(Con):...My amendments are inclined to emphasise the
importance of basic science. I very much take what has been said by
the noble Lord, , and others about developing
knowledge for its own sake. That was a very clear statement of a
very distinguished mathematician in my youth, GH Hardy of
Cambridge. He was a theory of numbers man, which had no very
obvious application to anything much at that particular moment,
except that he brought the wonderful Indian mathematician Ramanujan to
this country and made him prominent. GH Hardy’s view was that
mathematics, particularly the theory of numbers, should be
researched, investigated and developed for its own
sake....
(CB): My
Lords, today I hosted a group of education leaders
from India and in our discussion, they asked:
“What are your worries about Brexit when it comes to the UK
education sector?”. In listing my worries, a list which is too
long to talk about now, I stated that one of my biggest concerned
research. It is all very well for the Government to say, “We’ll
keep giving you the funding for research that we get from the
European Union, even if we leave”, but it is much more important
than that. That is why I support Amendment 488 in the name of the
noble Lord, .
The key to research is collaboration. Already, we are seeing
EU-funded research universities in Europe not partnering with UK
universities because they are worried that we will be leaving the
European Union. If I may illustrate the power of collaborative
research, while I was in India in November, at the same time as
the Prime Minister and the Universities Minister, , the University of Birmingham
held a workshop with the Panjab University. There we showed the
power of collaborative research: when the University of
Birmingham conducts research, our field-weighted citation impact
is 1.87. The Panjab University figure is 1.37. Yet when we carry
out collaborative research, the impact is 5.64, or three times
the Birmingham figure. When we do research with Harvard
University—I am an alumnus of the Harvard Business School—while
Birmingham’s impact is 1.87 and Harvard’s is 2.4, our combined
impact is 5.69. This is serious. We must encourage collaborative
research with the European Union and this amendment should be in
the Bill...
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