EU red tape is now getting in the way of scientific progress

The development of new technology is frustrated by an old-fashioned approach to regulation

Rules and regulations: the EU single market can be a barrier to innovation Photo: Alamy

By David Willetts

 

This week we are rightly celebrating the 20th anniversary of the European single market, without which we would not have had the mobility of goods, services and people. It was one of the last Conservative government’s greatest successes and is still what Britain most values about the European Union. But sometimes the rules needed for a single market instead become barriers to innovation.
 

It may be inadvertent – the current regulations assume a given way of doing things and a new technology does not fit in. For example, space tourism and commercial access to space are within reach. We are backing growth in this important industry, but we must go further.
 

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is one example of a new mass space vehicle that could operate in the UK if the rules were right. Yet, absurdly, the whole of Europe is at risk of missing out because we cannot agree a regulatory framework that will allow the necessary reusable aircraft-type launchers to operate here in Britain.
 

Sometimes, there is just a depressing hostility to what is new, often led by incumbents who have most to lose. It was the Victorian railway industry that was most keen on the laws requiring a man to walk with a red flag in front of newfangled motor cars.

Today, if a few member states obstruct a new technology, such as the hydraulic fracturing – or “fracking” – used for the extraction of shale gas, they can have a disproportionate effect at the EU level. Whatever the reason, economic advance is threatened.

Nano-tech is another example. To date, there is no scientific evidence that nano-materials per se are damaging to humans or to the environment, as a German report recently observed. And yet the same report recommends a substantial raft of specific regulatory measures. Instead, we should use the regulations we have already got on chemicals.

Sometimes, the problems go deeper, and amount to misusing the precautionary principle. It is right to take reasonable precautions when there is evidence, however limited, that not to do so would increase the likelihood of exposure to a risk.

But we must not confuse potential hazard and real risk. Too often, activities that are potentially hazardous are treated as genuinely risky, when the size of the exposure is so low that there is no real risk. In 2010, the EU banned the use of Bisphenol A in making babies’ bottles. This chemical has long been used to harden plastics. It is now subject to proposals for a French national law which would ban it from all food contact materials from 2014. There is no reliable scientific evidence to justify such a proposal.

That’s not to say that scientists can do anything they want. They have to accept constraints set by the moral framework of the community from which they draw their support. We have to understand what people are worried about and why.

Nano-technologies, life sciences and space vehicles are just some of the examples I come across. Soon you have quite a long list of technologies which Europe is adopting much more slowly than our competitors.

We cannot afford such complacency. Last week, the Prime Minister spoke about our aspirations for our country’s future. We must liberate the researchers, the innovators and the entrepreneurs if we are to make the most of the opportunities before us and if we are to compete with China and other rapidly developing nations.

We really can remain at the cutting edge of the world’s science and technology. But there is a real threat to it – an approach to regulation so far removed from any rational appraisal of risk that it threatens to exclude Europe from many of the key technologies of the 21st century.

The single market is a great advance. It would be a tragedy if it were used to stop the very processes of innovation which will drive growth in the future.

David Willetts is Minister for Universities and Science