My Lords, I also support Amendments 479A, 480 and 481A to 481D. I remind
the House of my already declared interest as a so-called lay member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
The case for a non-executive chairman has been made extremely cogently by both the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, and my noble friend Lord Selborne, and I hardly need repeat what they have said. Certainly, anyone who has read the corporate code knows that the case for non-executive chairmen is spelled out extremely clearly and cogently and that the notion of having an executive chairman is roundly condemned. The first works much better than the second and avoids conflicts of interest. The two functions are different and should be carried out by different people. Innovate UK will be much stronger in its performance if it is chaired by someone who has a science-related background but is also in the business community. It is crucial that we should make that link.
As to membership, having had personal experience of council membership—I am not the only person in the Chamber so to have done—the EPSRC has one of the bigger budgets and one of the bigger boards. I talked to the chief executive, who told me that there is a limit of 18. He said it operates customarily on about 15 or 16. I do not think the boards need to be quite as large if we have UKRI also on the scene. However, we should be practical about this. All of the members of the board of the council have full-time careers and are doing a full-time job—this is something extra that they do—and some are very pressed indeed. The noble Lord, Lord Darzi, is a good example of someone who does multifarious things. The thought that the board can operate with the subcommittees that it has, with the travel it engages in and the consultations that it has with the universities, and that it can do so without having both numbers and variety of people on the board—businessmen as well as people like myself and academics—is fanciful. It will weaken the total structure if one does not allow the councils to fulfil the remit that UKRI is meant to create and enable them to do.
It is important that the Government do not limit the size of the council to that which would make it difficult for it to be effective. I am not going to suggest a limit—if you want to put in a minimum, put it in—but, on the whole, the figure for the councils, certainly for the larger ones, should be in double figures.