Brexit: Impact on Universities and Scientific Research

03 November 2016

Moved by Lord Soley

That this House takes note of the potential impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union on funding for universities and scientific research.

 

Lord Bilimoria:

My Lords, when I visited CERN in Geneva, I realised that the experiments that led to the famous Higgs boson discovery, ATLAS and CMS, were both headed by British scientists: Professor Dave Charlton from the University of Birmingham, and Professor Sir Tejinder Virdee from Imperial College. And of course it was Sir Tim Berners-Lee who actually created the world wide web at CERN. Then, this year, we had the gravitational waves proving Einstein’s theory of relativity, 100 years later, with 1.3 billion light years being measured. Who were two of the principal scientists behind that? Professor Alberto Vecchio and Professor Andreas Frieze—EU scientists at the University of Birmingham. What makes this country great—this 1% of the world’s population, as my noble friend Lord Kakkar said—is not our natural resources but our talent. The jewel in our crown is our universities, which are the best in the world, along with those in the United States of America.

 

I declare my various interests, including being the proud chancellor of the University of Birmingham, chair of the advisory board of the Cambridge Judge Business School and the president of the UK Council for International Student Affairs, representing the 450,000 international students in this country, of whom 180,000 are from the EU.

 

I say that we achieve all this excellence in spite of underspending on HE. We spend way below the EU and OECD average, and we are well behind the United States of America. When it comes to our research and development spending as a proportion of GDP, South Korea spends double the percentage that we do and we are way below the EU average, let alone that of the United States. What is scary is that the proportion of GDP spent on R&D, 1.6%, has been falling from 1985 to 2013. Will the Minister acknowledge this?

 

We heard from my noble friends Lord Rees and Lord Smith and others that at the University of Cambridge, around 16.5% of university staff are EEA nationals. When it comes to PhD students, that figure is 27%, and for MPhils, it is 21%. Look at the awards: UK institutions have won more ERC awards than any other country—989 compared with France’s 577.

 

On the implications and opportunities of leaving the EU on science and research, the University of Cambridge’s response is that,

 

“it will create significant challenges for Universities. We recognise that there is a great deal of uncertainty”.

 

Everyone has said that today. But the university also said that the political instability raises significant questions in the following areas. It refers to,

 

“our recruitment and retention of the brightest and best staff and students regardless of nationality … the future of our substantial European research funding”,

 

and the point that many noble Lords have touched on,

 

“the extensive global network of the University’s collaborations”.​

Sixty percent of the UK’s internationally co-authored papers are with EU partners. The mobility of our scientists is phenomenal—I have given you just one illustration. Professor Alice Gast of Imperial College, one of the top 10 universities in the world, said:

 

“Foreigners improve the creativity and productivity of home-grown talent, too”.

 

They enrich our universities, both academics and students.

 

Cambridge was the highest recipient of EU funding allocated under Horizon 2020, about which lots of Peers have spoken. I want to ask the Minister about intellectual property. In the event of Brexit—which may not happen, by the way—the value of any EU-based research for exploitation may be limited. Does the Minister agree with that? The UK has played a key role in shaping the design and implementation of the EU’s research programmes to ensure that the funding has been allocated on excellence. That has not been mentioned so far. Legislating for the ERA could have potential negative impacts on our current world-class systems.

 

People talk about the drop in the number of EU applicants, which is real—will the Minister confirm that? But the other aspect is that as the Royal Society said, the scientific community often works beyond national boundaries on problems of common interest and so is well placed to support diplomatic efforts that require non-traditional alliances of nations, sectors and non-governmental organisations. This is known as science diplomacy.

 

I conclude by saying that what worries and saddens me about this whole situation is that here we are talking about excellence and Britain being the best in the world, and yet my noble friend Lord Smith spoke about hate crime. I have lived in this country since I came here from India as a 19 year-old student in the early 80s. In 35 years I have never experienced any hate crime except for this year—and this year I have received it in abundance. Whether it is tweets, emails or letters, I cannot even repeat what people have been saying to me. It has saddened me. And yet this is the country that Liam Fox talks about opening up to the world. The world is laughing at us. They see us as closing up to the world, inward looking and insular, not open, not diverse, not plural, not tolerant and not brilliant. The headline of an Indian newspaper would read: Lord Bilimoria—this is not the Britain that I know and this is not the Britain that I love.

 NHS and Social Care: Impact of Brexit Next

21 July 2016

Motion to Take Note

Moved by Baroness Watkins of Tavistock

That this House takes note of the implications of the European Union referendum result for government policies on ensuring safe staffing levels in the National Health Service and social care services.

Lord Bilimoria 

 

My Lords, the NHS is Britain’s national treasure. It is something we are all proud of in this country, something we all benefit from and rely on from cradle to grave—yet it is an institution that is constantly under pressure and which faces enormous challenges. It is the largest employer in the country and the sixth-largest employer in the world. Across the board, with doctors, nurses and administrative staff, the NHS has always relied on huge numbers of foreign staff, from within the EU and from outside it. Today there are nearly 60,000 EU nationals working in the NHS. Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, voiced concerns about the impact of a leave vote, stating that, “Another issue”, alongside the potential impact on NHS investment,

“is the damage caused by losing some of the 100,000 skilled EU workers who work in our health and social care system. Uncertainties around visas and residency permits could cause some to return home, with an unpredictable impact on hard-pressed frontline services”.

Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS, said:

“We’ve got about 130,000 European Union nurses, doctors, care workers in the NHS and in care homes. And we should surely miss the benefit they bring were we to choose to leave”.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, for initiating this debate. It is widely acknowledged that the NHS is struggling to recruit and retain staff. In 2014, there was a 50,000 shortfall between the number of staff that providers of healthcare services said that they needed and the number of posts, with particular gaps in nursing, midwifery and health workers. Yet the coalition and Conservative Governments set themselves a target to reduce net migration to a level of tens of thousands, which they have completely failed to achieve, with the current level running at 330,000. Just this week, the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary distanced themselves from that target, discussing sustainable levels of migration rather than specific targets. The Prime Minister has now been forced to accept that it will take some time to reduce migration to the tens of thousands. Will the Minister confirm that it is still the Government’s policy to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands and clarify when exactly that ambition is likely to be realised—particularly keeping in mind how the Government will achieve that when the NHS and care sector alone employs 130,000 migrants?

I remind the House of the widespread fear created last year when the Home Office announced that nurses would have to leave the UK if they were not earning £35,000 within six years of living here. I remember how appalled the public were on hearing that. Nursing is one of the noblest professions; nurses work extremely hard, long and unsociable hours, and have always been significantly underpaid for what they do. Many nurses who have come here from the EU and outside ​would have been forced to leave the country. People who have contributed to our country and who have helped to save lives would have been uprooted from families through a draconian, ruthless and uncaring move. Thankfully, though a public outcry and the nursing professions’ emphasis on the severity of the UK’s nursing shortage, the Government did a U-turn and nursing was added to the shortage occupation list at the end of last year, meaning that nursing was exempt from these rules—thank God.

The Government’s thinking is what is so worrying here. It has led to ill-thought-out policy decisions previously, with the Government committed to Brexit and with Vote Leave’s campaign focused mainly on reducing migration. We are again in danger of implementing draconian measures that would cause untold damage to our most prized public service. The Government want to reduce migration, but here we have our treasured NHS reliant on that same migration. We are told that it is business as normal until Britain leaves the EU, but it is not. Every day of uncertainty risks skilled EU nationals leaving our country and the NHS. We need to give them reassurances to ensure that does not happen. Will the Minister give us that reassurance?

Quite apart from Vote Leave’s constant claim that EU migration is putting pressure on our public services, in this case, without EU migration, the NHS, the jewel in our crown, would collapse. People speak about migrants making it more difficult to see their doctor, but more than a third of doctors working in the NHS were born abroad. The whole campaign in the build-up to this wretched referendum was toxic, and much of what people voted on was nothing to do with the European Union. In fact, the King’s Fund said clearly that the tension between staffing levels and the financial pressures felt by care services is nothing to do with the EU.

A member of my team, who moved to this country 16 years ago and is married to an Englishman, went to the emergency room on the weekend after the EU referendum with a bloody finger which was broken in four places. She was told by somebody sitting next to her in the waiting area that she was a burden on this country. She has worked hard, paid taxes and contributed hugely to this country but was called a burden. That is just one of the many reported sad cases of racism and hate crime that have exploded since the referendum result.

During the EU referendum, there were many cases in which the NHS was used, as it has been used so many times in history, as a political football. There was the infamous Vote Leave battle bus, which had emblazoned on it:

“We send the EU £350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead”.

Then there was the infamous Vote Leave campaign film showing the fate of the NHS inside and outside the EU, ending with the words:

“Every week the UK pays £350 million to be part of the EU. That’s £350 million that could build one new hospital every week, £350 million that could be spent supporting our doctors and nurses. Now is your chance to take back control and spend our money on our priorities, like the NHS”.​

Those were absolute lies. The £350 million was incorrect. We contribute £150 million net a week, which is £8 billion a year, and even if the £8 billion was all spent on the NHS, it is a department with a budget of well over £100 billion. Nobody put the £8 billion into the context that it is 1% of annual government spending. It would not even shift the needle, but the Pied Pipers of Hamelin fooled the British people. I have heard of individuals saying that they voted to leave the EU to save the NHS. That is sickening, gut-wrenching. Does the Minister agree?

We are meant to be a first-world country. What was the Electoral Commission doing allowing a campaign bus bearing false information to drive around for months and feature as the backdrop of TV interviews day after day? When my business, Cobra Beer, advertises on TV, it is regulated by the Advertising Standards Authority. We cannot make claims that are untrue or misleading as the ASA would make us take down the ads immediately and we would face the possibility of fines and a loss of reputation. However, I am told that in the referendum the ASA had no control. What is going on? Will the Minister explain why he and fellow Ministers stood by and allowed false statements to be made without holding the perpetrators to account? Does he agree that we need elections to be supervised by an Electoral Commission with teeth? In India, which held the largest democratic elections in the world, with 800 million voters, the Chief Election Commissioner is the most powerful person in country at election time. He is more powerful than the Prime Minister.

The pressures on the NHS and its staffing are because of many other factors that are nothing to do with the EU or migration, such as our ageing population. Even before the EU referendum, the causes of the current nursing shortage were identified: the Government had not funded enough student nursing places; the nursing workforce was ageing; and gaps were not being filled. Since the Francis report, safe staffing levels and increasing healthcare demands on NHS services have pushed up the demand for nurses, while at the same time trusts have faced greater financial difficulties which have made recruiting more difficult.

After the EU referendum result, Jeremy Hunt told EU workers:

“You do a brilliant job for your patients, you are a crucial part of our NHS and as a country we value you”.

Underlying all this is uncertainty surrounding what will happen to EU nationals in the UK while we are negotiating with the EU and whether Parliament will be fully involved in the decision on whether or when to invoke Article 50. Will the Minister tell us that it will go through Parliament and will not be a government decision alone, in the way the Government decided to withdraw from the presidency of the EU in the second half of 2017 without consulting Parliament?

Hours after the EU referendum result, Nigel Farage stated that the official Vote Leave campaign’s call to spend £350 million a week extra on the NHS with money saved from contributions to the EU was a mistake and could not be guaranteed to happen. What hypocrisy!​

There are further, broader implications of leaving the EU—for example, for companies seeking to conduct clinical trials. The UK will lose influence over the European Medicines Agency. Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS, wrote recently of his blueprint for the NHS to survive life after Brexit, including acting on prevention and health inequalities. He says that how NHS healthcare is provided needs a major overhaul, and that if GP services fail, the NHS fails. He even says that there is no need to “take back control”, in the words of Vote Leave, as:

“We already make the big decisions about our health system largely as we please, as do the Germans, the French and the rest”.

He says that the Government need to invest in NHS infrastructure and,

“as the largest employer in Europe, the NHS needs to do a better job training and looking after our own staff”.

He says that while the NHS is the cheapest health system in the developed world, there are still major inefficiencies to be tackled, and the time for change is now.

To conclude, here we have the three Brexiteers that the PM in her wisdom has appointed to take us out of Europe. Their motto must be, “All for one and none for all”. David Davis has said that his target is removing the UK from the EU on 1 January 2019 and pressing the button on Article 50 by 1 January 2017. I say to him, “Dream on”. The PM says, “Brexit means Brexit”. I ask her, “What does ‘Brexit’ mean?”. It is still very much up in the air. This debate is just one example of the drastic impact of Brexit.

The NHS, the heart of this country and of everyone’s lives in this country, is reliant on EU migrants to keep us alive—and we want, in the words of Vote Leave, to “take back control”? We are losing control day by day.

 

The Economy
28^th April 2016 

Motion to Take Note 

Moved by Lord O’Neill of Gatley
That this House takes note of the steps Her Majesty’s Government are taking to build a stronger economy.

Lord Bilimoria (CB)

My Lords, just about every Peer taking part in this debate has spoken about Lord Peston. I have been here for coming up to 10 years and he showed me kindness and encouragement from the day I arrived and in the debates I was privileged to take part in with him. What I loved most about him was that there was always a smile when he greeted you. He was completely non-political—it did not matter ​whether or not you were a Labour Peer—and was respected by the whole House. We shall miss him greatly. He would definitely have been speaking in this debate about the steps being taken to build a stronger economy.

This morning I chaired a conference of the Westminster Higher Education Forum. Its theme was enterprise and entrepreneurship in higher education, culture, skills and encouraging graduate start-ups—music to my ears. I was privileged to introduce our keynote speaker, an individual who, when I came over from India as a student in the early 1980s, I used to see on television, read about in the newspapers and who helped to transform this country from being the sick man of Europe that it was at that time. In the Cambridge University that I attended in the 1980s there was no word such as “business” or business school—and as for entrepreneurship, forget it.

It was clear to my family and friends when I came here in the early 1980s that this was a country where, if I worked here after I finished my studies, I would never get to the top. I would not be allowed to get to the top because, as a foreigner, I would come up against a glass ceiling. They were absolutely right, I am ashamed to say. So what has changed in this country over these last decades? What has enabled this country, which was the sick man of Europe in the early 1980s, to become the envy of Europe today? That is the theme of this debate—the steps taken to build a stronger economy. The glass ceiling has been well and truly shattered. Just look at the number of ethnic minority Members of Parliament we have now compared with only a quarter of a century ago when there was a handful.

The person I introduced to the conference this morning was hugely instrumental in changing “entrepreneurship” from being a word that conjured up images of Del Boy and second-hand car salesmen to now being a cool term, encouraged by all Governments. That individual was the noble Lord, Lord Young. The noble Lord is one of my colleagues who, at the age of 84, never stops. He was instrumental in helping to create the atmosphere of aspiration in which the glass ceiling has been shattered. It has gone so far that, as I have been saying for years, a British Asian will be Prime Minister of this country. The Prime Minister himself said recently that a British Indian will be Prime Minister of this country, but not too soon, please.

The business situation has changed dramatically. I am proud to say that today Cambridge University has a business school. In January I was appointed as chair of the advisory board of the Cambridge University Judge Business School. As serendipity would have it, the day my appointment was announced, the Judge Business School was named in the top 10 in the world NBA rankings after only 25 years. The Harvard Business School was founded in 1908. Today the largest society at Cambridge—apart from the Cambridge Union—is the Cambridge University entrepreneurs. We have come a long way.

In the last Budget there was encouragement for entrepreneurship. There was a lowering of certain taxes and increasing of the entrepreneurs’ relief, ​encouraging wealth creation. Yet, based on this morning’s conference, I had recommended to Vince Cable when he was Secretary of State for Business that we should have a competition in the country for 100 growing businesses to attend courses such as the business growth programme, which I attended at the Cranfield School of Management, and the diploma in entrepreneurship at the University of Cambridge. One hundred of these would cost the Government £1 million but would pay back billions in growth. Vince Cable was excited about it but his civil servants shot him down. Does the Minister think it would be a good idea to encourage entrepreneurship in growing businesses in that way?

Many noble Lords have spoken about productivity. We are lagging behind and we need to do much more. We have heard that we do not invest enough. The noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, spoke about how our investment as a proportion of GDP in R&D and innovation has gone down from 1.3% of GDP to 1%. The noble Lord, Lord Mair, spoke of the importance of investment and innovation and how much more we could do if we were to invest the 3% of GDP that Germany invests.

Let us look at what this country can achieve. I was privileged to visit CERN, where the professors heading the two experiments which discovered the Higgs boson particle are the leader of CMS, Professor Sir Tejinder Virdee of Imperial College London and the leader of Atlas, Professor David Charlton of the University of Birmingham, of which I am proud to be Chancellor. We can go further. This year we had the announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves, finally proving 100 years later Einstein’s theory of relativity. Among the key professors of this discovery were two from the University of Birmingham, Professor Alberto Vecchio and Professor Andreas Freise. One of the instruments that helped in the discovery of those gravitational waves from 1.3 billion years ago was designed and made in Birmingham.

The scientific papers produced by British universities are completely disproportionate to our population, let alone to our investment in research and innovation. Just imagine how much more we could achieve if the Government were to ramp up their spending on R&D and innovation. Does the Minister agree that we should have tax incentives to encourage companies to invest more in innovation? I could tell noble Lords story after story about the glass ceiling being shattered. Earlier I was sitting next to my noble friend Lord Rees, who apart from being the Astronomer Royal was President of the Royal Society—the prime achievement for a scientist. Who is the current president of the Royal Society? It is none other than Professor Sir Venki Ramakrishnan. He is of Indian origin, from Trinity College, Cambridge and a Nobel Laureate.

If we leave the European Union, we will lose a huge amount of research and development funding. It will hamper something that is already underfunded. We will also lose the high level of collaboration that exists between British and European universities. What most people do not realise and is rarely highlighted is the fact that the UK is the number two country in the world for foreign direct investment. Almost half of that is in financial services, but we are still second in ​the world. Would we be able to retain that position if the EU referendum leads to Brexit? In the perception of overseas countries, there is no question about it. Forget what President Obama said, especially whether he used the word “queue” or “line”. Hillary Clinton has herself, unprompted, confirmed that she too would be concerned if we left the European Union.

People from every single country I have spoken to say this. Whether I speak to members of the Indian Government, the Indian Administrative Service or businesses, they all ask, “How can you leave the EU? We see the UK as the gateway to Europe. We want you to remain a part of Europe”. The IMF has said that we should not leave, let alone the CBI and the Bank of England. I have spoken to professors from Harvard Business School and once again they were unanimous in saying, “You cannot possibly leave the EU”. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, listed many of the myths about Brexit, and there are accusations from the Brexiteers of scaremongering by the Government and the Remain campaign about the uncertainties.

There is no question about it. If we leave the EU, I have no doubt that this country will survive and possibly thrive because we are a hugely adaptable, flexible and resilient nation. I am openly Eurosceptic. I think that the structure of the European Parliament is appalling. MEPs have no connection with the regions they represent. Unlike Members of Parliament where there is a clear connection between Members and their constituents, I do not know anyone who knows who their MEP is. MPs have a clear line of accountability and responsibility that does not exist in the case of MEPs. The European Parliament has to move once a month to Strasbourg. Can noble Lords imagine what it would be like if every month we had to move out to Belfast or Edinburgh—and not just us, but everything? It is ridiculous.

The euro is a proven failed project because one size cannot and will not fit all. I used to think that by not being in Schengen we were losing out on tourists and business people, but now we realise that from a security point of view, we are lucky that we have retained control of our borders. We are not part of an ever-greater integration and there will never be a united states of Europe. I hail from India, which is a truly federal country. There is a central Government, a central defence force, foreign service and tax system, but there are states with chief Ministers who have autonomy and a great deal of flexibility. That combination makes for a truly federal country, but that will not and cannot happen in Europe. The only person in history who has ever united Europe was the Emperor Charlemagne in 800 AD.

The European Union makes up a tiny percentage of the world’s population at 7%, and yet it has 25% of the world’s economy. It also has 50% of the world’s welfare spending. How sustainable is that? The European Union is in urgent need of reform. I turn to the concessions and reforms that the Prime Minister managed to get recently. However well intentioned he was, I am sorry to say that every single person I have spoken to has confirmed that they will not influence them one iota in making their decision on whether to stay in Europe. But in spite of this, and in spite of my being a Eurosceptic and all my concerns about it, I think that ​we should stay in Europe. PwC predicts a reduction in GDP if we leave and the uncertainties are real. The shock to our economy would be huge. The Minister talked about our current account deficit being high. Our budget deficit remains high, let alone the effect of Brexit on our currency. I do not know if we would be able to withstand those shocks, and being the most successful economy in Europe would not last very long.

Everyone talks about the WTO. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, was absolutely right to ask why all those free trade agreements with the WTO are the cure to everything. He discussed the Swiss, Norwegian, Canadian and Albanian models, but every one of them would still require us to contribute to the European Union and possibly allow the free movement of people.

I shall conclude on that point: the free movement of people. When the subject of immigration was brought up at the conference this morning, the panel spoke of the concerns of those in higher education about our Immigration Rules, which are hampering our universities. That drew applause from the audience. Some 30% of the academics at our top universities like Oxford, Cambridge and Birmingham are foreign-born. Overseas students are still categorised by the Government so that they fall into the immigration figures. Does the Minister agree that we should take foreign students out of those figures? Recently I spoke to the new Australian High Commissioner to India in Delhi. She said, “Thank you for the UK immigration policy because Indian students are now coming to us instead of going to the UK. We are benefiting from the brightest and the best”.

The most important point is this: is it the EU or is it NATO that has maintained the peace over the past 70 years? I would say that it has been both. This was summed up for me by a senior vice-chancellor of a European university who said to me the other day, “How can the UK as a country even think of leaving Europe? You have saved us twice. You are seen to be the beacon of freedom, liberty and democracy. How can you even think of being responsible for what might potentially destroy the European Union? Would you be able to live with that?”. I do not think that is what our country does; we do not operate alone, we work together. The title of the debate concerns the steps to take in order to build a stronger economy. It is relevant to say that it depends on whether we stay in Europe or not. The vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge summed it up in his opening address for the last academic year:

“If you want to travel fast then travel alone. If you want to go far travel together”.