We are joined by Peter Kyle, the newly appointed Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: We’ll get to your brief in a moment. But just building Britain, how do you take the country with you? You have a lot of very slim majorities. You could piss people off very quickly, wouldn’t you?
Peter Kyle: We have just won the election with a substantial majority and we have made no secret of what our intentions were in terms of building and winning Britain back in the election. That’s something we’ve talked about repeatedly all along. And it was there, written in our manifesto, loud and clear. So it’s not really just about selling the country. The country has just endorsed our manifesto and our approach to this matter, but we will do so by resolution using the power and authority that comes with central government. But as you heard there, we will always, always give local areas, local authorities, the first chance to get it right. We see it as a partnership between different layers of government. We all have a role to play in this. Local areas must have control over where housing and other infrastructure is built. But in some situations there are only local barriers to doing this. In these circumstances, you will find an assertive central government when we try to break down these barriers. Sometimes local authorities ask us to do this because they have too many obstacles at the local level.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: So sometimes you get over your fears. In Helia’s work, we also saw the beginning of the construction industry objecting to the kind of difficult demands you’re going to put on them in building social housing and saying, ‘Well, you can’t do that and still make a profit’. In the past, we’ve seen governments weaken requirements for developers. Do you promise you won’t?
Peter Kyle: We have high expectations. We are going to create and build 1.5 million new homes. We’re not going to have some parts, not all parts, but some parts of the development community come to us for better expression and say they want it better. We are actually talking about making sure that we create the conditions, we break down the barriers that prevent developers from coming in and developing quality homes right from the start of this government. So they should seize the opportunities we create and not say “we want more, more, more”. Now come to us when there are specific challenges and we will try to be a partner in overcoming those challenges. But our country needs new homes. It needs new social homes, it needs new infrastructure, whether that means laboratories for science and life sciences, whether that means data centers for the digital infrastructure of the future. This is the government that will break down those barriers and ensure that we can prepare our country for the future.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: Let’s go to your department. You said today that you are now the economic department of science and technology. The impact of Brexit has of course been very damaging to science in Britain and we have only just returned to the Horizon scheme. How do you intend to replace this lost ground and turn science into an economic powerhouse?
Peter Kyle: If you go back to those dark times when the government landed us with the terrible Brexit deal and took us out of the Horizon programme, which meant that scientists in this country could collaborate and work with scientists elsewhere and so on in an incredibly productive way. Of course, it has now come back to some extent. But fortunately, we have a very resilient, world-class scientific community. We have the Crick Institute, we have a university sector that is very mature, and we have great partnerships between the private sector and public research institutions. What we’re talking about now builds on that because we want to make sure that’s part of our economic development agenda. So we have already announced the Regulatory Innovation Authority, which I will launch shortly. This will accelerate innovation in the regulatory environment so we can get out there and quickly benefit the nation’s health and economic growth. We will check the planning. We will also ensure that the regulations are updated and ensure that we build more laboratories and data centers in the future. So these are the things that we can do immediately to really capture them. And of course we’ve announced in the last 24 hours that Patrick Vallance, the former chief science officer, is coming into government as a science officer to make sure he can bring his wisdom and experience to turbocharging and be the partner that the sector needs to really grow the sector. We will become the economic department at DSIT.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: Universities are necessary for science. When will they get their settlements from the government and know if they can all survive?
Peter Kyle: It is not just an economic settlement. Now the department I’m responsible for funds the research side of universities, and that’s key funding. We want to make sure we can make better use of existing funding. So we’re moving from one- to three-year funding programs to ten-year research and development programs if it benefits the nation’s health, economic growth, or our priorities, which we set in industrial strategy. This will not cost the exchequer a penny, but it will give certainty to these research institutions and it will squeeze private sector funding, it will unlock more private sector investment in these sectors. These are things we can do without spending, without borrowing, without more taxation. These are the lessons we have to learn and therefore we will not be judged on the limitations and failures of the last 14 years because there is another way forward. Having the assertive government that exists, unlocking the potential, using all the tools it has, not just tax and spend, to ensure we can get the investment in our economy and the public services we so desperately need.