MP calls Wellcome board self-serving

Warrington MP Helen Southworth has challenged the Wellcome Trust to justify its advice to government to site the Synchrotron project at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordhsire rather than at Daresbury, Cheshire.

She suggested in a Westminster Hall debate this week that members of the Wellcome Trust board had put pressure on the government to choose Oxfordshire because many of them were based at Oxford and Cambridge universities.

"They were more interested in the quality of the wine at the high table rather than the quality of science," she said.