Name: Science and Technology Committee (Commons)
Uploaded: 2026-10-21T08:33:28+00:00
Duration: 8709 s

00:04 - 02:14

Speaker 2

Order, order, and welcome to today's meeting of the Science and Technology Committee. This is our second session on the machinery of government changes, which were announced before the summer recess, and today we'll be looking at ministerial responsibilities and what the changes mean for the future of science, innovation, and technology policy and decision making. And we're very pleased to welcome, to be joined today by Nigel Huddleston from the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, an early example of how we will be working across committees, and I'm sure the departments will be working across departments as well. And we're very pleased to have ministers and officials from each of the three departments most affected by the abolition of D-SIT. And many thanks for joining us today and demonstration that the abolition of D-SIT will not lead to less scrutiny of science and technology.

Before we start our main session today, I wanted to turn briefly to the provision of information to our committee by departments. Since the machinery of government changes, responses to correspondence and reports from our committees have been regularly delayed beyond agreed deadlines. This is something the committee does not expect to become routine. So could you commit to underlining to your respective teams the importance of timely engagement with this committee? And I see all the ministers nodding.

Great. Well, I will accept that and thank you very much for that. And I'll ask each of you to introduce yourself in response to the first question presented to you. And the first question from our committee is going to be from George Freeman. George.

02:14 - 03:47

Speaker 3

Thank you, Chair. Morning, all. As a veteran of a few government machinery changes, thank you for your time this morning. We've heard quite a lot of concerns in previous hearings about just the damage, the risk of disruption, leave aside everything else. We've been, as you know, in the last year, 18 months, two years, very focused on applauding the government's announced increase of funding, the focus on industrial strategy, and focused on how this actually plays out across government.

You'll have seen our report, Flying Blind, asking which money is being allocated to which geographies and which sectors so that we can track delivery. So I wanted to ask about three things this morning: one, the disruption; two, the budgets; and three, the political vision and delivery leadership. And I'm going to focus to start with, if I may, Minister McDonald and Director General Jones. If I can start, Minister, with the vision, the aim, the political side of things.

...and which in its creation had sent a signal that we were putting science, innovation and technology at the heart of government. And in particular now how the delivery governance is run. You've got two ministers in cabinet. You've got a Secretary of State for DBIST and a focused AI minister. That can be a strength and a potentially a cause of some clash.

So we're keen to hear from you the vision and then the political implementation. And then perhaps Alex I can come to you on the money.

03:47 - 05:16

Speaker 1

Great. Thank you very much George. Yeah you're right. You've been through a few machinery of government changes yourself and I think that you'd agree with me that the civil service are incredibly adept at following those instructions. But of course it does come with some cost.

Any restructure comes with some cost. And so I think as you say it's very important to set out the rationale for it. And to my mind in any sense and you'll forgive me I'm an engineer and I come from it from an engineering perspective, form always follows function. You have to adapt the form of government to the function that you want it to carry out. And we're fortunate in that the Prime Minister's given a very clear objective.

And in fact he gave that objective very directly to me when he appointed me to the job. And what he said to me was that he wanted to put science back in the service of industry. And that's a really strong focus on the application and commercialisation of science. And I know that this is something that you wrestled with when you were science minister too because we recognise that the UK punches well above its weight in terms of curiosity-driven research, basic science, but that much of that science is commercialised overseas. Despite the fact that the Prime Minister made that, gave me that objective, I was very clear in a speech that I gave early on to the Universities UK conference that that doesn't in any way diminish the work that we're doing on curiosity-driven research.