Speeches by Freeman.

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Last question: if we want, as a Committee, to monitor the implementation of the framework, the success in harnessing science for industrial gain, is there a dashboard? Where should we look? Is it the Cabinet Committee? Is it you, Patrick? Who is the lead and where should we look to hold you to account?”

“In the S&T framework, for the benefit of new colleagues, there were 10 workstreams, I seem to remember. Is that right? I think DSIT leads on four or five of them. It could be seven of them, I can’t remember. Can you remind us?”

“Thank you.”

“Which is encouraging. We need not worry that the new DSIT framing, the digital department, means that the hard wet science, the robotics, the agri-tech, the space, all that hard stuff, will be deprioritised within DSIT as a new digital department.”

“For the record, Seb, what is this that we are passing around?”

“Thank you, Chair. Welcome, Sebastien. This is a very short introduction. There are three things. Seb is on the frontline of the medtech sector at King’s over the road. What you are about to hear is a very interesting story. I will let him explain it, but what I am holding up is a robotic syringe. I want to flag three t…”

“We are legislators, trying to work out how to legislate and control on behalf of the public. What should we think is the crime in this ecosystem? What is the act that we need to try to legislate against?”

“The villages and towns of Mid Norfolk are reeling from the cost of living crisis and the Government’s taxes attack on jobs and small businesses. Rather than taxing rural areas and spending the money in the cities, may I suggest that Ministers allow rural councils to keep the proceeds of their growth and incentivise the…”

“The question is how well the UK is promoting those around the world. Are people in South Korea and Japan aware of that? Is there more we could be doing?”

“One of the tensions is academic data versus industry. I knew there was a thing called the marine tech corridor on the south coast, but UKRI did not recognise it because it has not come out of UKRI; it is defence industry and shipping. These clusters are not all academic.”

“Thanks, Chair. Thanks to the witnesses for coming in. This is a key conversation as the new Government look to harness S&T for economic growth. There is a tension, isn’t there, between sector and place? For 14 years, I lived it. In the coalition, we went big on sectors, and the catapults were framed around building on …”

“On this point, I think we all agree that clusters in the UK are a great strength. As a Minister I was trying to encourage the system to think beyond Cambridge and, indeed, Oxford. I am glad that on my cluster tour I got to all three of your universities. How good do you think we are, as a country and an ecosystem, glob…”

“They shouldn’t be, and the datasets need to reflect that.”

“I rise to speak on behalf of Mid Norfolk, a rural, agricultural, food-processing constituency that is reeling from this surprise and savage attack that was not in the Labour manifesto. I have no direct interest in farming, but I am the child of a farming family—my stepbrother runs that business. I worked on farms from …”

“I will not, as time is short and colleagues want to speak. This policy is a prescription for the industrialisation of the countryside, cooked up in the Treasury in the summer when nobody was looking. It will lead to family farms being broken up and sold, farm investment falling and young farmers leaving, with a major e…”

“Secretary of State and permanent secretary, it is very nice to see you. Could I just echo the comments, as a former Minister, about how nice it is to hear the degree of continuity of mission? There will be disagreements about implementation, and our job is to hold you to account. This sector is risky and long term enou…”

“There was a thing in DfE called the future skills unit. As Minister of State, I was quite frustrated, because, when you went to clusters around the country and asked, “What is holding you back?” whether it is the Glasgow space cluster or the Teesside hydrogen cluster, the answer very often was a lack of skilled staff c…”

“I am not going to pretend that it is easy, but we need to get to a point where we can say, “We invest £9 billion a year in life sciences”, or whatever the figure is, “and the private sector number is X and going up. Space is not going up. Why not?” The same is true for the clusters. I tried, but we did not get it over …”