The Minister of Labour Patrick Vallancewho helped spearhead the country’s response to the Covid pandemic, said he would not have served as a minister in a Conservative government.
The former British government’s chief scientific adviser was made a peer and appointed minister of science this year after Keir Starmer’s party won the general election. And he made it clear on Thursday that, had he been asked by Rishi Sunak to consider serving in a Tory government: “I wouldn’t have done it, no”.
“As a civil servant I am very happy to serve under any government, and will do so because that is the role of the public service,” Lord Vallance added. “But as a minister, of course you have then [a] political angle to it as well, and that adds a layer of complexity. You can’t be a minister and not be part of a political system, and that’s different.”
Last year, Vallance’s private diaries of the Covid pandemic made headlineswhich reveals his frustration with the then politicians at the heart of the government. But he said his biggest concern was about the science not being integrated into the system.
“I’m not sure if I was individually critical of what ministers did,” he said. “What I said was that I thought the government as a whole didn’t have a mechanism well enough developed to take science and technology to all the places where it needs to be, because I can’t focus on a single policy area or operations thinking where science technology or engineering will not make a difference,” he told the Guardian.
His comments came alongside the announcement that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has reopened recruitment for a new chief executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
Vallance said he would set the new head of UKRI – the country’s biggest public research funder with a budget of £9 billion a year – the challenge of transforming the body.
He said that as well as funding curiosity-driven research – something he described as “the goose that lays the golden egg in the coming years” – UKRI would also send money to research that would support the government’s five missions, including the starting economic growth and making Britain a clean energy superpower.
“If we can get the government to want to use research to understand how better to deliver [those] missions, I think we’ll end up with better results, faster results — whether it’s a technology answer or whether it’s a social science answer, whether it’s another answer,” he said.
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The successful applicant will take over from Prof Dame Ottoline Leyser at UKRI from June 2025, when her five-year term ends. While the campaign for a new CEO was initially launched earlier this year, it reopened after the general election under the new government.
Vallance said Leyser’s successor will need to be a leader capable of handling a broad portfolio and bringing people from different disciplines together to tackle problems. “What’s the point of having UKRI if it’s not about bringing things together and getting some of that cross-fertilisation? And this is both between disciplines, and between private and public sector.”
