Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-125)
WEDNESDAY 5 FEBRUARY 2003
PROFESSOR EBRAHIM
MAMDANI, PROFESSOR
IAN W. MARSHALL
AND PROFESSOR
MARTYN THOMAS
Mr McWalter
120. European Research Council business, you
are nervous about taking existing research budgets and channelling
them through rather unproven mechanisms, do you feel that this
is a real danger to you and that you would like it all to go away
really?
(Professor Thomas) It depends what you are trying
to achieve and what time scales you are operating on. There is
no doubt that scientists benefit from international collaboration,
and scientists do collaborate internationally, both industrial
based and academically based scientists. However, you have to
be able to sustain the science base that you have from year to
year. If you have a mechanism which is already under stress—and
in our area in the ICT area of activity the funding is under stress,
there is not enough to fund anything like all of the good proposals
and good researchers that exist in the current science base—there
is a real fear that if you perturb the process that is already
understood, particularly if you move into Europe, where it is
perceived and it is judged from the Framework programmes that
the overheads of bidding will be higher, the bureaucracy will
be higher, the time delays will be greater and clearly people
are going to be nervous.
121. Your memorandum is pretty hard hitting,
you basically think that the current European structures often
produce funding for mediocre projects, you think that the Joint
Research Council is a body in which world class research really
cannot be expected to be carried out. Although it is nice that
you play lip service to the European dimension is the reality
that we are much better at doing things within the United Kingdom
than we are in getting involved in all of this other business?
(Professor Thomas) The reality is this: if what you
want is to fund individual, good scientific projects then the
current European mechanisms are not the best way of doing that,
not the most cost-effective way of doing that, but that is not
what they are for, and therefore we are judging them on the wrong
criteria. If what you want to do is stimulate collaboration, parts
of them are very good at that; the networks of excellence over
the past period have been very good at encouraging academic collaboration
and some very effective ones have been established. If what you
want to do is broaden the science base into the candidate and
new Member States, again the Framework programme has been very
effective, it seems to us, in achieving that but, of course, at
a cost, and part of the cost is that you are not funding as good
science in terms of the pure excellence of the scientific programmes
that you are funding. My view, as a naive scientist and an industrialist,
is that you really ought to determine what your priorities are
and devise individual mechanisms to achieve those priority objectives
in the most cost-effective way possible rather than having a broad
programme which seeks to achieve all of these things and ends
up with almost every part of the constituency looking at their
area and saying, yes, we can spend the money better.
122. I think what has come out not only from
what you said but also from previous evidence is there is sort
of a twin track here, some things are done very well by our own
research councils and for other projects it is best to go to Europe.
From that point of view you want both mechanisms to be properly
funded and the work they support given the maximum possible impetus.
Given all of that do other European countries see these projects
similarly, because if they do not have our rather more refined
targeted operations of the sort that are funded by our research
councils then these European councils are going to be doing a
different job than is done for us by them and over time those
different priorities are going to be increasingly incorporated
into the framework structure?
(Professor Thomas) That is a very fair point. It is
very hard to judge that because from the United Kingdom we get
a skewed view of the constituency. The people we tend to meet
in Europe are the people engaged in the European programme and
who have therefore bought into the mechanisms and are working
with them effectively. While we deal with people in the United
Kingdom who are involved in the European programmes, we do also
talk to people who have decided not to bid in to the European
programme or who have bid and are largely unsuccessful. Inevitably
we get a view that is skewed towards a negative side compared
with what we see of other European countries and it is hard to
get a balanced view. If I may, I would like to mention two areas
where there is a bit of conflict. One is a mechanistic one, and
if you could resolve this for the universities it would be hugely
valuable, that is that the funding mechanism will not allow as
allowable costs, the recurring costs of universities. You are
only allowed to charge direct costs and overheads, you can only
charge people on temporary contracts. There is a national policy
to stop having researchers on repeated temporary contracts but
the moment that you give somebody a permanent contract you cannot
charge them against a European project anymore. We had a stupid
situation in one university where a research secretary had been
funded for seventeen years on a temporary contract. The university
said, "this has to stop, we will have to give her a permanent
contract". After giving her a permanent contract, a month
later they had to make her redundant because the funding dried
up immediately and they did hot have any source of funding any
more. They reinstituted a temporary contract and got her back
on the payroll there, but this is just insane. The other issue,
this is more strategic, it seems there is a bit of a conflict
between the best science, which is typically driven bottom-up.
Most of the universities in particular have a very clear idea
of what research they want to do and then they go looking for
how they can get it funded. The Framework programmes are, of course,
constructed top-down; there are overall objectives that are laid
down so there are inevitably conflicts between what people are
trying to do in building the consortium to bid in, and what the
Commission has set out they are trying to achieve in laying out
the overall Framework Programme. This mirrors what we see in the
United Kingdom. I am member of the EPSRC and it is fairly widely
felt that the quality of science that is done in "responsive
mode" within research councils is higher than the quality
of science that is funded in the managed programmes, because you
end up funding further down the funding line in the managed programmes
simply because you have constructed a managed programme and that
is what you are setting out to do. Maybe it is worth thinking
about whether the Framework Programme would not be better if you
set some really high level objectives, then asked for responsive
mode bids, and did not go about it in the heavily constrained
way that it is at the moment. Apart from anything else you would
take a lot of delay out of the process.
Chairman
123. Can I ask you all the last question, how
do you measure benefits from collaboration between people? What
you are kind of suggesting is there is a forcing of collaboration
from the top down between people. How do you measure collaboration?
How would you measure a Watson/Crick collaboration as against
what people are trying to do today from the benefits of science?
(Professor Thomas) Individual scientists judge whether
working with other scientists is valuable to them or whether it
is valuable to the science they want to do and in the main they
find relationships they want to sustain That often involves substantial
travel because you do not find people who are geographically close
to you necessarily who are the right partners for the piece of
work that you want to do. Firstly, having a mechanism that would
enable you to fund the underlying travel that you need, to find
your people, and secondly to establish the relationship and then
to sustain it is very important. I think the measure of success
is the length of time which some of these collaborations have
continued. In the IT area there are collaborative relationships
between British universities and French and Italian universities
that have been running for two decades now and are extremely successful,
measured in terms of the scientific, peer-reviewed output.
124. Is that at the level of individuals not
the institutes?
(Professor Thomas) Yes, I would say so.
125. You would rather go for that rather than
forcing institutes together, I do not mean mergers.
(Professor Thomas) Industrially it is an institutional
relationship. If you can get an SME into a relationship with major
companies that can be hugely beneficial. ARM made an enormous
amount of benefit out of the IMI component of the framework, in
fact it avoided having to take in venture capital as a consequence.
(Professor Marshall) I have several things to say,
to be honest, the direct answer to the question is that one measures
the value of collaboration on the basis of, does it help you progress
towards your objective or does it help my company? In a sense
I would encourage you to ask a slightly different question in
respect of the Framework programme. What people are doing is looking
and saying, okay, if these are the mechanisms on offer I can collaborate
with people in certain ways and I can collaborate in a way that
allows me to know people and share expertise with people in Europe
or I can get into a large project, and the projects are necessarily
large because of the bureaucratic overheads, where I am collaborating
with people from all over Europe. That is really useful if you
want to do something that requires across Europe standardisation.
What I cannot get is easy collaboration with a group in Turkey
who I happen to know are doing something very closely related
to what I am doing and we can get value out of working together,
it may be with two institutions from the United Kingdom and one
from Turkey. In principle the European mechanisms would fund that
kind of collaboration but in practice the bureaucratic overhead
is such that it is not worth it for that scale of project. If
you make the project really large it gets rejected on the basis
of insufficient partners. I suggest that we should push for a
third mechanism, followed by Europe, which encourages small-scale
collaboration, and which is much more light weight than the existing
Framework Programme. This is possibly a role for an ERC, let us
have an ERC but let us make sure it does not conflict with United
Kingdom research councils and make sure it is doing something
different. You could say, we want the ERC to coordinate small
scale collaboration between 2 countries or possibly 3 countries.
(Professor Mamdani) I would like to say that when
you talk about research projects you are mainly talking about
new knowledge generated by these projects. In collaborative projects
there is also a very large component of knowledge transfer, rather
than new knowledge generation. The European collaborative projects
have been useful in doing knowledge transfer. As we have gone
from Framework 1 to Framework 6 it has evened out, and the advantages
to Spain and Portugal have not necessarily come largely from the
generation of new knowledge but knowledge transfer. So consortia
are created on very careful calculation by the participants, on
what they would give away when they engage in knowledge transfer
and what they are going to get from being able to generate new
knowledge. In a basic research project, you are able to have,
not only European partners, but you are going to have a collaboration
of equals and you are likely to generate more useful new knowledge
from that. You have to take this balancing act that almost every
organisation involved in EU projects actually carries out in its
own mind and usually hits the decision quite correctly. Different
people have different things they are trying to get. Generally
speaking all organisations do that calculation and they do come
up with the right answer. You need to look under the surface of
the balance between new knowledge and knowledge transfers.
Chairman: I have been absorbed this afternoon.
It is a very important area for the United Kingdom and leads us
into new arenas in our inquiry, we will start thinking about broader
questions and how the European funding money fits into that concept,
you have added that dimension to it in that last session. Thank
you very much indeed. Watch on our website to see how it develops
and you will see your name mentioned in lights, if the research
exercise stays there put it down that you gave us evidence and
perhaps just made a big difference. Thank you very much indeed.
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