UK's biggest export - our bright ideas

THE collapse of biotech group Celltech into the arms of a little-known and second-rate Belgian pharmaceuticals company should be provoking some hard thinking in British industry and the Government.

The UK biotech industry may have swallowed billions of pounds to little effect. But Celltech, along with a couple of other success stories such as Powderject and Amersham, was supposed to be different.

It developed an arthritis treatment with the potential to become a blockbuster - a drug capable of generating annual sales of more than $1bn (£590m). Yet because it was unable to turn the idea into a commercial possibility on its own, it - like Powderject and Amersham, which both fell to the Americans --has agreed to be taken over by a foreign group.

It is yet another example of our shameful legacy of failing to capitalise on innovation.

And while Britain boasts two of the world's largest pharmaceutical groups, Glaxo-SmithKline and Astra-Zeneca, their production lines are under strain and need infusions of the lifeblood created lower down the research chain.

In America, which usually sneers at government involvement in business, this does not happen. The US has a system where successful biotech firms mentor developing business. Through quasi-government organisations, billions of dollars are spent nurturing biotech seedcorn into something strong enough to stand on its own.

Celltech's disappearance abroad should be particularly embarrassing for the Government. After all, it has made much play of its desire to establish a working relationship between academic science and the business community to ensure that Britain, not Belgium, gets the benefit of our top-flight research.

But, espousing a view that became fashionable in the Thatcher era, the Government seems rather nonchalant about foreign ownership of UK industry. In a global marketplace, it is argued, it does not really matter where a company is based.

So as swathes of British companies from investment banks to car manufacturers have fallen into foreign hands, the Government has stood quietly by applauding the international movement of capital.

While the revival of UK car production owes almost everything to foreign ownership, there are plenty of workers who can attest to the potential dangers of being controlled by a distant parent. When push comes to shove, the employees far from head office tend to get the boot. And it is satellite subsidiaries whose investment budgets are cut.

It has become a 21st century axiom that corporate prosperity depends on creative thinking. How tragic if Britain allows today's winners to wither on the vine and fails to nurture the seeds of tomorrow's success.

Nuclear dustbin

THE Government has decided to reorganise Britain's nuclear dustbin. The old, failing BNFL - the glow-inthe-dark utility - is being stripped of its multi-billion pound liabilities and a new debt-free, groovily named British Nuclear group is being set free to compete for exactly the business it already carries out.

That, of course, is the signal for the new executives of this trendy 'cleanup' company, which will have a guaranteed turnover of about £2bn and profits of roughly £200m a year, to get down to business.

First task: design a smart new logo. Second: you've guessed. Start work on the tough new assignment of dreaming up an executive remuneration scheme to reward top executives for doing what they are already supposed to be doing.

And the man leading this nuclear revolution? Step forward the perma-tanned Lawrie Haynes, who used to be project director at that other British power house, BAE Systems.

There is something palpably wrong when utilities can be transformed into 'profitable' state-owned companies that shower riches on their bosses.

Network Rail, the so-called not-for-dividend company in charge of a lamentable rail system about to be paralysed by strikes, has been witness to a power struggle between the chairman, Ian McAllister, and the remuneration committee over - what else? - bonuses.

Guaranteed: no gurantees

OH whoops. First the Financial Services Authority had to explain that investors should not have taken out of context a description on its website that zero preference shares were 'low risk' when it was already investigating them in its probe of the split-capital trust fiasco.

Now, in a letter to the Financial Times, its Head of Retail Themes (sic) has been forced to explain that when the FSA talked in a brochure about final salary pension schemes as 'guaranteed', this was not what it meant. It was illustrative, only, of the differences between final salary schemes and money-purchase plans.

Phew! That will be a comfort to the thousands who have lost savings in pension scheme wind-ups and those whose benefits have been cut in final salary schemes.