Having spent fifteen years as an entrepreneur in the Eastern region, I have always been passionate about supporting the Innovation Economy.

That’s why I was so delighted to visit the New Anglia Cluster as Minister of State for Science, Innovation and Technology last week to meet innovators, entrepreneurs and scientists, including:

• Visiting Freeport East for a roundtable on its role as a facilitator of innovation (focusing on green hydrogen, AI, robotics) and to see first-hand the port’s autonomous vehicles.

• Speaking at the New Anglia LEP’s Connected Innovation Conference at BT’s Adastral Park near Ipswich to highlight the global importance of the New Anglia Agri/Bio/CleanTech Cluster of Innovation.

• Visiting Norwich Research Park to meet researchers, participate in a roundtable and showcase the pioneering work being done in Gut Medicine (Quadram Institute), Genomics (Earlham Institute), Plant Breeding (John Innes Centre and the Sainsbury Laboratory), Biomedical Research (the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital) and Clinical Trials (National Institute for Health and Care Research).

• Visiting the Hethel Engineering Centre to highlight the 60 high-growth start-ups across the Advanced Manufacturing, Materials Science, Automotive, Digital and Space Tech sectors.

• Catching up with the New Anglia LEP team on all things enterprise and innovation across the region.

To learn more about my previous work on innovation, please visit my website here.

Having been a leading figure calling for a proper offshore solution over several years, I recognise that the East Anglia Green proposals put forward by National Grid (although not directly impacting upon Mid Norfolk) are a big part of that wider campaign.

That’s why I added my name to the letter submitted to my former BEIS colleague the Energy Minister by OffSET MPs last summer criticising the lack of proper public consultation conducted by National Grid over the EAG plans (see more here) – and why I now welcome the news that National Grid ESO have listened to the concerns of MPs and campaigners and are now launching a review that will consider “offshore routes” for energy transmission in our region as well.

As has been widely publicised in recent years, the East is at the forefront of the offshore wind revolution that is already strengthening our UK energy resilience and driving forward the decarbonisation of our energy network. However, our region must have a proper say in how the necessary infrastructure is delivered, with all of the available options up for consideration.

As local MPs, we disagreed with National Grid’s assertion that they DID properly consult the public on whether or not this infrastructure should go ahead onshore (with new pylons running from Norwich to Tilbury) or be included in an offshore solution.

The news of this review is therefore a positive step in the right direction and I would encourage all of my constituents to take the time to have their say.

Rest assured, I will continue to work with parliamentary colleagues and local campaigners on this key campaign.

To learn more about the announcement, please click here.

To stay up to date with all of my work on this issue, please visit my website campaign page here.

Mental health provision has long been an issue very close to my heart. I have seen first-hand how mental health issues affect friends and family members and can destroy lives.  

As many of constituents have seen, the CQC have recently upgraded the overall rating of Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust (NSFT) from ‘inadequate’ to ‘requires improvement’. The Trust’s ratings for being safe, effective and well-led also improved from ‘inadequate’ to ‘requires improvement’.

This is positive news – but it is simply not enough.

That’s why, as part of my ongoing work alongside fellow parliamentary colleagues in the East to hold Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust (NSFT) officials to account and to try and drive forward the significant and urgent improvements required to mental health provision in our region, I welcomed the updated provided to us as regional MPs earlier this week by the minister responsible for mental health, Maria Caulfield MP.

While the Minister recognises the progress that has been made over recent months, she has been clear that she still sees very significant challenges at the NSFT which must be addressed. NHS England will therefore continue to provide close support to the NSFT as they continue with the package of improvement measures that are being implemented, with a full-time improvement director in place and representation on the Trust’s governance meetings so that they have full visibility of the latest data on improvements needed.

NHS England will also work closely with the NSFT and the two county Integrated Care Boards as work continues to drive forward the speed and level of improvements needed for mental health provision in the region.

I will be following progress very closely – and look forward to the next Norfolk and Suffolk MP meeting with the Minister so that we can continue to scrutinise the progress being made.

Rest assured, this remains a key focus on mine at this time.

To learn more about my work ‘speaking up for mental health services’, please click here.

George Freeman, Minister of State in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, responds to a Westminster Hall debate on genomics and national security and outlines how the Government is putting research security right at the heart of our international collaborations.

The Minister of State, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (George Freeman)

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I thank the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) for bringing this important issue to the House. He and I both know how important the subject is and that the Chamber is not full because of the business going on elsewhere. I reassure him that we take this issue very seriously. Some of things that we are doing are not in the public domain, for obvious reasons, but I will answer his questions. I agree with just about everything that he said, so we are very much on the same page.

Let me start, as the right hon. Gentleman did, by reminding listeners and viewers of what a success story British genomics has been, going right back to Watson and Crick’s famous pint in the Eagle in Cambridge—and, in this International Women’s Week and week of women’s science, let us not forget the third discoverer of DNA, the great Mary Black at King’s College London, who often gets left out of the story—through the work that Fred Sanger and his team did at the University of Cambridge on the structure of DNA and how it works, and right up to our leadership in genetic research and medicine in the UK.

It is worth saying that that leadership is not just in human genomics but in animal and plant genomics. I was recently up in Scotland visiting the Roslin Institute and the James Hutton Institute. Across the UK, we have such an understanding of not only genomics across humans, animals and plants, and their diseases, but the application of those genomics to help to develop drought-resistant crops for Africa and disease-resistant crops that do not need to be sprayed with highly carbon-intensive pesticides. The underpinning technology is fundamental to net zero and global sustainability, to allowing agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa and to improving nutrition and health around the world. The front end now is cancer and rare disease, but the revolution in technology will drive sustainability and prosperity around the world over the coming decades.

I am delighted to respond to this debate, not least because, when I was the Minister for Life Science in the coalition Government, I had the great privilege of setting up Genomics England, which was our first big move to capture our leadership in this global race. I remind the House that we set up Genomics England very carefully as a reference library, not a lending library. Some 100,000 NHS volunteers and patients offered to be sequenced—it was not just the snip, which is the bit of DNA segment that we know is implicated in disease, but the whole of their genome. We could then look at whole-genome analysis at scale and link it to someone’s phenotype, life cycle and hospital records, and start to shine a light on the real insights into the mechanisms of disease. We might discover that men over the age of 55 with red hair, a beard and early-onset diabetes are more likely to respond to a particular drug than others. The work transforms not only the business of drug discovery but diagnosis, and it accelerates access for patients to treatments.

We originally focused GEL—Genomics England—on cancer and rare disease, which is where the appliance of genomics is most urgent and transformational, but we were clear that it was never going to be a lending library, so nobody would ever have access to an individual patient genome or an individual patient record. Researchers could interact with the database for the basis of research, but they would never be able to take out of the library any of the core data. I pay tribute to all the people at GEL, because in the 10 years since it was launched there have not been huge debates in Parliament or any scandals. People have not been marching up and down. In fact, thousands of NHS patients have happily enrolled and, through Biobank, we have taken the number of NHS volunteers to half a million. I pay tribute to the team behind that work. It is possible to build these datasets. We were absolutely clear that it was embedded in the values of the NHS: one for all, all for one, and shared data for national as well as personal good.

Alongside GEL, there is the UK Biobank, the National Institute for Health and Care Research BioResource, and now Our Future Health, which is looking at longitudinal datasets. We have not just done the deep science; we are building an ecosystem of genomically informed medical research and medicine in the NHS. I was particularly proud that we launched the NHS genomic medicine service. It is about not just science but research to drive better medicine in the NHS. In the NHS around the country, genomic medicine clinics are now accelerating access for researchers and patients.

The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland is right, as was the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), that we are in a global race in so many of these technologies, and particularly in genomics. In my recent speeches, I have set out what we mean by being a science superpower. It is not just a glib phrase. I define it not just as, first, world-class science—and with two of the world’s top three universities, we are a world-class research centre. To be a science superpower we need, secondly, to go out and solve some of the problems in the world, not just study them; thirdly, to recognise that science is conducted in international, global career paths and put the UK at the hub of those networks; fourthly, to insist on attracting much more industrial research and development, to help to drive this country out of post-pandemic recession and get long-term investment; and fifthly, and crucially, to insist on and stand up for the values on which science is conducted: free speech, critical thinking, respect for intellectual property and respect for law, in a collaborative setting. That is true on our own campuses—we will never be a science superpower if we have a cancel culture calling out and preventing free speech—and is equally true internationally. We will not be a superpower unless we take a stand against other countries that aggressively use science and steal intellectual property.

I have put the research security agenda right at the heart of our definition. Here in the UK, in 2020 we set out the Genome UK 10-year genetic healthcare strategy, with £175 million for life-saving programmes around cancer and rare diseases. We have set out the UK biological security strategy, recognising exactly the points made by the right hon. Gentleman about biosecurity in an interconnected world. In the pandemic, we saw the cost of disease to the global economy, as well as to our own, and we glimpsed the value of health and strong health resilience. That is biosecurity in terms of human health, but we are also in a world in which more and more food products and animal products are transported, and where climate change is driving new patterns of migration in insects and animals. There is a growing threat of infectious disease—pathogen biosecurity—which is one of the issues that our new economic security cabinet has looked at. We have now refreshed our biological security strategy.

Research security is at the heart of our international collaborations. Last year, I signed an agreement with Sweden, and there is a similar one with Thailand. In my work internationally, at the G7 Science Ministers summit in Japan this year and at the G20, we have led in putting research security on the table internationally as a key issue that we must all work on.

Mr Carmichael 

I want to bring the Minister on to the point about BGI. I think we are aggressively agreeing with each other here, essentially because we are talking on parallel lines. Will he address the point about BGI and similar companies, and their need to comply or else be treated differently?

George Freeman 

Absolutely; it is as if the right hon. Gentleman has read my notes.

Here in the UK, we are toughening up our regime. The National Institute for Health and Care Research has a set of very clear principles, as does UK Research and Innovation. We have set up the research collaboration advice team—RCAT—which is a new system to help all our researchers across the UK ecosystem with advice and support. We insist that they exercise due diligence if they sign a collaboration with, say, the “South China Sea research collaboration company”. We do not expect all our researchers to be policemen and women, but we do expect them—and they are now required—to show due diligence before they sign some lucrative research agreement.

We have set up RCAT as a specialist advisory group in the Cabinet Office, connected to our intelligence agencies, so that it can check quickly whether a partner is benign, hostile or dangerous. That system has been working well since we set it up a year ago. The team is in the Cabinet Office, 350 queries have been handled, and we are getting international visits from people who congratulate us on getting it right, although a lot more remains to be done.

I reassure the right hon. Gentleman that we have an economic security cabinet, which I joined three weeks ago. It looks much more strategically and in granular detail across exposure to hostile actors in the UK economy. That includes everything from genomics to the biosecurity piece that I have discussed, along with semiconductors, space and cyber-security—the whole piece. We are now in a global race not just with our benign competitors but with hostile actors who wish to use science and technology to hold us back and undermine us, or to steal our science and technology for their own use.

BGI is clearly one of those danger points in the ecosystem. I share with the House the fact that, in 2014, I was wheeled out to give a speech on the occasion of the visit of President Xi to the Guildhall. When President Xi and then Prime Minister Cameron were wheeled in, I was speaking to around 1,000 Chinese delegates about Genomics England. I had been prepared to pay tribute to the work of BGI when my officials pointed out that at that point Genomics England was suffering several hack attacks from BGI each week. That was a wake-up call for all of us.

We are well aware that we have to manage such risks properly. On that point, I commissioned and have literally just received from UKRI a detailed assessment of all the China research and innovation links across our system—we did the same last year for Russia. I have passed that through to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Security. He and I, and our officials, will go through it shortly in detail, looking in particular at some of the actors such as BGI that we know to be aggressive in their international acquisition of intellectual property.

I reassure the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland that we have put research security at the heart of discussions at the G7 and G20. If we are to harness science and technology for global good and to deliver that extraordinary opportunity of helping to feed, fuel and heal emerging populations safely, international collaboration will be required. However, we have to ensure that we defend not only the values of good and open science but our own economic security, and that we get the balance right. We do not want to conduct research only with our strong, strategic, military partners, but we want to defend our values.

The right hon. Gentleman made an interesting point about critical national infrastructure that I will pick up in the economic security cabinet. It is a point that I have made in connection with another bit of our science infrastructure. We all recognise that the threats now mean that we need to think about the value of other infrastructure. I will come back to him on that.

The right hon. Gentleman made an important broader point about how the Government handle data. It is fair to say that the pandemic revealed the best and the worst, in a way. The NHS put together the world’s biggest clinical trial—not just bigger than the next one but bigger than the next 10, and faster than any of them—which was an incredible operation, embedded in the values of the NHS, and it worked brilliantly. Equally, the clunkiness of some testing data feedback from different towns and regions held back some decisions. I think the role of data will be rightly highlighted in the covid review.

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for bringing this subject to the House. I will come back to him on the CPNI point. I look forward to pursuing the subject with him in future.

Hansard

If we are to achieve the UK’s Net Zero targets and move towards a greener, cleaner, healthier 21st century model of life, it is imperative that we continue to make steps towards decarbonising our transport network.

That’s why, having previously served as Minister of State at the Department for Transport with a responsibility for transport decarbonisation, I am delighted to learn that Norfolk has been awarded a further £11.5million from the Government’s Zero Emission Bus Regional Areas (ZEBRA) scheme – which will support an additional 55 zero emission buses in our county.

These buses will be built by UK bus manufacturer Wrightbus, supporting hundreds of high-quality jobs in the UK, and this new funding will also mean that First Bus’ Norwich depot will become one of the first all-electric bus depots in the country outside of London.

There is still much more to do but this latest funding (in addition to the previous £3.3million awarded to Norfolk under the scheme to support 15 zero emissions buses) marks another key step on the road to decarbonising Norfolk’s bus network. Furthermore, it will help us reduce pollution and improve air quality in our local communities.

The Chancellor’s announcement of a further £355 million for zero emissions buses in the Autumn Statement was the latest signal of the Government’s commitment to Transport Decarbonisation (part of a £5billion package of investment during the current Parliament) and I look forward to seeing more progress in the coming months and years.

Rest assured, I will be doing my utmost to ensure Norfolk continues to get its fair share of any future funding – and to help everyday Mid Norfolk households and businesses get on to the ‘Road to Net Zero’ in a cost efficient and effective manner.

To learn more about my work on environmental issues, please visit my ‘Food, Farming and the Environment’ campaign page here.

To learn more about this new £11.5million into Norfolk, please visit the EDP article here.

Following my webstory update last week, I am delighted to hear that NCC’s Cabinet have indeed given the greenlight for the purchasing of the necessary land in Swaffham required for the construction of a new home for Fred Nicholson School.

This is great news! And sends the clearest possible signal to the SEND community that NCC are committed to doing all they can to ensure Norfolk has the support it needs.

While there is much work still to be done, this is a huge step forwards locally – and I commend Jane Hayman and her wonderful team at Fred Nichs for all the hard work they’ve put into this campaign to date. I remain firmly committed to doing all I can to help them drive it forward – and look forward to the day (not in the too distant future) when I can visit in person the brand new, fit-for-purpose home of this truly inspiring and much valued school.

Please see here the EDP article sharing the news.

To read last week’s webstory, please click here.

To learn more about my work with Fred Nichs, please visit my website here and here.

To learn more about my work on SEND more generally, please visit my website here.

When I was first elected in 2010, Norfolk was the only UK county not connected to the motorway and dual carriageway network. Not only had this held back businesses and families for too long, it had also proved dangerous for thousands of commuters travelling down unsafe single-carriage roads. 

That’s why I vowed to get this sorted and was delighted to work alongside my fellow parliamentary colleagues, local councillors, businesses and community groups to secure the dualling of the A11 – a key first step. 

While the current A11 improvement works close to Wymondham are to be welcomed, I am acutely aware that many local communities are suffering from a spike of “rat-running” by motorists aiming to quickly move around Wymondham to continue their journey, or who instead wish to cut through the Wymondham-Kimberley/Carleton Forehoe-Barnham Broom-Honingham corridor to join the A47. 

I raised this issue with National Highways and Norfolk County Council Highways back in the autumn – and welcomed their acknowledgement of the problems being faced, as well as their commitment to go away and work together to explore what more they could do to mitigate rat-running during these improvement works and improve signage. However, from conversations with local councillors and constituents, I am aware that the issues have arisen once again since the Christmas period.

This week, I have been in touch with both National Highways and Norfolk County Council Highways again – and I am now awaiting a further update as to what they plan to do.

Rest assured, I will continue to do all I can to speak up for our Mid Norfolk communities.

To learn more about my work on this issue, as well as on rat-running more generally (including my work with the South of the A47 Taskforce I set up), please visit my website here.

Mental health provision has long been an issue very close to my heart. I have seen first-hand how mental health issues affect friends and family members and can destroy lives.

My own father sadly suffered a complete and tragic life collapse as a result of a toxic mix of head injuries, a career dependency on gambling and untreated mental illness including depression and alcoholism. Just ten years after winning the 1958 Grand National as the Queen Mother’s jockey, these issues meant he lost his marriage, livelihood and access to his children.

I also saw the devastation that mental health can inflict upon the families of my friends – including the suicide of a late friend’s son after years of battling bipolar disorder.

That’s why I always go out of my way to shine a light on this crucial issue, and why I welcomed the opportunity to visit Norfolk and Waveney MIND’s REST hub in Norwich this past Friday.

While visiting Dereham Town Football Club back in the autumn, then club chairman Ashley Bunn made me aware of his role as Director of Strategy and Business Development at MIND, inviting me to come and meet with the team, as well as find out more about the vital work they do every single day.

The REST hub in Norwich is an incredible local asset – one of four such hubs run by MIND in Norfolk – and MIND are contracted by the local Norfolk and Waveney Integrated Care Board to run a wide variety of other mental health support services across the county too.

They do vitally important work and it was a real privilege to see what they do on the frontline.

To learn more, please see the video I filmed with Kate Frost, Manager of Norwich REST below.

Today is World Book Day, an annual charity event that began in 1995 to promote children reading books for pleasure and every child in full-time education will be given a book token, offering them the opportunity to choose a book of their own. 

Reading improves children's vocabulary while learning new information and enhancing their imagination. Today is also a fun way to appreciate many authors across over 100 countries around the world, but also to recognise the literary heritage within Norfolk - with Norwich being the first English city to be names a UNESCO City of Literature. 

Raising the level of aspiration in our Norfolk schools is vital for our future - and at the heart of my Norfolk Way project. What better way than to give youngsters a love of reading: a love that opens doors in our minds and stays with us for the rest of our lives? 

That’s why I was delighted to launch the “Get Norfolk Reading” campaign in 2017 in conjunction with Beanstalk – details here - https://www.beanstalkcharity.org.uk/register-now. The reading campaign is also supported by Stephen Fry, Louis de Bernieres and many other authors from our area. 

If you know of anyone who has a few hours to spare each week to read to children of primary age, please do encourage them to get involved and together we can make a difference.