has been known for quite a time that some minorities, most notably the West Indians, have been seriously under-achieving at school, thereby exacerbating yet further their economic and social deprivation, caused in the first instance by prejudice and discrimination in the employment and housing markets. Much the same is true of the Bangladeshis, whereas other Asian groups do broadly as well at school as the indigenous whites. Why is this and what should be done about it?
Having taken much written and oral evidence, we turned to published research for its answer. I myself read extensively for months. There is some very good research but there is much that ranges from the not-very-good to the decidedly poor and parti pris. In the course of my reading, one essay stuck in my mind. It was by Dr. Bhikhu Parekh, a former member of our committee, who left his British university to become, on secondment, vice-chancellor of a university in India. In his essay, Dr. Parekh first lists the many factors which have been thought by different research workers to contribute to ethnic minority under-achievement. He notes six major factors and about as many minor factors; I need not trouble your Lordships with what they are.
Dr. Parekh goes on to note the defects of the research debate that has gone on in recent years. His list is revealing. First comes what he calls the fallacy of the single cause. Second comes the assumption that a factor which affects one group must necessarily affect another group in the same way. Thirdly, the debate is conducted at too abstract a level to relate to the reality of the school or the child, to permit sensible discussion or to have clear policy implication. Fourthly, most
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participants are deeply committed to specific theories and either ignore others or dismiss them with a bundle of sweeping generalisations. Lastly, the debate on so sensitive an issue—where every possible explanation points an accusatory finger at someone—rapidly becomes politicised.
Dr. Parekh believes (and so do I) that one can extract at least some fairly reliable conclusions from the better research. But his critique of the general picture is, I am sure, only too accurate. This will not surprise opponents of the social sciences—though I should interject here that I believe the ESRC's record in this area is a good one—and such opponents will no doubt go on to argue that the whole exercise is not worth the money that is spent on it. I must disagree, for reasons which I shall try to explain.
Your Lordships may very well say to all this, "Yes, we agree that there are many important economic and social problems, and it would be a great help to society if we understood them better. But social scientists have been spending Government money studying them for quite a long time and we are not much wiser. And, in useful practical terms, what has emerged? Rather little." I would have to agree in large measure—and, I believe, so would most social scientists. But they would surely add a proviso, and so would I.
In terms of the growth of knowledge and the development of the science, these are early days. To go on from their present embryonic state to argue that the social sciences will never become as practically useful as the natural sciences does not follow, and the whole weight of the history of the natural sciences argues very much the other way. Had research in the physical sciences been dependent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on government funding in the way it is now, one can hardly doubt that voices would have been raised about the desirability of cuts. And, had medical research been so funded, one must doubt whether it would actually have received any money at all. One is bound to suspect that even half way through the last century a medical research council would have been regarded as a prime candidate for pruning. Fortunately for posterity, money came in other ways.
It has to be remembered that the scientific knowledge we now take for granted took a long time and much effort to acquire—and the nearer we get to biological systems, the longer it has taken and the more difficult it has become. Human societies are not only the most complex of all the biological systems; they tend also to be the least susceptible to what is perhaps the most powerful of the scientific methods—namely, the controlled experiment. So, if it took until the latter part of the last century for medicine to begin to prevent and cure disease, we can hardly be surprised that the social sciences are only now beginning to accumulate the understanding they need in order to become practically useful. No scientist can seriously doubt that the methods of science which have proved so immensely powerful in understanding the natural world will, in time, unravel the complexities of man's economic and social activities.
We ought to remember also that the political and dogmatic overtones of the social sciences which so infuriate politicians and others—understandably—as well as their tendency to oversimplify, have their

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parallels in the early history of the natural sciences. They, too, had their tenaciously-held dogmas—if less obviously political in the current sense of that word. Indeed, one can perhaps detect dogmas even in present-day natural science, though they tend to melt away as they are subjected to the advance of knowledge—and early science certainly oversimplified. Indeed, I believe that these defects, as we now see them, are probably an inevitable phase in the development of any science.
I do not think, therefore, that we should worry too much about economic and social science dogmas. They, too, will melt away in time—and more rapidly, the faster the subjects develop. They are regrettable of course—chiefly, because they tend to hold back the key advances—and they are liable to squeeze new minds with new ideas. But the remedy is not to give up hope and support but to encourage and support the best and most rigorous research. By this, I do not necessarily mean copying the precise methods of the natural sciences and I do mean fostering ideas which do not necessarily fit into established wisdom. The ESRC could do worse than try to list the dogmas in its area—be they dogmas of technique or concept—and build into their peer review system an academic counterbalance and some detached outside viewpoints. Perhaps they do; I can only hope so.
In short, I believe that we should spend more and not less than we do on the smallest and cheapest of the research councils. The ESRC consumes only £22·4 million out of a total research council expenditure of £516 million—just 4 per cent. If there is no money overall—and I profoundly hope that there will be—then I at least would prune just a little off the others; 1 per cent. all round, perhaps, for a start.
I say that for two reasons. In the first place, I believe that, given time, the social sciences can do as much for our society—albeit in a different way—as the natural sciences have done and are doing.
The Earl of Longford: My Lords, may I put a question to the noble Lord? There are many people who are well-disposed towards these studies who would prefer to call them social studies and not social sciences. In other words, has the noble Lord considered the possibility that the whole phrase "social sciences" is very misleading?
Lord Swann: My Lords, I agree in large measure, but I would also say that there is no clear distinction between what one might call the social end of the biological sciences and the biological end of the social sciences. If one wishes to remove the word "sciences", I see no objection: "science" really only means "knowledge".
Secondly, I believe that the key factors limiting the growth of the national wealth—on which the total research council budget ultimately depends—are, as I argued earlier, not so much scientific and technological as economic and social. The ESRC is presently putting great weight on research into these areas and in the long run it can only be to the advantage of the other research councils to forgo a little now.
4.30 p.m.
The Earl of Selborne: My Lords, I start, as did my noble friend Lord Jellicoe, by declaring that I have a close involvement in today's subject as chairman of one of the research councils—in my case as chairman of the Agricultural and Food Research Council. Also, like my noble friend, I must declare my indebtedness to the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, who once again has drawn our attention in a masterly way to the erosion of the science research base in this country.
It is a matter of some consolation that your Lordships' House returns to this subject quite frequently. The noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, reminded us that it is nine months since we debated a subject allied to today's debate. I believe that it is very appropriate that we should have such a debate. The noble Lord explained very clearly—I do not think anyone need reiterate it—how, whatever might have been the hopes of the present Administration that the science Vote be maintained and with it the research thrust, sadly this simply has not been the case. We had the cuts in the UGC some four years ago and we have had also the in-built momentum caused by the cost of research itself. It appears to be an immutable fact that research, machinery and technology get ever more expensive and with it just to stay in the same place appear to come costs which we fail to recoup. The result—by whichever measure one wishes to choose—is that the research that we are undertaking in this country is diminishing. This again, as the noble Lord, Lord Walston, pointed out, has been clearly expounded by a paper at Sussex University.
The sad fact is that we are now having to decide which of our growth industries we are able to underpin with research; and this at a time when we live in an age of high technology. It is the unenviable role of the Advisory Board for Research Councils to have to make some of those decisions. The ABRC pointed out to the Government in 1983—again, very clearly, I felt—that it simply was not adequate any more even to attempt, albeit unsuccessfully, to maintain the science Vote if we were to try to achieve for research what we had tried to achieve since 20 or 30 years ago—the adequate underpinning for technology which was becoming ever more expensive and ever more complicated. There had to be increased expenditure and an increased priority given to research expenditure. This point was not taken.
The expenditure which was given to the science Vote for the ABRC to give advice to the Secretary of State remained static at first and I maintain, as would others, that in practice it has diminished. With it has gone an opportunity. Whatever other public expenditure costs the Government (who I have to say I support from these Benches) wish to pare, the one that I, as a farmer, would suggest we simply cannot afford to cut—the seed corn—is, by this inability to answer the 1983 recommendations of the ABRC, the area that I fear, by default, the Government have chosen.
There is perhaps one area in which insufficient advice is given to the Government—and, goodness knows, plenty of advice is given in this area of research priorities. It is the balance between defence research and civil research. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord

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Sherfield, who reminded us that over 50 per cent. of research expenditure in this country goes on defence. That may be right; I do not know. But I wonder whether the Government are satisfied that the mechanism which reviews the balance between civil research and defence research is adequate. Certainly I know that there was some concern that the spin-offs from defence research were inadequately finding their way through into industry. The Secretary of State for Defence addressed himself to this problem and, again, I should be very interested to hear from my noble friend the Minister when he replies as to whether the Goverment are satisfied that real progress has been made in interlocking industry into defence research.
Wider than that, if we accept the premise, which so many other speakers have made, that we are under-funding research and that whole blocks of industry are going to suffer, are we right to assume that we can still afford, unlike most other countries, I believe, to put over 50 per cent. of our research investment into defence?
The noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, referred to the tripod, which is the funding arrangement for research councils, and I should like in particular to address myself to the commissioning leg of that tripod. I must take up the invitation of the noble Lord, Lord Walston, to address myself in particular to agricultural and food research simply because it is certainly the area which I know best. I must say that I believe that those other research councils which derive part of their funding from commissioning face exactly the same problems. These problems, again, were referred to in a previous debate. At the time the customer-contractor principle was being adopted—that is, the time when Lord Rothschild's report was adopted, albeit in a modified form—I remember that in that interesting and long debate in your Lordships' House grave concern was expressed as to whether research could adequately be funded through the commissioning procedure and whether the funding was likely to be affected by the vagaries of Treasury support or political whim. It was pointed out then that even applied research implies a time-scale which does not fit in neatly with the year-by-year expenditure through normal accounting procedures. Then, as often since, assurances were given that the requirement to give continuity of funding of research was understood and that the department would be able to undertake this responsibility adequately.
Of course, if one now looks at the agricultural departments—I do not refer just to MAFF; I also refer to DAFS and to the department in Northern Ireland—one sees that they are, for reasons which I think we all understand, under very close scrutiny on public expenditure. It may well be that the changing emphasis in our policy towards agricultural production requires an assessment as to how expenditure within those ministries should be best deployed. It is certainly the case that an increase in output is no longer a prime objective. But if for the moment we look at the requirements of the producer at a time when we recognise that the common agricultural policy has led us up something of a cul-de-sac, that systems of agriculture have been supported which now perhaps look untenable, that the prices the
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producers are going to receive for some commodities will be reduced somewhere down to world prices and that in other commodities there will be constraints put on production levels, as is the case already for milk, I think there is a very firm onus on those commissioning departments to give to the producer the options which research and development are designed to provide. Indeed, it is exactly there where the research service and the development services are finding themselves under great pressure in a farming industry which is in great confusion, after years of expansion, suddenly finding that priorities have changed. To have the research capacity reduced at this time could be seen as a final blow to an industry which has been so responsive in the past to technological changes.
I am sure that I do not need to remind the Minister of the debate we had not so many months ago about cuts at the Welsh plant breeding station. The noble Baroness, Lady White, will remember that she and others in this House forcefully pointed out that there were many areas of agriculture which were suffering great difficulties and that they looked with great suspicion at the concept of achieving quite modest economies in research at a time when the industry would need all the support it could get.
Yet another debate—and I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, will refer to this when he speaks to his Select Committee's report—emphasised how we must improve the agricultural and environmental research interface. Great concern has been expressed, not only in this House but also elsewhere, on the environmental impact of agriculture and allied industries. The Government quite correctly gave a commitment to increase their research capacity in this area.
Later this evening there will be a debate on animal welfare or subjects allied to it. I am sure that it will be the wish of the public as a whole to see the research capacity in this area maintained if not increased.
To take a further area, perhaps not so much the Ministry of Agriculture as the Department of Health and Social Security has produced several reports—one is this report I hold in my hand, the Diet and Cardiovascular Disease Report—suggesting that there should be changes in the diet of this country: we should reduce the amount of fats that we eat. I understand that this report has in the main been accepted by the Government and there are implications there not just for the producer but also for the food industry and the consumer.
There have been recent reports on the sad state in which the food industry finds itself. The noble Lord, Lord Walston, has already referred to the Advisory Committee on Applied Research and Development's report on the food industry. Again, the Government, quite correctly, in my mind, have said that, yes, this is a strategic industry which finds itself in some difficulties, perhaps because the industry failed to support its own research adequately some years ago. Nevertheless, the case is that we are now losing market share. The fast moving technology is not being adequately developed in this country. There must be further expenditure in this area.
All the areas I have quoted come firmly under the category of commissioned research. As others have explained, that is not to say that the science Vote itself

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is not being eroded. However, it is the commissioned area to which I was particularly addressing myself. I would make the very strong plea that before yet further cuts are forced on the Minister of Agriculture and his colleagues in Scotland and elsewhere, very careful consideration be given to these and other issues, which the public, and indeed the farmer, are expecting to be funded.
It must not escape your Lordships' notice that it is rather ironical to have two speakers from these Benches pleading special reasons why cuts in public expenditure, however many there should be, should not affect their own vested interest. I think there is a very firm onus on the research councils and others to look at the possibility of perhaps developing a fourth leg—I suppose it will no longer be a tripod; perhaps I should now call it a table—to the funding of research councils. Something which the Secretary of State for Education and Science has suggested to universities and others is that they should be looking at increased funding from industry and from alternative areas.
I would say that all research councils do receive quite considerable sums of money from other such areas. For instance, I think the European Commission has fairly imaginative proposals. But if I can suggest one palliative to add to those which have been suggested earlier, there is a strange concept called attribution. For example, if you get money—in some cases, not always—from a source such as the European Commission, as, for instance, the head of a research institute of whom I spoke earlier, you then find that you have that sum of money docked off your budget. I know this causes great frustration. It really is counterproductive in every sense of the word. It certainly discourages managers of research institutes from going flat out for such funding from Europe. I ask the Minister whether he can assure us that the Treasury are going to take a more enlightened view on this rather small area.
While I am talking about palliatives, there is just another small one. The Rayner Review has pointed out areas where, by better housekeeping, research councils can make ongoing savings in both running costs and once-and-for-all costs. Those once-and-for-all costs tend to be capital sales. Again I am sure that the Rayner Review proposals are sensible. However, very often the research councils will find that if they make those sales the money is clawed back. I suggest that, at a time when we all recognise that capital is short in research, every inducement should be given to these research institutes or research councils to reinvest those capital sums which they have been able to redeploy.
What other sources would make up the fourth leg? I am very excited by the prospects of the Agricultural Genetics Company. This is tapping City money for what is admittedly the glamour area in agricultural and food research, biotechnology. But the intellectual property is very valuable and certainly many see value of an enormous commercial excitement coming out of these research programmes. Our own Agricultural and Food Research Council's programme is five years old. Certainly there will be funding from that source. I am sure that this principle of inviting industrial and City funds can be exploited further.
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The story of pyrethroid insecticides is one of the great success stories in the agricultural industry. I think I am right in saying that the value of these pyrethroids is expected to be something like one billion US dollars this year. The royalties from that—which I hasten to say do not come straight back to the research institute, which is Rothamsted, but go into the Treasury—are very considerable.
There will be others following. There are programmes which follow it precisely. But there will also be others in slightly different areas of agrochemicals which will be great money spinners. Again, when we harness the commercial potential to the research requirements, I see opportunities to make up at least part of the deficit in funding about which we have all talked so much today.
There are other more mundane opportunities to which perhaps I could draw the attention of the Government, which affect the Agricultural and Food Research Council. The National Seed Development Organisation, which is really the rent collector for plant variety rights, which are bred by the public sector, is, I know, up for review at the moment. I am sure the opportunity should be taken to look very carefully at the opportunities to put some of those royalties—which again disappear into the Treasury or into the Ministry; I am not sure which—back into research. It is a good principle if you can give people encouragement by letting them see royalties go back to their institute. It seems to me good management. The agricultural engineering industry and the food industry are both sectors which rightly look to public research to help underpin them, but they should in turn be prepared to invest more than they have in the past. I say no more on that.
Lastly, it leaves the agricultural producer, who again, quite frankly, is at the moment being asked to fund a bit more of his development service. A figure of 20 per cent. has been suggested by the Minister of Agriculture. I have no doubt he will be asked very soon to fund part of his marketing in the form of giving support to Food From Britain. I make no apologies for adding to the shopping bill which that producer is going to be asked to fund and saying that he should be looking carefully at his contribution to research. He has done well out of research over the last 20 to 30 years. As I have said before, industry is technology led. Yet, compared to other industries, his contribution is not very impressive. That is entirely true of all sectors. The sugar beet grower and the hop grower are small areas of agriculture. Nevertheless, they pay large sums of money towards their research. There are individual groups of farmers and the like who do likewise.
However, I would suggest that particularly the sectors of agriculture which are well organised—I refer to milk, for which we have the Milk Marketing Board, meat, for which we have the Meat and Livestock Commission, cereal, for which we have the Home Grown Cereals Authority—all have the structure which already exists to make a contribution, if they so wish, towards their own research and development. I suggest that for the very parochial reason that it is very difficult to ask the Minister of Agriculture to fight fiercely to retain this research capacity against these other competing claims if he cannot at the same time

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point out that the industry itself expects to pay as other industries would.
We have heard much from many speakers—I am sure we shall hear more during the course of this evening—about the lack of stability and the low morale at present existing in research institutes. We have to recognise that there will be times when difficult decisions have to be made as to what are priorities in research. It is going to cause difficulty. It is the job of research managers to overcome those problems. However, I think we are entitled to say, "Let us have at least a figure which will be the final funding level for research in whatever sector and thereafter the funding will be protected".
This is the requirement which I go back to and which was mentioned at the time of the Rothschild Report. If we continue to keep research in some degree of turmoil, the research results will suffer. That is most certainly the case today; it is certainly the case in the Agricultural and Food Research Council; and I have no doubt that it is the case in the other research councils as well.
4.50 p.m.
Lord Todd: My Lords, I should like first of all to echo earlier speakers in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, not only for bringing before us the subject of the research councils but for presenting the general problems to us in such an admirable way. I could touch on a great many points that he made but it is quite unnecessary after his exposition. I was particularly pleased that the noble Lord should bring this matter forward. The research councils are a vital component of the provision that we make in this country for promoting research. Especially is that true of university research, which is the area with which I personally have been most concerned in my career. They do that by being a part of what is called the dual support system—a system which has been described to us already this afternoon by the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield.
That system was for long the envy of scientists in most countries. It depended on the University Grants Committee making, in the course of setting the general grant for individual universities, provision for each university to maintain an adequate research base—that is to say, to fund properly equipped laboratories and other facilities. The research councils then came in by providing from the Science Vote money necessary to provide the extra expenditure called for particularly good forward-looking projects, described in the official literature as researches of "timeliness and promise".
I said that that system was the envy of scientists in many countries, but I am afraid that it is not working very well today and it has not indeed been working well for some years. It is almost exactly five years ago that in a presidential address to the Royal Society I drew attention to this very problem that we are talking about today; but nothing much has been done during those five years. Accordingly, the problems which were clear enough then are, if anything, clearer today and more urgent.
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There is not much point in our bemoaning the alleged weakness of this country in technological innovation if we are not prepared to tackle seriously the problem of funding the research on which technological innovation today almost invariably depends. Our deficiencies in financial support for research were set out in general terms today by the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, and in one particular instance, the case of the Medical Research Council, they were set out admirably and in detail by the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe.
I could say, as we all could, "Let us have more money for these councils". That is all very well. It would be very nice, and I hope very much that they will get more money; but I think that I should like to look at some aspects of the system as we have it now to see whether we are doing all that we can. In other words, I should like to ask what has gone wrong with the dual support system. That is a pretty complex question, but I at least think that I can identify three major causes of our troubles. The first two involve consideration of that sacred cow of our university system which goes under the name of academic freedom.
I have mentioned that the Government, through the UGC, always included a sum in the university grant which was to provide the basic requirements for the maintenance of research and scholarship. No precise sum was ever mentioned. It could not be because that would have interfered with academic freedom. One must never tell a university how much of its grant it may spend on anything, so no precise sum was specified. But I think that it was assumed that about 30 per cent. to 35 per cent. of the total grant would be devoted to this purpose.
When the financial winds began to blow cold, as they did first some years ago, I am afraid that some universities at least found it a good deal easier to absorb the cut-backs by raiding this part of the budget rather than other parts of it where they would have the awkward and tiresome business of dealing with people. This of course simply meant increasing pressure on the research councils—and, incidentally, on the charitable foundations which were called upon to make up the deficit. That is the first of my three causes.
The second is related to that. When the Robbins Report on Higher Education was implemented—and that implementation is a matter which, as many of your Lordships know, I opposed at the time—the form of implementation led to the creation of 20 or so new universities, most of which proceeded to follow as closely as possible the traditional pattern of university education which in this country is set largely by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It was accordingly assumed that all of them would be free to pursue what research they wished; that they would all have the basic support necessary through the UGC; and that that could then be topped up by the research councils.
Although I think it was a foolish decision, this might have been all right if money had been unlimited, but money was not unlimited. As we all know, money has become tight recently, and it shows every sign of getting tighter. The difficulty caused by that is going to be just that much greater because of this belief that all

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the universities should be free to develop research as they wish.
The third reason that I have to explain the difficulties of our dual support system concerns the size of the Science Vote from which the research councils are financed. It is to the credit of Government that they have sought—with varying degrees of success, but they have certainly sought—to maintain the value of the science budget in real terms; that is, at a roughly constant level. That, however, has not been enough to prevent very serious hardship. First, we have the combined effect of the two causes that I have mentioned already, but there is a third which is at least equally important. That is the ever-increasing sophistication in equipment for research which has been mentioned by one or two earlier speakers this afternoon. As research advances, so does the sophistication of the equipment needed to carry it out; and this rate of increase is far beyond that of the retail price index.
Let me give your Lordships one little example that I happen to know. About 25 years ago or a little more, I as an organic chemist came across the fact—a new one to me—that in physics a phenomenon had been discovered and was being looked at called nuclear magnetic resonance. I thought that that might be useful to what I was doing in chemistry. I tried to find out about it, and I discovered that there was an instrument—the first instrument of this type—being made commercially in America. I thereupon managed to rake together the money to buy one. I may say that I did not get it from a research council. I obtained it in fact from the Wellcome Trust, but that is neither here nor there. I acquired the money. I cannot remember the exact sum, but I think it was about £12,000, which was quite a lot of money in those days. But I bought this instrument.
Since then nuclear magnetic resonance has become an indispensable tool in chemistry and, as we have heard today, it is now penetrating into medicine. As it has become essential for all the chemical schools to have these instruments, they descend upon the research council for the money. Of course, instruments have been getting steadily more and more sophisticated year by year. Only the other day I was asking my successor in the chemistry department in Cambridge what their new instrument, which they are purchasing at the moment, is going to cost them. He said, "A little over a quarter of a million". With that rate of increase in sophistication, just to keep the money supply to a research council at the level dictated by the Retail Price Index is not going to help a great deal.
These are the kind of reasons that got us into trouble. What are we going to do about it? I should like to look first at research funding, which is met by the university grant and which has been steadily eroded for various reasons, some of which I have just outlined. I have already drawn attention to the vast increase in the number of our universities which occurred in the 'sixties. In all these universities, as in the older ones, the view seems to be held that teaching can be of university standard only if the teachers are engaged in research and that all university teachers, and hence all departments, are capable of first-class research.
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I do not accept either of these views. There are good departments and bad departments, and there are academics who are effective in research and academics who are not. There is, in my view, much scope, and indeed need, for selectivity in research support. Not all departments in all universities should be supported, in my view, as potential centres of excellence in research. I should even consider it possible, under certain circumstances, that a hierarchy might be developed in the university system in which some of the universities devoted themselves essentially to teaching and that research would not be universal in all departments in all universities but would be distributed, perhaps even in a limited number of universities. This is not the first time I have said this, and I do not expect that that view would find a great deal of favour with some of my fellow academics. But sooner or later they have got to face up to this problem. Money is tight, and it may well get tighter.
Let me turn to the other vital component, the research councils, which are financed through the science Vote of the Department of Education and Science. They are being hard hit financially and although individually they differ in the extent of work which is carried out by their own staff in institutes or in units associated with universities, they are, overall, the main source of extra funding for research in universities both through provision for research expenditure and for grants to postgraduate students. I cannot go into detail about all of them, but for various reasons the Medical Research Council seems—if all I hear from my university colleagues is correct—to be peculiarly badly hit and a number of important MRC units in universities widely acclaimed for their work in a variety of branches are in dire straits. I think the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, would confirm that.
As a chemist, my own contacts have been much more with the Science and Engineering Research Council, or, to be more precise, with its earlier manifestations: the Science Research Council and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. I should like to draw attention to some of its problems.
The sorry pass to which the council, the SERC, has come—and through this deficiency the sorry pass to which the country has come—is highlighted by the steady growth in the percentage of first-class, so-called alpha research grant applications which have to be turned down because they simply have not got the money. In my own subject for some time now well over 20 per cent. of such applications have had to be refused out of hand. In this situation, and in the light of the knowledge that large increases in the science Vote are not very likely in the immediate future, I think it is about time that we looked at our priorities. Already the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, has drawn attention to the very large defence research budget. I shall not touch on that. I was looking at the annual review of Government-funded R & D for 1983, which was issued this year by the Cabinet Office. In it I see, on page 26, that out of a total disposable SERC budget of £191.8 million in 1982–83, £49.9 million went to nuclear and particle physics, £38.9 million to astronomy, space and radio, £41.3 million to engineering and £47.3 million to the rest of science. I find this distribution a little bit odd, especially when I remember that the whole of medicine, through the

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Medical Research Council, gets just a little over £100 million a year.
This disproportionate spending, or apparently disproportionate spending, on nuclear and particle physics in particular is not new. As long ago as 1964, if you look at the final report of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, of which I was at the time chairman, you will find that we were very much concerned then with the cost of nuclear and particle physics. Compared with what CERN proposes to do now, it may seem rather humorous, but at that time the great problem was: should we take part in a terrific scheme to produce a 300 GeV machine?
If we take the present situation about expenditure on nuclear physics and the new proposals for CERN, I have no doubt whatever that a very strong case can be made out for going on with them—a very strong and reasonable case for high expenditure to keep in the forefront of nuclear physics. But an equally strong case can be made out for many other branches of science and I would repeat now what I said in 1964. Government should not, and must not, try to control or decide what research is done, but they must surely decide how much they propose to spend on various kinds of research; in other words, they must determine national priorities.
Now, as back in 1964, we have got to ask ourselves, and the Government must ask themselves, whether, assuming that they have no more money available than they have indicated they will give, it is reasonable to devote such a large proportion of it to one particular area of science—an area of science, I believe, which is likely to be of much less immediate value to us as a country—rather than to a number of the other areas of research which are now being starved of resources. My Lords, I believe that in this matter we have got our priorities wrong.
5.10 p.m.
Lord Hooson: My Lords. I step into this debate very gingerly. I am neither an academic nor a scientist and I have no connection with any research council or research institute. My sole justification for taking part in this debate is that I am a politician and it seems to me that it is pointless to have a debate of this type unless one is trying to get across a message to the Government, and the message that is coming across and which should come, in view of the distinguished contributions that we have had to the debate, concerns the danger of a country in our situation cheese-paring about producing what is essentially the seed-corn for future development. Whatever developments we may have in the future, industrially, technologically, medically, agriculturally and so on, will depend largely upon the basic research that is done now. It is a fairly self-evident proposition that a country should spend that proportion of its resources on research that need dictates. When one looks at a country in our position—and we had a pe-eminent industrial position but, technologically, we have fallen steadily behind other countries—it seems to me that the need is obvious.
It clearly emerges from the debate so far that this is not a subject which lends itself to across-the-board economies. When one decides what type of research
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one requires, it seems to me that the across-the-board economy which is so often applied by the research councils is inappropriate.
I want to concentrate my few remarks this evening on one particular aspect of research about which I know a little—that is, agricultural research. Our minds have been directed recently by the famine in Abyssinia to food production and its difficulties in various parts of the world. It so happens that, during the publicity that has been given to the Abyssinian debacle, I learned that we are now producing enough food in this world to feed adequately the 4 billion people who live in it. That is a great development that has taken place over the last two decades.
The reason why we have famine in areas like East Africa, Abyssinia and so on is connected not with the production of food world-wide, but with the difficulties of distribution, and it arises particularly in those areas where they have benefited the least from agricultural research. There are other areas of the world which were very much subject to famine—for example, the Far East. However, as a result of the "green revolution", and so on, their agricultural production has increased enormously and they are therefore able to look after themselves.
I am told that, if one translates world food production overall into the production of reasonable meals, we produce the equivalent of 12 billion reasonable meals per day—enough to provide each person with three reasonable meals. I mention that fact because it seems to me that it stems from a great deal of the agricultural research work that has been done in this country.
I know of one agricultural research station—the Welsh Plant Breeding Station at Aberystwyth—and its particular contribution. I know that, because of the research done there in the early years of this century, in the 1930s and so on, particularly by Sir George Stapleton and the distinguished team which he controlled, that station was able to advance the production of grasses and forage crops probably more than any other station in the world. I have been assured by scientists from Cambridge that Aberystwyth is still regarded as pre-eminent in the world for research on grasses and forage crops.
We know now that the research carried out by Stapleton on the production of improved grasses and the techniques he used have resulted in them being copied in various parts of the world. I mentioned in a previous debate his influence on Australia, New Zealand and on the green revolution in other parts of the world. As a result of research started at that station, there have been produced drought-resistant and disease-resistant grasses which have enabled the world to develop enormously.
From the national point of view, there has been perforce, as with most agricultural research stations, an across-the-board cut which has now resulted in the Aberystwyth station, for example, being reduced to a budget of £3 million per annum, which is not enough to carry out its national research as the essential grass breeding station for this country. Most of our grass grows in the western area but this station serves not only Wales but the western region altogether. Quite apart from that, its research, which has such an influence on the rest of the world, is affected. That is

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one example where I have knowledge of the eventual effect of the across-the-board economy. If this is going on in different areas and in different departments of which I know nothing, its eventual result would tend to suggest that this country and the world will suffer.
Our country has surely made a pre-eminent contribution in basic research to the development of mankind in industry, technology, medicine and agriculture, to give only a few examples. I very much agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Swann, when he said that basically we are concerned in this whole matter with the question of attitude. A confident country that is developing has confidence in its research and it goes ahead with its research programmes in confidence, although some of its research will inevitably prove to be barren. On the other hand, a confident country also goes ahead with its research programme in the knowledge and confidence that it will benefit from it eventually. It appears to me that basically what is wrong is our attitude towards research, which affects us in so many ways.
I said at the commencement of my remarks that I was speaking in this debate because I am a politician. I am fully aware of the fact that one cannot in a democracy get people very excited about the government curtailing scientific research because few of the populace appreciate its importance for their future and their children's future. But we in this House do appreciate that, and that is surely the message that we want to get across to the Government.
5.18 p.m.
The Earl of Cranbrook: My Lords, after having been brought so refreshingly home to our political base by the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, perhaps I should apologise to your Lordships for reverting once again to a scientific intervention. I speak as a member of the Natural Environment Research Council and not, I must emphasise, from the elevated position of chairmanship, as have two noble Earls who have spoken previously from this side of the House. I do not in any way speak for the Natural Environment Research Council, which has not put forward to me any particular points that it wishes to be made. I speak from my personal experience.
As the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, mentioned in his introductory remarks, this particular research council, for historical reasons, consists (to use the noble Lord's term) of a somewhat haphazard mix of institutes: the BGS (the geological survey) is very large; the Institute of Virology is very small. Nonetheless, it has a coherence and a cohesion. However much the leader writer of Nature may thunder, as he did recently, I remain convinced that there must always be in the national interest a strong and vigorous research council devoted to the science of the natural environment.
I draw your Lordships' attention to a small selection of subjects of vital national importance that fall into the area of the NERC responsibility. First, we are an island, or islands; our coastal and shelf seas receive run-off from one of the world's major industrial centres. In national terms it is vital for us to be informed of the robustness of this system, its capacity to absorb inevitable amounts of pollution, and the stability and productivity of the biotic elements within it.
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We must understand the interlinkages of the living marine systems with the non-living processes, such as sedimentation. We must understand the roles of the oceans in the cycling of gaseous pollutants—sulphur dioxide, the nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide. Oceanic processes are involved in releasing these to the atmosphere and, perhaps, in the case of carbon dioxide, in providing an ultimate sink system for the permanent fixation of this potential pollutant. Again, we must pay attention and have regard to the potential of the sea as a disposal site. This is a controversial issue, but if we accept that on land pre-emptive neutralising disposal is permissible, why, prima facie, should it not also be excusable and useful at sea?
Those are just some examples of the areas of research of the Natural Environment Research Council in which I see a vital national and international need. But this afternoon we are talking primarily about the resources that are available to our research councils, and attention has been concentrated on material resources rather than on intellectual resources, and it is with these that I shall deal.
As has been mentioned sufficiently often this afternoon, the Department of Education and Science allocation—the so-called science Vote—has remained more or less stable. Some noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, and the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, have drawn attention to a number of problems, including one which I myself have mentioned on a previous occasion: the problem of pay awards which breach cash limits. After cash limits have been set, pay awards are permitted by the Government outside the control of research councils that make a nonsense of the cash limits.
Mention has also been made of the excess of alpha grade research applications that cannot be funded. I have satisfied myself in this quarter that in the Natural Environment Research Council this is not because there has been a drift in the assessment of applications. It is not that the alpha has been enlarged; it is genuinely that the resource has become limited in relation to the number of applications.
However, as again has been emphasised often enough this afternoon, it is in the area of commissioned research that the problems are greatest. From my experience in NERC, I doubt whether we can any longer accept that the system is working as it was intended to work. At meetings of the council I have heard the head of an institute describe the present system as "chaotic". Institute directors find that frequently the proportion of their funding which is due to come from Government commissions is not known to them until partway through, half-way through or even later through the financial planning year. It is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to operate in a balanced fashion if funding is as unpredictable as that.
On the other side of the coin, I have heard in council a department representative describe the system as a "morass". So I am forced to ask—and I should be grateful if my noble friend could take note of this in his reply: is it made clear to departmental heads exactly what are the mechanics by which they must go about commissioning research from the research councils? What arrangements are made at departmental level to ensure that the National Environment Research

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Council Institute directors are used as a point of first contact when it is decided to commission research in relevant fields?
A particularly cogent example that is before us all at the minute is the problem of acid precipitation. At a time when NERC scientists had identified this as a priority for scientific research, and at a time when on a wider scale the whole of the environmental movement in this country and elsewhere in Europe saw it as a pressing international, political and environmental problem, Government funding was initially low; it sunk to a negligible level; and then suddenly there was an enormous turnabout. It is now a band-wagon to be jumped upon, and one has to ask why. Where is the long-term planning for Government research? Is this a political panic? Has it suddenly sunk in on someone that this is an issue? In which case, is this an uninformed response to some rather poorly evaluated stimulus? Did someone somewhere see a TV programme and think, "My goodness, we must do something about it"?
In the NERC, as has been made clear by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, and doubtless in the other research councils, the response of institute directors to declining commissioned income has been to look for it outside Government funding. I am surprised that, speaking from his position, the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, did not refer to this as a quadruped rather than as a table. But NERC has set up its own internal marketing agency and is actively devoting considerable resources to seeking commissions outside its normal field of support. It has had some very successful commissions abroad. It has found work in Indonesia and, like so many other research organisations, it sees the growth and outward-turning of China as an area of great potential support. This is stimulating for NERC scientists. It is good work; it is competently done; it earns foreign currency for the nation.
But I seriously question whether or not it is the proper function of a national research council to be out there in the market. From where I sit in the NERC and from outside it I very seriously doubt whether our national research institutes should primarily be concerned with doing research which is in our own national priorities or whether they should be looking outside for it. Is it right that these research institutes should be competing with other agencies in the private sector?
Moreover, I seriously wonder whether it is right that the senior scientists and directors of NERC institutes should be devoting their time, or requiring other people to devote time, to the preparation of competitive bids which inevitably have only a limited expectation of success but which, nonetheless, in order to be competitive, must be properly and carefully prepared. It is an expensive occupation. Is it right that our national research institutes should be in this field competing with the private sector?
Personally, I believe that the principal customer for our research councils in the contractor-customer system should be the Government through their departments, local government and Government agencies. In the case of the NERC, the Nature Conservancy Council springs to mind. This will
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require closer co-operation than at present appears to exist both from my own evidence and from the evidence produced, in the case of AFRC, by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne. There must be the capacity to review the problems before they are right in our laps and to plan and commission research on a proper timescale. Long-term exchanges must be the forerunners of the actual commission itself. There must be an atmosphere of confidence between the principal and the agent.
Like other institutes, as the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, suspected, the NERC has been applying across-the-board economies. The NERC has been slowly shedding staff by a policy of only partial replacement through natural wastage. If needs be, I have no doubt that the NERC can, and will, undertake more radical reforms in order to adapt to current financial climates as they are seen. But if the Government seek a leaner, fitter NERC, I believe that the Government must themselves review their procedures for commissioning research to provide the stability and the confidence that will be needed. Only if this confidence exists will the research councils attract the good scientists and let these scientists do good science and not get bogged down in financial and managerial problems which seem at the minute to occupy so much time.
I come to the final question. Let us go back to the beginning and ask just what happened to the good intentions of the Rothschild arrangement? What happened to the proportion of commissioned research which was to be devoted to strategic elements? What happened even to the 10 per cent. over FEC—full economic costs—which were supposed to be there in commissions?
5.31 p.m.
Lord Adrian: My Lords, I speak as a university scientist, and perhaps I should add that I have at the moment no formal connection with any of the research councils and so I have to speak from a general point of view without any very particular knowledge of the kind that we have had already from noble Lords. May I add my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, for bringing this debate to the House this afternoon, and say that I agreed almost entirely with everything he said. I have also to apologise to the House as I, too, have an engagement which I have not been able to avoid, and I am afraid that I shall not be able to stay to the end of this important debate.
The plight of the research councils, indeed the plight of basic science in this country, has become a national issue. The Royal Society, the Science Policy Unit at Sussex University, reference to which we have already heard, television programmes, The Times Higher Educational Supplement, all in their own ways are telling the same story—that we can no longer claim to be holding our own among the leading scientific countries of the world. One has to ask why this should be so. Certainly the curtailment of expansion and now the actual contraction of funds available for the basic science enterprise must have played a part.
I do not now want to question the size of the science Vote, but rather to ask whether we are getting value for the money that we spend. I find it inconceivable that if we ordered matters aright, we should be unable to

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have some world-class science for a spend of close on £1,000 million, and nor do I claim that we have yet reached that sorry state. Indeed, there are notable recent successes to our credit. But I am concerned that the present ways of organising basic science in this country and strategic research create a danger of money being less and less efficiently spent.
We can still praise, I am glad to say, the basic science that the research councils do, but nevertheless I think we can ask—at least ask—whether some of their mechanisms for doing it are ideal. Additionally, I am persuaded that the Government avoid a major responsibility by failing to provide strategies and policies designed for this particular period of contraction with an understanding of the problems faced by the research councils and the universities—policies which I believe must have as a clear aim maintaining the quality of the scientific endeavour of this country.
The Government's apparent unconcern may be either on principle or because there are few in Government who have first-hand knowledge of how science works in this country. But the effect of this "vacuum at the centre", already noted three years ago by your Lordships' Committee on Science and Technology, adds greatly to the adverse effects of purely financial cuts.
For the truth is that the research councils and the universities, as has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Todd, have not been any more exempt from the syndicalism of post-war years than have the nationalised industries or the Government services itself. I do not think we can reasonably expect them to be any better at dealing with necessary contraction.
Multi-layered committee structure, management problems, centralised wage bargaining, unionisation of the work force and increased liabilities for redundancy and retirement are just as much problems for the research councils and often make it difficult to reallocate their resources in a way best calculated to preserve the quality of scientific output.
In the last year, as the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, has told us, we have seen the Medical Research Council cut expenditure on consumable supplies, chemicals, radio-isotopes and such like necessities, so hard that some work actually had to stop, and now, so that it can begin again, it has had to plan large reductions in support of research at universities and support for training fellowships. These damaging plans had arisen because the council's disposable income was to have fallen by £4 million in 1984–85.
Work at MRC institutes had already been damaged—and now there were to be further reductions in university work. These proposed reductions had partly been caused by money directed to the AFRC for its reorganisation. In order to reduce the AFRC, itself one of the smaller research councils, the MRC, SERC and indirectly the universities were to have borne a heavy cost. One shudders to think of the knock-on effect on universities if, as may well become necessary, the SERC or the MRC themselves have to be restructured.
Yesterday's announcement from the DES seems to go some way to recognise these dangers, but the science community has some excuse for feeling that it
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is living in a world of hasty and ad hoc expedients, imposed by a Government who seem only at the eleventh hour to grasp the nature and consequences of their acts. We must be thankful, and indeed are thankful, for the extra money for the research councils which has just been announced—and it is reassuring to hear that it will go towards restructuring and towards university work—but I have to say that already students at Cambridge, and I believe elsewhere, are today demonstrating about the new charges on their parents which will provide this new money.
If we are to see, as I fear we shall, more students forced into debt by the inability or even the unwillingness of their parents to pay, it will not comfort us much at the university to think that their hardship is supporting the research councils. If this charge were in turn to discourage some from going to university to read sciences, the decline in our science base would be reinforced.
It is interesting, my Lords, to look at your Select Committee's Report on Science and Government and to read the following comment from its conclusion:
"From one Government to the next adjustments of the machinery to fit the people available makes obvious sense. The present Government has chosen to do without a Minister for Science and Technology, a Chief Scientific Adviser (in name) or a Council on Science and Technology. But many of the functions which the Committee have identified as necessary are in fact being carried out by one means or another".
Three years on the consequences of our Government's choice are plain to see and I believe that your Lordships' committee, of which I had the honour to be a member, would not today be so willing to believe that one means or another was good enough.
5.39 p.m.
Baroness White: My Lords, like all the rest of us, I, too, am indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, not for the first time, for having taken an inititative in bringing this extremely important matter before your Lordships' House. I am also grateful to the two chairmen of the Medical Research Council and the Agricultural and Food Research Council respectively for two most impressive speeches. I noticed that the noble Earl, Lord Swinton, who is to reply to the debate, was listening with serious attention to those speeches, as well he might. He could hardly have had a better exposition of the problems which face those responsible for the research effort in this country than was contained in the contributions from the two noble Earls I have mentioned.
Although the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, made a reference to Sir Keith Joseph's announcement last week, which was picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, just now, I have been surprised that otherwise little attention has been paid to this initiative, because from a political point of view it really is a most remarkable exercise. Sir Keith has publicly hypothecated, for the benefit of the research Vote, the money to be drawn from better-off parents of students in higher education; and this is, to say the least of it, an unusual political gambit. It is a courageous one, as the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, indicated. Is it perhaps the boldness of despair? This is not the occasion to discuss the equity of imposing such charges on the families of students already committed to university courses, though this factor will undoubtedly add to Sir Keith's

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political problems with some of the supporters of his own party. But one cannot help asking oneself what happens to the science Vote next year, or the year after, if the politics go wrong, which is not entirely inconceivable. However, that is a matter for the future.
The significance of the exercise, however, seems to me to be that it illustrates the recognition in the Department of Education and Science that Britain is slipping badly in the international league table of scientific and technological research and development, so that even unorthodox measures have now become politically admissible. The immediate question before us surely must be, therefore: will Sir Keith's initiative work? Is it too little? Is the sum of £24 million to be added to the science Vote and the UGC equipment grant next year a mere bagatelle? I think it was intended to be more than that.
As a stopgap for the year 1985–86, to which the announcement referred, the answer must be that it will be a significant but temporary alleviation of the otherwise nearly intolerable pressure on the research councils' budgets. In particular, I had understood that the £6 million to be set aside primarily for restructuring by the AFRC, and to a lesser degree for the other research councils, would be likely to remove the threat of a special levy on the Medical Research Council and the Science and Engineering Research Council, though I was interested to observe that the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, is not as yet convinced of that. I had understood that that was the intention. It certainly signals the fact that the DES accepts that restructuring can be not only painful but costly, as anyone concerned with implementing the corporate plan of the AFRC is by now acutely aware.
So this bonus announced last week is necessary and welcome as far as it goes. So also is the £8 million to be used partly to top up funds to cover the "alpha quality" applications for research grants which SERC in particular, but also the other research councils, have recently been obliged to turn down to a most disturbing degree. One has only to read the relevant passages in the SERC and the MRC annual reports to grasp the need to spend more on encouraging our potentially best scientific brains. The rest of the money announced by Sir Keith as a bonus will go to funding other urgent priorities. The £10 million to be allocated to the UGC for additional equipment grant is likely, so we are told on the grapevine, to be distributed very selectively indeed. We can all, I think, guess at some of the favourite sons who will be receiving the bulk of that money. Again so far as it goes it will no doubt be a helpful supplement, but I am afraid that it will leave a great many university institutions still bereft of necessary funds for updating equipment or for securing equipment without which they cannot adequately carry on the research in prospect.
This announcement of extra money for the research vote has been designated by the top people in the Research Councils—I quote some of the phrases that I have heard them use in the past few days as providing—"a breathing space", "a stay of execution", "a brief respite"; a brief respite, my Lords, before the slow erosion of British scientific endeavour starts all over again. This was the warning that some of us received at a meeting held in your Lordships' House last evening.
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Why the pessimism? Because some of the basic factors in our slow but persistent decline over the last few years remain with us. Reference has been made to them by several noble Lords during the course of this debate. The realisation of the prognosis by Sir David Phillips, the chairman of the Advisory Board of the Research Councils, that, unless there is a commitment by Government to at least a steady state of funding in real terms, the erosion which we have been suffering over the last few years will continue, means that, in the next decade, public support for scientific research and development in this country could be reduced by up to 25 per cent.
Now, that is a very striking and shocking figure. This estimate was made before the recent announcement of the extra £24 million for 1985–86 but, as has been pointed out, it simply postpones that estimated reduction by a couple of years at best. The cumulative effect year by year of persistent under-funding of costs, of allowing only 3 per cent. for salaries and pension indexing, when even the Chancellor of the Exchequer admits to an inflation rate of between 4 and 5 per cent., repeated regularly year by year, can undermine a very significant proportion of our national research effort. This has recently been coupled with a decline in the value of sterling which affects a field where some of the action is necessarily international. There is indeed a danger that Britain will be regarded more and more as an unwelcome partner in international co-operative efforts because we can appear keener on cost-cutting than on exploiting the new frontiers of knowledge. This can be extremely serious in certain endeavours where the very scale of the work demands an international rather than a national effort.
It is now fashionable to quote the words of the noble Earl, Lord Stockton, who we are delighted to have with us on this occasion, because his remarks are indeed so apposite. In his much admired speech last week he surely put his finger on the root cause of many of our current ills—the failure of the present Administration to recognise the essential difference between recurrent and capital expenditure, between spending and investment.
This is what bedevils much of our science research policy. Cost effectiveness, corporate plans and a degree of selectivity are necessary and desirable, but only against the acceptance that a considerable proportion of research, including especially basic and strategic research, as opposed to day-to-day problem solving, is investment and should be treated as such. The Government are selling off our capital assets without adequate re-investment in our physical infrastructure. Even the CBI appears to have noticed that. If the Government continue to regard our intellectual infrastructure in scientific and technological research and development as annual expenditure, which can regularly be eroded, then the politically courageous manoeuvre of the Secretary of State for Education and Science will provide only the very briefest respite. In three years' time we shall be, in real terms, back where we were.
Other noble Lords have mentioned the report of the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University, which pinpointed some of the hazards which we face as a nation. The recent OECD report on Science and Technology Indicators—indicators of the national

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resources devoted to research and development—suggests that Britain has now dropped to the bottom of the list of major R & D countries within the OECD area. If one takes other bases of calculation by proportion of GNP devoted to research and development or by expenditure per head of population, we are markedly insecure in relation to our competitors.
While we welcome Sir Keith's brave gesture, the sooner the Chancellor of the Exchequer takes the road to Damascus the better. If he does not, our medium and long-term outlook is bleak. As has been suggested in particular by my noble friend Lord Gregson, we shall be back in the position where some of our ablest people will be tempted to look elsewhere and where great multinational companies, which regulate so large a proportion of the world's industrial and technological research, will regard Britain as an assembly area and not as a main source of exciting initiatives and fruitful ideas.
However, we ought not to despair. We still have a good and very highly regarded scientific community. We need not drop behind, still less sink down, if we make up our minds to use our resources intelligently and are not beguiled by the prospect of pie-in-the-sky tax cuts, so evident in the Chancellor's statement last week.
I have taken this line because I feel passionately that those who are wrestling with these problems of national research and development deserve the support of interested lay persons like myself who see this as a real threat to the long-term future of our nation. That is why it is fair to put this point of view to Her Majesty's Government, who are, after all, responsible as the guardians and trustees of our future prosperity and the quality of our society and our economy. Unless we get this right, the various details which have been touched on in this debate, important as they are, do not really matter all that much.
There are one or two relatively minor points, of which the Minister has received notice, that I want to touch upon simply because I have a particular personal interest in matters concerned especially with the natural environment. I entirely support what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, about the aspirations of the Welsh Plant Breeding Station—with which the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, I am quite sure, is by now adequately familiar—but I am also concerned with the work of certain bodies for which continuity is of the essence. One cannot study long-term trends in the natural environment unless one has available an adequate continuum of data. Such work is not as exciting as high technology, and is perhaps not economically so important, but it is an essential basic tool for the natural scientist.
In this I am thinking of work such as that carried out by the Geological Survey and the Soil Survey (both of which have their current apprehensions) and also the adequate monitoring of certain natural conditions. Such areas are tempting to those seeking inconspicuous economies. But as the history of acid rain (as it is popularly called) shows, such economies can be at a much larger ultimate cost.
Finally, there is another point of minor interest in the total picture, but important for some of us. I should like to know from the Minister what has happened to
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the fair promises given last July in the debate on the report on the relationship between agriculture and environmental research, presented to the House by the noble Lord, Lord Adrian. In particular what coordination has been achieved, not only between DoE and MAFF with the Natural Environment Research Council and the Agricultural and Food Research Council and their respective satellites, but also with the stated intention to bring in the Economic and Social Research Council? I believe that there has recently been a meeting which may have had some fruitful results.
Time is getting on and I shall not pursue any of the other matters which might well have been raised in this debate, but I reiterate our considerable gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, for having initiated a discussion which must be impressive by any standards.
5.55 p.m.
The Earl of Halsbury: My Lords, the noble Baroness has taken the words out of my mouth. I, too, express my gratitude to my noble friend Lord Sherfield, but, as the time is late, like her I will not dwell on its expression.
Of the 55 years that have elapsed since I attained my majority, 24 have been spent serving on the Science Research Council and the Medical Research Council, and a further 12 as chairman of the Meteorological Committee. Two-thirds of my adult life has been concerned with the subject we are debating this afternoon. In the course of that time I have developed some strong opinions of my own on certain aspects of it. My opinions are not necessarily those of others and I do not expect everybody to agree with me. I can only state what I believe myself, as I did to Mr. Reginald Maudling 20 years ago.
At that time a new government had come to power and was wrestling with the recommendations of the Trend Committee and with the problems that arose out of setting up Mintech—the Ministry of Technology. At the same time, the Conservatives were then in opposition but they put on their thinking caps and were preparing to think what their attitude to all these vexed questions was. Mr. Reginald Maudling convened a colloquium of interested parties, to which I was invited and to which I spoke. After it he asked me whether I would be good enough to put my views in writing and send them to him.
This I did. I told him that the impossible structure of DSIR was owing to its trying to run all the government research laboratories, which were the proper responsibility of government, together with an industrial university axis, as it were. The trouble with the Ministry of Technology was that after shedding the university side it was trying to operate on an industrial and defence axis. In my view, no fewer than three big departments at the apices of a triangle could correctly represent what needed doing—the Department of Education, which became the Department of Education and Science, Defence and Industry, with the 40 industrial research associations that it had inherited from the old DSIR.
Inside that triangle I suggested that there should be a system of advisory councils doing what my noble friend Lord Todd has emphasised must be done,

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settling priorities as between one demandant and another. The different client states of each Ministry would all make their own demands and the Minister had to decide what priorities should be assigned to each of them. Outside that lies a field for executive action, if necessary through executive councils, one of which would be a research council, of which a number were brought into being. I emphasised that the characteristics of a research council were that it should be executive, making its own decisions within the limits of the budget allowed it by its Minister, but it must be regarded as non-initiatory: it would not be there to start projects; it would be there to receive and to respond to demands for research funds primarily from universities. Its function would be to be selective, to pick for support those research projects of special timeliness and promise. There was a very real public relations problem in adjusting the relative demands of big science and little science—big science being nuclear physics and astronomy and little science being the others.
In order to establish that justice was being done the peer assessment of projects put forward was strictly judicial. The research councils ought not to embroil themselves in running research stations, possibly in competition with work going on in the universities. After grappling with the grouping of all the rest of the Government establishments under one of these three headings, there was still quite a substantial number of them out on a limb. I could not see any natural collective grouping under which one could compose them. I saw absolutely no reason—and here I quarrelled with the established doctrine entirely—why each should not be the responsibility of one relevant Ministry. To illustrate my point—and I must talk in terms of the ministerial structure of the time when I was giving this advice—let the Road Research Laboratory be the responsibility of the Ministry of Transport; let the Building Research Board be the responsibility of the Ministry of Housing.
It was always thought that research was something so misunderstood by arts graduates that they could not possibly be entrusted, within the framework of the Civil Service, with responsibility for a research laboratory. I challenged this. I said, "This is nonsense! If you give a man a responsibility to discharge, he will, as a responsible person, discharge it to the best of his ability. He is not required to do research if he is responsible for it; he is merely responsible for seeing that he gets it done. He can have a research council, he can have an advisory council, to keep him on the straight and narrow path. They can help him find a good director for his laboratory and so on; but, for the rest, I see no reason to suppose that it is necessary to group these all under one Ministry and there is no indicated Ministry to do it under."
I further added the rider that the two cultures must not be kept so apart that they are not allowed to collaborate and to meet one another. They will always remain apart. The best thing to do is to put them together into one organisation and let each understand that the other is not, as Lady Caroline Lamb said of Byron, "mad, bad and dangerous to know".
The recommendations that I made to Mr. Maudling at that time in fact very largely came to
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pass—although whether or not as a result of my making them I have not the slightest idea. But, at a due point in time, the Department of the Environment came into existence and my triangle became a square with four Ministries, one at each of the four corners, but with the same internal structure as I had advocated from the start. A relevant National Environment Research Council was set up.
So I felt that things were going very well—it was exactly what I wanted to see—when a new principle was enunciated, cutting right across the whole thing. That was the customer-contractor principle, as expounded by the noble Lord, Lord Rothschild. This seemed to me entirely to cut across the Halsbury principle of straight-line responsibility from Ministry through to research laboratory. I was very much against it from the outset. Its first casualty was the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, which had been a protégé of mine for many years and whose solvency I had successfully ensured by making it an industrial research association. It simply became insolvent while the DTI was wondering what to do about it. It just had to fold up—no money. If it had been a company limited by guarantee, like so many of these things, I should have gone to prison for running a business knowing it to be insolvent.
So far as the Medical Research Council was concerned, apart from going through the motions of pretending that we were adopting the customer-contractor principle, it was a dead letter from the word "go". And nothing is heard of it now. Its latest casualty is the Geological Survey—and I am sorry that the noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook, is not here to listen to what I am going to say, but I am sure that he will read it in Hansard tomorrow. This I am very interested in because it involves another old protégé of mine. When I was on the DSIR advisory council, it had much too much work to do to carry out all its supervisory responsibilities in council, so it deputed them to one of its members. I was told off to be a visitor to the Geological Museum, with the result that I paid regular annual visits to Sir William Pugh, then the director—and I am talking of back in the 1950s, a long time ago. It was very convenient because I was also the chairman of the advisory council for the Science Museum next door; so that, whenever I visited one on business, I visited the other for fun as well. I got to know that Geological Museum very well. Of course, it has now been transferred out of the ambit of NERC and has been telescoped with the National History Museum on terms that nobody quite knows. The structure of the future joint organisation has not been worked out; and it is not good for morale for people to be there not knowing exactly what is going to happen to them.
What went wrong with the Geological Survey as opposed to its museum, its interface with the public which had been taken away from it? It reached the point where 75 per cent. of its funds were going on commissioned research. That was far beyond any principle that the Rothschild Report indicated and it is a very dangerous situation to be dependent for 75 per cent. of your work on commissioned research. This was reflected in the staff employed. When the system started in 1965, they were employing 380, I believe. By 1979 they were up to 1,150, of whom three-

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quarters were on commissioned research. And then the blow fell. The NERC decided that it wanted to spend less on geology and more on biology—although, for heaven's sake, there are three other research councils concerned with biology. The ARC is concerned with biology; the MRC is concerned with biology; the SERC is concerned with biology, and so is the NERC. Biology was not really being badly under-represented in this sense.
Then the whole system collided with the most disastrous mistake that the research councils had inherited from the soft hand of the early 1970s. This was the soft, wet period in our history when a most unwise understanding was come to between the research councils, and the scientific Civil Service generally, and the trade unions by which there would be early tenure establishment of employees of the research councils. I think it is absolutely wrong to take a young research assistant and give him tenure for life in some particular job which you have got to hold open for him for ever. Tenure should mark a commitment by both sides, employer and employee, to be dedicated to one another. Tenure in the universities is by committed academics, to ensure their academic freedom for all time.
What happens with a research council whose numbers have increased during a growth period from 380 to 1,150? What happens when it gets the treble incidence of this unwise arrrangement—which the Treasury should never have allowed it to make—with the trade unions about tenure of establishment; a reduction in Government purchasing power, leading to cuts in research budgets generally; and the NERC decision to spend less on geology and more on biology?
I can tell you what has happened. They have just managed to knock down staff numbers to 920 established staff, whom they cannot get rid of except on ruinous terms. The average salary of a geologist in the office is £12,000 a year; but if you want to have a geologist in the field you have got to add another £6,000 a year for his residential expenses, his travelling expenses and any instrumentation that he wants, and so on. The only way that the Geological Survey can be solvent at all is to withdraw all the geologists it possesses from the one place in the world which furnishes their raison d'être and put them into offices in London instead of out in the field in Scotland—great areas of which are marked "not surveyed in detail", and have been so marked on the popular geological maps that one buys.
This really is an absolute tragedy. I am reminded, in the context of management of research councils and so on, of a very popular sketch in one of Dick Emery's ever-popular reviews. It is of an overgrown idiot who is engaged on some fairly simple but, it is hoped, remunerative operation with his father. He has just one simple thing to do and he always manages to misundertand it and do the exact opposite. As he and his father survey the havoc that he has wrought, he looks up with a bright smile and says, "Dad, I think I've got it wrong again". That is exactly how we have been handling our research councils for all this time. councils for all this time.
What is to be done about it? I do not know, but I know what I would do. I would take the Geological Survey and the Ordnance Survey and put them
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together as one organisation, out of the scope of the National Environment Research Council, and make them the departmental responsibility of the Department of the Environment. That is what they ought to be, and if you have no split responsibility—there was a whole consortium of Ministries supporting this and then they withdrew their concerted support—make it a straight line responsibility of one Minister and you will get some sense out of the system. But as things now stand, I give it up!
Lord Shackleton: My Lords, before the noble Earl sits down, may I just point out that in fact the Ordnance Survey is under the Department of the Environment, and they are not making a very good job of it?
The Earl of Halsbury: My Lords, the sooner somebody kicks the Permanent Secretary and makes him make a good job of it, the better. That is what "line responsibility" means.
6.10 p.m.
The Earl of Bessborough: My Lords, I am sorry the noble Earl has not gone on longer because he has entertained us more than any other speaker this afternoon and this evening, and he has also spoken very wisely as well. Like all previous speakers, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, for having called attention to the research councils and their resources. I have been involved, not as long as the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, but for some 20 years since I was Parliamentary Secretary to my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor, when he was Lord President of the Council and Minister for Science, and later as Under-Secretary of State for Science and spokesman on these subjects, both science and technology, in opposition.
As I think I have said on more than one occasion—the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, reminded me of this only the other day, and I certainly said it when we were drawing up our report on Science and Government under his admirable chairmanship—I have always thought that the arrangement whereby a Minister for Science (who then happened to be the Lord President of the Council) was responsible for both basic and applied research worked very well. The Minister then had a relatively small office of some 60 people—it was not, I would emphasise, a department or a Ministry—in Richmond Terrace, responsible for following the work and answering in Parliament for the research councils, and with close relations with the noble Lord, Lord Todd, as chairman of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, who also made some very wise remarks this afternoon. We had close relations with him, and also with the DSIR, including the industrial research associations, as well as the Government research establishments, and, of course, with the Atomic Energy Authority itself, of which the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, was then chairman.
We might conceivably go back to that sort of arrangement, or we could, as was recommended in the report on Science and Government, at least have a Cabinet Minister, a Secretary of State in the Cabinet, speaking for both science and technology. The noble

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Lord, Lord Adrian, quoted the relevant passage, and I will not repeat it.
The noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, and I have worked together for many years with different hats on, before, during and since the second world war; and there is no one in your Lordships' House who has a higher opinion of his remarkable qualities and ability than your humble servant. During one period, which I should like to mention this evening, when we worked together in West Africa, we both served the grandfather of my noble friend Lord Swinton, whom I am very glad is to reply to this highly important debate. I know how much his grandfather, looking down on us from on high, must appreciate the fact that he is sitting on our Front Bench.
It has always seemed to me extraordinarily difficult to decide what proportion of Government funding should go into basic and what proportion should go into applied research and development. During most of the period in which I have been interested in this subject—and indeed I wrote a book about it, commissioned by the Clarendon Press, covering, inter alia, the complex problems of priorities—I have worried about this. At that time we in Britain seemed to put a much higher percentage of our GNP into basic and purely curiosity-orientated research than a country such as Japan, which spent only a very small proportion of its national income on basic research and put most of its funds into application and development, with considerable commercial success, as we all know, all over the world.
In saying this, I am certainly not advocating any reduction in the expenditure of our five research councils; and indeed with many of your Lordships, I was particularly gratified to learn last night, at a meeting with Sir David Phillips, the chairman of the Advisory Board of the Research Councils, and Professor John Kingman, the chairman of the Science and Engineering Research Council, that the work of the councils was now about 60 per cent. applied and only 40 per cent. basic. That seems to me to be a trend in the right direction. I recognise, of course, that the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals has admitted that the cuts in university funding in recent years have fallen more heavily on research than on teaching, and that the effect on research is apparent in a reduction in departmental and laboratory expenditure by universities from their recurrent income over the three years 1979 to 1982.
It is clearly for this reason, among others, that, as I see it, the Government have encouraged the shift of this year's higher education intake into the public sector, and I am glad to see that the funding of the research councils from the science budget has increased quite considerably, as has already been indicated, over the past four years. I see, for example, that the budget for the Agricultural and Food Research Council has gone up from £29.5 million in 1979–80 to £46.5 million this year; that the budget of the Economic and Social Research Council has gone up from £16·8 million to £22 million; that the budget for the Medical Research Council of £57·2 million has virtually doubled to £117·2 million, and that, adding in another two or three million pounds from the Department of Health and Social Security, this then
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goes up to the figure which was given by the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, of £120 million. Then, the Natural Environment Research Council has gone up from £36·6 million to £65·9 million; and the SERC, as I say, from £175 million to £278 million, an increase of over £100 million.
Even taking into account inflation and the more expensive and sophisticated equipment mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Todd, these increases are not wholly insignificant. I am glad to learn, too, that there are thése contributions made direct from departments—not only from the Department of Health and Social Security but also to other research sectors from other appropriate departments. Only last week it was announced the funds would be made available for science and research additional to those anticipated for 1985–86; that for universities the UGC would decide on the distribution of an additional £10 million a year to modernise laboratories and equipment, this being an immediate, if only interim, response to the UGC's advice that the equipment grant should immediately be increased to the level indicated by the equipment grant model.
I also note that the Advisory Board of the Research Councils will advise the Secretary of State for Education and Science on the allocation of £14 million, of which £6 million will go on restructuring (as I think has been mentioned) in order to allow for more cost-effective use of resources in the future. Moreover, the capacity for scientific research in universities has been expressly assisted by the Government's £4 million "new blood" scheme, which has funded 200 posts in the natural sciences and technology.
Whatever other noble Lords may say—indeed, whatever the noble Baroness may say, who, as usual, made a most interesting, useful and slightly controversial contribution—or whatever was said on the BBC 2 "Horizon" programme, which I watched attentively, these additional funds are significant. I see that both the UGC and the Advisory Board of the Research Councils have agreed that better value for money could be obtained from research support services. I see also that the Rayner-style committee reported in September 1983 that savings could certainly be made in stores, purchasing, estate management, workshops and library services, with a total saving of £3.3 million a year, and that a once-and-for-all £5.3 million could also be realised.
I know, too, that the UGC is seeking to be more selective in the allocation of research resources and is considering ways of improving targeting and control. In that connection, noble Lords should look at the ABRC/UGC joint report of 1982.
With these figures in mind, I must admit that I felt I could safely support the Government and my noble friend on the Front Bench in their present policies concerning research and higher education. However, I should be glad to have my noble friend's comments on a paper which I received on Monday from the Natural Environment Research Council—not from my noble friend Lord Cranbrook but from the secretary of the council—in which they recognise that, although the Government have sought to protect the real value of the science budget, reflation has not kept pace with the increase in the cost of our sciences.

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Although the NERC told me that every effort would be made to increase value for money—my noble friend Lord Cranbrook more or less indicated this—the NERC believe it to be most unlikely that the level of scientific output can be maintained and consider that the council will have to withdraw from important areas of work, including many of commercial and international significance. The support of training and research in universities and polytechnics will have to become much more selective. I should be grateful for my noble friend's comments—as, no doubt, would my noble friend Lord Cranbrook—and also for my noble friend's comments upon commissioning and the other points which my noble friend Lord Cranbrook made in what I thought was an excellent speech.
Much as I understand the qualms of highly respected Chancellors and Vice-Chancellors of certain universities and of the chairmen of certain research councils, I think that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science has pursued as wise and sensible a policy as is possible within his budgetary limits. The more I look at basic research the more I feel that this should perhaps be conducted upon an international basis, in the same way as fusion research is carried out at Culham—the Joint European Torus—and in the European Strategic Programme of Research in Information Technology—ESPRIT—and, maybe, also through CERN, which I do not believe we should leave.
However, overall, I support the Government's policy regarding the research councils. Frankly, I am not so worried about the work of the research councils as I am disturbed by the facts given in the full-page advertisement of the Engineering Council which appeared today in the national dailies. This is the most disturbing page I have seen in any national daily for weeks. I do not believe that these facts have been mentioned by noble Lords. However, I believe that they should look at them very carefully in order to see how the percentage of the market in so many industrial sectors in the world has fallen dramatically over the last two generations. It makes me want to echo the words of my noble friend Lord Stockton in his maiden speech in your Lordships' House:
"What is happening to our beloved country?"
All I can say is that I hope that as a result of such cries of anguish, such cris de coeur, this trend will now be reversed, especially in the new technologies: in information technology, in what I call AI—not artificial insemination but artificial intelligence, although I wonder whether the two might not ultimately be brought together in some way—and in other technologies such as space and application satellites, which can be commercially attractive.
So far as the research councils are concerned, let them carry on as best they can, with the Government funding them as generously as they can.
6.26 p.m.
Lord Hunter of Newington: My Lords, I also should like to add my tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, for a most brilliant introduction to this debate. At this late hour I wish to make only one or two points. All the main points have been made, some
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more than once. This has been one of the most brilliant debates to which I have listened in your Lordships' House.
The noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, referred to the fact that in the 1960s the science Vote grew at the rate of 10 per cent. and that although its growth rate declined towards the end of the 1960s it remained positive. This occurred against the background of low industrial productivity and increased inflation. The reason for this was, I believe, because of the unquestioned belief that money spent on science represented a wise investment which would yield economic dividends.
What actually happened during the late 1960s was a crisis of confidence. Events seemed to fall short of expectations. In Westminster and Whitehall the mood was growing that the liberal support of science and its reorganisation, following the Trend report, had not delivered the goods and that the time had come to rethink the relationships between science and government. One of the questions which faces us in our debate today is whether this confidence has been restored.
As we know, two things happened. The Secretary of State for Science, Mrs. Thatcher, set up a CSP committee under the chairmanship of Sir Fred Dainton, and the Prime Minister, Mr. Heath, set up a central policy review body under Lord Rothschild, whose first study concerned government research and development. As the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, has said, the situation today is compounded by the action of the Government on their reports. The CSP report was completed in 1971 and was available to Lord Rothschild while he completed his report. The CSP report classified research as basic, strategic and tactical.
As the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, has said, the real difficulty occurs over strategic research. This is likely to increase the understanding of basic science and to generate knowledge; but the outcome cannot be predicted, as noble Lords have said, particularly at the time the work is undertaken. The MRC are, in my view experts in strategic research, as the number of their Nobel prizes indicates. This point was made by the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe.
Because of the mood in Government and Whitehall that the scientists had not been delivering the goods, judgments were made by Government following the Rothschild Report which form the background to this debate. One question is whether the Chief Scientist's proposals have worked well and whether Government departments are the proper source to initiate strategic research. The noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook, has already mentioned this important factor. Has the customer-contractor principle of Rothschild succeeded in this strategic area, albeit against the background of financial stringency? Is our machinery the wrong machinery? The Rothschild recommendations included, as noble Lords will remember, the transfer of very substantial sums to various departments to deploy as they thought fit, and the funds were taken from the ARC, the NERC and the MRC. For some reason the SRC, as it then was, remained relatively unscathed, in spite of its strong engineering and technological connections.
In the end, as noble Lords know, something of each of these reports appeared. The CSP's proposal resulted

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in the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, and Rothschild's proposals for a Chief Scientist were accepted in 1972. We now have just over 10 years' experience of this system. What happened between the long-standing and prestigious research council, the MRC, and the DHSS? What problems faced its Chief Scientist? There was a conviction that the MRC gave full weight to the need of the DHSS for strategic research. In consequence, the Government returned to the MRC the money which had been removed, about nine years later. There is a view that a Chief Scientist is probably not necessary in the DHSS, because they have such a close relationship with the MRC. Some feel it would certainly avoid a great deal of bureaucracy and paperwork.
What of the other research councils? There is some evidence that the chief scientist's organisation is a positive bar to easy relationships with the relevant research councils. The Government must not have been very happy with all this, otherwise they would not have set up the Advisory Council for Applied Research and Development under the chairmanship of Sir Henry Chilver. As noble Lords will know, his board has vitalised the situation, and they now have joint membership with the ABRC—and we recently saw a joint report by the two chairmen.
What should happen in our penurious state? Should funds for strategic research be returned to the research councils? Certainly your Lordships' Select Committee on Science and Technology received evidence in one of their inquiries that departments could not find the money for strategic research, such was the pressure of immediate events and the shortage of resources. But there is the other point that strategic research does not fit easily within departmental boundaries because the concepts are so often wider. As has been said by many noble Lords, the fundamental policy of the Government in this field contrasts with that of many governments abroad—our rivals—who are pouring money into strategic research.
There is a new look in the universities. Strategic research has a new prominence, as indicated by the public statement of the noble Lord, Lord Flowers, when he was chairman of the vice-chancellors' committee. Perhaps we have all learned an important lesson in the past decade.
6.34 p.m.
Lord Kilmarnock: My Lords, this debate is of such importance that we in the Alliance seriously considered devoting to it one of the very few days allocated to us for debates of our own choosing. Fortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, has been able to obtain an earlier date than we could have offered. We congratulate him on that, because there is real urgency in arousing the awareness of the public and of the Government to the severe threat to our basic research base, which could have very important implications in the future for the health and prosperity of the nation.
I want to speak mainly but not entirely about the MRC, to whose plight several noble Lords have already drawn attention—notably, the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, and the noble Lords, Lord Todd and Lord Adrian. The noble Lord, Lord Todd, said that
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the MRC was particularly badly hit, and we have to remember that the figures given recently by the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough, were cash figures and not figures in real terms.
I want to get down to brass tacks. The noble Earl, Lord Swinton, will no doubt recall that I addressed a Starred Question to him on 1st August concerning a proposed grant-in-aid to the MRC for 1984–85. The noble Earl made two statements then which I subsequently found hard to reconcile. At column 788 of the Official Report for that day, the noble Earl said:
"the Medical Research Council's grant-in-aid for 1984–85 represents very approximately the same share of the science budget as in 1983–84. However, the council is having to accommodate within its cash limits some unavoidable increases in expenditure",
which he then detailed. The noble Earl continued:
"Therefore, it faces a drop in disposable income, which it estimates might be about £2 million".
Later, when I pressed the noble Earl, he stated at column 790:
"As to this great fuss about the cuts"—
and I ask your Lordships to note those words—
"I must point out that the council's 1984–85 grant-in-aid is £117.2 million compared with £113.7 million in 1983–84".
When I asked the noble Earl whether this did not represent a cut in real terms, he answered:
"My Lords, I think that is just about level pegging".
But how can the noble Earl reconcile his claim to level pegging with his earlier admission of a drop in disposable income of £2 million? In fact, the figure is nearer £4 million if inflation is taken into account. After all, it is disposable income that counts. I assume that the phrase "level pegging" is a slightly more colloquial version of the ABRC's planning guidelines to the MRC on the basis of "level funding". But whichever phrase one uses, surely it is clear that it is not being met.
I would suggest to the noble Earl that the real situation at the moment is that the increase from £113.7 million to £117.2 million represents a growth of about 3 per cent.—which is at least 2 per cent. below expected inflation. That is just the position this year. Over the next two years there is the additional requirement mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, that the MRC should contribute £2.7 million to redundancies in the AFRC and the NERC. Can it conceivably be right—I have asked the noble Earl, Lord Swinton, this question before, and I ask it again—that monies voted by Parliament for scientific research should be syphoned off to pay for redundancies in other councils? Surely restructuring should be treated quite separately.
Why is it that the research councils are not receiving the same help with their redundancies as the universities? Why is it right that the universities should receive additional government funds for redundancies but that the research councils should not? The logic of this defeats me. It is possible that the £6 million to be provided for restructuring, and to which several noble Lords have referred, may be applied for that purpose. I hope this will be the case, and I look forward to hearing the noble Earl's reply on that point.
Our concern cannot be limited to this year or next year. There is a growing danger that cumulative under-funding will eventually cripple our research effort. If

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the MRC is to be confined to 2.5 per cent. cash-limited increases over the next 10 years as against inflation forecasts of 5 per cent. and 6 per cent., this is estimated to lead to a minimum decrease in real income of 17 per cent. over the decade. I have seen estimates of decreases as high as 25 per cent. in real terms. How can the council plan ahead or even make the most cost-effective use of its units and staff under the shadow of such grim expectations? The brief respite to which the noble Baroness, Lady White, referred will do little to allay those grim expectations.
Turning to more specific concerns, I want to discover from the Government how much importance they attach to medical research in relation to preventive medicine. This must surely be a very high priority in the programme of any Government concerned to contain National Health Service costs due to demographic and other demands. To mention only a few fields, the MRC is working on transplantation immunology (think of the failure rate there!); on cardiovascular disease, for which there are 230,000 admissions annually; on AIDS, that terrible scourge; and on environmental medicine. In the field of community care, they have funded a highly relevant care attendants' scheme on the subsequent progress and re-admission rates, etc., of elderly patients who have been discharged from hospital, and the financial implications of community care. This kind of research is crucial to the success of the Government's own care in the community policy.
I should like to mention one other area, which is currently the cause of widespread public concern. I refer to cot deaths. At present, it is the subject of controversy and appalling worry to young mothers. I understand that suggestions that suffocation and, in some cases, infanticide are among the most frequent causes are unfounded. Only on Monday in the Guardian Dr. David Southall, a senior lecturer in paediatrics, explained why more, not less, research into cot deaths is required. Few people perhaps realise that it is the commonest form of death in the first year of life, affecting between one in 500 and one in 1,000 babies.
I am aware of a particularly interesting project at Manchester in which new methods of preventing respiratory distress syndrome in the pre-natal infant are being pioneered. If such children are born prematurely, there is a greater likelihood of cot death; but there is no guarantee for the funding of this research beyond the next 22 months. Would it not be a tragedy if it had to be terminated, or if some other line of inquiry of equal quality had to be turned down by the MRC because it was funding redundancies elsewhere? What would the young mothers and the future mothers of Britain think about that?
There are many things of great promise that the MRC would, I understand, want to pursue if funds permitted. There is one that I want to mention in particular because it would build on and, in effect, become the application side of the well-known molecular biology fundamental research at Cambridge. This would require new money—not fast money as I think the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, said—because it involves a new hospital centre for molecular medicine. But we have to realise that some capital and recurrent expenditure will have to be made
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if we are to become internationally competitive on the applied side of this rapidly expanding field. As my noble friend Lord Walston said, starving geese do not lay golden eggs.
We must not confine our concern to the MRC alone; or I must not. There are five councils, to all of which short-term uncertain funding is damaging. On the whole, research is cumulative and the spin-off, whether in commercial developments or the better use of public funds, is dependent on that accumulation. A longer and much more consistent look at funding is therefore required. A five- to ten-year plannning framework is preferable in research terms and almost certainly more cost-effective than short-term, one-off grants. No one is asking for tenure for life. I hasten to assure the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, that we are not in favour of that, either. But a very worryingly large number of highly qualified PhDs—potential high flyers—are still on short-term grants well into their thirties; living literally from hand-to-mouth and from one short-term project to the next.
The team I mentioned earlier in relation to cot deaths is led by a highly qualified young woman PhD who, since starting her career, has been on one 18-month grant, one two-year grant and two three-year grants. At 32 she has no formal career structure whatsoever. There is little possibility of lateral movement into commerce or industry. With those prospects the word is spreading that "research is dangerous". The young hopefuls are speedily demoralised, and the more prudent aim at the Civil Service or something else which is more secure.
Is that the climate we want to foster; a climate in which the best people are discouraged from going into research and those who have gone in are discouraged from staying in the game long enough to exploit the full potential of their work? There has been talk of the brain drain—I think my noble friend Lord Walston spoke about it—by which talented people are syphoned off from the system and rescued by other countries. But is there not an earlier problem, which might be called the brain barrier, which simply discourages people from entering the system in the first place?
It is not only the position of talented individuals that should cause us concern. It is especially the case in preventive medicine that the shorter the term, the less worthwhile will be the results; the more sophisticated the technology, the longer will be the training time required to master it. I am reliably informed that on a three-year project one spends the first year getting the method right, the second getting some results, and the third shopping around for new funds to continue the job. The productivity of highly trained people is, therefore, severely curtailed by reliance on three-year grants.
On these grounds one had hoped that the MRC would not be forced into following the growing practice in other councils of reducing their five-year programme grants in order to fund cheaper three-year projects with a reduced salary bill. So it is alarming to learn from the MRC's letter to the vice-chancellors that a main ingredient in their "package of stringent measures" will be to reduce long-term programme grants to universities by 25 per cent. as against the 7·5 per cent. reduction of three-year projects. It is

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devastating to hear—no, I do not think that "devastating" is too strong a word—from the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, and others, that over half the high scoring alpha applications for new programme grants will have to be refused. It is not a question of turning down the dross, but rejecting the créme de la créme! It is clear that the council has only taken this drastic course through force majeure, and I hope we shall hear from the noble Earl that the Government have finally realised the gravity of the decisions into which they are forcing the MRC and other councils. The noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook, referred to a similar situation in the NERC.
The MRC case is very telling and has received powerful advocacy—much more powerful and weighty than any I can deploy—and so I want to say a few words about the reconstructed ESRC, to which the noble Lord, Lord Swann, referred, which has the smallest budget of all and is doing increasingly valuable work. I was amused by the first sentence of the review of a book of Professor R. E. Pahl's in New Society on 18th October:
"British social science has taken a bashing in recent years, for being trivial, boring, irrelevant and stuffed with pat-a-cake ideology and prefabricated jargon".
The reviewer goes on to contrast this with the post-Rothschild social sciences which are slimmer, fitter and committed to a more muscular and rigorous research programme. I think many of us will welcome this development, although I am not sure that I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Swann, who wants to trim 1 per cent. off all the other councils in order to fund further developments there.
I am extremely interested in the Centre for Health Economics and the Centre for Addiction Research; others will welcome the Industry and Employment Committee's new project on competitiveness and the new research into the use of computers in schools. But I want to ask the noble Earl one question in this field. All disciplines need the tools to carry out their jobs. Data collection is a very expensive business. Social scientists say that laymen do not appreciate the cost of surveys. The United Kingdom Government Statistical Office has been extremely helpful in the past, but cuts in staff have made it less accessible. Therefore, social scientists, including economists, are making increasing use of the data archive held at Essex University. This is partly supported by the UGC and partly by the ESRC on short-term research contracts. This inhibits investment in hardware and makes it difficult to take full advantage of the new information technology. Does the noble Earl not think that this is shortsighted, and can he give us an undertaking to see that this archive, which has been described to me as the Rutherford Laboratory of the social sciences world, is securely funded on a regular basis in future?
Finally, what of the advice given to the Government by the Advisory Board for the Research Councils on the proper level of scientific research spending? I found it pretty scary to read Professor Sir David Phillips, who has already been referred to several times this afternoon, in evidence to the Commons DES Select Committee on 19th June this year, on page 5. He says:
"Even if one accepted the need to restrain public expenditure"—
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I would not want to speak against that—
"the inescapable conclusion one comes to. looking at the forecasts, is that for those departments which support basic and strategic science there is likely to be an erosion in the funding over this period and we read this document"—
I think he refers to the Green Paper on Public Expenditure—
"as telling us that we must look forward to something like a 25 per cent. decline in scientific research over the next 10 years".
Later Sir David explains that the breakdown of types of research varies according to the branch of science in question; but in the case of the MRC it is roughly 25 per cent. basic, 40 per cent. strategic and 35 per cent. applied. But one cannot have the applied research without the other two.
Later, in the same evidence, Dr. Bodmer says:
"It is our responsibility to support the basic science base and the basic science base is ultimately the source of all science that has application".
He says that no one in their right mind would support biotechnological research into cancer simply for its commercial application; but,
"unless we see that basic research continues to be supported we shall see the loss of the source of innovation that is needed for applications that are commercial".
He criticises the Government document referred to by Sir David Phillips for not even deigning to mention science as important for the economy of the country; and this is a point made by the MRC in another submission where it expresses its hope,
"that the ABRC will impress upon the Government the longer-term benefits that a small shift of resources"—
a small shift of resources—
"in favour of the science Vote at this particular time would confer on the future welfare and prosperity of the United Kingdom".
Later, at a session of the evidence on 19th June, Dr. Roberts said,
"Just to be ludicrous, and this is the magnitude of it, if we talk about withdrawal from an area such that we can find 25 per cent. savings, it probably means withdrawing from medical research. I am not advocating that but I believe that we are glossing over the magnitude of the problem".
Those were Dr. Roberts's words.
These are weighty comments from serious men, which it would be folly for the Government to disregard. It is high time the public were informed of what is going on, and I hope they will at least get an inkling of it from this debate. It is absurd to apply the pudding basin principle to public expenditure cuts—half an inch off all round, snip, snip, snip. In some cases the locks may be too long and in others too short already. The tragedy here is that only a tiny amount in relative terms is required to preserve our national pre-eminence in scientific research. The noble Earl, in the exchange I quoted at the beginning of my speech, referred to, "this great fuss about cuts", as if it were much exaggerated, much ado about nothing. I hope this debate has convinced him that this is not the case, and that he will represent to this right honourable friend the Secretary of State, with all the force and urgency he can command, the strong and authoritative views expressed this evening on all sides of your Lordship's House.
6.51 p.m.
Lord Shackleton: My Lords, I think the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, can be well satisfied with this debate.

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Perhaps it may be appropriate if I were to say what was the origin of the debate. It was the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, who was so concerned about the situation in the medical research council that he was really demanding action and—and the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, will confirm this—possibly action by the Select Committee of your Lordships' House, on Science and Technology. However, the House of Commons are also looking at the research budget. Lord Sherfield, as chairman of the committee, initiated a debate which, as always on this sort of subject, has been of a very high class indeed.
I am sorry that the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, is not here. He made a coy remark at an earlier stage saying that he had to attend the unveiling of a portrait of, I would say, a very distinguished Member of your Lordships' House. Everybody got the message that it was the unveiling of Lord Jellicoe's own portrait that he had to attend. So we think it is quite right that he should be with us in spirit even if he is looking at his own picture.
I always find it interesting to wind up a debate, especially when the facts have been so brilliantly deployed. I am bound to say that the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, really needs reading again on publication, as do many others. I look at those who have taken part. The noble Lord, Lord Walston, said it was a pity that industrialists, people from industry, were not taking part. I stretched it a bit hard when I said there were nine, but I do regard him, as a farmer, and the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, as representing very successful, important sectors of industry. Perhaps equally important, there were eight distinguished scientists. Again I include the noble Lord, Lord Walston. I wish he were here.
Noble Lords: He is here!
Lord Shackelton: Oh! he is here. He once had a research fellowship in bacteriology. We have four Fellows of the Royal Society. The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, represents both categories because at one time he was head of the research department in Decca and I think I am right in saying he is responsible for the long-playing record, and he has filled almost every scientific post. I am very grateful to him for saying that one does not have to be a scientist in order to take part in discussions of this kind. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hooson, that it is vital that all those of us who have tried to take an interest in these matters should continue to do so. To take Lord Halsbury's speech, if I may say so, I always find great trouble with Lord Halsbury. He is one of the most articulate and convincing people. When he has finished speaking, I think he is absolutely right. Luckily, after a while it wears off. Unfortunately, some of his ideas wore off other governments.
I really must say something to the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough. I will give him 100 per cent. full marks for loyalty. Either the department, doing their best, or the Conservative Central Office gave him a paper which purported to say just how well the Government were doing; whereas it must be obvious that, for good or for ill, the situation is anything but satisfactory. The noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, who has just been
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speaking, has given all the figures and others have given them before.
I hope that when the Minister comes to reply he will not attempt to ride off by saying that really the science budget has all been retained and everything is splendid, when all the evidence shows the opposite. We cannot all be wrong. Not only have these distinguished scientists taken part, but we have also heard members of our own Science and Research Committee, no fewer than five of whom actually held chairmanships of particular committees. They have come to the same view. Since the Minister has covered such a wide field, I would urge him to read those two admirable journals, the New Scientist and Nature, which do a splendid job in educating those of us who are not scientific. Nature, which is very objective, does say that the impoverishment of the British research enterprise is not in question. This is in the light of the extra funds that have been available.
I suppose one should congratulate the Secretary of State for Education and Science. Since he is a member of this Government, I suppose it is fair to say he has done rather well, but at some price: others are having to be sacrificed. However, there is no doubt that the evidence is pretty damning and that we do see potentially a real decline in the scientific effort. I am talking about the basic scientific effort. I think one of the messages that has come out today is the importance of the basic research.
For instance, I was very glad that the noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook, spoke up for the Natural Environment Research Council, which is quite severely threatened these days, especially since the occurrence of these particular problems with the geologists. Incidentally, I am very glad the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, referred to the geological situation, which is a result of the decline in the commissioned research, if I may say so, a direct consequence of the acceptance of the Rothschild Report. Both the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, and the noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook (I think it was Lord Selborne), have said that when we debated the Rothschild Report before there was a kind of easy guarantee that the money would be forthcoming and we now know it is not forthcoming. This is having a shattering effect on the long-term functioning and the continuity of research councils and other bodies, the universities, and indeed the scientific and academic worlds. I am very glad to see the noble Lord, Lord Todd. He will know that we have been debating these issues for practically a generation, and they are important.
However, I think we are clearly in a more difficult and dangerous position than we realise. If I may quote the position on NERC's income, in 1980–81—and this is for the benefit of the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough—it stood at a peak of £102 million. That is at 1984–85 prices. In 1984–85 it was set at £92 million; and another £5 million, much to my pleasure, has been devoted to Antarctic research, which has come out in addition. There is no doubt that those figures pose a serious threat to the efficient functioning of these bodies.
I do not propose to talk very long on these matters because I think the case has been very fully made. However, again if one looks at the AFRC, this year, despite the extra money—I do not know whether the

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noble Earl, Lord Selborne, mentioned this—there will be 400 to 500 redundancies.
When we come to consider "restructuring"—it is a lovely cover word—I should like to say something about it. Restructuring in industry is quite different from restructuring in a university or government establishment. It means, in effect, that one has to pay out fairly large sums in redundancy. Almost certainly one has to drop certain forms of activity. It may even be desirable to drop some of them because other things come along.
In industry, restructuring should always improve profitability. I have been involved quite recently in the restructuring of a company where the numbers were dropped by 40 per cent. Very generous redundancy was paid; and higher production and profits resulted. That is not happening in the restructuring in government. Again it is an anxiety that government departments have been cut to the bone. Certainly we watch with great anxiety what is happening in industry.
I have no need to refer to the Sussex University study, which has already been well referred to. I think that it is apparent that whatever else is happening, there is a decline in our position in the world share of research and development.
I want to stress that however hard the department has tried—and I give it full credit for what it seeks to do—it is constrained in a strait-jacket. Those people in the general world who press for this, that or the other in industry or elsewhere may not appreciate the fact that we are to a large extent talking about academic work in this debate. But it is the academic work—the strategic research—that is in danger of being seriously reduced. The theme of Sir Andrew Huxley at this year's parliamentary and scientific dinner was that our research effort is in danger of being seriously reduced. Our research effort has been one of our great glories. Obviously there is a limit to the amount of money one can spend on research in this tremendously expanding field. There are so many striking opportunities for scientific development in industry, in science and in the laboratories that one cannot begin to meet the opportunities. But there is a real danger that if we start cutting back at this moment we shall damage the whole operation.
When one looks at, for instance, the Jack Lewis study on research grants and the effects of these, the situation is very alarming. I expect that the noble Earl has read it. If he has not, I ask him to look at what is said there:
"The science board has experienced great difficulties in managing a complex portfolio of grants, studentships, central facilities and international agreements. It has consistently maintained that research grants should have the highest priority of funding, but nevertheless has equally consistently had to provide less for this item in its budget than it would have wished because of financial pressures. Morale in most areas of the academic community is low because of the unfunded alpha-graded problem".
I am sure that the Minister is well aware of it, but I wish to draw his attention to the fact that it is appalling that those projects for research which have been graded Alpha—which means that they are the highest quality—are not to receive grants. The figures and the statistics are there. Some of the statistics can be qualified, and that qualification is explained. The
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trouble arising out of the delay and uncertainty is the loss of continuity. Again one needs to stress that.
What are the other ill effects? One of them has again been referred to in the recommendations. It is that there is a real and potential movement of research workers away from the United Kingdom. This should be monitored systematically. I would draw the Minister's attention to the fact that, some years ago when we were confronted with this problem, we sent the well-known writer William Cooper (Harry Hoff) to America to help draw people back to England. I hope that the Government will examine that.
There are many other problems which I do not have time to go into. I should particularly like to draw attention to an area which has not been satisfactorily dealt with except on an ad hoc arrangement—multi-disciplinary activities crossing the borders of different councils, as Browning said,
"on the dangerous edge of things".
That is an area which I hope will be given further attention.
I have already mentioned the geologists. I should like to come back to what my noble friend Lord Gregson said when he referred to the fact that as a nation we are confronted by the most serious problems. Even this year the price of a barrel of North Sea oil has dropped by a dollar. I give the Government full credit for sincerity in pursuing their policies. I do not agree with them in a lot of respects, but they are concerned and they believe that economy in public expenditure will lead to a more vigorous and successful country. But cutting or allowing a decline in this area runs entirely contrary—if I may have the attention of the noble Earl who is about to reply——
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, I am listening.
Lord Shackleton: My Lords, the noble Earl was also talking at the same time, but he is very clever at these things. The Government should be consistent in their policy to make this country more effective industrially and to make economies in public expenditure. But this is a field which cannot be funded overall by private enterprise. There is no solution down that path. That is not to say that we should give a blank cheque to the universities or to the research councils. But basically, if they are to sustain their policies, out of that £1,500 million—£1½ billion sounds a bit more—which is set aside for tax cuts, a relatively small proportion (and I know that everybody is saying the same thing) would make all the difference to something which is fundamental to the development of our national prosperity.
I hope that when he comes to reply the Minister will take note of the arguments that have been put forward, particularly those of the noble Lords, Lord Gregson, Lord Todd and Lord Adrian, who have asked the Government to give rather more of a lead and for there to be selection in this area. I should also have liked to ask the Government, although there is perhaps not time at this stage, about their attitude to supporting co-operation in Europe. Incidentally, nobody, as far as I know, has mentioned Scotland in the debate. I do not know how much Scotland is suffering. The research councils' writ does not run over all the research establishments in Scotland. Basically I ask the

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Government to reckon that the year of grace, which is really only a very partial year of grace, is not adequate. We hope that they will introduce a sustained policy for the support of science and particularly of basic science.
7.7 p.m.
The Earl of Swinton: My Lords, like noble Lords who have already spoken, the Government are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, for initiating this debate. His contribution and those of other noble Lords have been thoughtful and of great interest. I look forward to reading what they said in my own time, and I shall also draw my right honourable friend's attention to the debate.
I shall try to respond to as many of the points made as possible, but I am sure your Lordships will all agree that it has been a long and wide-ranging debate. Among the subjects that have come up are pyrethroid insecticides and herbicides; TV violence; senile dementia, which I am sure is not a problem for any Member of this House; and 20-year-old Jaguar cars, which may well be. Seriously, if I miss out any noble Lords or Baronesses, I shall do my best to write to them.
Before responding, however, I must briefly set the scene. The research councils are often thought of as five identical bodies, differing only in the areas of science they support. While there is a grain of truth in that, the differences between them are almost as striking as their similarities. Some of the councils operate largely by awarding research grants to university scientists; some operate mainly through their own institutes. Again, some are funded entirely by grant-in-aid from the science budget of the Department of Education and Science; some receive substantial income, in addition to their grant-in-aid, from other departments, from overseas countries and from bodies such as the European Community in respect of commissioned research. I might add that many of those contracts, especially overseas ones, are won on merit against stiff opposition. Yet again, some councils conduct or support extensive work in other countries; some virtually confine their work to the United Kingdom. Nor are their histories comparable one with the other. Where, however, they do closely resemble each other is in their determination to promote and support science of the highest quality—a determination which is shared by the Government.
I should here like to pay tribute to the way the councils—by which I mean not only the chairmen and members of the actual councils but also their Staffs—have steadfastly pursued excellence and continue to do so in spite of some unavoidable difficulties in recent times—difficulties not of their own choosing. I should also like to commend the councils for the part they play in maintaining the high regard in which British scientists are held by their peers in other countries. The dual support system for university research, of which the research councils are one leg, is a peculiarly British arrangement and has its critics. But it nevertheless appears to suit our national temperament and it has no doubt played a part in fostering British science to the point where it is held in high esteem internationally. But by far the greatest factor in this is, of course, the skill and inventiveness of our scientists themselves.
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The noble Lord's Motion is in part concerned with resources and most noble Lords have spoken on that theme. In one sense this debate is timely, therefore, as it was only last week that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science announced that the science budget for 1985–86 will be £587 million, which includes £14 million additional to previous planning figures. My right honourable friend went on to say that he intends £6 million of the additional money to be used for restructuring of certain of the research councils. I think this may come as good news to the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock.
My noble friend Lord Bessborough went into some detail about the finance arrangements. I am grateful to him for this and also for the kind remarks he made about my late grandfather. I do not think, therefore, that I need to go into details on the financial statements, about which he was thoroughly accurate. My right honourable friend now awaits the advice of the ABRC on how the enlarged science budget should be distributed between the research councils and the three other smaller bodies which are also funded through that budget. I understand that that advice is likely to reach him shortly. I should add that in formulating its advice the ABRC goes through each research council's plans for the next three years in considerable detail as part of the "Forward-Look" exercise. The head of each council plays a major part in this dialogue.
This additional money is hard evidence of the Government's determination to maintain their support for basic science at a particularly difficult time for public expenditure. At the same time, the Government would wish to give the research councils every encouragement in the endeavours they are making to attract money from the private sector. I welcome the comments made by my noble friend Lord Selbourne along these lines. I recognise the difficulties in this, and there is no question of our wishing to substitute private for public sector funding on a large scale. But it would be wise of the councils to recognise that the public purse is not bottomless—indeed, from what the chairmen and other noble Lords have said today, I am sure that they know this already—and that some easement may equally well be secured by increasing their income from the private sector, even if only marginally.
Obtaining the best possible value for money demands tight management. I am glad to say that the heads of the research councils are co-operating fully with my right honourable friend and with my honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science in seeking to increase efficiency, to transfer technology to industry, to publish corporate plans and to translate into their own operations the principles of the Government's financial management initiative. The councils are also active in seeking international collaboration wherever that is possible and desirable. The Government will continue to look to the councils to promote these and similar measures so as to maximise value for money.
I turn now to some of the points raised in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, asked what the Government are doing by way of response to the report by Sir Ronald Mason. This report was addressed to the chairman of the ABRC and it is

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therefore for that body to decide whether to respond to it, and, if so, how. I understand that the ABRC has discussed the Mason Report and that its recommendations are influencing the board's thinking and the general thrust of its work. I might add that I understand that the report has also been discussed by ACARD.
The noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, and also, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Todd, asked about research in the universities and UGC funding. Research is considered an area of particular priority by this Government. In 1984–85 the DES will be providing over £1,000 million to research, about £550 million for the science budget and about the same amount through the grant made available to the UGC. The Government, however, acknowledge that there is some evidence that the reductions in the grants allocated to the universities have fallen disproportionately on research. It is because of concern expressed in a number of reports about the effect on research that my right honourable friend invited the UGC to consider, in putting their advice to him on the future development of higher education, what measures might be undertaken to increase the resources devoted to both fundamental and applied research for the sake of the quality of our science and for its contribution to the economy.
My right honourable friend also referred to the need, in the light of the pressures on public expenditure, to consider the case for greater selectivity in the funding of research activity and greater specificity of funding, including recognition of institutions' success in seeking research monies from external sources and increased co-operation with the research councils. I have read with particular interest the UGC's recent advice to my right honourable friend about research provision and, like him, welcome the committee's proposals for a more systematic and selective approach to the allocation of the UGC block grant to the universities. This should reinforce the selectivity already in force on the research council side of the dual support system.
My noble friend Lord Jellicoe and a number of other noble Lords, but particularly my noble friend, drew my attention to the state of the MRC and its budget. The council's 1984–85 grant-in-aid from the science budget is £117·2 million as compared with £113·7 million in 1983–84. I know that the council regards its current allocation as representing a £2 million drop in disposable income because of inescapable increases in outgoings, and that the ABRC and, in turn, my right honourable friend will take account of this when deciding the allocation of next year's science budget. The council must, of course, operate within whatever grant-in-aid it receives in 1985–86 and later years, even if this means painful decisions about priorities.
As to the future, the MRC's allocation for 1985–86 and beyond has not yet been announced. I am aware that the ABRC, in their advice last year, provisionally recommended that the MRC and the SERC should contribute to the restructuring costs of the AFRC and the NERC and that the MRC have discussed their financial position with my right honourable friend. This is the point that the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, was making very forcefully. The
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allocation in the science budget of £587 million recently announced for 1985–86 will be a matter for advice from the ABRC, after which my right honourable friend will decide on the level of funds to be made available to the MRC. I have no doubt that he will take the MRC's representations into account.
My noble friend Lord Selborne and the noble Lord, Lord Sherfield, asked about defence research and development. The Government are committed to maintaining expenditure on defence, including research and development related to defence needs. In our view, the balance between defence R & D expenditure and other areas of R & D expenditure is about right. Most defence R & D is in the fields of applied research or development. An insignificant part of that budget is devoted to basic research. Nevertheless, my right honourable friends the Secretaries of State for Defence and for Education and Science are concerned to minimise any duplication that may exist between research council-supported work and work undertaken for the Ministry of Defence. Some of the latter is in any case carried out in universities on a contract basis. The annual review of Government R & D expenditure published by the chief scientific adviser in the Cabinet Office gives the Government an opportunity to review the balance of R & D provision across all departments.
The noble Lord, Lord Todd, made fairly strong comments about high-energy particle physics. I hasten to add that I am in no way a scientist. I do not think I got even an O-level in any science subject, so I may be slightly out of my depth here. The SERC expects to spend a total of £52.6 million on high-energy particle physics in 1984–85—about 19 per cent. of its allocation from the science budget, of which some £35.6 million is the United Kingdom subscription to CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
On 22nd March this year my right honourable friend published the 1983 advice that he had received from the Advisory Board for the Research Councils. This contained a careful discussion on the case for keeping under review the competing claims of current and new areas of scientific research. He also announced his agreement to the ABRC and SERC jointly undertaking a review of United Kingdom participation in high energy particle physics, under the chairmanship of Sir John Kendrew, the President of St. John's College, Oxford. I understand that Sir John expects to be able to report to the chairmen of ABRC and SERC by Easter next year.
In giving his agreement to the review, my right honourable friend made it clear that should the ABRC recommend any change to the United Kingdom's relationship with CERN, this was a matter for Her Majesty's Government, to be considered by due process and in consultation with other members of the organisation.
A number of noble Lords, not least the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, drew my attention to the Lewis Report on the rejection rate of alpha-rated research grants. Research grants are the main way by which the SERC supports research in the universities. In recent years the council has had to reject an increasing number of research grant applications on financial grounds. The rejection rate is now some 30 per cent. of

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applications which the council has graded alpha. This is a matter of serious concern to the council and the Lewis Report was produced to identify the consequences of this phenomenon. I might add that the additional money in the science budget in 1985–86 should allow a better acceptance rate.
The noble Baroness, Lady White, asked about agricultural and environmental research. The relationship between agricultural and environmental research and the useful report on the subject prepared by the Select Committee on Science and Technology, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Adrian—who we were glad to hear earlier this afternoon—was discussed very fully in the House in July. I know that since then the research councils and the ABRC have been looking carefully at the recommendations which concern them.
The Agricultural and Food Research Council has established a working party under the chairmanship of Professor D. C. Smith, who was an adviser to the Select Committee. I understand that the AFRC's working party will be taking into account the views of NERC and of other bodies and will seek to define the areas of research which the Select Committee thought were grey areas and to define the respective responsibilities of councils in these areas. I expect the ABRC will be consulted on the group's findings in due course, and the group is expected to complete its work in the spring.
The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, mentioned the transfer of control of the Geological Museum from the NERC to the Natural History Museum. I understand that this transfer of control will take effect from 1st April 1985 and that the decision to merge was made principally on the grounds of science and museum management and practice. I understand that the British Geological Survey's library will remain in the Geological Museum building for a short period after 1st April 1985 until the NERC have made alternative arrangements for access by London-based organisations to the reports and maps now held in the library.
My noble friend Lord Bessborough asked me to comment on a letter which he had received from the NERC. I think that he quoted a pessimistic passage based on an assumption that over 10 years the science budget may decline by 25 per cent. in real terms. This is a worst case assumption based on maintenance over 10 years of level funding, which is in reality less because of pay settlements and the numerous reasons that your Lordships have raised this afternoon. The NERC are not yet at the point where they are seriously considering withdrawing from a major area of work, although like all research councils they are under heavy pressure. A further assumption is that commissioned research will decline at the same rate as the science budget. I hope that the real picture will be much less severe.
The noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, mentioned cot deaths. I understand that the Medical Research Council, through its research grants scheme, supports much work which may turn out to be relevant to sudden infant death syndrome or "cot death", as it is commonly known. I am aware that the incidence of cot death is increasing, and this is clearly a very worrying problem. The MRC spent £244,000 in
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1983–84 on work on problems of this kind. The DHSS is, I understand, sponsoring a study into cot death based at Sheffield University. In addition to this work a registered charity, the Foundation for the Study of Infant Death, promotes research into the causes and prevention of cot death by means of grants to individuals. I hope that noble Lords will agree that substantial effort is being devoted to solving this dreadful problem.
The noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, also asked about the ESRC's data archive. I understand that the ESRC are discussing the future of the archive both internally and with the Government, but I cannot at present say what will be the outcome.
I must emphasise the confidence felt by the Government in the research councils as eminent bodies with great prestige and with a high degree of independence conferred on them by their charters. The peer review system, whereby scientific priorities are essentially decided by scientists rather than being decreed by the Government, is the cornerstone of the research council system. It has stood the test of time and has survived intact through successive Governments of both main parties. This Government have no intention of seeking to change that basic tenet of the civil science system.
I would recommend to noble Lords the 1983–84 annual reports of the research councils, copies of which have been laid before your Lordships' House. These give an idea of the immense spread of scientific activity which the councils in aggregate cover. I shall not attempt to describe the spread in detail; an example or two must suffice. One or more councils support research into the distant parts of the universe; the most basic particles of matter; climatology; plants and animals; medical matters (both laboratory-based and clinical); robotics; information technology, and so on. Indeed, noble Lords, have referred to some other areas in the course of this debate. Experimental work is carried out throughout the earth's surface, including in Antarctica, where British science is pre-eminent, on the sea-bed, in the oceans, and in space.
Finally, I would again make the point that, within the limits of overall public expenditure constraints, the Government will continue to give the fullest possible support to civil science and in particular to the research councils.
7.28 p.m.
Lord Sherfield: My Lords, I should like first to thank all noble Lords who have taken such a spirited part in this debate, many of them at considerable inconvenience to themselves. Their contributions have combined to make a very interesting and comprehensive debate and they have, incidentally, been far too kind to my own contribution. Secondly, I thank the Minister for his reply. As the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough, said, I had the privilege of acting as the Foreign Office adviser to his grandfather when he went out as the Minister Resident in West Africa in the summer of 1942. I have many memories of that experience, both serious and amusing, and I certainly benefitted a great deal from the experience.
I have to say that the range of my expectations of the Minister's reply was not high, and the result was well

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within the middle of the range. Perhaps it was an error for me to have raised the question of whether or not the science budget has been maintained in real terms, because it has proved to have been a bit of a hare and has produced a large number of rather confusing figures. There is no doubt that in the last two or three years the amount that has been spent on research, as opposed to things like superannuation, restructuring and pensions, has fallen, and that is the crucial point.
As regards international collaborative research, which we did not discuss in detail, it is perhaps important to make the point that, although international collaborative research has many and important advantages, it does not follow that it is a means of saving money. It may probably have the opposite effect, and this is a point which must always be borne in mind.
In conclusion, I express the hope that the noble Earl the Minister and his colleagues will reflect on the points made in this debate in the context of our future as an industrial nation. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Experiments on Living Animals
7.31 p.m.
Lord Somers Lord Somers rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will consider the withdrawal of the White Paper on Scientific Procedures on Living Animals (Cmnd. 8883).
The noble Lord said: My Lords, we have had a most distinguished debate this afternoon on the question of research, and I can only hope that nothing that I say this evening will be interpreted as casting any disparagements on that very distinguished and splendid part of our civilisation. In fact, I can say that I owe a good deal to research because without it I very much doubt whether I should be standing here speaking to your Lordships. Of course, whether the Government think that that privilege is worth paying any money for, I must leave to them to decide.
However, this evening I shall deal with only one small area of research, and that concerns the Government's White Paper on Scientific Procedures on Living Animals. I am not usually one to get excited over the question of vivisection. Of course I detest it, as I think anyone with any sensibility would do. But I believe that those who campaign so very earnestly against it are sometimes apt to forget the horror of human suffering. I have seen enough of that to realise that while vivisection is able to do anything to relieve human suffering, it must be accepted.
However, I cannot look at it as anything except a necessary evil and one which needs the most strict supervision and control. At this point let me say that I wholeheartedly condemn the fanatical approach of some misguided persons who think that they will gain public opinion by doing harm to others. That is absolutely unforgivable and, incidentally, it defeats their own end because it simply puts people against them.
A good deal of emphasis has been laid on the necessity of developing alternatives to the use of five animals, and I, too, should like to see them not only developed but, where they have been proved capable of doing that for which they were designed, made compulsory. However, one must admit that at the moment their capacities are limited. Professor D. H. Smyth in his book Alternatives to Animal Experiments, which is published by the Scoler Press, lists them as follows: (a) Dummies; (b) Models and computers; (c) In vitro methods; (d) Tissue cultures; (e) Use of lower organisms; (f) Man as an alternative; (g) Using fewer animals; (h) Mass spectrometry and gas chromotography; (i) Audio-visual aids; (j) Saturation analysis and radioimmunoassay; (k) Alternatives in the cosmetic industry; (l) Alternatives in the behavioural sciences; (m) Alternatives in bacteriology, virology and immunology; (n) Alternatives for teratogenicity testing; and (o) Some miscellaneous alternatives.
That is quite a formidable list. I shall not weary your Lordships by going right through the list, but I should just like to mention one or two. The chief use of dummies, of course, is for teaching. They make it unnecessary, until perhaps the very last stages, to dissect a living animal.
In vitro methods are interesting. They can take an entire organ, such as a heart, a liver or an intestine, and keep it alive for a short time separate from the body, performing its normal functions. I believe that they can continue to do this for several hours, providing opportunity for much useful research.
As to tissue cultures, which are so often quoted as an alternative to the use of live animals, they have many advantages, but they also have their limitations. Professor Smyth points out that after a time the cells in these cultures begin to change and are no longer of use. He also points out that all the cells in our bodies are not the same and that a drug which is perfectly innocuous to one group of cells may be absolutely toxic to another. So, of course, one must make certain that one has the right group of cells.
However, one thing is essential: if these alternatives are to be of any use, they must be made compulsory, unless it can be shown that the desired result cannot be obtained without the use of live animals. Where the latter are used, the very strictest supervision is necessary if we are to make certain that no abuses are being made.
The White Paper, which I am asking Her Majesty's Government to withdraw, does not tighten the controls at all; instead, it relaxes them. In the Introduction in paragraph 2 it says that the new controls,
"will give better protection to animals used in scientific procedures".
In fact, in many cases the result will be the exact reverse. Let me give a few instances of the changes. In paragraph 7(8) we see that microsurgery on living animals, which was formerly banned, is to be allowed, under anaesthetic, for the purpose of acquiring skill. I suppose that that is allowable in that it prevents students from going abroad and perhaps picking up even worse practices there.
Paragraph 27 gives the purposes for which a live experiment can be carried out. These purposes cover

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practically everything. For instance, the words "scientific research" would be an excuse in any conditions whatever. Paragraph 43 says that an animal need not always be destroyed after experiment; it may be re-used. That was not formerly the case. The condition that it must be kept under anaesthetic may easily be abused.
Paragraph 44 says that curare and other similar agents known as muscle relaxants, but which may equally well be called paralysing drugs, are to be used with permission. This means, of course, that an animal can be paralysed so that it is incapable of moving but at the same time be completely conscious. Therefore, it may be suffering excruciating pain but be unable to move. On the subject of pain, if anybody doubts whether animals are capable of suffering pain I have here a learned study by Professor Patrick Wall of University College, London, if anybody would like to have a look at it. It is completely convincing that animals can suffer pain.
Paragraph 30 deals with tests for cosmetics. It says that the obnoxious LD50 test and the Draize shampoo tests are to continue. Tests for cosmetics are absolutely unnecessary. There are several firms now which produce perfectly good cosmetics based chiefly on vegetable sources. Not being very experienced in the use of cosmetics myself, I consulted a friend who uses them. She tells me that they can be obtained at most health food shops, and that they are entirely satisfactory.
Many eminent doctors and scientists have protested against the provisions in this White Paper. Among them, one which has met with very general criticism is the one in paragraph 51, which says:
"Provision would be included to make unlawful unauthorised disclosure of confidential information."
The people have a right to know what is going on in these institutions. A cover-up policy does no good whatsoever to the scientific profession; it merely arouses suspicion.
Some will no doubt say, "Why make all this fuss about a few small animals when there is so much suffering in the world?" My reason is this. I feel that it is morally wrong to inflict unnecessary pain on any creature which is unable to defend itself. That, in my opinion, is contrary to the law of justice. Incidentally, it is no matter of "a few" small animals. The figure for 1983 in Britain alone was over 3½ million.
I am not a scientist, but neither am I a crank. I am perfectly ready to accept the opinion of a distinguished scientist, such as Professor Smyth, that it is impossible at present to do without animal experiments. But he has mentioned a great many alternatives, and I feel that these could and should be developed. But to achieve this, pressure must be brought to bear on scientists to do so, and this pressure can only be brought about by making it more difficult—I say more difficult, not less—to obtain permission to perform a live experiment. I should like to quote here from the
notes which the RSPCA made on this White Paper.
They say:
"Some areas of work are particularly appropriate for increased replacement of the use of animals, such as the production and testing of vaccines.
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"We believe that the Home Office should give greater encouragement to the search for alternative techniques, particularly at the stage of licence application, and that licences should not be granted where alternative techniques could be used to achieve the same ends".
Many of your Lordships may have heard of the organisation known as FRAME—which is, of course, an initialised abbreviation of the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments. They are doing excellent work, and I am glad to see that they have the approval of the Government, who are intending to give them quite a useful grant before long.
I shall end by emphasising this point. I am not pleading for the abolition of vivisection at present. I hope that science will advance to the point where it is no longer necessary, but until that time I am prepared to accept it. But I make two conditions: first, it should be kept to a minimum—that is, to those cases where it is necessary for the prevention or cure of disease—and, secondly, it should be kept under the strictest possible supervision. This White Paper provides for neither of these conditions.
Any Government, of whatever party, can make mistakes: they are, after all, only human. But my experience has been that the one thing which is completely beyond the power of any Government is to admit that they have made a mistake. How much more we should respect and admire them—how much more we should trust them—if only they did!
7.45 p.m.
Lord Mishcon: My Lords, I believe that there will be three things upon which this House will be united in regard to the Unstarred Question so usefully moved by the noble Lord, Lord Somers, because he has enabled this House, once again, to discuss the matter of cruelty to animals and vivisection. First, I imagine that each one of us is a lover of animals. The basis on which I was brought up was to mistrust, and indeed to have a prima facie dislike for, anyone who was not a lover of animals. The second thing that I imagine unites us is an overwhelming desire that we should advance that part of science which does not destroy human life but prolongs human life and lessens suffering both among human beings and among animals themselves. The third thing, I suppose, is a desire to see that a proper, fair and equitable balance is made between those two considerations.
I mention that this is not the first time by any manner of means that your Lordships in your wisdom and in your mercy have contributed to a discussion of this serious subject. The legislation upon it goes back to the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876, never amended, never revoked; and now we are again looking at a White Paper which discusses that Act, 108 years after it was passed. How many extraordinary changes have taken place since the passing of that Act! Indeed, when it was passed it was literally true that there were only a few hundred experiments carried out. Certainly only a few hundred animals were involved; and most of the experimentation, if not all of it, was done in regard to matters relating to surgery.
I noted the figure given by the noble Lord, Lord Somers. If I heard him aright, he mentioned a figure of 3½ million as the number of animals currently annually

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involved. The figure that I had for 1980 was 5 million. I do not know whether the figure has rapidly decreased to 3½ million. If it has, all of us will at least welcome some improvement in that rather dreadful statistic. Not only has the number of animals involved been so varied between 1876 and now, but the whole nature of scientific experiments and the nature of these experiments has altered, too. Therefore, it was not difficult for your Lordships on several occasions to take the view that it was about time we had some up-to-date legislation.
Whenever this matter has been debated in your Lordships' House, whenever there has been an opportunity to discuss it, that great friend of animals my noble friend Lord Houghton of Sowerby—I nearly called him Lord Houghton of Assisi—has addressed your Lordships with a conviction, a principle and a fervour which has always commanded your Lordships' respect. Indeed, the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, has played a very honourable part in the discussions upon these matters. He has advanced views not always agreed with by all your Lordships, but nevertheless one knows that he, too, is a man possessed of great scientific knowledge, with such an ordered brain, and at the same time a man of infinite mercy.
It was indeed because of a Bill that the noble Earl brought before your Lordships' House, the Second Reading of which took place in October 1979, that that Bill was referred to a Select Committee which reported in April 1980. I have had the benefit of reading that report, and, if I may say so as somebody who had nothing to do with it, it is truly a magnificent report and is a great credit to your Lordships' House.
That Select Committee had the benefit of a departmental committee which was set up in 1963 and of which the chairman was Sir Sydney Littlewood—a very distinguished solicitor. That departmental committee made 83 recommendations. It is odd to think that 83 recommendations were made 20 years ago. Some of them have been carried into practice, but none of them has yet been carried out in a change in legislation. The Government is committed, as I understand it, to legislate. They made that declaration in November 1979. I have no doubt that they collected a few votes on it, because it was repeated in a recent manifesto, and, if all the items in their manifesto were as warm and as merciful and as kindly, they would receive no criticism from my Bench or from my noble friends.
This White Paper, upon which one imagines legislation is going to be based, was issued in July 1983: there was to be consultation upon it and representations were invited. It would be interesting to hear from the noble Lord the Minister when he replies, what is the extent of the representations that have been received and what effect, if any, on the Government's thinking, by way of variation of what is said in the White Paper, there has been in response to those representations.
There were four main items of concern in relation to the 1876 Act. The first was that many uses of animals cannot now be interpreted as experiments. The second was that legislation protecting consumers was now
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more stringent and the third that there were some purposes for which animals were used which could really be described as trivial. The question arises and concern is felt as to whether ethically those experiments should be permitted and who should be the judge. Lastly, there were rare instances—and the noble Lord, Lord Somers, has referred to some of them—where animals were used in a way completely repugnant, not only to members of the public, but indeed to scientists as well.
Now, my Lords, we all have those concerns, and we all want to produce a balance. As the noble Lord, Lord Somers, intimated, neither mankind nor animals nor good causes are served by fanatical extremism, and indeed I know that that too is a matter upon which all your Lordships will have a unanimous view, especially at this moment.
Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Somers, I did find much that was worthy in the White Paper. I did find that there were some improvements in the existing conditions and indeed on existing practice, and it is worthy of note that the Government have gone further in the White Paper than the European Convention. The European Convention permits us to go further, and we have taken advantage of that permission. In some respects, as I said, we are better off than the European Convention would have us be in regard to the question of consideration for animals.
My Lords, if I may, there are just some questions which I should like to put to the noble Lord the Minister arising out of what I have said. I do not think it a useful exercise of your Lordships' patience for me to summarise the recommendations in the White Paper, because I have taken it for granted that all your Lordships who have been good enough to wait for this debate, and certainly those participating in it, have studied the White Paper and need no paraphrase of it from me.
The questions that I think do arise are the following. I mentioned the European Convention. It is very important, as the noble Lord, Lord Somers, I think intimated, that there should be such a convention because otherwise it would mean that we should legislate but all that people who wanted to carry out certain experiments not permitted under our legislation would have to do would be to make a short journey abroad into the Continent of Europe. So this European Convention is very important.
My first question to the noble Lord the Minister is to ask him how far that convention has gone and, secondly, because it is related, is he able to give the House any intimation as to when this long-awaited legislation is due to come before Parliament?
Under the present Cruelty to Animals Act, the maximum penalty, I believe I am right in saying, is a fine of £100. If I am right in that, or anywhere near right, can the noble Lord the Minister intimate whether or not, in the legislation that is to come before us and in the thinking of the Government as shown in the White Paper, it is intended to have penalties which are much more commensurate with public feeling on this particular question?
It is mentioned in the White Paper that there will be an increase in the number of inspectors. Now, the White Paper, as I read it, did not say that there will be

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an adequate increase in the number of inspectors. Can the Government intimate to the House that there will be? Upon this vital matter and in regard to the very important duties that they have to carry out, will the Government see to it that the addition to the number of inspectors will be adequate to allow them to carry out their important duties?
The Government mention in their White Paper the question of guidelines, and it is mentioned in connection with the very difficult matter that the noble Lord, Lord Somers, briefly but, if I may say so, very effectively, referred to—that is, the pain and suffering of animals and certainly the severity of it. Can the noble Lord the Minister tell the House upon what lines that guidance is going to be issued? Who will be advising on it, and, my Lords, will the guidelines have the statutory effect that a breach of them will in fact be a matter of offence under any proposed legislation?
My last two questions—I promise the Minister—are directed to what is happening elsewhere and in particular in Sweden, Canada and the United States, but I propose to concentrate for only one minute before I conclude upon the United States. Are the Government aware of the proposal by the United States of America to require the appointment at each research institution of an animal research committee which will consider both the care and the use of animals and will be required to review any research proposals in which animals are likely to be exposed to severe pain and distress? Does he know of the interesting requirement in that proposal that there should be at least one member of that committee who is a representative of the public? Would not the Government consider that such a proposal, if legislated for in our country, would mean a great lessening of the burden upon the Home Office and upon inspectors and would ensure that the projects were examined on site by the committee, which would mean that they came forward in very much better form when an application was made to the Home Office under the proposed legislation?
Lastly, I turn to the question that worried the noble Lord, Lord Somers, and has troubled everyone of your Lordships present in this Chamber tonight and the public outside—that is, the use of animals for experiments with cosmetics. In that connection, I ask whether the noble Lord the Minister is aware that in 1983 18,037 experiments were apparently carried out on animals for cosmetic and toiletry purposes? Is not that a matter which should be looked at more than closely? Would not the Government agree that if such experiments are allowed—I am not saying in using those words that I think they should be—they should be limited to research on the most severe and serious skin complaints and those only?
I hope that in posing these questions I have not put too great a burden upon the Minister. As I have said, we are indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Somers, for making possible yet another discussion on this important matter, and I believe that possibly the House can best be served on this occasion by the asking of questions on this important White Paper.
8.3 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells: My Lords, I have already apologised to my noble friend the
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Minister and I want to apologise very sincerely to all your Lordships for having to leave the House for a long-standing engagement probably before the end of this debate, unless we are all very brief as I dare to hope I shall be.
I am among those, like the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, who finds it difficult to see why the noble Lord, Lord Somers, wants this White Paper withdrawn. Studying it as intelligently as I can, I cannot have it in me to be other than grateful that, as we have heard, more than 100 years after the 1876 Act a real attempt is being made to update the law. That surely must be good news.
If the noble Lord, Lord Somers, reckons that it is not intending to update things enough, at least we may take comfort that such of the provisions as may find their way on to the statute book would be steps in the right direction. Private Members' Bills against cruel experiments on animals failed at the Second Reading stage in 1973 and again in 1977. Her Majesty's Government are now seeking, through this White Paper, I believe, to pave the way for new laws on this emotive subject. For the life of me, I cannot see why this move is not to be welcomed.
We have already expressed our abhorrence of the extremists' actions in recent months. I hope that no extremist from either side would be allowed to become a member of the animal procedures committee outlined in paragraph 16. This would need very careful scrutiny when the Committee was made up. People can easily disguise their extremism when it suits them. One would also like to see those appointed to include, first, a lawyer; secondly, someone specifically to represent the ethical viewpoint; and, thirdly, a person expertly, not just amateurly as so many English people are, concerned with animal welfare.
The inspectorate is obviously a key element in the greater supervision of animal use in experiments which is envisaged. It is significant, I am afraid, that after some quite fulsome words about the inspectorate's expanding task in paragraph 19—I noticed this as did the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon—one had to go right through to the end to paragraph 54 before there was any mention of adequate funding. I doubt whether the implication in paragraph 54 carries with it sufficient funding. The paragraph says that a small increase of manpower will be necessary if new legislation is to have any impact at all. I say amen to that.
The clauses in paragraphs 24 to 26 are perhaps the nub of the matter. I hope that the important line in paragraph 24, line 4 I think it is, will be written firmly into the new Act; namely, that the word "pain" should be very broadly interpreted to include,
"disease, other disturbance of normal health, adverse change in physiology, discomfort and distress".
That seems to me to be a good package and brings home to me, and I am sure to many other people, how much pain is inflicted in the name of scientific advance on animals at the present time. All honour to the work of the RSPCA in seeking to curb this. To curb one aspect I am glad that project licences will not be issued to persons under 18, with the consequence that under the new proposals experiments in schools, with all their hazards, will be against the law.

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I welcome too the general provision that each person should be individually licensed and carry his or her own responsibility for the animals used. I am bound to say, however, that in the user establishments clause I do not think that the phrase "adequate care and accommodation" really means a thing. Rather there should be a code of practice setting out in detail, for example, the minimum freedom of movement to which an animal should be subjected.
I am glad that so many of the proposals set out in the report Animals and Ethics, made by a working party convened four years ago by the Dean of Westminster, Edward Carpenter, have been accepted in principle. Like the Council of Europe Convention, the Animals and Ethics report recognised that it simply is not possible to give animals all the ideal environment requirements, but where such deviations are absolutely unavoidable then efforts should be made at the other end of the business, as it were. In other words, is there unnecessary duplication of experiments? Could not information gained in one experimental laboratory be fed into a computer which would then be checked when further applications were received? My Lords, I welcome, with apologies to the noble Lord, Lord Somers, the general plans outlined in the White Paper; improved, I hope, in some of the ways I have touched on, all of which will need money: I do not doubt that there's the rub! But if my noble friend Lord Somers is afraid that at present we are only in the realm of lip service and are seeking to draw attention to this matter by the wording of his Motion, then, of course, I go along with him. I believe that the Government are intent on much more than lip service. I prefer to be optimistic.
Concern for the welfare of animals brings out many of the best features in people. One might not think from the attendance in your Lordships' House tonight that English people love animals as much as we do. But we do love animals and, without being smugly self-satisfied. I should have thought that there were very few countries in the world that care for animals as we do. Care for the rest of creation, especially for those parts which cannot answer for themselves, is engendered and encouraged by our bothering about animals; by a sensitivity to our kinship with the animal kingdom and, indeed, for the mystery of life itself; by the awareness that there are moral imperatives which cannot be dealt with simply in utilitarian terms. The extremists, as we have heard and as we all agreed, are not to be pandered to; but the general public interest in minimising cruelty to animals is, I believe, a very strong one and one which we shall do well to heed and promote in this House. Therefore, I oppose the thrust of the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Somers, and welcome the White Paper as being generally on the right lines.
8.12 p.m.
Lord Ferrier: My Lords, I am pleased to be following the right reverend Prelate in saying what he said; namely, that personally I welcome the White Paper and believe that as a result of this debate the noble Lord, Lord Somers, (for whom I have particular affection and regard) will be satisfied that the course
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that is now before us is the best course available. I took part in the important debates, which have already been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, and which led up to the completion of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury's Laboratory Animals Protection Bill, and we are looking forward to hearing the noble Earl when he speaks later in the debate. At that time I described some of the reasons why I myself though not a technical man, believe that I am qualified by experience to take part in a debate of this sort. I need not emphasise that I have been fated to be involved with animals at work and in play since I was brought up by an eminent professor of physiology and took some part, (despite being quite a little boy) in helping him with some of his work in the University of Glasgow which led up eventually to the solution of the cause of rickets. From the Army, where I found myself for one brief period involved with a large number of remounts from South America—a terrifying experience, but I worked with shoeing smiths and vets and I consequently had a valued and varied experience there—I then went to work in India, where I became concerned not only with field sports, including whipping in to a pack of fox hounds, but also in industrial and agricultural processes involving the use of animals.
I feel that this might be the juncture at which to emphasise one of my feelings about the criticism of people who are working with animals. It simply does not pay to hurt them. Nobody can say that it is worthwhile for pain (which it is very difficult to evaluate) to be applied to animals. It was after I retired to this country that I became chairman of a pharmaceutical company with its own animal laboratory. In the course of the later years of my life I have studied shooting dogs, particularly pointers, and have shown dogs of my own breeding and won prizes at Crufts. I have undergone anti-rabic treatment as a result of being bitten by a rabid dog and, what with this and that, have rubbed shoulders with men and women who know about animals and have lived with them. Therefore, I regard myself as competent to contribute to this debate in which, as I have said, I disagree with my noble friend Lord Somers that the Government need hesitate to go forward with the programme which they have in mind based on this White paper.
Subsequent speakers will refer to the need of our association with Europe. In fact, the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, has already mentioned it. I assure your Lordships that our connection with animal research in the world-wide spectrum of the healing sciences is without parallel. I feel that it falls to me to emphasise that in all my long and varied experience I have been impressed by the tenderness, the consideration and the kindness of veterinary officers, doctors, researchers and the menials who help to look after animals in applying to their tasks the care for animals which they themselves felt and which, under the existing regulations, they were compelled to observe, even if they did not like it.
Perhaps this is the moment to refer to the word "cruelty" which is always applied to the Act of 1876. I can only say that it might be worthwhile studying what went on in the debates on the Bill of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, in respect of this word "cruelty" and how it ever came to be mixed up with an

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accusation, as it were, in respect of medical research. I will not suggest that this is an occasion to talk about pain and the evaluation of pain; but our Government are committed to replace the White Paper in due course.
But, my Lords, to dismiss it now, I believe, would be to throw away much of the work that has already been done. So my first point is to emphasise that the people concerned with research and with the care of animals, whether it be in terms of medical research or to help man with his agriculture or the like, feel that it just is not worth while to inflict upon animals pain which can be avoided. That is my first point.
My second point is a little complicated. It is a complaint about the extent to which the "antis", who have already been referred to, interfere with necessary and legitimate work which is directed in the long run towards the avoidance of suffering. That is what we are up to in medical research. But where do they get the money from? My Lords, they get it from legacies. I do not know at all, but perhaps the Minister may know, the depth of the pockets of these associations so that they are enabled to pay high salaries to individuals conducting opposition to research work. Is it that the substantial sums at their disposal have got to be spent in accordance with the wishes of the donors, namely, in dealing with experimentation, vivisection, or the like?
My feelings in this respect are supported by what we have heard in the debate on research which immediately preceded this one. It seems that there is a tremendous lot of research which is limited by the availability of resources. I wonder whether there are any means whereby people could be persuaded, if indeed there are adequate funds to support the work of "antis", to support research such as has been referred to this afternoon.
The noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, mentioned cot deaths. Oddly enough, that is a subject which I raised in this House the other day and I have in my pocket a letter which arrived only this morning, pointing out something which I did not understand, which is that the Department of Health and Social Security and my noble friend Lord Glenarthur have no control over medical research in Scotland. That is in the hands of the Secretary of State for Scotland. I mention this only because there is a possibility that we can use this means of getting in touch between the two departments. Obviously, from what has been said in this Chamber today, an enormous amount could be done if more money was available. I believe that there are a large number of people who have subscribed and will continue to subscribe to anti-vivisection movements and others of that nature, who could have their money diverted to (shall we say?) important work such as that of the Battersea Dogs' Home.
That, then, is my second contribution to the debate. First, I wished to emphasise my impression of the natural feelings of the people dealing with animals who like to be kind and do not like to be unkind; and secondly, to wonder where we could go if only we could persuade people to leave more money for research, such as I know they do to, say, cancer research today.
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I have one or two notes here on points which I will briefly mention. One is to remind your Lordships that when they talk of "an experiment", a diet is an experiment. If you put two dozen mice on a diet, that is 24 experiments; and it is as well to remember that this question of anaesthesia in experiments is an interesting one. We had an old rabbit in my pharmaceutical company who lived to a great age. He had "an experiment" several times a week when a drop of blood was drawn from his ear—because he was "bloody" and could be used to check the output of a narcotic in that way without any anaesthetic.
I see I also have a note of a point which may be interesting to your Lordships from the veterinary angle: that is the use, in dealing with horses, of what is called "a twitch". That is a short stick with a loop on it which you put over the bottom lip of a horse and twist it like this. It looks awful—I was watching my daughter doing it to one of her horses the other day—but the fact is that it is painless, and not only is it painless but it allows the horse itself not to feel—am I not right?
That is my contribution to this most fascinating debate. I think we owe an expression of gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Somers, for raising it. I am sure the right reverend Prelate was right in saying that there is no point in suggesting a withdrawal of the White Paper. Let us go ahead, as we are doing now, and I look forward with the keenest anticipation to hearing the speakers who are going to follow me in making my rather amateurish contribution.
8.26 p.m.
Lord Airedale: My Lords, it may be that sooner or later someone will say that, with my name, I ought to be taking an interest in this subject, and I therefore thought that I might as well say it myself and get it out of the way! I think it is my only qualification, really, for taking part in this debate, and I see on the list of speakers who are to follow me the names of distinguished scientists, so I will confine myself to just a very few points that have occurred to me in reading the White Paper.
I quarrel with paragraph 9, in which it is said:
"It will also be a feature of the new controls that no animal should be subjected to a level of pain greater than is appropriate to the procedure in question".
I simply do not understand how anybody can contemplate the deliberate infliction of pain on an animal as being "appropriate". I very much prefer the words of paragaph 26. I hope that these, and not the words in paragraph 9, will appear in the Bill. It says there:
"the new system of control will ensure that in no procedure will the level of pain be permitted to exceed what is unavoidable to achieve the intended results".
Paragraph 32 deals with what I suppose one might call random research. It says:
"Research with no immediately clear application has led to many of the greatest practical advances".
That is undoubtedly true, and I suppose a good example of it was the discovery of penicillin by Sir Alexander Fleming. Sir Alexander was not looking for penicillin when he made the discovery, and in his modest way he said: "Penicillin simply flew in through the window of St. Mary's Hospital". But I wonder +78how

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many experiments Sir Alexander had conducted and how many kindred experiments had been conducted by his colleagues all over the world before penicillin "flew in" through Sir Alexander's window.
I would say that if scientists wish to pursue research with no immediate objective in mind, let them do so to their heart's content if they confine themselves to creatures without the higher sensitivities. But to subject animals with sophisticated nervous systems to experiments in the interest of purely random research, in the hope that a spin-off like penicillin or something of that kind might eventually arise, should not be permitted. I hope that paragraph 32 will be reconsidered before the Bill is presented.
There is a curiosity in paragraph 41 which deals with applications for project licences for education and training. It states that,
"procedures for the purpose of education and training should be permitted only if their objective cannot be achieved by effective audio-visual or any other suitable methods or combination of methods. This will be met by requiring applicants for project licences for this purpose to certify that the objective could not effectively be achieved by such means".
I hope that when the Bill is published no applicant for a licence will be allowed to certify anything at all. I hope that the certification will be a one-way traffic from the authority which gives permission for the licences. That is the intention of the White Paper, as expressed in paragraph 38. I do not want there to be any possibility of the authority sheltering behind a certificate arriving from the applicant. Let the applicant make his representations, but let the authority do all the certification.
Paragraph 43, which is the only other topic that I want to mention, appears to look forward to the day when people will no longer be able to say that laboratory animals never come out, because the 1876 requirement that experimental animals must be killed in every case is to be repealed. The advisory committee look forward to these better times, too, when they say in paragraph 79:
"A dog may have undergone surgery from which it has recovered sufficiently to be taken home as a pet".
This must be so. Pet animals nowadays undergo serious operations from which they recover and return home, just like their masters. It is an absurd idea that every laboratory animal should be regarded as being incapable of being released, given a good home and able to live out its life in the natural and normal way.
However, I can foresee one or two administrative problems. It is very important that the laboratory should find a good home for every animal that is released. How will this be controlled? What is "a good home"? It is not a very easy subject with which to deal. Will laboratories be allowed to sell the animals which they no longer require? Will they be allowed to undersell the professional breeders of pet animals? And if they derive an income from the sale of animals, will they be less economical about the number of experiments that they conduct than they are now, when they have no income to alleviate the expenses of running the laboratory? These are some of the administrative problems which may arise from this new policy. We need to think about these matters before the Bill is introduced.
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That is all I have to say, apart from saluting the noble Lord, Lord Somers, for the very moderate terms in which he introduced this subject.
8.35 p.m.
Lord Hunter of Newington: My Lords, legislation for the protection of animals in Britain predates that of any modern state and I, for one, have tended to think that we have nothing to learn from others who are attempting to catch up. The essential framework of our legislation has not changed, though experience over the years has led to many improvements. In recent years the anti-vivisection lobby has become more demanding and militant. Now that the legislation is being reviewed, it behoves us to consider whether the legislation is still on the right lines and to cast a glance or two at what others are doing. We are very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Somers, for raising the matter at this time.
The first fact one discovers when one looks around is the heightened awareness by experimenters of the responsibilities associated with the use of animals: an increased sensitivity to their needs and their capacity to suffer. This awareness will do more than any legislation, but it is this awareness which has prompted important developments in Sweden, Canada and the United States.
It would be fair to say that there has been a notable reluctance among British experimenters to discuss the moral implications of animal experiments. Both I and many others who have held a Home Office licence feel that we operated within the law. The regulations and permissions were carefully monitored by the Home Office inspectors. Some scientists honestly believe that only they can appreciate the issues and that discussion with others might not be very profitable. The Research Defence Society has done a wonderful job in defending the situation against the extremist anti-vivisectionists, but the new factor is a general interest and concern by a broad section of the rational general public. A "low profile" approach has not stilled the protests of the anti-vivisectionists.
What responsibility do scientists have to be accountable to the public for their actions and activities? Would sharing the responsibility with informed members of the public not only lighten the burden of decision but inform the public on the issues in a way which has not been attempted before? Surely the informed public have a role to play in countering the extremists. Moreover, the public must know and understand how scientists are striving all the time to devise new methods of testing which do not involve animal experiments.
Looking around the world, we find that scientists are less inhibited in this debate about the ethics of using animals in experimentation and that they have invited participation by the public at large. Is it time for scientists involved in research with animals to consult that section of the general public which has a genuine concern to avoid unnecessary suffering? Animal experiment review committees could contribute a valuable dialogue with the general public. Now is our chance to look abroad, because these experiments have already started.
The question, then, is: will lay input encourage scientists to be more reflective in their management

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and use of animals and in experimental procedures without detriment to worthwhile scientific investigation?
In July 1979 local ethical committees for the review of animal experiments were made mandatory in Sweden. As originally conceived, the committees were not to be mandatory but advisory bodies, encouraging consultation between investigators and other experts. The greatest threat to the usefulness of the Swedish committees is posed by the strength of the anti-vivisection lobby striving for the unobtainable. By demanding the immediate abolition of the use of animals for experiments, they are hampering the amelioration of animal suffering that is possible now. That is what is happening in Sweden.
In North America, scientists are currently trying to come to terms with the new guidelines on laboratory animal welfare proposed by the National Institute of Health, which were mentioned this evening by the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon. As he said, one of the major proposals requires that each institution appoints an animal research committee. This will consider both the care and the use of animals and will be required to review any research proposal in which animals are likely to be exposed to any pain or distress. Most controversial of all among these proposals is a direction that at least one committee member must be unconnected with the institution; in effect, a representative of the general public.
Failure to comply could deprive the research institution concerned of money from external sources, because most funding agencies traditionally defer to the National Institute of Health in the matter of regulations. So this is a profound revolution on the American scene. Veterinary surgeons have been in the van of the United States' initiative and their diploma in laboratory animal medicine is increasingly accepted as a suitable qualification for those employed in animal care. It is too early to say how this NIH initiative might work, but surely we should be studying this experiment closely. Current proposals allow the appointment of outside members but the committees will want to appoint people from the community with sufficient objectivity to be credible as representatives of public opinion. In Canada, the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, representing 36 member organisations, proves an effective mouthpiece for welfare concerns.
It would be wrong of the United Kingdom not to consider these developments with the greatest of care. We must accept that we have something to learn. In fact, the expression of concern for improvement in laboratory animal welfare in Canada has outstripped legislative provision here. We have a fine Home Office inspectorate with a history of which they can be proud. Through them, we could have an excellent means of supervising institutes based on ethical committees. Of course, their full-hearted co-operation would be vital to the successful functioning of the committees—but by this means, we could avoid some of the snags and disappointments which have occurred in Sweden.
8.47 p.m.
Lord Houghton of Sowerby: My Lords, when I first saw the Question on the Order Paper by the noble Lord. Lord Somers, I was a little doubtful whether this
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was the time to have a debate on the subject. This was in view of the fact that so much work is now in progress following the publication of the White Paper last year, the difficulty of defining the present position of the Government on some of the proposals in the White Paper, and also the difficulty posed to those of us who have been within the range of discussions and consultations in bringing them before your Lordships' House. So it struck me that this was a difficult time for some of us to discuss the subject.
Nevertheless, I think that so far this has been a most fruitful occasion—and by the end of the debate I am sure it will be more so. A number of valuable comments and criticisms have been made, which I believe will come timely to the Government's further consideration of the White Paper. I withdraw the reservations I had in my mind about dealing with the matter at this particular time.
That does not mean to say tht I am going to inflict a long speech upon your Lordships and deal with the matter in any detail tonight. The noble Lord, Lord Somers, does not of course expect the Government to give an affirmative answer to his question. It is an art form of procedure when one asks the Government to consider withdrawing something—and do not expect that they will do so. In fact, most people probably hope that they will not. I would not join with the noble Lord in asking the Government to consider withdrawing the White Paper. We do not want to start all over again. Indeed, there is so much in the White Paper that is good, we would only have to re-write it if we did start all over again. We have to go on from here.
What we want are improvements. This is no reflection on the White Paper, because White Papers are published for the purpose of seeking constructive proposals and comments in order that a final revise of the proposals and of the approach may be made in the run-up to the legislation.
I am not going to ask any questions of the Minister except one. I asked this question during the debate on the Queen's Speech, and it has been asked by my noble friend Lord Mishcon. My question is this: can we really rely on the Government introducing this legislation in the next Session of Parliament?
I read in the newspapers of the difficult and controversial legislation that is blowing up in the field of social security and in other areas, which is going to impose enormous burdens on the time of both Houses of Parliament. I ask myself about building societies, farm animal welfare and swans—and I could list a number of other topics which are all clamouring for the attention of the next Session of Parliament. That next Session is going to be a really busy one, and many controversial matters will come before us.
My difficulty is the privilege I have in being within the range of consultation and discussion on the White Paper. I am chairman of the Committee for the Reform of Animal Experiments, and have been since it began. That committee has been working in a joint effort with the British Veterinary Association and with a body that has been referred to already—FRAME, which exists for the purpose of finding alternatives to the use of animals in medical experiments. This combination of CRANE, the BVA and FRAME has proved to be a most useful one. I might even say that

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it has been a most formidable one, because within the range of those three bodies there is probably as constructive and moderate an approach to this matter as one can find anywhere in the spectrum of animal welfare at the present time.
We are most anxious that when the Government's revised proposals are made, much that has been recommended to them from that source will be adopted. I do not want to anticipate what the noble Lord the Minister will say or to prejudge anything connected with his remit tonight, but we are expecting another memorandum from the Government some time in the New Year which will give their opinions about the matters which have been referred to them as a result of their request for information, proposals, and criticisms of the White Paper. We look forward to that memorandum.
As far as the three bodies I have mentioned are concerned, we have had much to say about many of the proposals in the White Paper, and I will not go into that aspect now. Some of the weaknesses of the White Paper have already been picked on in the course of this debate, and others have not. But what we have done—the three bodies acting jointly, to which I have referred—is to make the crucial issue of the forthcoming legislation the minimisation, the control and, wherever possible, the complete elimination of pain to animals in laboratories, That was the central issue of the 1876 Act in the context of that time. It is the central issue of the next piece of legislation in the context of our time.
In this connection we have to have regard to many procedures on animals which have long ceased to deserve the name "experiment". They are not experiments; they are procedures. To a very large extent they are routine procedures. In 1876 animals were not being used by the million for the testing of toxicity in substances of all kinds, from the kitchen to the garden, to the farm, to the lavatory and to the dressing table. These are substances of an infinite variety which are tested on living animals for dangerous side effects. Although the existing legislation talks about the control of pain, unless to relieve it would defeat the purpose of the experiments, there are thousands upon thousands of animals going through a most distressing experience by having substances pumped down their throats to see how much one can inject into them before they die. That is not a pleasant thing to be doing to any animal yet in the case of LD50, and in other ways, animals are being subjected to excessive doses of irritation, possible infection and other side effects of substances in order to satisfy the safety syndrome of the consuming public.
There is probably no problem upon which the public have two sets of values, their own and those of the animals. They are very reluctant to reconcile the two. People can go from a meeting on the protection of animals straight into a chemist's shop and buy something which is there because it has been stuffed down the throat of a helpless animal so that they can buy without fear that it will do them harm. If the public want to save animals from these dreadful experiences and agonising death, they have a simple remedy—stop using the substances that give rise to this very dreadful use of living creatures for the service of
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mankind. But we know that is an impossibility because we are all dependent upon substances, drugs, medicines, household utensils and all the rest of it.
We have much reconciling to do before this legislation is ultimately approved by both Houses. I beseech the Minister to make sure, in his discussions on the future legislative programme for that Session, to allow us adequate time. I must say that it is a great comfort to know that it will be a Government Bill. We will be out of the tricks and the devices of the Private Member's procedure, with people getting fussy and fidgety as the calendar goes on. It will be the Government's job to see that Bill through, however long it takes. It will not take anything like so long if the Government make up their mind that they must get the highest common denominator in their approach to the different controversial matters in it.
Therefore, my message to the Minister and to your Lordships' House is that when this Bill appears it will represent five years of work and waiting for the fulfilment of the pledge given by the Conservative Party during the General Election of 1979, and renewed since. After all that time this Bill had better be good. Upon my word, it had better be good! Throughout that time public opinion on this question has been hardening. When one leaves a problem unresolved for too long the price goes up all the time. History has proved that time and again. If you do not do it when you should then later on you have to satisfy stronger demands. The public are hardening towards a more drastic curtailment of the use of animals for numerous, seemingly trivial or unnecessary purposes.
I think that so much that might have been regarded as significant progress in 1979 will by next year be scorned as political palsy, or even worse. The unfortunate experience that some of us are having is that while this is all going on not only are the Government being attacked but the militant movement inside some organisations is being directed against those of us who are trying to steer a steady and constructive course in this debate and in the approach to the new legislation. We are already under fire. We can stand for that, but we certainly cannot stand for what is going on now in the name of animals, animal welfare and animal liberation. I dissociate myself completely from the frantic behaviour which we are at present witnessing. I associate myself with the criticisms that have been made.
I sincerely hope that the people concerned will stop it. It is not doing any good. It will be a great shame if the pedestal of public respect and compassion that animals have at present is dragged into the mire of public indignation and condemnation. It will be bad for them and also for those of us who are trying to improve the condition and treatment of animals in society. I beg of these people—I do not know them and I doubt whether I have any influence on them—that it would be very desirable for them to stop what they are doing and let us get on with the constructive work which is now in progress.
There, I think, I can draw my remarks to a conclusion. I look forward to the publication of the further document in the new year. I hope to be pleased with it, as do many of my friends who have been working hard to assist the Home Office to come to conclusions in that document which will command

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widespread support. Let us get on with it. Let us have the Bill ready for the next Queen's Speech so that the moment Her Majesty utters the promise that a Bill will be introduced to update, review or reform the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 we can have it the next week and start on it, with the whole of that Session before us to see it through. That will be the day. I only hope that, with my ambitions in life, I live to see it.
8.58 p.m.
The Earl of Halsbury: My Lords, I too, am grateful to my noble friend Lord Somers for putting this Question down for debate because it gives me an opportunity to ask the noble Lord who is to answer for the Government a couple of questions on his forward look for the Bill arising out of any representations that have been made to him about the White Paper.
Those I shall come to later, if I may, because I should like to bring a little comfort if I can to my noble friend Lord Somers and also to the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, on where I think they are distressing themselves unduly by failing to take certain factors into account; the failure to do which tends to get people to catch hold of the wrong end of the stick. All the factors of self interest operate on the side of the animal. Alternative methods are cheaper—I repeat, cheaper.
At one time I was chairman of the Institute of Cancer Research, which used 100,000 mice per year at £1 each. I had to find that. We were an unendowed organisation. I had to find someone willing to give me £100,000 with which to buy those animals. So if there had been an alternative method it would have been much cheaper.
For heaven's sake, all the alternative methods are much cheaper. But as somebody once remarked, if you want to do research into teratogenesis, which is the production of monsters during pregnancy, nobody has ever seen a pregnant test tube and you may have to use an animal for this purpose. but generally speaking, where you can have alternative methods they are very considerably cheaper.
The next point to observe is this. I expect nearly all your Lordships have a driving licence. Very few of you would want to do something which would risk the loss of your licence. Still, if you were no longer allowed to drive a car, you could take a taxi. But if you have your licence taken away by the Home Office for doing something you should not do to a mouse, you do not just lose a means of transport, you lose your livelihood. So the last thing you are going to do is try to pull a fast one on the Home Office inspector.
Furthermore, your employers will be on the side of the inspector. They will not want to pull a fast one and risk getting caught, because all your work will be terminated and there is no resale value for half-completed research. So from that point of view the employer will be on the side of the inspector, the licensee will be on the side of the inspector and all three of them will be on the side of the mouse for that reason.
The noble Lord, Lord Somers, referred to muscle relaxants which he said are really paralysants. He referred to curare in this context. It is quite true: curare is a South American arrow poison, and it kills by
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paralysing the muscles you use for breathing. But short of a lethal dose it does relax the muscles. I hope nobody in the House is over-squeamish about surgical operations. When you have made a hole on the outside of a human body you have only begun. You have to open up that hole by pulling, and you bruise the tissues very considerably. So to be able to use a muscle relaxant based on research on curare is a very valuable addition to the tools of the surgeon. The two most commonly in use are hexamine and decamine. I had one or other—I cannot remember which—in the course of an operation, and I was not bruised at all. So they are very valuable tools in the hands of the surgeon.
It is a great mistake always to use a pejorative word in this context. Vivisection is a pejorative word. It means cutting up alive without anaesthetics. But you never get a licence to do that from the Home Office. The word was coined before anaesthetics existed, and nobody would be allowed by the Home Office to cut up a live mouse without anaesthetics. It would never be permitted. So really we all have a self-denying ordinance. So do not use the word "vivisection" it means surgery without anaesthetics, and nobody will ever get a licence to do that.
The noble Lord, Lord Airedale, I think was a little disturbed at the idea of random experiments out of random curiosity. Scientists do not do that sort of thing. I do not pick up a mouse by its tail and drop it in to a bottle of sulphuric acid to see what is going to happen. I know what is going to happen: I shall inflict a very nasty death on the mouse. We do not do that kind of thing. It is quite unnecessary to take precautions against it.
Take LD50. Why do we use LD50s? Why do we not use LD1s, for instance; that is, something that would kill 1 per cent. of the batch of mice instead of 50 per cent? It is because it can be shown mathematically that for a given level of significance you use fewer animals on an LD50 test than on an LD25 or an LD75. It is in fact the minimum use of the animal. Why do we do it at all? It is because some very important drugs have a very low chemotherapeutic index. That is the ratio between the lethal dose and the therapeutic dose. Some of the cancer resolving drugs (carcinolytics, as they are called) have very low chemotherapeutic indexes. In giving a therapeutic dose you are very close to the lethal dose. They do make people very ill: hair falls out, skin comes off and so on. It is most important to know, in this range of drugs with a low chemotherapeutic index, what it is safe to give, where is the LD50, and so on. This is very important to know. That is the context in which things of that kind are done.
You do not use LD50s on experiments with cosmetics like cold cream. You use what we call a limit test. You ask yourself what is the largest quantity of cold cream a child could possibly swallow, from its mother's dressing table, as a percentage of its body weight. You give that percentage of its body weight to a mouse and if nothing happens, you are okay. That is what is called a limit test.
Take safety testing. You do not normally test something on an animal for safety, believing the substance to be dangerous. You believe it to be safe, but you want confirmation. Probably 99 times out of

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100 you are quite right; nothing at all happens. For example, is it a particular cosmetic carcinogenic? You put in on the skin of a mouse. If nothing happens, then it is not. So the mouse has not suffered in any way. It is freely available for re-use for another carcinogenic test and so on. All these safety factors are operating the whole time on behalf of the animal. It is always receiving the benefit of human self-interest in the course of that sort of work.
The word "cosmetic" is of course again a sort of pejorative term; you feel it is decoration for prostitutes, or something like that. But scar tissue, as I have said before——
Lord Houghton of Sowerby: Yes, you have.
The Earl of Halsbury: but not to a House of the same composition. Scar tissue has a high tumourogenic potential; it is more likely to produce a tumour than others. So a cosmetic is to hide a scar; call it beautification—that is another emotionally laden word. It is to hide a scar, but it is particularly important that you know that that cosmetic is not carcinogenic because the scar is particularly liable to engender it. So it is tested, and so on. But this all works in general in favour of the animal.
The Draize test is a case in point. This is another pejorative term. The Draize test is no longer used. It was invented because specific eyebrow black used in the United States was suspected to cause blindness in human beings. I think that the man's name was Draize. He fixed up this test in which the cosmetic was applied to the eyeballs of rabbits, and they did go blind. It is no longer done that way. The test was rigged up in an emergency. It got a bad name for itself. People talk about it as if it was an everyday practice at Boots, or something like that; not a bit of it! There is now a microscope through which one can look at any sign whatsoever of damage to the cornea in a rabbit.
There is a specific reason for using rabbits. They have corneas that do not blink, or something like that. I have forgotten the actual reason. But nobody would use a rabbit at £5 if he could use a rat at £3 or a mouse at £1. Those figures are ones that I carry in my head from of old.
The reason that I am going on like this—and I am nearly coming to the end—is simply to give a little comfort to my noble friend Lord Somers and the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, that the sort of things that scientists do in the laboratory are such that we are not really as black as we are painted.
There was a point that the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, made about the adequacy of the number of inspectors. How long is a piece of string? One hears that the number of animals being used rather than using alternatives is 3 million. It was 5 million in days gone by; so the number has gone down. How on earth does one inspect 5 million? The imagination boggles at it. But they are concentrated into only 600 establishments, and I think that there are 17 or so Home Office inspectors. That gives about 30 establishments per inspector. Most establishments are working on a small number of standard procedures which have all been agreed with the inspector in advance. A person
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plotting his course on a new experimental line always fixes it with the inspector first to make sure that he will get permission to do it within the terms of his licence.
That again comes back to the point of the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, about some beastly scientist, drunk in charge of a mouse, who proceeds to do something horrible to it. Scientific laboratories are not run in that way. We have an immense corpus of knowledge which makes it quite unnecessary to do random experiments.
Lord Airedale: My Lords, I do not remember having said anything like what the noble Earl said just now that I said. But he is not suggesting, is he, that this White Paper does not envisage the deliberate infliction of pain upon animals in certain circumstances?
The Earl of Halsbury: My Lords, we deliberately inflict pain on ourselves in certain circumstances. As a student I used to prick myself with pins to compare one pain with another and one area of my body with another from the standpoint of sensitivity. I think that I shall be answering the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, if I now put my two questions to the Government.
The first is that I think there is a right and a wrong way of introducing a pain clause into the Bill. I should far sooner keep a pain clause out of the Bill and put it in as a licence condition. But there is a half-way house between the two, as represented by the old Schedule A to the Companies Act, which was a model form of memorandum and articles of association which one could follow. There is no reason why there should not be scheduled to the Bill a model licence which would have a model pain clause in it, and then there could be put in the Bill a condition that any licence not issued in those terms should be subject to report to the advisory council and comment thereby. That would be a happy medium.
The reason that I want to keep the pain clause out of the statute in rigid form is that probably another 108 years will go by before we get another Act of Parliament, from a still more enlightened age. In the meantime, all sorts of things can happen. Once that clause is put into the Bill, there is nothing that can be done about it. But if it is put into the Bill as a model licence and it is then required that any variation from the model licence will be reported in exceptional circumstances, that would be a happy medium. I hope that the noble Lord will get that under his belt, forward it to his advisers and see whether something on those lines cannot be agreed.
My other point is the question of the council. Generally speaking, the White Paper follows the lines of the Bill that I piloted through the House twice, unamended, having been previously amended by the Select Committee which studied it. But in my Bill it was a statutory council, and that means that the Minister has to publish its report. If we are to have just an advisory council appointed by the Minister, with no statutory obligations, there is no reason that he should follow its advice, publish its advice or anything. He need not be bound to follow its advice even if it is a statutory advisory council, but at least he would have to report to Parliament once a year that he had overruled his own advisory council for reasons which seemed good to him as a Minister. I attach great

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importance to having a statutory council and not an unofficial one appointed by the Minister. Again, I should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Elton, if he could include a reference to that in his reply.
9.13 p.m.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Elton): My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Somers, directs our attention to a very sensitive and a very important issue. It is one that has recently been much in the public mind, and not all of the public concerned with animal welfare is as intemperate and irresponsible as the sham poisoners who strutted into the limelight during the last few days.
Responsible supporters of animal welfare are concerned to achieve the best standard of animal welfare achievable in our present and developing circumstances, and that is the Government's aim also. The circumstances include the state of both medical and veterinary science, the identified and unidentified threats to both human and animal health and, in the wider context, the state of the law on such matters in all the European countries.
Within that context, as my noble friend Lord Ferrier has ably pointed out, there is a balance to be struck, and it is the duty of the Government to strike it and to embody it in law. I need scarcely remind your Lordships that the human population of this country was. until quite recently, subject to the lethal scourge of diphtheria. We can remember, too, the crippling and often fatal attacks of polio. If it had not been for medical experiments on animals we should not be able now to protect our children—and adults—from these two killers; nor would this country's 230,000 or so diabetics be alive today, let alone able to lead normal, useful lives. The past contribution of these experiments to human health is therefore a fundamental part of the health of the nation.
And much the same is true of animal health, for it is medical experiment with animals that has enabled us to isolate and counter many animal diseases as well. Before the last world war, I remember as a child being deeply grieved by the death of a puppy from canine distemper, and in 1959 I lost a beloved Airedale—in this case a terrier!—to leptospirosis. But both those diseases have now been controlled as a result of experiments on animals, as have blackleg in sheep and cattle and many other animal diseases.
So, although there are some people who believe that there is no balance to strike because no animal experiments should be permitted, I do not believe that they are among your Lordships. In this House we recognise that governments must ensure—and statutes must permit—that, where human life can be protected or saved by medical experiments with animals, then it should be.
But that bald statement is not enough. There can be no question of the unbridled exploitation of the animal kingdom for trivial reasons; nor is this often distressing kind of work something that should be undertaken by just anyone who feels like it, in any place or conditions they choose. The Government have an overriding responsibility for the welfare of the people of this country but they also have a moral responsibility for the welfare of its animals.
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That is a responsibility which we have been pursuing to considerable purpose in recent years, and abroad as well as at home. Our domestic legislation is already ahead of that of the rest of Europe. Your Lordships may also know that we played a leading role in drafting a European Convention which will require other European countries to improve their standards. Even then, I fear, there will be less stringent control over pain levels elsewhere than in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, it is a start, and I can tell the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, that we hope it will be agreed early in 1985.
I mention that only in an aside to begin to establish our credentials in this matter. It ought not to be necessary to do that, but from some of the propaganda one sees being generated these days one might think the Government were not seriously concerned and seriously active in these matters. So let me also mention that we are the first British Government to provide government money to fund specific research into non-sentient alternatives to animals as the subject of this sort of experiment; and I gladly acknowledge the valuable work in this field of the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments, as well as that of a number of individual companies.
In spite of the impressively long list of alternatives which the noble Lord, Lord Somers, gave from the late Professor Smyth's admirable book, we shall never, I fear, find a means of doing entirely without animals for experiment. But the 1983 statistics do show that the number of experiments in that year was again lower than that in the previous year and was in fact the lowest since 1959. Various of your Lordships wanted to know the actual figures. They were 5·6 million in 1971, 4·6 million in 1980, and 3·6 million in 1983, which was the lowest ever. Many factors may have contributed to the decline in numbers but I think that the Government's constant exhortations to licensees to develop and use alternatives and the helpful work that I have spoken of have had a considerable effect.
I turn now to the White Paper. It was published in 1983 as a means both of airing our proposals for further legislative progress and of opening up this whole subject to debate. That, as the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, rightly said, is what White Papers are for; and it seems to have been remarkably successful in both respects.
I should like to start my commentary by acknowledging the considerable help we have received from the Committee for the Reform of Animal Experimentation. My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State has asked me to pay a warm tribute, which I willingly do, to the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, for his ready participation in discussions, and to say that consideration of the pain condition, with which he is particularly concerned, does continue.
It seems to us that what is needed is not so much a definition that will satisfy students of semantics, but something that will give practical help to those in the laboratory who must be able to identify both a threshold of pain and the moment at which it is passed. That is what we are now working on and we are considering, as the noble Lord says, publishing a supplementary document on this and other important

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developments in Government thinking after Christmas.
I should also acknowledge both the help and the approval of important public bodies, including the British Veterinary Association, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, FRAME, and the Royal Society.
Since the White Paper was published we have received the views of thousands of people and we are grateful to them. Their letters covered the whole range of opinions, from the view that all animal experiments are evil, to the belief that increased control would prevent the sort of discoveries that have brought great benefits to both humans and animals in the past. A large number of people who wrote did so in identical words—they had, I gather, been put up to it by animal welfare societies—demanding a total ban on particular types of experiments. Many also suggested—again in identical terms—that the proposals in the White Paper actually relaxed controls which are presently in force under the 1876 Act.
I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, that the whole spectrum of comments offered on the White Paper have been read and considered with great care. We are glad to see that many people who do not want to see all animal experiments abolished have welcomed its proposals. There is wide acceptance of the need to tighten controls.
The Cruelty to Animals Act has been sufficiently flexible to control the kinds of research which could not have been foreseen in 1876. But we do now need to give statutory force to controls which are already imposed by administrative means. We also need to embody new additional controls in statute so that all who are concerned can see the framework within which—and within which alone—the Government will permit this very sensitive work to be done.
Anxiety about the White Paper proposals comes mainly from two opposite directions: from those who believe that they do not go far enough, and those who think that they go too far. To start with the latter, your Lordships should know that some scientists have expressed reservations because they feel that administering a tougher system of control will mean an increase in bureaucracy. Even they have generally welcomed the principle of tighter controls with a wider application. They support the continuation of the present pain condition attached to each licence. This is designed to ensure that no animal under experiment may suffer sever pain which is likely to endure.
Some scientists have also taken the initiative in drafting guidelines on pain and its relief. The Biological Council has already issued guidelines on this matter, and the Royal Society is drafting a code of practice which will contain detailed guidelines on the relief of pain or distress in animals. We have studied the guidelines issued by the National Institute of Health in the United States of America about which the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, asked me, and I understand that the Royal Society is taking into account both them and the Canadian guidelines in this work. Their work will be particularly helpful if the Government decide to issue a code of practice themselves when new legislation comes into force.
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My right honourable friend the Home Secretary has conducted a full-scale field trial of the new system proposed in the White Paper. He has been aided in this by a large number of licencees, for whose co-operation he is most grateful. A report of the trial has been considered by his Advisory Committee on Animal Experiments, chaired by Dame Mary Warnock. In the light of the trial, some details of the proposals, notably the requirement for an independent sponsor for every project, are now being reconsidered.
Much of the anxiety about the White Paper proposals which has been aired this evening involves, I believe, a misconception about the proposals. It may be that some of it can even be traced back to misinformation generated by pressure groups. I gladly assure the noble Lord, Lord Somers, that there is no truth whatever in the allegation that curare or similar muscle relaxants, which are at present permitted in some circumstances, would be permitted in place of anaesthetics. The use of curare is not prohibited under the 1876 Act and the noble Earl has made clear why this should be.
Curare or curariform substances may at present be administered with the special permission of the Secretary of State, but only after 48 hours' notice has been given to the local inspector, so that he may attend the experiment if he wishes. Under the new legislation these purely administrative controls will be given the full force of statute law and be put on the face of the Act.
I hope that I can reassure the noble Lord, Lord Somers, that the White Paper will provide positive extra protection for laboratory animals. The proposed system of licensing projects and individuals separately will give us tighter control than ever before over programmes of research work. The new legislation will bring under control for the first time procedures such as those involving the use of animals in the production of serum and antibodies. It will, for the first time, bring under control the use of embryos and foetuses at specified states of development.
Again, as the law now stands animals suffering from potentially painful genetic defects can be bred freely and without control. For the first time they also will be given the protection of the Act. There will, also for the first time, be regulation of establishments which breed and supply normal animals for laboratory use; and the inspectorate will be strengthened to enable them to apply the new controls effectively. I do not echo the words "How long is a piece of string?", but my right honourable friend is determined that the inspectorate shall be sufficiently strong to make its inspection effective.
The White Paper proposes that scientific procedures which may cause distress, suffering or lasting harm to live animals may be permitted for the particular purposes which it specifies. These purposes are those which appear in the draft European convention. Noble Lords, and the noble Lord, Lord Somers, in particular, have criticised the list as being so broad that it would cover virtually any purpose for which a researcher wished to use an animal. Again, I can reassure your Lordships that all research work will require specific authorisation and it will always be at the discretion of the Secretary of State whether or not a project licence to carry out the work proposed is granted.

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Research may not always have an immediate application to medical treatment, but it must always have a clearly defined scientific purpose. I hope that that is as reassuring to the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, as the reference of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, to mice and sulphuric acid.
A proposed project would have to meet the criteria of permissible purposes. But that would be only the first test; there would be others. The Secretary of State would have to be satisfied of six further things: that the aim of the project was worthwhile; that its design was good; that no non-sentient alternative to animals was practicable; that only the minimum number of animals necessary to achieving an objective was to be used; that there would be no infliction of unnecessary pain; and that appropriate measures would be taken to reduce any pain and suffering which did occur. Not until he was satisfied on all six counts would he be prepared to issue a project licence. In reaching that decision he would be advised by members of the inspectorate (who will, as now, all hold medical or veterinary qualifications).
Nor is that all. Further specialised advice would be sought wherever necessary from a specialist assessor acceptable to both the applicant and the Secretary of State. If the issue was sufficiently important, this advice would come from the Secretary of State's Animal Procedures Committee.
Those are the proposals for legislation which we shall introduce as soon as parliamentary time allows. The noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, is an old enough parliamentary hand to know that whatever is in my mind, I cannot say anything stronger than that. We expect to provide substantially increased penalties to see that the law bites. A breach of the guidelines would not, I believe, be an offence, but it would be admissible in evidence in prosecution.
The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury—and I pause to acknowledge the great value of the noble Earl's ability to combine lucidity with direct personal experience—has produced a spread of ideas about the pain clause which I shall certainly undertake to bring forward to my right honourable friend. I can also tell the noble Earl, in regard to the council, that there will be a statutory animal procedures committee whose annual report the Home Secretary will be required to publish, and I refer him to paragraph 17 of the White Paper. I understand that it is virtually identical to what he has himself proposed.
I understand the acute disquiet that many people feel about experiments on animals for purposes such as the testing of new cosmetic ingredients. But the testing of these, as of other chemical substances, is a crucial part of the environmental protection measures for people who work in factories for which the trade unions have rightly campaigned for very many years. Workers who manufacture cosmetics and other goods are exposed to levels of contact with their products scores of times higher than are their eventual customers. The girl who makes cosmetics has to be protected as well as the girl who wears them, and many cosmetics of course are used by their users every single day of an adult life. No Government could contemplate the discovery in 25 years' time that a deodorant, which had not been adequately tested in
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1985 or 1986 was in fact a carcinogen when it was accumulated over a lifetime.
For those of your Lordships who nevertheless find cosmetic experiments the least acceptable of this kind of work—and I understand that feeling—I point to the steady decline in the extent to which they are done. There were 31,300 experiments in 1980 and that number has declined in every subsequent year. In 1983 it had fallen to 18,000, a reduction of 13,000 or about 42 per cent.
The LD50 test has been a matter of long-standing public concern, and I am grateful to the noble Earl for his explanation of it. It is on the way out, scientifically speaking, in many areas. There are occasions when it is necessary to have a precise measure of the toxicity of a substance. For instance the therapeutic dose of some anti-cancer agents is quite close to the lethal dose and doctors must know if they are going to kill or cure.
Again, LD50 tests are necessary in order to standardise biological products and living infectious agents for which there are no means of chemical assay. But for many purposes formal LD50 tests are no longer necessary, and, where they can be shown to be unnecessary, the Government are working to get rid of them altogether.
Your Lordships raised the matter of the reuse of animals. I would reinforce what the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, said that there are some procedures such as pyrogen testing where the animals appear to suffer nothing at all, and it seems wrong to order the death of ten animals who have had their temperature taken ten times without showing the slightest concern. In fact the animal may be less concerned the more it becomes accustomed to the procedure. I could give other examples. We do not, however, intend, although these animals may go into private homes, ever to permit their sale from the laboratory which we think would not be proper.
The noble Lords, Lord Mishcon and Lord Hunter of Newington, put before us the idea of ethical committees. I shall refer briefly to this before I conclude. David Britt's intereresting article which I think figured in the researches by the noble Lord, Lord Hunter of Newington, and I see the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon was indeed an interesting article. But the Government do not intend to impose a system of formal reviews either by fellow scientists or laymen on all establishments where animal experiments take place.
We know that it is a growing development for fellow scientists to be involved in reviewing animal experiments. We consider this to be a valuable supplement to the guidance and control of the Home Secretary's inspectors. Although we can well understand the arguments in favour of formal reviews, at the moment we would agree with the views given by Sir Andrew Huxley, President of the Royal Society, in his excellent anniversary address on 30th November last year. If I may quote from him, he said:
"Apart from the need for the subject's consent and his opportunity to bring an action all experiments on humans in this country have to be approved in advance by local ethical committees, and it is often said by representatives of the animal protection societies that analogous ethical committees should be set up for animal experiments. This has been done in some other countries such as Canada and Sweden, and it seems to me that it can be a

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satisfactory alternative to a system such as we have in Britain in which approval is given by a government department acting chiefly through a team of inspectors."
I continue to quote:
"But in my view"—
Sir Andrew said—
"it would be superfluous and tiresome to have both. Our Home Office Inspectorate is effective and its rulings are generally accepted as appropriate, so I see no advantage in switching to a totally different method of regulation which has its own pitfalls and which is not supported by the long tradition of satisfactory operation that our present system has".
That concludes the quotation.
It would be wrong to leave this reference to Sir Andrew Huxley without paying tribute to his initiative in establishing the Royal Society's Steering Group to compile guidelines on animal experiments to be published jointly by the Royal Society and the Universities' Federation for Animal Welfare. The drafting of these guidelines has already begun.
I return to an earlier theme. Each year, new medicines, new vaccines and new surgical techniques are developed which prolong life, alleviate suffering and protect against illness and infection. Millions of people of all ages benefit from this work; so too do domestic pets and farm animals, but it is the welfare of human beings that gives us greatest concern.
A few moments ago, I mentioned polio, diphtheria and diabetes. Their control represents the merest fraction of what animal experiments have resulted in for the human race. These experiments have also given us the techniques necessary to carry out heart surgery and kidney transplants. The treatment of pneumonia, of heart disease, of cancer, of leukemia and of hypertension have all been developed as a result of experiments on animals. So has the use of anaesthetics and pain-relieving drugs.
The Nobel Prize for Medicine this year went to Dr. Cesar Milstein of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, for his work on monoclonal antibodies. This work may revolutionise the treatment of many painful diseases, including cancer, and that work is the result of experiments on animals over the past four decades.
We have been considering questions that are of great moral importance. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bath and Wells has made that clear enough. They are also of enormous practical importance to the millions of users of everyday products and thousands of victims, present and future, of painful and lethal diseases.
There is, therefore, a balance to be struck, and it must be struck responsibly. It is not easy, to strike it responsibly in the environment created by campaigners who too often seem to be determined to look at only one side of the scales, even though, had it not been for the other side, they might not even be alive on this earth to do their campaigning. The noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, is right to rebuke those extremists who perpetrate the, to me, disgusting paradox of using violence and causing suffering in support of the good and gentle cause of reducing violence and suffering for animals.
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As a Government, we are responsible for the welfare of all members of our society. To protect them we believe that some experimentation must be carried on. We are also responsible for the welfare and protection from suffering of the animal kingdom that Providence has placed in our care. To protect them we believe that this experimentation should be carefully restricted and controlled and rendered, where possible, unnecessary. The balance we now propose gives a perceptibly tighter control than has been on the statute book before.
The noble Lord, Lord Somers, asks whether the Government will withdraw the White Paper. The answer, my Lords, is that we will not; but, as I have said, we are considering adding to it. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary will carefully consider everything said in this debate, and we are grateful to the noble Lord for providing the occasion for it.
House adjourned at twenty minutes before ten o'clock.