European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Lords, 2018-02-26
Topic: Technology
John Kerr (Crossbench, Unknown): Exactly. I strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has just said. I would like to be helpful to the Minister—it is my main purpose in life. I detect that this debate is at present all going one way, although I do not know if the Minister agrees with me on that. If he is a cynic, he might say that that is not altogether surprising, as the collective noun for a group of chancellors, vice-chancellors and university chairmen is the House of Lords It is important that the Minister should listen to the Cormack-Deben advice. It really would not do to answer this debate with the same answer he started off with to the last debate about medicines and Amendment 11—where, as I recall, his line was that publishing a strategy would introduce an unwelcome, undesirable and impossible delay to commencement. I may have misunderstood him, but it seems to me that the time when we need such a strategy—the strategy that is called for in this amendment—is now. We need it to be helpful to the Minister because if on Report we do not see a strategy, there is absolutely no doubt how the House would vote. This debate has made very clear, from all sides of the House, that continued membership or a close relationship with the research framework programme and with Erasmus is seen as sine qua non. If the Government do not give us the strategy which they think may achieve that, I am confident we will vote for these amendments. The strategy would have to contain a little more than a declaration of intent. In relation to Erasmus, it would, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, have to include something about visas. I think it would also have to include something about fees. It is relatively easy to see what one would have to say. On the much bigger issue of research, it would have to include something from the Treasury. If the sensible suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Patten, was accepted by the Treasury, that would be excellent. But it seems to me that the Treasury is going to have to accept a lesser commitment, which is that when it is pay as you go—which is what it is going to be, as my noble friend Lord Hannay has pointed out—we will pay for whatever we get. That seems to me to be a sine qua non It is of course the case that we will not be taking the decisions or laying down the policy anymore. But it will still be essential for our universities to have access to these networks. This would not just be helpful for the Minister on Report and in the negotiations in Brussels, where such a Cormack-Deben voluntary offer would go down extremely well, but also be something to deal with the uncertainty problem which the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, drew attention to. We are no longer desirable partners in research networks, because it is assumed that we will be country cousins or non-players We are no longer receiving the same demand from foreign students to come here to research. We are damaging the sector now—this is an area where the damage of Brexit precedes the deed. So in three contexts, it would be helpful to the Minister if he would say that he will take this away and think about producing a government strategy in both areas before Report.