My Lords, I strongly support the noble Lord, Lord Watson, on this. I assure noble Lords that I have entered the premises of the James Hutton Institute, which is held in high regard not just in this country but internationally.
Here we have a situation where government departments are, very reasonably, keen to try to live within their means, and there is a suspicion among the research councils that public sector research establishments might be unloaded on to research council funding. When I wrote to my noble friend Lord Younger, having raised this matter at Second Reading but without referring specifically to the James Hutton Institute, he was good enough to admit that that was the concern. Those who were concerned did not want departments to get rid of their responsibilities by passing the funding over to research councils.
This is a typical government spat, with public sector research establishments not being allowed to apply for research council funds. As I understand it, this is a ruling made through the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, pointed out, the irony is that the James Hutton Institute is not even a PSRE, so it gets caught by a sort of collateral fire. It is an international institute but, through this ruling that any institute that gets funding of more than 50% cannot apply for research council funding, it cannot apply for international funding either, whether at an EU or an international level. This is a clearly pernicious ruling that has no bearing on the James Hutton Institute. As I said, it is there to be prevent PSREs being unloaded on to research councils. It lies within the power of the Minister, standing at the Dispatch Box today, to say that Clause 88(4), which says that,
“UKRI must have regard to the desirability of not discouraging the person from maintaining or developing funding from other sources”,
can be put into operation immediately. Forget the rather infelicitous double negative; it is saying, “We encourage people working in research to look for funding wherever they can”, but of course that must be based on the quality of the science—supporting
excellence, as the previous amendment referred to. No one doubts that the James Hutton Institute is a centre of excellence that should be encouraged to apply for international funding and indeed for research council funding. It needs this pernicious ruling to be abolished, and that could be done here and now.