Speeches by Freeman.

“And we need data. We heard earlier that we need to be able to explain to our voters not just that for every £1, £3 trickle down, but that UKRI is turning £9 billion a year into £20 billion or £30 billion of private—”

“Thank you for having me, Sir Geoffrey.”

“Is that a polite way of saying that we are going down in the rankings?”

“Thank you for having me, Sir Geoffrey. I will not repeat the disclosures of my various hats earlier but I refer back to it. May I just say how lovely it is to see the four of you, having worked closely with you all, and how good it is to see four women leaders? One of the things about the science and technology space i…”

“That is interesting; so that would be your KPI of how academically competitive we are globally. Is that number going up?”

“Is that online, available to us?”

“Where do we track them?”

“Can I ask you a specific question on that? As you know, the orthodoxy in Whitehall and the Treasury, which is out of date—it dates back to the ’80s—says that we don’t back winners; we invest only where there is demonstrable proof of market failure. That is the orthodoxy that governs Innovate UK. It has to tie itself up…”

“I remember very clearly trying to set some strategic priorities when you were setting out the strategy and, Dame Ottoline, you fought back commendably hard to insist, “This is a system and it can’t be tracked in that way.” I think it is really important that, in order to defend public money but also internally for lead…”

“So what would be your best example today of a UKRI programme that is high risk, strategic and might fail, but is absolutely what we should be doing?”

“You are being very polite, but I think I am hearing that it feels like a jungle of competing interests and, if we are going to be strategic globally, we need a bit of stronger leadership. Everyone is being very polite, but having lived in it, I know that that is also how it seems when you are inside it.”

“Your answer suggests that the UKRI board does not have an active programme that says, “These are the high-risk programmes we’re running. We’re proud of them. They might fail but they’re big, strategic programmes.” Is that right?”

“Is there an example of a high-risk project that UKRI is sponsoring that you are very excited about, that might fail, but that is absolutely worth having a go at?”

“I want to ask about risk. The NAO Report very helpfully highlights the issue of risk appetite across our ecosystem. On one end, academic funding is done in the traditional way, and then, as you go across towards national strategic priorities—semiconductors or the competition with China—and then across to funding global…”

“Will the Minister give way?”

“Will the Minister give way?”

“Does the shadow Minister agree that as well as all the points that have been made about agriculture and solar, there is a democratic point here? Residents in 14 villages in my patch, and in many others, will find that they are living in the middle of a power station. Let us name it for what it is: a power station. They…”

“I rise not just as the Member for Mid Norfolk, but as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on science and technology in agriculture. As Members will be aware, Norfolk is Britain’s first county and our leading agricultural county—the Royal Norfolk show is the premier show in the country. Norfolk is absolutely …”

“That is a very good point, and I do agree—in fact, I will go a lot further than that, if Members will allow me to get to the radical, central elements of my Bill. However, I do agree that that is absolutely something we need to do. Across Mid Norfolk, the 23 villages—I will not list them all—go from Old Buckenham in th…”

“The hon. Member—I am tempted to say my great and hon. Friend, since we have spoken in this Hall together so many times—is absolutely right. My constituency has 130 villages and three towns. At the last boundary review, I lost Wymondham because the rest of my patch has had 10,000 new houses built in the last 10 to 15 ye…”