I would not have been a minister under Tories, says Labour’s Patrick Vallance

The Labour minister Patrick Vallance, who helped spearhead the country’s response to the Covid pandemic, has said he would not have served as a minister in a Conservative government.

The former UK government chief scientific adviser was made a peer and appointed science minister this year after Keir Starmer’s party swept to victory in the general election. And he made clear on Thursday that, if he had been asked by Rishi Sunak to consider serving in a Tory government: “I wouldn’t have done, no”.

“As a civil servant, I’m very happy to serve under any government, and would do so because that’s the role of the civil service,” Lord Vallance added. “But as a minister, obviously, you then have [a] political angle to that as well, and that adds a layer of complexity. You can’t be a minister and not part of a political system, and that’s different.”

Last year, Vallance’s private diaries from the Covid pandemic made the headlines, revealing his frustration with the politicians at the heart of government at the time. But he said his main concern was about science not being integrated in the system.

“I am not sure I was individually critical of what ministers were doing,” he said. “What I said was I thought the government as a whole didn’t have a mechanism well enough developed to take science and technology into all the places it needs to be, because I can’t think of a single area of policy or operations where science technology or engineering wouldn’t 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 largest public research funder with a budget of £9bn 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 years to come” – UKRI would also direct money into research that would support the government’s five missions, including kickstarting economic growth and making Britain a clean energy superpower.

“If we can get government to want to use research in order to understand how better to deliver [those] missions, I think we’ll end up with better results, faster results – whether that’s a technology answer or whether it’s a social science answer, or whether it’s some other answer,” he said.

The successful applicant will take over at UKRI from Prof Dame Ottoline Leyser from June 2025, when her five-year term concludes. While the campaign for a new CEO was initially launched earlier this year, it has reopened after the general election under the new government.

Vallance said Leyser’s successor would have to be a leader capable of dealing with a wide portfolio and able to bring people from different disciplines together to tackle problems. “What’s the point of having UKRI if it isn’t about bringing things together and getting some of that cross-fertilization? And that’s both between disciplines, and between private and public sector.”