November 1998

Westminster Report, IEE Review

Parliament returned from its Summer recess on Monday 19th October and rose shortly again for prorogation before the State Opening when the new Parliamentary Session began. As this Report was written before the State Opening on 24th November, its implications on engineering will be reported in the next issue of the IEE Review. In the meantime, readers to this column who are on the net will be able to find the Queen's Speech, and the four or five days of debate that will follow, by accessing Hansard on the internet at www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm/cmhansrd.htm. Make a note of this site on your browser. In future I will give the dates of major debates that I report in this column so that those interested, and with access to the world wide web, can read the debates in full. Alternatively, the national debt can be relieved by buying expensive copies of Hansard from the Stationery Office.

Government goes on even when Parliament is not in session. Over the last few months, the Government's aim has been to present itself as the millennium heir to Harold Wilson's noted remark about his Administration being at the forefront of the "white heat of technology" . Indeed, Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Mandelson devoted much of his speech at the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool to the "knowledge driven economy", "information age" and "the digital revolution". The Government announced a host of initiatives, including a new Internet site, funding for the Foresight Vehicle Link, and took British businessmen to the United States to see technological innovation across the pond.

At the end of October, Department of Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Mandelson MP clarified the allocation of the Science Budget for the next three years. Presenting "the Science Budget for the next millennium", Mr Mandelson confirmed the extra £700 million, guaranteed by the three year Comprehensive Spending Review.

Science Minister Lord Sainsbury said that the three year budget enables the government to make long term plans, which are important for scientific research where a strategic approach is essential. Government figures indicate that the overall Science Budget will increase steadily by 2002, and will be 15% above its 1998 value in real terms. The main priority of the budget allocation is designed to pay particular attention to boosting postgraduate and post doctoral training and development despite the cut this year to the research councils which fund such research. It remains to be seen whether or not the three year plan can be maintained without further cuts in the face of recession.

This commitment to training was further outlined in the Chancellor's Pre-Budget Statement on 3rd November. The measures included Government consultation with small business on supplementing the current tax relief on research and development with a tax credit for small business. This would be calculated on the volume of R&D investment undertaken. The Chancellor also announced a private-public partnership for commercialising public inventions and the establishment of eight new Institutes of Enterprise in British Universities. In a separate announcement, the Government said it would provide £5 million of new funding to be matched by industry to support further research to develop new vehicle technology.

Apart from public funding, the main theme of the Government's policy towards science and engineering appears to be "technological innovation". Peter Mandelson, still at the forefront of his Millennium Dome project, made great play at the Labour Party Conference of the need for a fresh industrial revolution - the revolution of the information age. He argued that "a knowledge driven economy" is the key to preserving jobs in manufacturing and building for the future: "economic growth will depend both on how well we invent new industries and how we re-invent and smarten old ones. There are those who peddle the theory that the decline of manufacturing is inevitable. It is a theory that I refute. We should seize the opportunity the knowledge driven economy offers for the rest to catch up with the best".

In keeping with this vein, the DTI announced the establishment of two new websites. The Council for Science and Technology have set up a site (www.cst.gov.uk) that contains details of the Council's terms of reference and aims to communicate information about its role and work, following its re-establishment in March 1998 as the Prime Minister's top level independent advisory body on strategic science and technology issues. The website will also publish the Council's annual report and summaries of its meetings.

A further website (www.awise.org) aimed at bringing more women into science and engineering was launched by Lord Sainsbury at the beginning of October. The Government has acknowledged that the representation of women in science and engineering is at an all time low. This website will offer links with mentors, role models and will provide sources of advice. The DTI Development Unit for Women established specifically to focus attention on the issue of under representation of women in Parliament is also linked to the site. The Unit is currently engaged in a campaign aimed at increasing the number of girls taking science beyond GCSE level.

However, engineers are not just under-represented by the fairer sex. At the recent CBI conference, Alex Trotman, Chairman of Ford, noted that in the United States, 35% of university graduates went into engineering fields, whilst in Europe, the number was just eight per cent. The Government will need to do more to try and redress this balance and I look forward to further initiatives in the coming session of Parliament.

Nevertheless, whilst the Government push through these initiatives and expound the virtues of the technological "third way", unsurprisingly, the Opposition parties are focusing more on the immediate concerns of the engineering industry. The Liberal Democrats recently highlighted that 33,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in the last quarter. Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary John Redwood argued at the Tory conference in Bournemouth that a jobs crisis package was needed to prevent a manufacturing collapse. Outside politics, the Engineering Employers Federation have forecast that their industry would be forced to shed up to a further 115,000 jobs next year. The EEF have predicted a sharp economic downturn in the economy and further deteriorating conditions for engineering and manufacturing in general. In a gloomy forecast, they have predicted that engineering industry output will be down by 1%.