LONDON

Campbell: keen to see bolder strategy. Credit: PA

The British government is announcing this week that Anne Campbell, the Member of Parliament for Cambridge, has been appointed to a post in the Department of Trade and Industry, where her responsibilities are to include various science-related issues.

John Battle, the minister for industry, energy and science, is said to have told department officials last week that Campbell was to be appointed as his parliamentary private secretary, a relatively junior post in the ministerial pecking order, but one that still holds the potential for wielding considerable influence.

Campbell's appointment is likely to be widely welcomed in the scientific community. She is a former chair of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee, which brings together politicians with industrial and academic scientists. As an active member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, she has been a vocal critic of weaknesses in the previous government's science policy.

Shortly before the general election, Campbell said that she would like to see the position of the chief scientific adviser to the government strengthened to ensure that “the government's overall strategy for science is better followed” (see Nature 386, 315; 1997). She has also attacked the way in which the latest ‘prior options’ review of government-funded research laboratories was carried out.

Her appointment is expected to help assuage widespread concern in the scientific community that, although Battle is formally identified as the ‘minister for science’ — a capacity in which he has already attended several meetings of European research ministers — his portfolio is too broad to allow him to give research a substantial amount of his time.

Campbell, who has been an MP since 1992, is a mathematician by training and a former college lecturer in statistics. In recent years, she has spoken out strongly in favour of increasing links between universities and industry, as well as calling for more government support for small, high-technology companies. She was also instrumental in helping to launch the group Scientists for Labour.

Campbell had been tipped by some as a possible science minister. But some feel that her prospects were tarnished when she declined to vote for Tony Blair in the Labour leadership election three years ago over the way that the vote was handled.