EMIGRATION: THE "BRAIN DRAIN"

§ LORD ANNAN

My Lords, before the noble Lord continues, could he explain whether the figures he was giving from Professor Swann's Report, which are rather startling, include all Ph.Ds., whether British-born or not, or whether they include only those who are United Kingdom subjects? I think there is a great difference here, because we in our universities educate many foreign-born 1968 students, who come to this country to start with, and if they go back to their own countries this is not surprising.

§ LORD WINDLESHAM

My impression is that the Report refers to British students. The figures I mentioned are on page 13 of the Report. The information for which the noble Lord has asked will be in the earlier part of the Report. It is not directly related to these figures. But I have the Report, and I can give the noble Lord an answer to his question later.

I was about to speculate on the attraction of the United States to the scientist and technologist, because it is clearly a key ingredient in our debate. There is, of course, the higher standard of living in the United States—which must be a major factor—based on a gross national product which is eight or nine times that of this country, with a population not much more than three times our own. There are higher personal incomes and lower direct taxation, particularly in the upper ranges. There are, also, in an economy which is still expanding fast, more opportunities for qualified men to get on. I should like to return to that particular motivation in a few minutes.

In particular, the United States seems to have the capacity to absorb large numbers of people horizontally, whereas in the United Kingdom promotion tends so often to be by vertical ladders. In the large firms in the United States (and it is the largest ones which recruit internationally) there are often better facilities for research, and an atmosphere in which the scientist feels he is making a significant and valued contribution. This last factor is particularly important. I have had a letter from I.B.M. in connection with this debate, a company which I suppose is one of the great success stories of the computer age. They are employers of scientists and technologists in this country of great distinction, as well as internationally. I.B.M. say that they have learned a number of lessons, and the first of these (and I quote a paragraph from the letter) is that you will retain people in this country if you offer them the scope, the professional contacts, the equipment and the feeling that they are in the vanguard of research. To keep the best brains, you must enable people to 1969 use their brains, otherwise, reluctantly, they will go elsewhere where they can use them. That is the first lesson learned by employers of the size and reputation of I.B.M. and I think it should be noted in this debate.

The fourth category are the doctors, and in particular the junior hospital doctors. There is undoubtedly, in the case of junior hospital doctors, a feeling of resentment over the conditions in which they work and the financial rewards which can be earned. The Review Body on Doctors' and Dentists' Remuneration, in their Seventh Report, published in May of this year (Cmnd. 2992, at page 23), put their finger on a crucial point, relating to the emigration of doctors overseas to the output of medical schools, when they said—referring to the 1964 figures of the Oversea Migration Board: When every allowance has been made for uncertainties in the figures, it seems clear that there has been a substantial permanent loss. Britain can and should make a contribution to the development and welfare of less highly developed countries, but we find it very disquieting that the net outflow of doctors with United Kingdom passports should be so high in relation to the output of qualified British doctors from British medical schools. If we take the figures given by the Minister of Health in the House of Commons in February, the statement I quoted earlier, the net loss of British doctors, according to the Minister' was approximately 300 to 350. If this is related to the annual output of British medical schools, which in 1964, the same year, was about 1,500, it seems that the permanent emigration of British doctors is equal to between 20 and 25 per cent. of the annual output of the medical schools. Some estimates, in fact, are higher than 20 to 25 per cent. Dr. John Seale, who has made a special study of the emigration of doctors, has argued in an article in the British Medical Journal of September 2 of this year, that in fact 550 doctors born and trained in Great Britain emigrated in 1965. Dr. Seale calculates the proportionate loss of British born and trained doctors in relation to the output of the medical schools at about one-third. So the estimates vary from a low of 20 per cent. to a high of 33⅓ per cent. The only other statistic to which I should like to draw your Lordships' attention, which received wide publicity in the Press recently, was that in September of this year no fewer than 730 young doctors 1970 sat examinations in London and Edinburgh which would qualify them to practise medicine in the United States. In 1965 there were 621 who sat the same examination, and in 1964 there were 504. So in three years there has been an increase of 226.

Finally, what is to be done? More pointedly, what can the Government, any Government, do in this field? So far as direct action goes, I would suggest to the noble Lord who is to reply to this debate that the Government's role is a subtle one, and consists of supporting in a sustained way the most exciting work. The word "sustained" is important here because the abrupt cancellation of major projects—the cancellation of TSR 2 in the spring of last year is perhaps an example—disrupts whole teams and fragments the knowledge they have built up. Beyond this, it is true that there seems to be an inevitability about many of the forces leading to emigration, depending either on personal circumstances or motives of the individuals—and politicians are often on rather shaky ground when they get caught up with motives—or on the plain fact that the United States is a larger and more prosperous society than Britain. British scientists go to the United States for the same reason that scientists and other qualified persons come to Britain from less developed countries.

I believe, my Lords, we should be very careful about imposing any restrictions on the freedom of the scientist to work abroad. Science is international in its nature; it is one of the very few disciplines of thought and mind that are not affected by frontiers or race. We should also do well to remember that it is one of the most dangerous of all tyrannies, and one of the most timid, for a Government to prevent its people living and working outside its national frontiers if they wish to do so. Tinkering around with a ban on advertising by American employers seeking to recruit scientific and technological staffs in this country, which the Government are reported to have been considering, is unlikely to get very far—1,500 applications are only a symptom of something much deeper.

Money must have a great deal to do with this, and I have no doubt that other noble Lords later in the debate will be 1971 concerning themselves with proposals for rewarding scientists and doctors in a manner that is more appropriate to the work they do, and in a more far-sighted manner, from the point of view of society. As the noble Lord, Lord Snow, remarked in a Daily Mirror feature this morning, talent will always go where the money is. That must be true. But the sources of the brain drain lie deeper than that. They are to be found in the subsoil—if I can describe it as such—ofour society which was so brilliantly described in The Times last Friday, December 17, by Dr. Lynn, of the University of Exeter: Would Dick Whittington fail in modern Britain? asked Dr. Lynn. He went on to correlate the level of what he called "achievement drives"—which a layman I suppose could define as the desire to get on—in a number of countries with postwar economic growth in those countries. The high-growth countries, West Germany, Israel, the Soviet Union and Australia, all had high levels of achievement drive. The low-growth countries had low levels of achievement drive. In Britain he reported these drives were low.

Moreover, in Dr. Lynn's view the value of achievement is not compatible with that of equality. This is what he said: The value of achievement is inseparable from excellence, quality and success in competition. The more highly equality comes to be regarded, the less room there is for achievement. Britain surely needs a change of attitude here. Undue emphasis on equality, by undermining regard for achievement, may act to the detriment of the nation as a whole. It is here, my Lords, that the Government have a vital role to play. Until they can show that they have the vision and the ability to create the sort of society in which Dick Whittington would succeed, scientists, doctors and others will continue to emigrate to societies where they feel they will have more of a chance to achieve more. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.

§ LORD BOWDEN

My Lords, may I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, for introducing this subject to us this afternoon in such an extremely lucid and comprehensive speech, which, 1972 I must confess, deprives me of the opportunity of saying much that I had hoped to say this afternoon? It is an extremely important topic that we are to discuss, and one which in very truth is not merely a subject in itself but a part of what one might call the history of our times. I think it important to get it into proper perspective.

Scientists and scholars have wandered about the world for many thousands of years. When I was in Tiflis, in Georgia, not long ago, the Vice Chancellor of the University said to me that they had had a tradition of exporting their best scholars in order that they could have an opportunity of learning more ever since the days when they used to send them to work in the Academy in Athens under Socrates and Aristotle. The tradition of the migrating scientists is long established and is an extremely important component of the general world of scholarship. It has played an essential part in the dissemination of information which has led to the growth of our civilisation. This is certainly true. One hundred and fifty years ago, in fact in 1813, Humphry Davy, who was director of the Royal Institution, in Albemarle Street, went to Paris with Faraday, in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, and was received by the French as an honoured guest because of his intellectual attainments, because of his distinction as a scientist and because it occurred to nobody that anything he ever did would be of any significance to the war or to the commerce of either England or France.

The situation has dramatically changed of late, because it has now become obvious to everyone that the future of all countries depends, as it has never depended before, on these very men who could be safely ignored a hundred and fifty years ago. In those days the secrets of industry were not in the hands of scientists but in the hands of craftsmen. In those days—and I hope that your Lordships' Commission will remedy this if the Act is still on the Statute Book—any craftsman who attempted to emigrate and thereby take with him the secrets of an important British industry could be arrested and was liable to be hanged if he was caught.

The American textile industry was introduced into Massachusetts by a man who had served his apprenticeship to Crompton and escaped by sailing ship 1973 from Liverpool, bearing with him no papers but the whole details of the spinning engines in his head. As soon as he arrived he was introduced to bankers, and as a result of his efforts the American textile trade began. In those days all countries regarded the secrets of their industries as important and guarded them jealously. It is remarkable in retrospect that the first man who conceived the idea that a scientist or engineer might be as important to the community as a mere craftsman was Bismarck. In the 1850s and 1860s he urged the German Government to try to stop the emigration of scientists, who might help to benefit the rest of Europe at the expense of Prussia.

Nowadays we have come to realise that scientists and engineers are important, but we should have done this earlier. May I remind you that a hundred years ago, when this was the richest country in the world, it was simultaneously the most illiterate in Europe. Many of the best engineers who helped to make the industries of Lancashire had learned their profession in Zurich and in Germany. Henry Simon and Hans Reynold built great industries, made themselves wealthy and exploited the great commercial opportunities of Lancashire, bringing with them the skill given to them by their universities. In those days the most important of the exports from Switzerland was probably its engineers. They built the great railway systems of America, including nearly all the bridges in New York between Manhattan Island and the mainland; they created some of the most important industries in Lancashire; and when the first chemical plant was established in this country about ninety years ago even The Times was moved to remark that it was a national scandal that every one of the senior scientists had been educated in Germany. For many years we have depended greatly on the import of scientists from the rest of the world and so have most of the developing countries. It is important to realise that throughout the whole of its history America has depended for many of its greatest engineers on the universities of Europe.

I have said that the American railways were built by expatriate Europeans. Your Lordships will remember the tremendous influx of scientists in the 1930s as the result of the persecutions of Hitler. If one reads a list of the men who worked 1974 on the American atomic energy project one finds that half of them were born in Germany and fled from Hitler. At this moment, as a result of the catastrophe in the Faculty of Science in Buenos Aires three months ago, when the police moved in and beat up every man in the Faculty, 300 scientists have emigrated from the Argentine and, strikingly, have gone to other countries in Central and South America in groups of twenty or thirty, in the hope of returning when the situation has improved. Two hundred scientists similarly left Brazil during the persecution by the Government about a year ago. Universities are often regarded by Governments as places which feel free to criticise without having regard to the authority of the State, and if this happens scientists migrate, quickly and very properly, and the country that loses them does so to its enormous disadvantage.

The process of migration is complex and all-important and, as I have said, has a great significance for the world as a whole. I have here some figures showing the immigration into America of scientists and engineers, which gives also the countries from which the men came. Last year France supplied 26 scientists and 56 engineers; Germany supplied 124 scientists and 300 engineers; the Netherlands supplied 102 engineers and 34 scientists and we supplied 155 scientists and 507 of our engineers. The great point I wish to make is that in every single instance the number of engineers was three times as great as the number of scientists, and from Canada there went into America 200 scientists and more than 1,000 engineers—about half of all the engineers produced that year in Canada.

Other countries feel this problem of migration to the States much more acutely than we do. The point I wish to make most strongly is that this thing which we call the "brain drain" is not a single process of the translation of people to America; it is in fact an enormous migration in which Europe plays the part of what I may call a staging post. The people who lose most scientists and can least afford to lose them are almost invariably the developing countries themselves. The new medical school in the French State of Dahomey has produced a total of 70 doctors of medicine. Only 16 of them remained in their native land and 54 of them emigrated to metropolitan 1975 France. That represents something like 70 per cent. of emigrants.

The difficulties which the developing countries face if they are to try to keep their own best graduates at home are so much worse than anything we have ever faced that one must regard them as the principal sufferers from the brain drain. It afflicts them far more acutely than it afflicts us. Many of these countries, at enormous expense and with the best intentions in the world, have established universities which they hope will produce men intellectually as good as any to be found in the world. In many instances these universities have achieved great intellectual distinction, but what is one to do with a university if nearly all its products leave as soon as they possibly can? We complain if 20 per cent. of ours go, but what must it be like in a small poverty-stricken country in Africa, for instance, or in Malaysia, which is doing its best to raise its standard of living by educating the men who will introduce new industries, if, almost immediately, two-fifths of them, or three-quarters, or sometimes 90 per cent., leave in order to replace people in England who have gone to the States? I was able to trace the course of one particular class of 49 students reading electrical engineering in Buenos Aires. Of the 49, 40 failed, one was killed in a riot, four went back home, times 90 per cent., leave in order to rechester. This leaves a total output of zero. How is any country to establish a university system if, as a result of its efforts, there is no product at all to help to build up industries whose profits are to pay for the universities?

This problem is far more acute and serious than one would think simply by investigating its implications for ourselves. In some parts of the North of England 50 or 60 per cent. of all the doctors in the hospitals come from India and Pakistan—countries which have perhaps one doctor for every 150,000 inhabitants, whereas we have one doctor for a couple of thousand inhabitants. We, in turn, are losing our doctors to the United States of America, where they have even more doctors than we have, and we are recouping ourselves by recruiting people from India, where the medical profession is more thinly spread 1976 and needed more than in any other country in the world.

We fail to realise the value to the community of these people whom we are regarding as statistics. It probably costs about £20,000 to educate a Ph.D. It may be said (and I think the Americans have worked out the figures) that his value to the community during his lifetime as a source of new ideas and an influential member of an industrial process is at least a quarter of a million pounds. On this assumption it may fairly be said that if we capitalise the value of those who have left England for America since the war, we have very much more than paid back the whole of the Marshall Aid. In fact, if one works out the value of the men who went last year and assume that this rate of drain is maintained in perpetuity, it is fair to say that they are worth together something of the order of a couple of hundred million pounds, and that this may fairly be said to be equivalent to the interest, not only on the sums of money which we have been obliged to borrow from the World Bank but also on the total foreign exchange which the country as a whole possesses.

This sum of money is large compared with the total foreign exchange drain which influences our balance of payments; it is large compared with the available interest which we draw on the total national foreign exchange reserves of the sterling bloc. It is an enormous sum of money, and the value to the community of the people we are losing is so great that one might almost say it is the largest single item in the balance-of-payments problem, and it is one which is never normally included in it. May I repeat that the estimated value of the foreign exchange reserve of the community is about £2,000 million at this moment, and 10 per cent. interest rate on this is approximately equal to the potential value to America of the men whom she recruits from this country every year?

One cannot any longer regard this enterprise as a mere variant on the type of emigration which, as I have said, has been a constant feature of intellectual society since the time of Socrates. It is now beginning to be a major component of the wealth of the States and a major reason for the relative poverty of this country. Every time we lose a Ph.D 1977 we have lost a man who cost £20,000 to produce and who may produce at least the equivalent of a quarter of a million pounds of improved value to society as a result of his lifetime's work, and he will do this wherever he lives. The Americans, being conscious of this, are anxious to recruit such men. Our own national policy seems to ignore completely implications of their loss.

When we try, as we very properly might do, to recruit people from overseas, we find ourselves frustrated by the Treasury regulations about payment for passages. I should like, if I may, to read a statement of the official Treasury ruling on the subject of payment of expenses for would-be recruits to the scientific world of this country. I had a letter from the director of a large research establishment in this country who wanted to recruit a man from Australia who had replied to an advertisement. He said, when asked if he would like to come, that he could not if he had to pay his travelling expenses to be interviewed in England. The Treasury ruling is: We are only authorised to pay fares to senior appointments"— that is, such appointments as principal scientific officer or higher— and then only if it can be demonstrated that no suitable candidate is available in this country. The Treasury is prepared, in order to save a matter of a couple of hundred pounds, to lose the opportunity of recruiting a man who might be worth £20,000 to produce. I would ask the noble Lord who is to wind up whether as a result of this debate we can change this absurd regulation. I should like, if it were possible, even to suggest that no Englishman should not be recruited if a suitable man could be found abroad.

The Americans appreciate these things and have come to regard the recruitment of foreign scientists as a national investment, an investment which pays them handsomely. They take people and treat them generously; they pay their travelling expenses, pay the travelling expenses and moving expenses of their families, give them long leave and the rest of it, because they know that by doing this they are making an investment which pays many thousands per cent. In this country the Treasury has refused to do as 1978 much, and for this reason our own efforts to recruit people to counter the brain drain is totally inhibited.

I must next pass to what I think is the most serious implication of the whole subject. I ask myself, and I ask your Lordships to consider, why has this extraordinary development of American industry come about and for what are these engineers being produced? One is forced to conclude that the most important motive which drives America to recruit engineers is her expenditure on defence and on the space race. And it is important to get these things into proper perspective. The total budget for defence and for the space race in the States every year is more than half of the gross national product of Great Britain, and it is between two and a half and three times as much as the total budget available to the Chancellor of the Exchequer of this country. The noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, referred to the achievements of I.B.M. in recruiting scientists from this country. I think it worth remarking that last year the total income of I.B.M. was as great as that of I.C.I. and the British Motor Corporation put together, and the total profits of I.B.M. were as great as those of I.C.I. and B.M.C. put together twice over. One must remember the quite extraordinary size of some of these enterprises in the States.

I have said that defence and the space race are enormous industries. I believe it is true to say that the only larger industry in the world than these two I have mentioned is organised crime in the States, which is now claimed by Americans themselves to have an annual income about three times that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer of this country. Without wishing to appear to be alarmist, I hope there will not be a reciprocal brain drain from America of people anxious to establish a market in this country for some of the things which seem to be so profitable over there.

The point I wish to make is that this immense industry, as Mr. Eisenhower forecast, has acquired a momentum and an identity of its own which is quite independent of its purpose, which is almost independent of the operations of the American Government itself. Very recently there was a 10 per cent. cut in the defence budget which was spent in 1979 California and as a result of this 2,000 qualified graduate engineers were immediately thrown on the labour market and could find nothing to do. The political pressure which they were able to produce was so great that a project which had been axed because it had no conceivable use as far as the Defence Department could discover had to be reinstated in order that these men should be kept in employment.

The economy of America is in quite an extraordinary situation. The total needs of the community, by which I mean food and houses, motor cars, roads and everything else, can be provided by the efforts of about half the working population. There is a very large number of unemployed, but the tradition of America requires that people shall work in order to eat, and for this reason the space race and the defence budget between them have now been elevated into what I believe to be the most extravagant, highly organised and nonsensical system of out-door relief ever organised by a great country in peace time. It is no use merely to note it and regret it.

We have to realise the vast sums of money which are at the disposal of the manufacturers who are engaged in supplying the various commodities to the American Government. Large areas of Western America, and many cities depend wholly on these two enterprises for their livelihood, and what began as an attempt to provide work for engineers have now grown until they have become one of the greatest forces in the world to-day. And the pattern of American education has been distorted to provide recruits for it. The brain drain is a reminder to us that the pattern of our own education may be similarly distorted in time, and if we are not careful we shall find we too are chained to the chariot wheels of the American machine which is to put a man on the moon. I read in The Times this morning an account of a proposal to launch a probe to Mars which was to cost £37,000 million over ten years. May I remind your Lordships that that is one and a half times the gross national product of his country? When one gets involved with figures of this magnitude the impact on the rest of the world is enormous and inescapable, and in my view may be disastrous.

1980 I have said that engineers are moving from Nigeria and Ghana and India and Malaysia and all these underdeveloped countries towards this country and towards Europe to replace men who are going from here to replace men who themselves are working on the space race. It is beginning to appear that fields in India will remain uncultivated in order that America should put a man on the moon.

The problem is one of extraordinary complexity, but we should deceive ourselves if we thought that the solution was easy, or that American firms, whose profits have been made and whose livelihood depends, as does that of their employees, on the development of this immense enterprise, will be willing to refrain from recruiting people over here merely because we think it is not fair. I do not believe that it is possible any longer merely to submit to the forces of the market which are as distorted as they are at the present moment. I began by saying that this is a symptom of a much more important and serious situation than the migration itself. I think, in fact, it is true to say that the whole pattern of education, of engineering and the development of the whole world is being distorted and perverted by the enormous sums of money which at this moment are being deployed in the United States for purposes which are scientifically trivial and are due to what appears to be the almost inevitable growth of industries which have become all-powerful and irresponsible and are wholly beyond the control of those in Washington who should be responsible for them.

§ LORD AMULREE

My Lords, I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, has put down this Motion for debate to-day, because there has been a great deal of correspondence and talk in the Press about these problems and it is good that we should have a chance to talk about them now. We have just listened to an extremely interesting speech by the noble Lord, Lord Bowden. I do not propose to follow him at all in the few words which I shall address to your Lordships to-day. I must say at once that I know nothing at all about technology and I am not a great expert in the field of science. But I would mention one 1981 point which has occurred from my own experience. I think that the first thing we have to consider is what is the extent of the migration of scientists and why it occurs. The second thing is whether or not it is a totally bad thing.

My one contact with science is that I have served for a considerable time upon the Council of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, which is one of the big bodies doing research in this country. We are not as big as some of the American societies, but we employ about 400 staff, and there are 90 graduates, some medical, most of them scientific, working for the Fund. We have no particular difficulty in recruiting staff or, when they have come in, in retaining them. I should like to touch on why I think this is possibly the case. It is not because we pay them so much better than anybody else: they are paid roughly on the scale of the Medical Research Council, which is not a luxurious scale. They work, however, in modern premises, in new buildings which were constructed only a year or two ago. I think one of the reasons for our success is the fact that when they want some particular form of equipment, it can be obtained fairly easily. That is because we, as a voluntary body, are well supported by the public, and so if any member of the staff wants a piece of equipment, provided it is approved by the Director it can be obtained by the chairman and treasurer together, with no further trouble.

There I think we come across one dilemma or paradox of modern times. Until fairly recently it was possible for an institution like a university, a hospital medical school or a scientific department which was run upon a voluntary basis, to obtain equipment fairly quickly, if necessary. In the present world, as I think most of your Lordships will agree, that is no longer possible, and one must therefore obtain money from the State or from Government sources. In the case of the universities it tends to come from the University Grants Committee; in the case of the hospitals from the National Health Service, and in the case of the medical schools I think from the Department of Science and Technology. But if the money on which you are going to survive, on which your work is going to be done, is to be obtained from sources like that, there 1982 must be a great deal more control of the expenditure, or expenditure has to he a great deal more carefully planned, than if the money were to come from purely voluntary sources. So, at the present time, if one has not got these enormous voluntary trusts and bodies such as those one finds in the United States, I cannot see that one can expect a great deal of change. I am not sure whether the process can be speeded up—I am not enough of an administrator in that kind of field to know—but I feel that that is one of the causes of the troubles we may get into with some of our scientists who go abroad.

The second question is whether or not it is a good thing to export scientists. There I personally agree that scientists should, broadly speaking, be extremely peripatetic. One wants them to move around the world, and I think the fact that a certain number from this country go to the United States proves two points: first, that the scientists that we train here are people who are really well trained and brought up and they therefore become desirable to a foreign country. Secondly, even though there is all the money which one needs—and I think we can say that the United States has, in a way, got all the money that she wants—the researches cannot be made merely by providing money. In other words, if you were to double, treble or quadruple the amount of money you are going to spend, you would not thereby double, treble or quadruple the number of first-class scientists to make use of that money. You could get scientists of a certain quality, but the really efficient, expert person is born and not made. That is another reason why the United States needs to draw people from other countries. That is as far as I want to go on the scientific side. I agree that it is not a good practice to argue from the particular to the general, but it is a point I wanted to make to your Lordships.

The second matter to which I want to refer is the question of emigration of doctors from this country. In the first place, we do not really know the size of the figure of those who go abroad permanently. Certain figures have been given by the Ministry of Health, figures have been given by Dr. Seale, and various other figures have been mentioned from time to time. Therefore I should 1983 be very grateful if the noble Lord, when he comes to reply, could give the House some idea whether we are likely to find out the number of doctors who emigrate permanently. When I speak of the number of doctors, I do not include those who have retired from practice and gone to live in a warm climate, or those women doctors, though there are not many, who marry foreigners and go to live in their husband's country.

There are large numbers of young men and women who go abroad on postgraduate training jobs of various sorts, some for one year, some for two years and some for even longer periods. The purpose of their going abroad is to get experience in that other country and then to come back again to this country. In fact one tends to encourage young men and women to take post-graduate jobs abroad for a short time.

I should like once more to quote from my own experience. During the 17 years that I was a member of the consultant staff of University College Hospital, 99 young men and women worked with me—I am sorry I cannot make it one more to make it a nice round figure but the total number, as I say, was 99, of whom 68 worked as house physicians. These were quite young qualified people, doing their first job before they were put on the Register. A further 31 worked as registrars; they were the people who were training to become consultants in various branches of medicine. From a statistical point of view, this is a relatively unselective sample from a London medical school—I make that claim with some diffidence, because I know that one can get into great trouble if one talks of something being "statistically unselective". Of those 99 people, in the past 17 years a total of 9 have gone to live permanently abroad in countries to which they went to better themselves; three have gone to the U.S.A., five to Canada, and one to Australia. That comprises a figure of 10 per cent.

A few others have gone abroad, but I do not think they are in quite the same category. One has gone to Jamaica, a country which required people from this country; another went to Israel because he was a practising Jew and wished to go hack to help; two have gone to the Forces; two have entered the missionary 1984 field; and one has gone back to Bermuda, where he came from. The sample is not a very big one, and although one must be careful not to generalise from a small particular, I am not very worried by the particular figures I have given. I have talked over the figure of about 10 per cent. with the Dean and the Secretary of the Medical School. They agree that that figure is about right, although they have not worked it out in detail as I have done. Therefore, I should particularly like to know from the noble Lord who is to reply the actual number of doctors who emigrate permanently.

Is it a bad thing for young people to go to do some postgraduate work in America or Canada? Personally I think not. It is something which I have encouraged many young people to do. When they come back, they say that enormous pressure is put on them to stay, and this is because they are found to be well trained, well qualified, and are much liked in the countries in which they work. I do not think it would be right to put any control on their movements, and I should not like to see any control being imposed. I cannot talk about the technological side of the matter because I know very little about it, but certainly one hopes that scientific and medical work is carried out for the benefit of all countries in the world, and that if significant facts are discovered they are published and spread throughout the world.

I agree that there is a great need in this country for more doctors. The numbers have not gone up as much as the population has gone up, and we require more. That can be done in one or two ways. One is by making the medical schools which exist take more people than they do now. I think that that would be a mistake, for it would mean a fundamental change in the methods of medical teaching in this country. Our doctors are well liked and appreciated in foreign countries because of these methods of teaching. The other way would be to start more medical schools. I was very pleased to read a day or two ago that the Government have agreed to set up a new medical school at Nottingham, but I do not think there will be many people coming from it to undertake work in the country for perhaps 15 years or so. Therefore, we are not likely to see a great improvement in the situation. Could the 1985 Minister, in his reply, give the House some idea of the real figure of the number of doctors who go abroad permanently during their working life—excluding, as I have said, those who go abroad for other reasons?

§ LORD TODD

My Lords, I was reading the other night the last debate we had in this House on this subject, nearly three years ago, in February, 1963, a debate in which I and several other noble Lords present to-day took part. It is true that it was not strictly a debate on emigration, but we were discussing a report by the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy. However, a great deal of that debate was devoted to the subject which is under discussion to-day. I must say that in the meantime we do not seem to have got very much further forward in this matter. Many of the points which were made in that debate are just as valid to-day as they were then. A good number of them have been made this afternoon by other speakers. I am afraid that I have little of great novelty to contribute, beyond what I have said on an earlier occasion, but I should like to underline a number of points which have been made by earlier speakers this afternoon.

I suppose that what we are all most concerned about is emigration, particularly emigration to the United States. As has been said before, this is neither a simple problem nor a new one. It is one of the group of problems which have been debated a great deal in recent years in this country, in your Lordships House, in the Press and elsewhere—a group of subjects covering not only emigration, but alleged backwardness in industry, failure to follow up new scientific discoveries, and so on. This is the situation which we now face, some twenty years after the end of the war; and I was very interested a few days ago to read a reprint of a speech in which a passage occurred which I may perhaps quote to your Lordships' to-day because of its relevance to this debate. This speech, which was also made some time after the end of the war, reads as follows: The return of the sword to its scabbard seems to have been the signal for one universal effort to recruit exhausted resources, to revive industry and civilisation, and to direct to their proper objects the genius and talent which war had either exhausted in its service or repressed in its desolations. In this 1986 rivalry of skill England alone has hesitated to take a part. Elevated by her warlike triumphs, she seems to have looked with contempt on the less dazzling achievements of her philosophers and, confiding in her past pre-eminence in the arts, to have calculated too securely on their permanence. Bribed by foreign gold, or flattered by foreign courtesy, her artisans have quitted her service—her machinery has been exported to distant markets—theinventions of her philosophers, slighted at home, have been eagerly introduced abroad—her scientific institutions have been discouraged and even abolished—the articles which she supplied to other States have been gradually manufactured by themselves…". There is a certain topicality about that statement, but it was made by Sir David Brewster in 1831, fifteen years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. So I think it is fair to say that we are not dealing with a very new problem in this country.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, said, one must get this problem of emigration in perspective. The trouble is that it is a complex one. But it is true that it has a very simple base, in that if there are two countries A and B, and the economy of the second is stronger than the first, and offers a higher standard of living, there will always be migration from A to B. In the case of science and technology, of course, there are other factors which come into play. As has been pointed out earlier today, science and technology are particularly international in character, and there has always been a great deal of movement between different countries. Scientific interchange and the movement, particularly of young people, from one country to another are things which we must by all means encourage. It is only when, through disparity in wealth or opportunity, one gets an undue concentration of talent in one particular country that there is any cause for disquiet. And this is, of course, what is worrying a great many people in this country today.

Are we, in fact, losing by emigration too high a proportion of our scientific talent, and are we thereby seriously weakening our own country's economic prospects? It is very important, if one is going to discuss this question, to know, first of all, what our losses are, both in quality and quantity. Here is one of the troubles, because we have nothing like accurate figures either for emigration or for immigration, especially in the field of qualified scientists and technologists. It is very heartening to me to know that, 1987 however belatedly, the Government have at last set up a Committee in order to get figures on these subjects, although I must say from my own experience of investigations of that type, that I am afraid the Committee are going to have a pretty difficult task.

At any rate, the situation as of now, or as of last year, 1965, as regards emigration is admittedly at least as disquieting as it was four or five years ago. It may even have been worse. Whether during this present year the situation has deteriorated still further one does not know, because the figures for 1966 are not yet available. But the economic freeze may very well have had an effect. The continued financial stringency in universities, the lack of expansion in industrial research—these things may well have exaggerated the situation as compared with last year; and I believe that there has already been during this year evidence of a distinct rise in the loss of people in the aircraft industry.

Another thing that is a little disturbing, from the point of view of emigration to America, is that last December the U.S. immigration laws were altered. They changed the quota system from a national basis to one which was related to the United States' needs. Particularly in view of the needs which the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, outlined, one must say that this change will mean that in the future it will be even easier for a qualified scientist or technologist to get an immigrant's visa to the United States. So that altogether there is not much sign of a betterment in the position.

Of course, migration of scientists and technologists, and indeed of all professional people, from the poorer to the richer and better-developed countries is of very long standing. A good illustration of this is the long-continued emigration of people from my own native country, Scotland, to England and elsewhere. We must also remember that until recently we took more scientists as immigrants from the Commonwealth than we lost to America or anywhere else. The situation may be changing now, but until recently that was certainly the case; and if one glances at our scientific community one will see how much this country owes to immigration of that type.

1988 I think it would be fair to say that the "brain drain", so-called which we are experiencing pales into insignificance compared to the brain drain which Australia and New Zealand have suffered for very many years in relation to this country. Indeed, if, as has been said by some, we are to-day now slightly in deficit in the immigration—emigration balance, the reason for that is perhaps not so much that Australia and New Zealand are doing better, but that a bigger proportion of their emigrants are going directly to the United States instead of coming, first of all, to this country. And we must also remember in this connection that at the present time we import more doctors from the Commonwealth than we lose by emigration. So there is no case for making a moral issue of this matter.

Looking at the situation from a national standpoint, even if emigration and immigration were strictly in balance, matters could still be very serious for us. They would be serious if we were exporting a large number of our better scientists and replacing them by people of lower quality. But here again the available evidence does not enable us to answer that question. We are unable to say whether or not that is the case. True, it is said by many people that we must be losing a great many of our best people, because the most serious loss is at the level of the Ph.D. and the post-Ph.D. scientists and technologists—in other words, the people who have been chosen on the grounds of merit to do advanced training. But, after all, exactly the same can be said about the scientists who come to this country from Australia and New Zealand. They, too, have been selected on merit. So there is no prima facie case for assuming that what we take in is any worse—or any better, for that matter—than what we send out. It is very awkward that we do not have the answer to this question, because in this matter of emigration I believe that it is quality that counts and not quantity. I hope that one of these days we shall have some more information on this aspect of the problem.

The point which I really want to make however is one which I think the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, made. This problem of emigration of scientists, technologists and the like is actually a worldwide problem, and it does not affect us 1989 to anything like the extent that it is affecting the underdeveloped countries of Asia and Africa. There the effect is disastrous on the development of their economy, and I believe that for them some form of control of this emigration will have to be found; because if it is not found the gulf between the rich and the poor in this world is going to widen even further and faster than it is doing at present.

So far as our immediate problem is concerned—that is to say, the problem of emigration from this country to the United States—it seems to me that all we can do is to look carefully at the reasons for emigration, and see whether any of them could possibly come under our control. Clearly, unless we are prepared to restrict the movement of our people in the way the Communist countries do—and I cannot imagine that anyone in your Lordships' House would wish to do that—we must accept that the economic dice are currently loaded against us and that we cannot completely stop emigration, even if we would. I must say that I myself would be an opponent of any scheme to stop emigration, whether it were by contracting to have people work for so many years in this country or by giving loans or by any other means. I would be entirely against any such scheme to stop emigration. This is not something that can be stopped by penal measures. If we are going to stop it at all, we shall do it only by making things more attractive in this country than they are elsewhere.

Among the complex of reasons that you get advanced for emigration perhaps the commonest are higher starting pay for young men, earlier responsibility, better overall career prospects and better equipment and facilities. Money may not be the main reason for emigration in many cases, but it is undoubtedly a factor, and I rather think that if we could do something about this, at least so far as the younger people are concerned, it would help.

In this country, even in industry, I think we are altogether too much addicted to the idea of payment according to seniority. We are too much addicted to a kind of equality of treatment according to age and length of service irrespective of ability. For example, we tend to start the young 1990 scientist in this country at a salary a great deal lower than that of his American counterpart; and we try to offset this by giving him security of tenure and regular increments, so that it may be that by the time he is 35 or so he may be earning much like his American counterpart. But the trouble is that the young man has probably recently married and has a young family. In fact, he is at the very stage where some extra money would make all the difference to him. I wonder why someone does not make the experiment of paying a very much higher salary to a young man when he starts in an industry and telling him that he is not going to get any increment for five year's; in other words, take a leaf out of the American book—start high and go up a little less rapidly.

I think industry really must try to do something about this. It must try to make itself more attractive; and not only in this way. It must make the road to the top for the scientist and the technologist a bit easier; it must be much more ready to seek for, and encourage, technological innovation; and, above all, it must try to avoid so far as possible "Stop-Go" policies in research. How often, I wonder, does industry encourage young research men to follow the ideas they get right through to the production stage? Industrialists have often told me: "You do not do this sort of thing, because the trouble about these research men is that they will stick to the bench or the workshop", or whatever it may be. My Lords, I wonder whether they ever get very much chance to do anything else. I think it might be found that there are many more people among these scientists and technologists who are competent in management than people suppose, but I do not think they get much chance of showing it. And when I hear a lot talked about management studies in industry I wonder whether the job of management of research is ever included in these studies, because research is something which so far. I think, our industry has not been very good at managing.

We have also to consider the situation in our universities. Lack of contact with many aspects of industry has been one of their faults for a long time. Another of the faults has been their undoubted 1991 glorification of pure research as the only thing which is worthwhile for a young man. In recent years we have greatly increased the amount of money fed into university research by Government, but at the same time we have greatly increased the number of universities. We now have 44 of them; and if we are encouraging all of these to go in for large-scale research, we shall lose, I feel, practically all the benefit that we might have got from the extra money we put into them.

We have to recognise that we simply have not unlimited funds; and we must recognise, too, that if we spread the funds we have got thinly over a great many different places, as we all too frequently do, we shall end up by doing little or nothing except increase the number of young Ph.Ds who have been trained to look to, if you like, academic research as the real career for which they were being trained; who will find that there are insufficient academic research openings; and who may in many cases have been trained in a way and in subjects which make them not of immediate interest to industry. Such men are certainly going to be frustrated, and they are almost certainly going to start thinking about emigrating.

Is it not perhaps time that we took a leaf out of the book of some other countries—America is one of them—and took up the idea of creating a moderate number of centres of excellence in research? Why should we not concentrate our main spearheads of pure research in a relatively small number of institutions, provide these institutions with absolutely the best of facilities (and this we could certainly afford to do) and perhaps orient the effort of the other places we have, much more than we have done in the past, in the direction of what is industrially desirable or important? In this way we might produce a bigger flow of young men with a real desire to go into industry, having been trained all along with this in view. I should hope that if we did this, industry would be ready to welcome these young men and would, perhaps, treat them properly.

My Lords, I have spoken long enough, I think, although I have touched on only a very few aspects of this interesting and important subject which the noble Lord, 1992 Lord Windlesham, has introduced to us to-day. But, in a way, I think that the difficulties we face over emigration are merely a part of our primary problem in this country. I believe—and I have said this to your Lordships before—that if we are not prepared to select our priorities in science and technology, and the way we think our industry and other activities should go; if, instead, we continue to try to compete with everybody in every conceivable field of science and technology, we shall be spreading our effort far too thinly, and the result will be continued economic stagnation and a steady aggravation of this emigration about which we are worried to-day. We must face up to this fact, and we must take some action; because, although it is true that resources in brains and money are not unlimited, I myself think they are perfectly adequate if we really get down to it and use them properly.

§ VISCOUNT ECCLES

My Lords, I should like to join with others and thank my noble friend Lord Windlesham for introducing this interesting debate, and for doing so in a speech which put before us the facts, and the lack of facts, about the brain drain in such an admirably clear manner. I am also very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, because I have never heard the global character of the brain drain described in such a remarkable way before.

I am quite sure from conversations that one has in industry that this brain drain has gathered pace in the last twelve months. I have sometimes even thought about the Communists. Can the Communists ever have had to take a more humiliating decision than to build the Berlin Wall? My Lords, in East Germany they must have had many debates on the brain drain—perhaps not unlike the one we are having this afternoon—before they sealed off the frontier and shot at sight those who wished to cross it. They were forced to their action mainly, I think, because they could not bear criticism of their own society or bring themselves to see themselves as others saw them; and no doubt it is very hard for us to see ourselves without a trace of prejudice or partial interest. And it must be very hard for the Government, with all the pre-Election promises 1993 they made to the clever young men who now want to leave the country which they are trying to govern well.

When I thought about this problem I found the origin of the brain drain away back in history, long before Socialism came to depress us. At the same time, I am convinced that the disparagement of financial success which has characterised the Labour Party for a long time has something seriously to do with the number of young men and women who are going abroad. Some 200 years ago the British were already the foremost Empire-builders in the world. This must have been a very exciting occupation. What was at first a romantic and perilous adventure, conquering and governing and civilising foreign lands, became in time a national habit; but after a few generations this habit must have entered into our blood so that it is now handed on from father to son. And the inherited urge is still there to get out of these Islands, to make a fine life, perhaps a missionary kind of life, somewhere else. I should be very surprised if there is a family represented in your Lordships' House which could not point to one or two members who had had a hand in the Indian Empire or who had emigrated to North America and settled there.

In the early days of the Empire, educated young men could go out as professionals, as soldiers, lawyers, administrators. Now the great majority who go are not in the public service, but seek their fortunes as business executives, scientists, engineers, salesmen, accountants and so on. They still want to go; you can feel that when you talk to them. This is the inherited wish to project Britain overseas. It still has something to do with many of their decisions. But this wish has now to be expressed in a different kind of career, and again the history book has something interesting to tell us. The business men or the qualified graduates who to-day go abroad often do so because they believe that a career in a profit-making enterprise abroad carries with it a much higher social prestige than in this country.

There are historical reasons for this. In the 17th and 18th centuries capital was so desperately scarce in this country that anyone who accumulated capital out of the acquisition or development of 1994 land or from some profit, scrupulously made or not, was something of a hero. Indeed, he had a very good chance of getting into your Lordships' House. But then a change took place, and towards the middle of the 19th century enough capital had been accumulated in stocks and shares, as well as in land, to start the fashion among educated men not to go into trade but it take up a professional career or, better still, to live the life of a gentleman of leisure. Therefore, the urge to "go out and govern New South Wales" was reinforced by the new social inferiority accorded to the man who stayed at home and went into trade.

I was in your Lordships' Library yesterday afternoon and I took down a volume of Murray's Extended English Dictionary. Under the word "trade", with the dateline 1813, I found this quotation: He was in trade; and Miss Atcherley was well aware his being trade was an obstacle impossible to surmount. The Empire has gone and the Miss Atcherleys of this generation are very different. Now they are only too happy to marry a young man from the City with a bowler hat and a rolled umbrella. But what about the chemist in his acrid white coat, or the engineer with his arms full of mechanical drawings? In their case some sense of social inferiority still remains. I believe that the feeling that production and distribution (and engineering in particular) are inferior to the professions and to merchant banking would have disappeared if the Labour Party had not come on the scene and mounted their attack against profits as something dirty, something to be taxed as heavily as possible. It is very important to notice that it is the attack on both flanks which has done so much to discredit British industry. Despised on the one side by the upper classes, treated on the other as politically and morally obnoxious by the Panty opposite, trade has had an unhappy time.

Contrast that with the newer countries to which these young men are tempted to go. In countries like the U.S.A. or Canada or Australia, business has never been attacked on either flank. There, the businessman, the salesman, the chemist, the engineer, is politically and socially as well regarded as a soldier or a lawyer or a landowner; and to make profits in those 1995 countries is as respectable as it was here in the time of Sir Robert Walpole. So the ambitious young man in Britain to-day, having the urge to make money, hears about the different prestige ratings at home and abroad. That is what makes him accept a financial offer which may, when allowance is made for the cost of living, be not all that better than he could have had if he had stayed at home.

It may be asked: "How could this disparagement of trade continue in the second half of the 20th century when politics is almost synonymous with economics?" The reason is not far to seek. My noble friend Lord Todd put his finger on it. The universities took the place of the upper classes as the source of the disdain and disparagement of business. It is the universities who have done so much damage to British industry with their preference for pure science over applied science and technology; with their advocacy of the honourable and comfortable security of public service against the ups and downs of competitive trade. If it had not been for noble Lords such as Lord Bowden at Birmingham, I do not know where we should have been. We should have had no higher technology associated with industry. We owe him and the other principals (or however they call themselves) of the Colleges of Advanced Technology a great debt of gratitude. I myself will never forget trying to get the universities to increase their courses in mathematics in order to meet the demand for mathematics teachers in the sixth forms of the maintained schools as well as the demands of the new atomic and electronic industry. It was a most depressing chapter at the Ministry of Education. In this hostile atmosphere in the senior common-rooms, many honours graduates must have felt that the choice for them was between going into research in this country or going abroad to make money. Of course, the prospect of earning good money counts.

I cannot agree with my noble friend Lord Todd that the dice are, as it were, always loaded against us. In money, we have loaded the dice against ourselves. Our British rates of surtax are not just a deterrent; they are a disaster. It may be that the standard of life of a young man, when he first goes to North 1996 America or to Australia, is not very different from what he might have had here. But he expects his salary to increase faster, and he expects to be able to keep a larger proportion of that larger salary, and he expects to be able to put by some capital for himself and his family. My Lords, young men choose one career rather than another, or at any rate many of them do, because they dream of the plums at the top of the tree. We offer far too few plums in this country nowadays. We offer far too few visions and dreams to our young people in our Welfare Society.

I should like to make just one further point. Young men I know who contemplate going abroad have said from time to time that they want to get out of the dull, drab mediocrity that covers, like a fog, so much of life around them. This drabness is the other side of the brain drain. For every restless ambitious man who goes abroad, ten equally clever men settle down in some suburb, satisfied with a modest salary and a prospect of a pension. These are men who did well at school and at university, who married happily and who have children. But, for one reason or another, half way in their career they reach an accommodation with dullness. When they are offered a rise in their salary of £1,000 or more—I have had experience of this—to move to a development area, they refuse. They prefer to say put in the suburbs, content with a small car, the bridge club and a holiday in Spain.

Their motives are mixed. Sometimes it is the wife's job or the children's school which determines their decision not to move up the ladder. Sometimes the man, realising that promotion will mean harder, more responsible, more worrying work, thinks that the extra, heavily-taxed money is not worth the trouble. He and his wife do not see how their social position can improve if he takes a job in the North of England. So they stay in the Home Counties and his brain stagnates, and with it the country stagnates. My Lords, brain stagnation is doing us far more harm than the brain drain.

What is to be done about this? If we raise the social prestige of being an engineer, a works manager and so on—and to do that we must welcome profits as a sign of admired success and reduce surtax on all earned income—the brain 1997 drain can be kept in hand and, far more important in my judgment, the able men who now opt for stagnation will wake up and achieve that personal success of which they are certainly capable.

§ LORD SNOW

My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, for introducing this important subject this afternoon, and we are all grateful, if I may say so, for the manner in which he introduced it. It seemed to me a model of detachment, and I found myself in very substantial agreement with something like 95 per cent. of what he said. I think I am more sombre about the outlook than he is, but I am also less resigned, so perhaps that just about evens out. I fancy that in this debate a lot of us will be repeating ourselves. The noble Lord, Lord Todd, for instance, produced three or four points which might have been taken literally from the speech of which, contrary to my habit, I have actually got the text in front of me. This is not a matter of collusion, although I was dining in Christ's the other night. In fact, the noble Lord was not present.

My Lords, I should like to begin by suggesting to your Lordships that we ought not to try to generalise this problem too much. I agree with all that has been said about the problem to the developing countries and what-not. The important thing near to our hand is what we can do with our own country and Europe? If we can get that right and prevent ourselves from becoming a kind of annex to the United States we shall have done something. So let us try to restrict our immediate consideration at least to what we can do ourselves.

The second point I should like to make straight away to your Lordships is that we ought not to worry too much about getting exact statistics, or at least we ought not to think that action should be inhibited until we have every Ph.D. labelled and classified. If we do that it will take us ten years; the thing will have gone too far and we shall have done nothing. These kind of statistics—I have spent much of my life on them—are terribly difficult to get, and they are not very meaningful when you get them. In fact, we all know the position well 1998 enough. I was in this from the beginning, years before the phrase "brain drain" was introduced. We know enough to know what is the position and, further, we have talked about this problem ad nauseam for more than long enough. The time has come to begin to find concrete proposals.

I should not inflict myself upon your Lordships this afternoon unless I had certain concrete proposals to make. The time for debate is really over. As several noble Lords—in fact, I think all the noble Lords who have spoken—have announced, though this is a very important problem and a very grave problem, it is not, of course, a new one. The only reason why it seems to us a new problem is that for two hundred years we have been on the good end of the brain drain and not the bad end. The drain from the Antipodes to this country which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Todd, has been one of the most remarkable examples of the brain drain operating in our favour. The last President of the Royal Society, one of the greatest of the presidents of the Royal Society, Lord Rutherford, was a New Zealander. Think of our senior scientific statesmen. Sir Solly Zuckerman is a South African; so is Sir Basil Schonland. Sir Harrie Massey is an Australian; Professor Philip Bowden is a Tasmanian, and so on. We could all reel off these names.

The other example which cuts nearer the bone, uncomfortably near the bone, and which was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Todd (in everything but a legalistic sense it is a great deal too close) is the present position of this country and America. Have your Lordships ever thought of the brain drain from Scotland to this country? It went on for two hundred years. It still goes on. The noble Lord, Lord Todd, is a rather fine example in point. Quite out of proportion to the relative populations, the Scots sent us scientists, engineers, and of course all kinds of other eminent professional people. This is very clear, and the parallel with the 1966 relations of this country and the United States is only too demonstrably clear. Scotland was much poorer than England. There was no linguistic barrier—at least, no barrier that a determined man could not overcome. Further, the Scottish education for a very long 1999 time, probably until the First World War, was a good deal more rigorous than the English. In just the same way, British education, certainly at school and I think in general up to the first degree, is still a good deal more rigorous than the American. I do not want to rub it in, but there is one simple moral to be derived from this example—talent goes where the money is. Money is not everything, but it represents a chance to do one's best work.

Scientists are no more mercenary than the rest of us, but they have a driving motive which is to do the best science of which they are capable. For that they need equipment and assistance and, quite as important, the company of able colleagues. The rich countries can give them all of that. Further, let us not be hypocritical, as scientists sometimes are. They are not specially mercenary but, like the rest of us, they like the status that money can offer and the comforts that money can buy. If one can cross the Atlantic and do good work and earn 20,000 dollars rather than £2,500, well, that is an attraction and I think it would clear the air if someone occasionally said so. Here I am not referring to Dr. Sanders, who was getting a good salary here and is completely uninterested in money and could have got much more in the United States.

I do not wonder that there is a brain drain, but I wonder why it is not larger, though I believe that it is dangerously large and, unless we take realistic steps, that it will increase. That had been obvious to most of us who knew American resources a long time ago. Ten years ago we knew it was already happening. In fact, it is nearly nine years since a letter was sent to a large number of young scientists, whom we can identify, working in the United States and Canada, signed by Sir John Cockcroft and myself, asking them to consider the position and to discuss it with the Committee which we were sending out, so that we could try to find what inducements would bring them back to this country. My friend and then colleague, Mr. H. S. Hoff, went out a few months later and has been out there for a large part of each year since then, interviewing these young men over the length and breadth of the American continent. So we have first-hand information on a large scale and in great 2000 depth for the whole period from 1958 to 1966. I may say that this has been one of the most thankless pieces of public service I have ever known and no one could have done it with more imagination and more patience. We have good information, not only statistically but psychologically as well. This total effort has brought back a considerable number of valuable men and a great deal of real information.

The facts are brutal. Professor Swann's Report was bad enough. In 1961, we were losing 12 per cent. of Ph.D.s and in the decade from 1952 to 1961 we probably lost something like 16 per cent. of all Ph.D.s over the range of subjects that the Swann Committee were considering. It has got worse since then. It is probable that at the moment of the recent crop of Ph.D.s we are losing one in five or one in four. I think that the Swann Committee are probably pessimistic, but they are not too far off. This loss is very large. No country can take it for long.

I also have to warn your Lordships that in my view the position will get worse, not better, because people tend to follow their friends. Fashions tend to be infectious. Once we get a group of young Englishmen sitting round San Francisco Bay, other young Englishmen will go and find them. Unless we show some initiative and imagination, we may get too near the position in New Zealand, which now has to train two first-class scientists to keep one. Of all Anglo-Saxon countries, they are in the most precarious position. We do not know the exact extent of the same kind of emigration from other European countries. I did not know the figures my noble friend Lord Bowden quoted, but it is clear that they are serious, but not so serious as ours. This country is obviously more vulnerable than, say, France. It is partly owing to the language problem and partly owing to the fact that, like most Englishmen, scientists do not really feel foreigners in America. This is one of our real liabilities in this respect.

I ought to say that throughout my speech I am using "scientist" to cover "engineer". It is too difficult to go on saying, "scientists and engineers" every time I want to use the nouns. No sane person wants to see us by a natural 2001 historical process stripped of our best young scientists, and no sane person—certainly not in America, where there are far-sighted people (I stress the word "far-sighted") who are as concerned as we are—wants to see the United States taking over the advanced science and technology of the whole Western world. They are already doing a very large slice of it—too much. It is time that we had a declaration of scientific independence. So we, and to a lesser extent other countries of Europe, are obliged to take steps.

There is a certain kind of step which we cannot take. Here, I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Windlesham and Lord Todd, that they may be a temptation to some, but they are right out. I mean anything in the nature of the making of restrictions on young scientists, or of making them serve a period of time in England in order, as it were, to pay for their education. I am sure that these attempts would do us moral harm. We must not make our lives smaller than they already are. We want to make scientists and science more expansive, not less. Further, as a more pointed argument, such attempts would do us practical harm. Anyone who has attempted to manage scientists will know what I mean. It cannot work. The word will get passed round the schools and soon we shall have fewer young scientists than we have now, and that is few enough. This is out of the question.

The steps we take are going to require more imagination than that and harder heads. I think I can suggest them in two words: one is choice and the other is pay. The trouble is that our kind of society is not well adapted for paying, and even worse adapted for making choices, particularly when the choice suggests that one kind of activity shall be preferred to another or that we ought to give favourable treatment to the excellent in any shape or form. That goes right against the contemporary grain in this country, much more than either in the United States or in the Soviet Union. Yet we have to do just that. We have got both to choose and to pay. If we choose right, the money will come back.

The first thing to accept—and here my noble friend Lord Todd and I are saying the same thing—is that neither this country nor any European country, 2002 except Russia, nor any combination of European countries, can do all the things that America does, either in pure science or in technology. That may be hard, but it is a fact of life and only fools quarrel with the facts of life. On the other hand, this country is already doing some things in pure science and in technology as well as the Americans. The sensible thing is to invest in strength and, of course, invest in necessities. For example, our atomic energy technology has been a major success. We ought to increase that investment. And that sort of choice means that there will be other things we cannot do. We have to keep our grip on the technologies that any advanced country requires—computers, micro-electronics, machine tools—even though the Americans have an enormous lead. These are necessities. In fact, that was one of the first decisions of the Ministry of Technology two years ago. If we choose in cold blood our strengths and our necessities, then a good many technologies will have to be sacrificed. There is just no argument against that. Other European countries do this somewhat better than we do.

Exactly the same is true of pure science. I will say more about this in a moment. In practical terms, pure science is not such a problem as technologies. Dr. Sanders said this week that pure science is international and that we all gain from it, wherever it is done. Nevertheless, I am convinced that without so many schools of pure research of the highest class, this country would in the long run—and not-too-long run—sink into the dingy and third-rate. It is very dangerous to think that we can separate technology from pure science in a clear-cut way. The real point is that if we make the choice, we can have some technologies and some fields of research where we can be as good as any country in the world. That ought to be our programme. Once that is established, the climate will be healthier, and it will help to influence the young scientists to stay.

But that is not enough, or anything like enough. We have to make their own conditions better. This means, I am sure, that we have to pay. Probably the easiest method would be by using some fiscal devices. I will suggest three, although fiscal things are not really my speciality; I am very bad at them, and I believe that others can produce more.

2003 The primary intention of my first two suggestions is to make some engineers and some scientists better off. As I said before, this is the kind of preference that goes right against the grain of our society, but it is better to go against the grain of the society than to see it decay within quite a short time. Scientists and engineers are, by and large, very much underpaid in British industry. They are very much underpaid by the standards of their American counterparts, and appreciably underpaid by the standards of their counterparts in this country who are not in industry. This is one of the reasons why so much of British industry is struggling—or perhaps it is one of the symptoms. We have far too few first-class scientists in industry now, and a good many of those industry is not good at using. As a rough generalisation, only substantial groups of scientists are effective in industry. It is no use putting them round in penny packets. Take the firms who employ 1,000 qualified scientists and you will write down the names of most of the British firms who are competitive by world-wide standards. But they will not stay competitive if their scientists migrate across the Atlantic.

I suggest here that we should bear in mind one of the few imaginative fiscal measures of this century. I mean—and I am banking on automatic Pavlovian laughter from certain noble Lords—the selective employment tax. We all know that this tax, as at present administered, performs both anomalies and certain absurdities. But it can be refined; it can be got right. At the very least, it represents an idea, and a cardinal idea. Just for once a Government is not afraid of showing preference or even indicating that one kind of employment may be more socially valuable than another. I believe that the positive aspect of S.E.T. should be adapted—obviously in far smaller numbers, and with much larger allowances—to those firms employing more than a minimum number of scientists. This will make it possible for firms in industries of critical importance to pay their scientists something more like a competitive salary.

My second suggestion is also designed, though not entirely, to attract more talent, even if it be part-time talent, into industry, and to meet some of this divi- 2004 sion that we see in the universities and the industrial world. It is shamelessly borrowed from America; it is also of the nature of a fiscal device. It is remarkably simple. A number of American universities now employ their faculties on contracts which engage their service only for nine months in each year; that is, the full salary is paid, but the faculty member is entirely free to do anything he likes, or, of course, to do nothing; to take up employment, take up consultancy, or even write books. He has three months where he is not at all under the control of his university. I believe that this concept would cost us nothing, and would be more valuable to us than to the Americans. We have an abnormal amount of ability in our universities in proportion to our numbers, probably more than any other country in the world. On the other hand, it has not until very recent days been usual, or even approved of, for this ability to take much part in the working world, and certainly not in industry. It is one of our crying needs that it should do so.

The third suggestion is concerned with the universities themselves. By choosing and by paying we stand a chance of getting some branches of technology—both in the public and private sectors—attractive to good scientists and engineers, and so able to hold their own in the world. But I am certain that all this will go quite dead unless we have some universities which are centres of supreme excellence. Here is another body of unconscious collusion with the noble Lord, Lord Todd. We have now forty-four university institutions; the Continent of Europe has many more. Each of these institutions ought to find its way to doing something well; but it is totally unrealistic to think that many can live at the same height as Berkeley or Harvard or something like ten more of the best American universities.

By centres of supreme excellence, I mean people who are taking original thought so far as it can at present go over a great variety of fields; I mean no more than that. With great effort, and deliberate and discriminating choice, we in this country might produce two or three such centres; the continent of Europe might produce perhaps another three or 2005 four—because the standard here is very high. Remember that the days of the 'twenties and 'thirties, when Cambridge, Copenhagen, Gottingen, and for a short time Rome, were the major centres of world physics, have gone, and unless we show great nerve and skill they have gone for ever. But still, there is a great talent in England and Europe. With good luck, and if we are not afraid to concentrate some of it, we have the intellects which could attract other intellects from allover the world.

But how to do it? To begin with, I am fairly sure that these centres of excellence—I apologise for the jargon—will have to be constructed, with perhaps one exception, on national bases. Universities are tricky and organic things, and I think that, once again, the sensible course is to build on strength. But it is very hard to see any administrative machine in this country saying, as we probably ought to say: "We can only afford, both in money and high talent, three great universities"—I am choosing the number three at random—"We are going to choose. Whatever else is sacrificed, these three will not be." I do not see that happening through any political or administrative machinery, and I must say that I do not blame any decision-maker who flinches from that particular choice. But I suggest that we have to find a way round.

Once more, we can borrow a fiscal device from America. It will have struck anyone who knows the United States how very large sums annually are raised from private sources, even by quite small colleges, with perhaps 1,000 students. Several that I know personally each raise privately, as a matter of course, every year more than private benefactors contribute to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge put together. Now, of course, there is more private wealth in the United States than there is here, and Americans are by habit more generous givers. But there is more to it than that. It happens—or, rather, it does not happen; it is considered policy—that such contributions in America carry substantial income tax relief, just as contributions to art galleries do. If we had this touch of fiscal imagination, I have no doubt that a good many of our universities would benefit; and I also have no doubt that within five or ten 2006 years we should have one or two or three universities, which would not be endowed like Harvard, but which would be rich enough to do anything we, or Europe, could reasonably possibly or even hopefully expect to do.

The cost of these suggestions, I think, roughly, would be something of the order of £30 million per annum in terms of direct current account. But if we are not too hypnotised by income tax theology, we realise that a great deal would flow back into the Exchequer. Anyway, can we afford not to do it? The alternative, before the end of the 'seventies, appears to be some approach to the New Zealand situation. I am not greatly addicted to agricultural metaphors, but if ever there was a risk of losing most of the seed corn, this is it.

I want to conclude by making an appeal to Her Majesty's Government not to be slow about this matter. If we go on collecting statistics, putting up committees and thinking for the next ten years, then such are the complexities of the interlocking English machine that we shall have reached the stage that just when we know what to do, it will be too late to do it, and we shall be left with the melancholy satisfaction of watching something which has already happened and which is irretrievable.

§ LORD ANNAN

My Lords, I should like to begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, for the admirable way in which he opened this debate, with such a wealth of factual information which was a great help to us, and also the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, for a remarkable speech because it surveyed the whole field in a way which, in my view, was quite outstanding.

I wonder whether I could try to follow more the noble Lords, Lord Todd and Lord Snow, and the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, in trying to see what, if anything, can be done about this situation. Before I do that, could I add one other statistic which came to my notice in a recent issue of Minerva, where a survey of just over 1,200 scientific emigrants just made shows that the physicists and chemists predominate. When this survey was taken, four-fifths were under the age of 40; the median salary offered in America was between 8,000 and 10,000 dollars at 2007 universities, and in industries 12,500 to 15,000 dollars. When asked why they went, low salaries in this country was the answer which only 6.5 per cent. gave. Low status was a much more common answer, and also irritation with the conditions in this country. They stay, so they said, in America because they find it more stimulating. They did not see their emigration as a political act nor as having any moral issue or connotation about it at all. They thought that the atmosphere of America was less congenial than in this country, but more stimulating. They prefer chan