Science and Discovery Centres (Funding)

I do not carry the figure around in my head, of course, but I can tell my hon. Friend that the NWRDA, through the Northwest Science Council, is very generous towards science. In fact, dare I say that it is looking after the interests of Daresbury at the moment? However, I will not stray into that area, Mr. Gale; I have taken the warning. At Bolton TIC, a pupil can invent, design and manufacture. An artist in residence, Iain Cant, has helped to bridge that difficult gap between science and the arts. He is partly responsible for the world's largest single stone sculpture, which can now be seen at the Eden project in Cornwall. That sculpture was designed and prototyped using equipment at the Bolton TIC. The Bolton Wireless Club, the Bolton Aero-modelling Club and the Bolton Astronomical Society have all been given access to the building, provided that they encourage children to join their clubs. As I have said, Bolton TIC is for all children aged between nine and 19, and not just those from Bolton but from across the region. The plan was to open it beyond school hours: in the evenings, at the weekends, and throughout the school holidays. Bolton TIC is situated in one of the most deprived wards in the country, so we were able to win neighbourhood renewal funding worth £300,000 to purchase a bus that conveys children from all the schools in the area to and from the TIC. Paul Abbott has built up a network of science communicators across the north-west. He knows who is willing to bring into the TIC equipment that the TIC does not already own: robots, lasers and so on. Many meetings, conferences and competitions for children are held in the building by a variety of learned societies, such as the Royal Society of Chemistry and other organisations promoting science and engineering. Professor Colin Pillinger, of Beagle fame, recently helped me to launch a series of lectures for children and the general public. Those lectures were very popular indeed. Ideally Bolton TIC, which we have always seen as a regional asset, requires £500,000-worth of revenue funding per annum, but in the past four years we have managed to run it on just £300,000 per annum. Conference business has provided £80,000 per annum and the rest has had to be raised through grants and sponsorship. The Department for Education and Skills funded the TIC for the past two years through its Excellence in Cities programme, but efforts to maintain funding at that very high level finally ran out at the end of March this year. On 1 April 2008, the board of the TIC and the NWRDA decided on a seamless transfer of the asset to Bolton council and the project will be known in future as Bolton science and technology centre. Bolton council has dedicated £300,000 to the centre for each of the next two years, when the future of the project will have to be evaluated again. The NWRDA and the former board of Bolton TIC have been assured that the original ethos of this exciting project, which is the first junior incubator in Britain, will not be lost and that the building will continue to be used to add value to the education of schoolchildren from Bolton and the entire region. I wish the project well in the future. I also want to take this opportunity to thank all the staff at the TIC and my fellow board directors who have struggled during the past four years to keep the project open for the benefit of local children. If a TIC works in the north-west, why cannot we have one in every region? There has been a lot of interest already in this concept; rather than having individual science clubs in each individual school in a town, it is a big science club for a town. I ask the Minister, ““Isn't that better?”” Young people play better music when they congregate together in music centres and I maintain that the same is true with science in Bolton TIC. So I encourage my hon. Friend the Minister to look carefully at this innovative project. Just as there are 101 reasons for the start-up of science centres, the funding of them is equally complex, as I have just tried to indicate. Right now, some of the centres are in danger of closing, as the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough pointed out. That is because of the complexity of the funding mechanisms. The people who run the centres spend inordinate amounts of time bidding for grants here, there and everywhere, and they are lucky if even 10 per cent. of the applications are successful. Furthermore, the funding is often short term rather than long term. My hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) will say more about the Inspire Discovery Centre in his town. Recently I have been in correspondence with Adam Hart-Davis, one of our best communicators of science in the media, who has related the plight of Explore-at-Bristol to me. It has had to close two of its main attractions, one of them being the Imax cinema, and to make 45 staff redundant as a result of a shortage of funding. The Wellcome Trust recently awarded Explore-at-Bristol a £1.5 million grant to build a touring exhibition entitled ““Inside DNA: A Genomic Revolution””, which will tour the UK when it has been built. The Wellcome Trust has obviously shown that it appreciates the work done by Explore-at-Bristol. Of the 18 centres that received £450 million from the Millennium Commission at the turn of the century, several are currently finding it difficult to survive. As the hon. Gentleman indicated, two of those have already closed: the Earth Centre at Doncaster and the Big Idea in Ayrshire. Further injections of capital have been awarded by ReDiscover. Some £33 million was provided by the Millennium Commission, the Wellcome Trust and the Wolfson Foundation in 2003. The stabilisation fund—£2 million awarded by the Government to stabilise millennium centres in financial difficulties—provided money in 2004. A further £1 million was awarded by the science centre enrichment activities grant scheme in 2006. All those sources of extra funding have kept many of these centres open. However, if those sources of funding are not replaced in the near future, many of the remaining centres will begin to close. Until recently, there was no overall umbrella organisation that looked after the interests of all those organisations. It is true that museums do have an umbrella organisation already, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, which is a non-departmental Government body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which museums can apply to for accreditation, as has been mentioned. However, the rest of the science and discovery centres remained unco-ordinated until the foundation of Ecsite-uk. Ecsite-uk has now been formed and it has a growing membership, particularly among organisations that do not fit conveniently into any silo. I mention again the Bolton TIC as an example; it falls in the cracks between Departments. The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and the DCMS have recently awarded Ecsite-uk £750,000, specifically to enhance the financial viability of science and discovery centres in the 2006-08 period. I will be interested to learn from the Minister whether any results have come out of that study yet by Ecsite-uk. As has been mentioned, the DIUS has commissioned research this year to establish how effective these centres are compared with other ““delivery mechanisms””— that is the Department's jargon, not mine—at helping the Government to meet both their science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, goals and their public engagement goals. However, a recent review by Ecsite-uk of worldwide studies in this policy area has shown that science and discovery centres are extremely valuable. Cardiff university's submission to our Committee has already been referred to, and the results from Cardiff appear to be positive. The Wellcome Trust published a review in 2006 on the effectiveness of the five millennium science centres that it funded, and it concluded that they:"““provide considerable resources for their local regions, contributing to local regeneration, supporting formal education and acting as regional 'hubs' for science-based activities.””" Museums differ from science and discovery centres in that they house important local and national collections. Some museums, such as the amazingly successful Manchester museum of science and industry, house science and discovery centres. The Catalyst museum at Runcorn once housed a static display of items collected from the chemical industry in the surrounding area and was funded entirely by that industry. In recent times, it has built in a school science laboratory and an interactive public science theatre. It also offers visitors daily demonstration lectures on a rolling basis and it houses three interactive galleries. In that respect, I declare an interest because I am proud to be one of Catalyst's patrons. However, its future is by no means certain. It has twice been saved from closure by Halton borough council and the Northwest Regional Development Agency. Ineos Chlor, a large local chemical company, has recently also provided a large one-off grant to keep the museum open. However, that is all short-term funding, and the future of Catalyst is by no means sustainable without more help. The formation of science and discovery centres began about 20 years ago. The Exploratory in Bristol opened in 1983, Green's Mill and Science Centre in Nottingham opened in 1985 and Techniquest in Cardiff and the Launchpad in London's Science museum both opened in 1986. Those were pioneering establishments in this policy area. Some centres receive far more visitors than others. For example, the National Space Centre near Leicester alone reaches 40,000 children every year through workshops and schools. Thousands of visitors come every year to look at its public displays and engage in its activities. The DCMS provides revenue funding of £320 million, most of which is for museums. Funding also comes from the DIUS and DCSF, which was previously the Department for Education and Skills. Funding also comes from a variety of charities, and I have mentioned the Wellcome Trust and NESTA. There is also funding from the regional development agencies, such as that in the north-west, from local authorities, such as Halton borough council, and from industry and commerce. Let me repeat, however, that much of that funding is extremely short term. There is a dire shortage of core funding outside the museum sector. Hardly any of the science and discovery centres can exist on the basis of their commercial activities alone. In most cases, their future business plans are not sustainable. It appears that they can generate a maximum of 78 to 80 per cent. of their income through commercial activities such as shops, cafes, restaurants, conference business, ticket sales and even car parks. There is a need for a Department other than the DCMS to take ownership of the co-ordination and funding of centres. Our current Science Minister, who is with us today, showed some interest in that role when he came before the Committee, but the Government as a whole seem to have rejected our recommendation that they give serious consideration to taking it on. We were disappointed that the previous Science Minister, Lord Sainsbury, felt that science and discovery centres should be self-financing through their own activities, despite the Government's strong commitment to STEM subjects. The Committee was disappointed by his response to a request for Government intervention in this policy area. He has seen for himself the excellent work that many centres do; indeed, I was with him when he visited Catalyst, for example. In their response to the Committee's report, the Government said that"““it would not be appropriate for any part of Government to take responsibility for them””—" science and discovery centres—"““in the sense that Ministers take overall responsibility for the actions of Government Departments and Agencies.””" The Government have also said that they regard centres as ““independent organisations””. Those remarks are disappointing, particularly given that so much public money—revenue and capital alike—is ploughed into keeping centres open year in, year out. Why can the Government not take a bigger interest? Our report recommended that the Government waive VAT for science and discovery centres, including museums, because they provide education for their visitors in a way comparable to schools. As the Committee's Chairman said, however, the Government dismissed our proposal. Every year for five years, Bolton TIC has paid about £15,000 per annum in business rates to Bolton council. Imagine if it could invest that money, which it worked to hard to raise and which comes to more than £50,000, in the town's children, instead of paying it back to the council. I therefore implore the Minister to look more seriously at waiving business rates for all these centres. The Wellcome Trust, which has given science and discovery centres £43 million for their public engagement activities in the past decade, is"““concerned that the Government's response does not provide the strategic vision we argue the sector needs.””" That is what we need—strategic vision. The devolved Governments in Wales, Northern Ireland and—the best example—the Parliament in Scotland are better at supporting these centres. Core funding, which is difficult to raise, is required to help centres to renew their equipment and their interactive exhibits. Anyone who has visited a hands-on centre will know how enthusiastic children can put exhibits out of action almost by the hour. In any case, exhibits and hands-on experiments need to be kept at the cutting edge—that is what science and discovery are all about. I am pleased that the Select Committee carried out this inquiry, because it has allowed a light to be shone in this dark corner of science policy. It has brought all the facts together so that there can be no misunderstanding about the difficulties that science and discovery centres are in. I hope that the Government's review will allow them to conclude that these centres are worth supporting—perhaps through the newly created co-ordinating body Ecsite-uk—and that they will provide core funding to keep them all open. If the Government do not do that, there is no doubt that many centres will go out of business. That will happen at a time when countries such as Canada and Japan see centres as playing a key role in maintaining confidence in scientists and their discoveries. Science and discovery centres play a role in nurturing our future science and engineering talent. All that it takes to keep them open is political will.