Some thoughts on science and technology policy under a future Labour government

I recently gave some comments to Times Higher Education on the prospects for research policy under a Labour administration. Because, inevitably, the writer was only able to use one of my comments in isolation in their piece, I wanted to write a short note expanding a little on my views. So this post is a rough attempt to pull together my reflections on the challenges Labour face and what we might expect from them given the lessons of history. Of course it is just my view, although based on more than two decades of researching UK science, technology and innovation policy, and everything might change when we see a manifesto.

The first thing to note is that there is typically cross-party consensus on the value of public R&D funding, and of science and innovation policy more broadly. New governments don’t typically come in and rip up structures and policy agendas in this area. Where there has been radical change it is usually because of some degree of agreement about problems with the status quo, even if the detail of that change might be the subject of disagreement between governments and oppositions. In recent times we can point to the post-financial crisis consensus between the main parties around the creation of research and technology institutes inspired by the German Fraunhofer model, or the more recent consensus that R&D and innovation ought to be considered as part of the answer to addressing regional disparities within the UK, or the renewed interest in technology policy as a component of economic/national security policy.

So, when New Labour came to power in 1997, they did not tear up the Major and Thatcher era focus on basic, rather than applied, research, and the associated focus on commercialisation of that basic research. Nor did they rethink the Thatcher era ‘managing decline’ policy of progressively concentrating block research funding in the so-called Golden Triangle. And even while they boosted basic research spending through the core science budget, and looked to overhaul the country’s deteriorating university research infrastructure, they presided over the continued decline of the non-university public research establishment base, a decline that had begun under the Conservatives and which ultimately cancelled out increases in research council spending.

This experience explains my remarks to the Times Higher that whilst the Labour Party’s interest in industrial strategy and the potential for R&D to play a part in regional rebalancing are welcome, I don’t think they will necessarily translate into radical change. On the one hand the assumptions - of managing decline and of the power of university research commercialisation - behind the current directions of UK science, technology and innovation policy are so deeply ingrained into policy and system actors alike that they are rarely consciously considered, let alone questioned. And, on the other hand, there are powerful forces in the system with an interest in lobbying against any change. What tends to happen in UK ST&I policy is that new initiatives are added on to the existing system without any real attempt to redesign the system to accommodate them. And new initiatives in the UK system are usually hopelessly sub-critical compared against the scale of the challenge.

This does not of course mean that change is impossible. There is a counter-example of an incoming Labour government making radical change in ST&I policy. Back in 1964 the new Harold Wilson government created a Ministry of Technology to sit alongside the new Department of Education and Science. MinTech, as it became known, was intended to be a powerhouse of applied R&D, of nuclear energy, and of the procurement of advanced technologies. The aim was to shift the emphasis of UK technology efforts away from their overwhelming defence orientation and towards civil technological development and the upgrading of UK industry. MinTech could trace its origins in part to the powerful wartime Ministry of Supply, and could mobilise a significant proportion of the public demand for new technologies. Finding ways to articulate this kind of demand pull and helping to create, shape and scale up early markets for advanced technologies is essential if R&D investment is not to be an expensive luxury that mainly benefits foreign actors. But this idea of a broader, activist technology policy, mobilising procurement as well as R&D subsidies, quickly fell out of fashion amongst subsequent Conservative and Labour governments alike.

So which will it be? I imagine a Labour Government, if elected, will keep the machinery of government in this field. We very likely won’t see the abolition of the current Department of Science, Innovation and Technology. I think it is inconceivable they will reorganise the funding body UKRI, though they might choose to modify its missions and goals. I don’t think they’ll mess with the new DARPA-inspired Advanced Research and Innovation Agency. They will likely make good on their commitment to longer-term budgeting, but I’m not convinced that the ten-year budgets they promise will be any different from the old ten year outlook? produced by New Labour. Without changing the underlying structures and frameworks, to set out a ten year budget is basically to set out an aspiration, not a binding commitment. No doubt we will see new industrial strategy programmes, but they will sit in isolation and be limited in their impact if the broader assumptions behind the orientation of the UK’s research and innovation system remain unquestioned.

I also worry that an incoming Labour government will retain the present government’s naive interest/obsession with AI and new digital technologies. Policy wonks of all political flavours, though clever, have the same blindspots. They all read the same Silicon Valley blogs and big name commentators, and it is far too easy to mistake hype for divinations of an inevitable future. This hype, unfortunately, tends to push in the direction of the UK’s existing obsession with the commercialisation of basic research rather than with a genuinely broader based technology policy that includes R&D and procurement at scale. There is a strong unmet need in the UK, as in many countries, to learn lessons from earlier waves of technological development, and from the history of policy towards and in response to them. But it’s hard enough to do this in opposition - to do it in government is almost impossible. I hope they find a way to do this, there’s plenty of expertise in S&T policy and in the history of S&T in our universities if they are willing to tap into it.

Edited 13:52 31 May to fix some typos and broken hyperlinks