Why not treat scientists like footballers?

It’s a global race, we are constantly told. David Cameron and George Osborne are insistent – the only way for the UK to prosper will be to compete and to win. That logic means that for the financial sector, we have to pay the most to keep the best. Limiting the bonuses of the top-bankers would be self-defeating because it would deprive us of the top talent. You can hear the same argument made for the English Premier League, the best football league in the world – the dizzying payments are justified, we are told, because this is the only way it can continue to be the best. In both cases, many would challenge the argument, but just for a moment, let’s say we agree – and turn our attention to another part of the economy where we not only fight tooth and nail to be best in the world, but are right at the top: UK Science.

Strangely enough, a different logic seems to apply here. In the City, we learned recently that more than 2000 bankers earn over a million pounds a year. Down the road, at leading London premier league football clubs, it is much more than that, with reports of weekly payments in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. All needed to secure the unique talent that fuels our obsession with money and celebrity respectively. Cut to the science sector, and it is rather different story. Science is a global industry, just like finance and football the players are highly mobile. In Cambridge, world-leading scientists are working in some stunning new laboratories that have opened in recent years. The buildings and facilities are world-class, the quality of science absolutely in the premier league. So, according to the logic applied to finance and football, we have to pay the best in the world. Don’t we?

At the Laboratory of Molecular Biology I was recently introduced to a post-doc who is a leader in his field, working on ground-breaking research that promises life-changing innovation in cancer treatment. He is contacted on a weekly basis by institutions across the world who want him to join them – if he was a footballer, his club would complain that he was being ‘tapped up’. But football agents would be delighted at just how little they would have to pay. As a civil servant, like thousands of other scientists, his already meagre salary of about £28,000 (that’s per year , not per week – we’re talking curing cancer here, not printing money or playing football!) is of course frozen. And not just frozen for one year, frozen year after year. Living in a high cost city like Cambridge, he ruefully admits that he can’t afford to live in the city. Can’t even afford to live within cycling distance. Instead he drives an old car to and from a lower-cost area where he, his wife and young child can just about afford to live. He doesn’t want to leave Cambridge. He enjoys working in a top-class environment, with colleagues who are at the forefront of their field, and this, just about, is enough to keep him here, for now. But other countries have top-class facilities too, and as more people follow the inexorable logic, so clusters of top scientists leaving to go to other countries will make it even more appealing for colleagues to follow. There is a tipping point, and once reached, it may be very hard to stop.

This might be read as a plea to extend the market logic that drives finance and football to other sectors. It isn’t – but just as finance and football are out of control at one end of the spectrum, the self-defeating constraints on pay for scientists such as those I describe are equally unsustainable. The argument made by the TUC that Britain needs a payrise is gradually gaining hold for sound economic reasons, but for scientists it can’t come soon enough. It isn’t a given that UK science remains pre-eminent, science does operate on a global scale. In one of the few sectors where we really are world-leaders, the current Government is so limited by it’s ideological determination to shrink the state and squeeze public-sector pay, that it puts our pre-eminence at risk.

Daniel Zeichner is Labour Parliamentary Candidate for Cambridge and a member of Labour’s National Policy Forum