Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220
- 242)
WEDNESDAY 28 OCTOBER 1998
LORD SAINSBURY
OF TURVILLE
AND SIR
JOHN CADOGAN
220. The JIF is for the university infrastructure.
Are there any concerns about other public sector organisations
which may have difficulties in this area and do you have any proposals
for ensuring that they have adequate investment?
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) I think the main concerns
have been very much that it is within the university structure
that we have seen this decline and that is why the effort is being
focused there. I would just take you back to the point in answer
to the previous question. This is not only a generous commitment
on the capital side but on the revenue side as well and I think
that suggests this Government has a real commitment to this area.
221. Have you any concerns that the Joint Executive
Committee is entirely male and also has no representatives from
any ethnic minorities?
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) This is always a major
issue. We have been doing a lot of work within the research councils
and I think you will see there that the numbers are moving not
rapidly but they are certainly moving in the right direction in
terms of the number of women on the councils.
222. We have got 20 members and they are all
male.
(Sir John Cadogan) Wellcome have an equal proportion,
they have half the membership, and it is for Wellcome to decide
that and Wellcome of course will reflect the Wellcome governors
because they are essentially the accounting officers. The research
council side has to be the chief executives of the research councils
because they are the accounting officers responsible to Parliament.
The sad situation is that we do not have a female chief executive
in a research council yet. This is almost an accident of history
and, as we all know, it is very difficult to fill the pipeline
and we are putting in a great deal of effort in order to fill
that pipeline so that women of experience and achievement are
coming through much more rapidly but they have not yet got through
to be chief executives of research councils. Believe me, it is
not through want of trying.
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) Can I draw your attention
on page 22 to the very substantial increase we made in the Dorothy
Hodgkin Fellowships. That is directly related to a very important
issue here which is making certain that women at that stage in
their careers do continue with science and I think that is a real
practical measure for dealing with that but obviously it takes
a long time to get a result.
223. Hopefully they will feed through sooner
rather than later. Just a quick one on the amount of the bids.
The minimum bid is £700,000 which is quite a large amount.
Are you concerned that moderate-sized bids that may fall in between
that sum and applications for other funding might have a problem
getting resourced?
(Sir John Cadogan) The £750,000 is a number which
was agreed between us and Wellcome. The point is that we have
got £600 million which is quite a lot and this was meant
to make a difference. We were looking there for, shall we say,
a large facility which could either be buildings and/or equipment.
Frankly, we felt that existing mechanisms such as the JERI and
such as the normal funding through Wellcome and such as the normal
funding via research councils and the funding councils could in
fact take care of that gap. We felt that £750,000 was a big
enough target for people to shoot at without us being overwhelmed
with applications because the one thing I know—because I
was an academic for 27 years and it has now been reinforced—was
that academics are very, very smart at putting applications in
if there is any money about and so we felt that we had to constrain
it in this way. So we are looking to the research councils to
do this in between and the funding councils. In this case we also
have as members of the JEC but not full voting members the chief
executives of the funding councils. We are discussing with the
funding councils how we can integrate the spend through JIF with
the spend through funding councils, which of course will be lower.
224. Do you think this level of funding will
encourage collaborative applications?
(Sir John Cadogan) If the guidelines that have gone
out do not encourage collaborations I do not know what will.
225. If people collaborate there is one application
rather than several.
(Sir John Cadogan) Absolutely. It will be collaborations
within universities and between universities.
Dr Jones: Can we now move on to technical support.
Dr Gibson
226. You will know that the Royal Society has
suddenly discovered that technicians have been disappearing in
universities for some time. After many years they have come out
with a report. The technicians and research assistants are on
short-term contracts and that does not bring the best people necessarily
into the jobs. It is a major issue. The biggest cheer I got at
a nature biotechnology conference was when I said the Government
was looking at this issue. It is a burning issue in the laboratories
in this country and I think we really do have to address it if
we are going to attract the best people into science at this level
as against them going into the City to get big bucks.
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) I think there are two
issues here. One is what kind of staff are used by the universities,
to what extent they do keep a cadre of technicians and develop
that. I think in the end that has to be largely their decision
and it will obviously differ from one area to the other as to
which is appropriate. There are certainly some particular research
units which have continued to keep very good people in those areas.
I think the second issue is the whole question of people being
employed on short-term contracts and that is something that certainly
in the post-doctoral field we are now trying to discourage very
strongly. As a result of Sir Gareth Roberts' work, the Vice Chancellor
of Sheffield, we have put some money into trying to get career
advice for those people against the background of the concordat
that was agreed to try and stop this practice.
227. These are mainly women. The Climatic Research
Unit at UEA has had several women on 25-year, one-year contracts
and surely they have proven their worth and should have a job.
They are doing high class research. It is usually women that are
on these one-, two- or three-year contracts. It is a major issue
out there in building morale around the research groups.
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) I think we are totally
at one with you. One can see why universities sometimes find this
an attractive option and it has something to do with keeping flexible
options. I quite agree, it is not the right way to do this. One
post-doctoral may be alright, two three-year contracts may be
alright, but to have this as a permanent way of life I think is
unsatisfactory.
Dr Gibson: They cannot get mortgages.
Dr Jones
228. Will funding bodies take into account the
practices of individual institutions in relation to appointing
technical staff on short-term contracts?
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) We have done that. In
the Government's response to the Gareth Roberts' report we have
said that we will keep this under review and we have asked the
research councils also to keep this under review.
(Sir John Cadogan) You will recall that in the White
Paper one of the many tasks which were laid at the door of the
new DGRC was indeed to look at this and when we did look at it
we did find that there was extraordinary variation. We had good
practice and bad practice. It was difficult for the research councils
to do very much on their own because they provided the money and
the universities were the employers. We spent a lot of time working
out the concordat which essentially said that the employers really
must take responsibility for career guidance and all the sort
of things you were worried about. In some universities they were
not getting maternity leave, they were not getting sick leave
and things like that. It took quite a lot of time to get everybody
signed up to it, but everybody is signed up now and, as the Minister
has said, we are requiring research councils to make it clear
that this is a condition of appointment. We have 30,000 short-term
research assistants operating in the system at the moment. However,
if we were—and it is not for us to do it—to say overnight,
"Well, we are not going to have them, they are all going
to have a full-time job," I am taking an extreme case now,
there would be no more jobs for young people for the next 25 years.
The numbers tell you that. So that is the dilemma, is it not?
Not all of those 30,000 can have a full-time job because it kills
it for all the young people coming in.
Dr Gibson
229. You may have to develop a five-year programme
like Wellcome did.
(Sir John Cadogan) Many of the research councils and
many of the charities do have the five-year or the ten-year term,
but then it is a question of what you do at the end of ten years.
We have got Inter-disciplinary Research Centres (IRCs) where there
have been key technical people in there who have been there for
eight or nine years and they want nothing more than to stay even
if it is on a two year and three year basis. So it is a balance
between being too paternalistic but on the other hand ensuring
that institutions take this very seriously and all institutions
are taking it seriously. Gareth Roberts has taken it forward.
I think we are much better than we were three or four years ago,
but it is not perfect by any means.
Mr Beard
230. Could you say how much the Government is
going to contribute to the synchrotron in capital and revenue
costs?
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) In this allocation I
think it is £35 million. Wellcome is providing £110
million. I think long term the current cost is £175 million.
So there will be another tranche from government but not within
this allocation period.
231. So the £35 million is the running
costs?
(Sir John Cadogan) No, the £35 million is our
contribution during this period of allocation so you have got
probably another £30 million outside this period, but that
will depend on the £175 being the right figure for costs.
At Christmas we will start the joint work looking at the exact
scoping of this project.
232. Will it be available to both bioscientists
and other scientists?
(Sir John Cadogan) Yes, it is very much on the basis
that this is a facility for both physical and biosciences.
233. Both academics and industrialists?
(Sir John Cadogan) I believe both. This is a national
research facility and it is obviously extremely important to all
sides of that and to the industrial base as well. The current
synchrotron was the first in the world. A tremendous amount of
expertise resides within our community for building these things
and we have a gleam in the eye that we are going to try and set
up a business with a company which I cannot mention who will build
beam lines to go on other people's synchrotrons. The synchrotron
at the moment has 3,500 users per annum and a significant proportion
of these are from the physical sciences and engineering, from
nano-technology to materials, to catalysts and have a huge component
on the other side. Walker's Nobel Prize was achieved on the synchrotron.
There are industrial users too who pay their way. It is possible
that you might get industrial users paying for a beam line because
the new synchrotron is a big Catherine wheel, as you know, with
these little tangents coming off it and you might have as many
as 60 or 70 lines on it and some lines will be for cracking big
proteins, so high intensity needed, some will be for materials
and some will be for industrial use. As Dr Dexter said, this is
all being discussed at the moment. I would certainly like to reinforce
what the Minister says. The synchrotron was among the highest
priorities in our case to government for CSR. We said this is
a cornerstone for United Kingdom science across the piece. If
Wellcome had not come in I can assure you that there would have
been strong recommendations coming forward to government that
the Science Budget should pay for it all. It is that important.
234. Could I go back to the point Dr Jones made
about the programme in other ministries, particularly the Ministry
of Defence which is probably the largest of the programmes. Is
it possible to review the way research is sponsored in the Ministry
of Defence so it has more spin-off into other civil applications
rather than being entirely available for very specific defence
purposes?
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) Of course DERA now has
a very clear commercial part to it as well so it is now doing
more contract work and I have no doubt that that will affect its
decision on allocation of resources, but obviously the final money
going into defence R&D is with the Ministry of Defence.
235. Is there not a case for the programmes
across the board to be more closely supervised by the Office of
Science and Technology to at least rule out duplication?
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) I think we do try and
make clear where the lines do come so there is no duplication,
but I think the idea that we should have, as it were, one Ministry
of Science which would control the whole budget would probably
not be the way forward and I think there are very few cases even
where there are Ministries of Science and Technology in other
countries where they do control all the spending across government
and the reason for that is very clear—that you want to have
a very clear ownership by the departments who are, after all,
in the end the users of this research and a very large part of
it is in terms of making them the intelligent customers in terms
of policy making. To the extent you take that away from them I
think you weaken that link and I do not think it would be the
way forward. You have got to give them the final decision on their
research. If you look again at America, there is no great Ministry
of Science and Technology, there is a small unit in the Commerce
Department and scientific advisers to the President, so it is
very close to our system, and I think in terms of excellence of
science, which is key to this, that is the way forward.
236. I was not advocating a wholly centralised
arrangement but this is something that appears to be a rather
Balkanised division of the programme between different ministries
at the moment with few talking to one another and not a lot of
relationship to what goes on in the Office of Science and Technology.
Maybe that is unfair.
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) I think the role of the
Chief Scientific Adviser is very much to provide that co-ordination.
He of course has a committee under him of the chief scientific
officers in each of the ministries. There is certainly co-ordination
taking place at that level.
Dr Williams
237. Could I come in on this point as well.
I am very pleased at the change in the terms of reference for
the Chief Scientific Adviser and the seat in the Cabinet Office,
but do you see it as part of your role, too, to stand near the
departments and see what is happening because there is a lot of
overlap, surely, in the Department of Health with the MRC or in
MAFF with the BBSRC, or the Ministry of Defence with the EPSRC.
I am trying to add to your powers here! Is part of your defined
powers to have that kind of roving commission or is it only the
Chief Scientific Adviser who has that across the departments?
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) He has the main responsibility
in terms of looking at the whole science base across government.
Where we have more co-ordination now taking place is in, for example,
the Foresight Programme where we do have an inter-departmental
ministerial group that looks at this and also because we have
a system whereby there are people nominated within each department
in terms of guidelines on scientific advice to different departments.
So there is some co-ordination at that level as well but the main
responsibility lies with the Chief Scientific Adviser and the
committee that he runs of chief scientific officers.
238. Are you a member of those intra-ministerial
groups?
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) Yes.
239. Are you actually the Chairman of that?
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) I am the Chairman of
the Foresight Group.
Dr Jones
240. The question is do yourself and Sir Robert
have clout to influence decisions? I was a bit concerned earlier
that you did not know even at this stage what was going on with
the budgets in other departments.
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) Sir Robert May is very
involved in those decisions. As I say, they have not yet been
taken in departments but he has been talking to people about what
they are likely to be and making an input into those decisions.
Dr Jones: The final question from Dr Kumar on
the Challenge Fund.
Dr Kumar
241. What activities can be supported by the
University Challenge Fund? Can it be used for example to provide
management experience or will it be confined to science-related
activities?
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) It is very much related
to the process of bringing products to the stage where they could
be funded by venture capital. I do not think it would include
management training of a general kind. It is very much more the
whole process of taking a product and doing the work that will
take it from a clever idea into a workable product which a venture
capital company might fund through a spin-off company.
Dr Jones
242. We have run out of time. Thank you for
your indulgence. Thank you for spending the time with us. May
I, Minister, wish you well with the three challenges you have
set yourself and echo the comments of the Chairman earlier and
hope we can be of assistance.
(Lord Sainsbury of Turville) Can I say I feel I am
very lucky both to be Science Minister and to come in at this
time when, just before I came in, a large sum of money was given
to science and I am absolutely delighted to work with you on making
certain this money is well used to support the science base in
this country. Thank you very much.
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