Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [396]
SCIENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
In 1988 and 1989 there was a great burst of public interest in the environment. Unfortunately, under the green environmental umbrella sheltered a number of only slightly connected issues. At the lowest but not by any means least important level, there was concern for the local environment, which I too always felt strongly about. Indeed, every time I came back from some spotlessly maintained foreign city my staff and the then Secretary of State for the Environment knew that they could expect a stiff lecture on the litter-strewn streets of parts of London. But this was essentially and necessarily a matter for the local community, though the privatizing of badly run municipal cleaning services often helped.
Then there was the concern about planning — or rather the alleged lack of it — and overdevelopment of the countryside. Here there was, as Nick Ridley became somewhat unpopular for robustly pointing out, a straightforward choice. If people were to be able to afford houses there must be sufficient amounts of building land available. Tighter planning meant less development land and fewer opportunities for home ownership.
There was also widespread public concern — some merited but much not — about the standard of Britain’s drinking water, rivers and sea. The European Commission found this a fruitful area into which to extend its ‘competence’ whenever possible. In fact, a hugely expensive and highly successful programme was under way to clean up our rivers and the results were already evident — for example the return of healthy and abundant fish to the Thames, Tyne, Wear and Tees.
I always drew a clear distinction between these ‘environmental’ concerns and the quite separate question of atmospheric pollution. For me, the proper starting point in formulating policy towards this latter problem was science. There had always to be a sound scientific base on which to build — and of course a clear estimation of the cost in terms of public expenditure and economic growth foregone — if one was not going to be thrust into the kind of ‘green socialism’ which the Left were eager to promote. But the closer I examined what was happening to Britain’s scientific effort, the less happy I was about it.
There were two problems. First, too high a proportion of government funding for science was directed towards the Defence budget. Second — and reflecting the same approach — too much emphasis was being given to the development of products for the market rather than to pure science. Government was funding research which could and should have been left to industry and, as a result, there was a tendency for the research effort in the universities and in scientific institutes to lose out. I was convinced that this was wrong. As someone with a scientific background, I knew that the greatest economic benefits of scientific research had always resulted from advances in fundamental knowledge rather than the search for specific applications. For example, transistors were not discovered by the entertainment industry seeking new ways of marketing pop music but rather by people working on wave mechanics and solid-state physics.
In the summer of 1987 I instituted a new approach to government funding of science. I set up ‘E’(ST) as a new sub-committee of the Economic Committee of the Cabinet which I now chaired. This replaced ‘E’(RD) that had been chaired by Paul Channon as Industry Secretary. I