Select Committee on Public Accounts Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-130)

DEPARTMENT OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY, BRITISH NATIONAL SPACE CENTRE, THE PARTICLE PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY RESEARCH COUNCIL AND THE OPEN UNIVERSITY

24 NOVEMBER 2004

  Q120 Mr Bacon: Can I just be clear: the £42.5 million is the global, as it were, total for the expenditure. Is it possible that you could send us a note of the breakdown of all the costs and where the contributions came from?

  Dr Hicks: Indeed.[3]

  Q121 Mr Curry: Professor Halliday and Sir Robin, you both say, "If we did not have a juste retour, we would not do very well in the programme." What is wrong with our industry—

  Professor Halliday: Hold on, I did not say that. I said that if you do away with juste retour, there is a risk of getting extra or less.

  Q122 Mr Curry: Sir Robin did say. The record, I am sure, will show that he said that we would not do very well if we did not have juste retour.

  Sir Robin Young: I do not know what I said but I did not mean to say that. If the CERN precedent, about which I know nothing I should say, is taken into account, then we do not do very well. CERN has no juste retour ingredient and apparently we do not very well.

  Q123 Mr Curry: I will put my question another way. Are you satisfied that British business is competitive, is well founded scientifically and in terms of engineering and management skills to be a real competitive force in this marketplace?

  Professor Halliday: My reading is, yes, to win contracts elsewhere. It is hard to prove in an absolute sense.

  Q124 Mr Curry: Sir Robin I think made the remark which I have attributed to him and it just caught my attention.

  Professor Halliday: May I just make one off-the-cuff remark? Let me give you a feeling for—

  Q125 Chairman: No remarks in this Committee are off-the-cuff! Everything is noted down.

  Professor Halliday: Well, not quite focused. I was astonished to discover—and this is what makes it unquantifiable—that Logica is the result of investment by the European Space Agency something like 30 years ago. It is a company that is drawn out of this background out of nurturing from ESA. How much of Logica's success value do you put into ESA's value added and how much is their own efforts? I have no idea how to do that, but there is no question about it, that is the origins of a very substantial British company.

  Mr Curry: Let us hope that ESA can help us with identity cards then!

  Q126 Mr Jenkins: The Commission inquiry into the Beagle and I read this extract for you and I want you just to then think for a moment. It says that the scope of the inquiry covered a wide range of important issues of concern to the UK, ESA and other Member States in ESA. Some of these matters are necessarily confidential between governments and the Agency and cannot be released. Professor Pillinger said that he had not seen a copy of the Report. Do you recognise the disquiet if we are not in a position to learn from our mistakes on our reports and all the information is not free, open and available to all participants? This is after all public money and I for one would deem it undesirable to have reports that may be missing information to be held back out of the area of public domain.

  Sir Robin Young: I certainly recognise that issue. It is currently being reconsidered by Lord Sainsbury, the Minister, in response to a recommendation from the Science and Technology Committee whose report perhaps I should mention anyway. They reported on 2 November. Incidentally, in response to Mr Bacon, they said, "We commend the Government for being enthusiastic about the Beagle 2 project. It was an exciting scientific opportunity with the potential to put the UK at the forefront of space exploration. The Government should not be shy about taking risks in science if potential benefits are there. In our view, this was a risk well worth taking." So, in addition to that report, they then said at least can we see this secret inquiry and we put that to Lord Sainsbury and that is where it lies. As you rightly said, the authors of the inquiry report said that some of it was confidential. So, that is the issue which went to ministers and is now with the Minister in response to the Select Committee's report.

  Professor Pillinger: The Beagle team conducted their own inquiry which ran to 268 pages and 270 recommendations and I can lodge a copy of those with the Committee. It is on the web if you want to read them.

  Mr Jenkins: I am not concerned about the technical aspect, what I am concerned about is the openness of Government and making sure that if the Government or Agency bring the shutter down and say that this is confidential, they have to have very, very good reasons for not telling us why and how they spent public money and I know that we will be mentioning that in our report.

  Q127 Chairman: Sir Robin, we have had reference to the commercial delegates and they are set out, as we have heard, in Appendix 3 at page 36. If you look at paragraph 2.18 which you find on page 19, there is some argument there and some discussion there about how you summarise the scientific evidence arising from space activities. I am just wondering whether you have adequate systems to summarise, assess and come to conclusions on the scientific and commercial benefits and what you do.

  Sir Robin Young: They are not good enough and that is why, in answer to Mr Jenkins, I hope I have made that clear. What we have is good performance indicators for the ingredients of what the partners do in their space work. What we do not have—and that is why the Report is right about this—is a way of looking at the overall performance of the whole space strategy, in other words the totality, the sum of the parts. The consultants who work with the NAO gave us lots of good suggestions about how we should track these critical performance areas in that box on table 12 on page 18 and they have given us a framework of 39 potential measures to track our performance, the performance of the totality in these performance areas. We are actually piloting that now. I should say that, as paragraph 2.19 which you referred to says, it is not easy to work out how space activity leads through into productivity and competitiveness but it is an exam question which we are on the case in answering.

  Q128 Chairman: Dr Hicks, I think I remember you were kind enough to refer to the brief and glorious period when I had ministerial responsibility for your organisation.

  Dr Hicks: I well remember it.

  Q129 Chairman: I was quite enthusiastic about working towards an International Space Agency. Whatever happed to that idea? Was it quietly dropped after I left?

  Dr Hicks: I think what we should say is that, just as with the partnership approach within the BNSC, we are trying to generate that partnership approach for international space activity. So, I think you can be proud at the idea that we should be working together, but it is not being pursued by a single agency but by strong cooperation between agencies.

  Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much. It has been a very interesting hearing. Mr Sheridan said that it was an anorak's Report but it is very important.

  Jim Sheridan: I take that back.

  Q130 Chairman: Professor, thank you for all you have done to enthuse the British public about your work—we are very grateful—even though it has cost £42 million.

  Professor Pillinger: That works out at about four minutes each per year at the minimum wage that a person can earn.

  Chairman: That is obviously a line you were determined to get out, so I have given you that opportunity. Thank you very much, gentlemen.





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