London

The British government was so worried about the loss of scientists and engineers to the United States in the late 1960s that it considered banning foreign recruitment advertising, according to documents released last week by the Public Record Office.

The documents, released under the ‘thirty-year rule’, also reveal proposals from a top civil servant in the Cabinet Office that scientists should be explicitly treated as an elite group in society, with benefits including special tax exemptions.

But reports from Germany, suffering a similar ‘brain drain’, showed that advertising bans had had little effect. The government was also worried that the press would react with hostility to such a suggestion.

Civil servants expected the Labour government of the time to be strongly opposed to making scientists a social elite. Even a merit award system for young scientists was scotched by the minister for education and science, Edward Short, as neither desirable nor necessary. Short warned that it could be a source of discontent and “future trouble” as it had been in the medical profession.

Officials at the time had difficulty in accurately assessing the extent of the ‘brain drain’. Estimates of graduate emigration ranged from as little as 5 per cent to as much as 40 per cent in at least one university that was a producer of top-quality engineers.

In 1967 the United Kingdom had a net loss of about 2,300 active scientists and 3,600 engineers. There was evidence that people leaving the country were disproportionately well qualified.

Zuckerman (left) and Wilson: concerned at the lure of the United States for UK scientists. Credit: MAFF / PA

Prime Minister Harold Wilson wrote to the minister for employment and productivity, Barbara Castle, stressing his concern at estimates that the United States would have a shortfall of about 400,000 engineers in the following decade, offering even more job opportunities to British graduates.

Cabinet Office officials considered the matter so important that they raised the possibility with the government's chief scientific adviser, zoologist Sir Solly Zuckerman, of treating scientists as “a preferred class of citizens”. This could have involved preferential grants, reduced taxation and improved arrangements for professional mobility and pensions.

“Any proposals based on such conclusions would be politically impossible at present but if the statement [that it is vital to stop the brain drain] is correct, I believe we should face it honestly,” says a letter to Zuckerman from F. H. Allen of the Cabinet Office. “There have been elite classes in the past: perhaps we shall deliberately have to create another in the future.”

Zuckerman thought that improved university administration would help, and advised vice-chancellors and principals to encourage moves towards a system like that of the United States. There, staff members were encouraged to accept external consulting work and had flexibility in salary systems and in making research grant applications.

A document from the Ministry of Technology to the Cabinet Office suggests the reaction to a possible advertising ban was reflected in the stout defence by the science magazine New Scientist in the face of “an outcry” by readers to its acceptance of full-page advertisements from an American recruiting agency. The authors of the ministry paper point out that the magazine “stood firm on its right to inform scientists in this country of the opportunities elsewhere”.

Zuckerman also advised the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to “limit” help requested by the Canadian government for Canadian firms trying to recruit British staff.