Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300
- 317)
MONDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2005
DR BOB
BUSHAWAY, MR
NICK BUCKLAND
AND DR
ED METCALFE
Q300 Chairman: But do they do anything?
Has anything happened because of it that you can point to and
say, "that only happened because there was such a committee"?
Mr Metcalfe: It is still early
days, but our science council is a little bit older. Interestingly,
the large companies in the region cite skills supply as one of
the reasons that they are there. If you ask them for the top three
reasons why they are there, supply of skills is usually in the
top three. One of the things that the science industry council
agrees on unanimously is the need to maintain and increase the
skills supply. We had a bit of debate in the early days about
what we meant by the skills supply, and it became clear that we
were talking about different kinds of scientists. Some companies
want out-and-out researchers with firsts and PhDs, and other companies
want more technical graduates. They were talking different languages,
but once they understood one another, there is a need for—
Q301 Chairman: Is not the real truth
that universities do not know who the hell you are, or care? They
make their own autonomous decisions—several of them have
closed their science departments for other reasons—and they
do not consult you, and you are left with the draught. You have
a region without chemistry or physics or whatever and you just
have to suck it and see. Is that not the reflection of what is
happening?
Mr Buckland: I disagree with that
because all RDAs have a vice chancellor on their board, so there
is a linkage there; and we have linkage with the regional HERDAs
as well.
Q302 Chairman: Is Steve Smith on
your board?
Mr Buckland: I know Steve Smith
very well, but we have Eric Thomas, who is the Vice Chancellor
at Bristol. We work with vice chancellors. We were informed by
Steve Smith just prior to their announcement, but that was obviously
an internal university—
Q303 Chairman: What did you say—"too
bad"?
Mr Buckland: No, we—
Q304 Chairman: Did you say, "This
is going to really, really hurt our interaction with business
and universities"?
Mr Buckland: We work with the
universities in the region, so, as I said earlier, we have the
same level of provision of chemistry within the region and they
have pushed into their strengths, and are at roughly the same
level of capacity.
Q305 Chairman: Do you really believe,
Nick, that regional development is the big idea that is bearing
the fruit of science development, irrespective of the odd department
closing?
Mr Buckland: I think there are
difficulties with these departments closing, and we have to make
sure that we have the balance in the region to take up the requirements
of the region; so we have to look at it on that strategic level
across the region.
Q306 Dr Turner: How worried would
you be about the economy of your region if one of the core science
subjects became extinct in it, like chemistry? Would you feel
the need to try and intervene? Would you be happy to contemplate
that? If Exeter has gone, what if Bristol closed its chemistry
department as well? You would not have any chemistry for 100 miles.
Mr Buckland: It would be further
than that. I live on the Devon/Cornwall border and we are further
away from Bristol than Nottingham is. If you go further down into
the peninsula the distances get greater, so there are issues on
that. We have to look very closely at that and work with the vice
chancellors and—
Q307 Dr Turner: How drastic would
the circumstances have to be before you would want to intervene?
Mr Buckland: I think we would
monitor that very closely and work closely with the vice chancellors.
That is all we could do.
Q308 Dr Turner: Do you think it would
be better to preserve lower quality university courses rather
than lose them altogether at the regional level? Where would you
set your limits?
Mr Metcalfe: I am not quite sure
what you mean by "lower quality"; it is quite a loaded
question. Certainly, there was a debate earlier about teaching-only
departments, and it may well be necessary to have some form of
outposts or hubs and spokes associated with some of the main universities
where subjects are taught locally and feed in at a higher level,
perhaps final year or postgraduate level into larger universities.
There have been some very good successes. Certainly Plymouth,
with its foundation degrees out in local FE colleges and then
feeding it to the centre, has worked extremely well. That is a
very successful programme.
Q309 Dr Turner: What about the sector
skills councils? How much influence do they have over university
courses in particular? Do you think they should have more influence?
Mr Metcalfe: The Lambert report
was quite specific, that they should have more influence on curriculum
development and course delivery. Of course, they are still fairly
new, but we have worked with some of the sector skills councils,
and e-Skills UK particularly. The problem is perhaps the supply
of graduates in a certain area. They are saying, "we are
not getting the right kind of graduates" and the university
was saying, "of course you are; we are producing firsts and
2.1s and good degrees and you are employing them, so what is the
problem?" When we got involved we understood that the employers
were looking for a certain kind of graduate, and we helped them
develop a degree that is now being developed within the universities,
so there is a solution.
Q310 Paul Farrelly: We have mentioned
the teaching debate, which we had earlier, and perhaps you will
forgive me for mentioning Keele University for the third time.
We have a nice little science park developing next to Keele and
it is particularly developing a medical cluster, based on a lot
of NHS investments going in, and that indeed is part of the RDA's
economic strategy and fully supported by Advantage West Midlands.
However, many people argue that that sits ill with Keele—not
expansion of science in terms of research or teaching but actually
a contraction that we have seen. It does not provide the best
narrative or advertisement for developing a science capability.
The question is not what RDAs can do to stop this, because I think
it is very limited at the moment, but what would be the one way
in the future in which you would recommend that we might consider
for you to improve your level of influence over what is happening
and what is supported at an RDA level in terms of the economic
development of the region?
Mr Metcalfe: One of the things
we are beginning to do in our universities is to encourage people
to work together more closely. If universities worked at a sub-regional
level, certainly in a larger region like mine as a cluster, collectively—we
are coming from the business support end, but there are other
indications for this, so collectively they produce what the region
needs. They can perhaps agree amongst themselves; there is a chemistry
department, a physics department, and as long as the travel times
between the universities and businesses are not too high, you
can see how the model might work. There is the beginning of such
a model in the West Focus Consortium, which is based in West London,
going out along the Thames; we have six universities coming together,
initially around the HEIF proposal, but we see no reason why that
should not extend to subject provision.
Mr Buckland: In Exeter, for example,
the RDA there has been investing with them and developing an innovation
centre, and relating that to some of their strengths. Certainly,
the Peninsular (Exeter) Medical School is developing that area
and activity, so we are working together.
Dr Bushaway: The problem really
is the sub-regional question. If regions are to be cohesive, then
you must play your assets as a team and you must look at what
you have got to do. The problem for the RDA is that you are really
asking them to be counter-intuitive. If the reasons for closure
are because funding levels are insufficient to sustain the activity,
and that is because the quality levels under a selective system
are not bringing in enough resource, it is surely then counter-intuitive
for the RDA to effectively support what is then a sub-regional
lame duck and to go against the policy of national selectivity?
We can argue—and you were doing that with the previous witnesses—whether
that policy is correct, but as long as it is there it seems to
me that it is very difficult to see the RDA having to come in
and pick up the baton on almost a counter-intuitive basis.
Q311 Dr Turner: How much of this
is chicken and egg? Obviously, it must be more difficult to sustain
a department either an undergraduate or research department, if
there is not a strong science-based industry presence in the region
as well. What happens in your regions? Which do you think is coming
first?
Dr Bushaway: There are four legs
to this particular stool. The one is national policy, as reflected
in the research councils and HEFCE, or the councils generally;
the second is the demand-side that is coming from employers and
businesses, whether they are within the region or nationally or
whatever; the third then is the supply-side stimulation at the
primary and secondary level, and is there a flow through to universities
of the right kinds of students with the right kinds of backgrounds
at primary and secondary level; and then the fourth is the university
leg where you have got to then deal with all three and make sure
that you are able to respond as effectively as you can; but you
are an autonomous and independently financed organisation whose
job, through its own governing council, is to sustain its business.
It is a complex interaction between those four issues. It would
be wrong to suggest that I know the answer as to when that balance
got out of kilter, whether it was at national policy level or
the law of unintended consequences, or whether somewhere along
the line we have lost the demand-side, or we have problems lower
down the supply-side chain; but somewhere there, in all four of
those issues and their inter-relatedness, has to be the answer
to the question.
Dr Iddon: The Medical Research Council,
thank God, say that in order to address the inequalities of health
which exist across the regions of the United Kingdom, there should
be a key medical school in each of those regions. The northern
regions have suffered badly in the decline of major manufacturing
industries in those regions, and just as the inequalities of health
are greater up there, the inequalities of regeneration and the
science base are less up there than they are in the south. Nothing
annoyed the north-west more than when the Daresbury Synchatron
disappeared almost and became the Diamond Synchatron Project in
Oxfordshire. It just seems to people who live in the north that
there is a greater and greater concentration in the red-hot economy
of the south, when we should be regenerating the northern regions
by preserving a high standard of science bases.
Q312 Chairman: If I can paraphrase
that, why do the universities like Cambridge do better than Bolton?
Is it something in the water? Is it the soil? What is it?
Mr Metcalfe: There is quite a
few hundred years' history in that. The northern RDAs have invested
quite heavily in supporting the universities and industrial R&D
support, so the north-east for example has set up centres of excellence,
which have had quite substantial investments in supporting universities
and helping them work more closely with business. The RDAs are
very aware of these disparities; in fact, it is the northern RDAs
that led the way—
Q313 Dr Iddon: Is the science establishment
supporting them?
Mr Metcalfe: I am not quite sure
what you mean by "the science establishment": do you
mean—
Q314 Dr Iddon: I am talking about
the power of Oxford, Cambridge and London, as the Chairman implied.
Are we not losing out to the golden triangle, because that is
where the academic power lies?
Mr Metcalfe: I think the golden
triangle sees a lot more investment from the RDAs in the north
going up there, and they say to us, "why are you not investing
as much as in the north?" There is a lot going on up there
to try and help redress the disparities. I think you have to do
both; you have to invest to support science development in the
north, and also you have to keep the triangle going.
Dr Bushaway: One of the most important
things that has not really been touched on, as far as I can see,
in this debate is the business of regional retention of intellectual
property and its management. That seems to be where Cambridge
does particularly well. If you take elsewhere, the Synchatron
example, it was true that for the old-style public sector research
establishments the package around how intellectual property was
generated and how it was retained and how it was commercialised
was very, very unclear, and I suspect most of the commercialisation
that would generate from that kind of activity would simply lead
the way either to other regions or outside the country. One of
the things that Lambert really hit on was the business of better
management of intellectual property. We do need to endorse what
that was saying and create the Cambridge phenomenon all over the
country, all over the other regions. There does not seem to me
to be any inherent principles that should prevent that.
Q315 Chairman: The Cambridge phenomenon
gets this name, and we can ask how it started; it was three guys
in a pub actually! It is not very sophisticated science, getting
the small businesses going. That could happen in Bolton or in
any place really. What are you doing to encourage that to happen,
is what we want to know.
Dr Bushaway: I think in all the
regions, as far as the universities engaged with RDAs are concerned,
we are all looking at how we can commercialise IP more effectively
for the benefit of the region. It is now embedded in regional
economic strategy. It is encouraged, for example, in the AWM sub-regional
investment in strategic funds for drawing out IP and commercialising,
and—
Q316 Chairman: Bob, while you are
looking at it, the Chinese and the Indians are doing it. They
do not mess about with committee after committee after committee,
and report after report, coloured and beautiful as they are; they
get on and do it.
Dr Bushaway: Everything is new
in the current situation as far as the England regions are concerned,
and from the university perspective there is a perception that
the regional development agencies are working out a wholly new
set of procedures and administrative arrangements. They are relatively
immature bodies in the best possible sense of the word.
Mr Buckland: We are investing.
I have mentioned the innovation centres that we are investing
in with universities, and science parks as well. Again, in the
south-west, there are some very good examples of that, like Tamar
Science Park in Plymouth. There is some science park activity
going on in Cornwall, and some of the activity has been in train
or on the books for something like 10 or 15 years. In Bristol
we are now investing in that and making that happen, so there
is investment happening there.
Q317 Chairman: Your confidence comes
through but we are doubtful.
Mr Metcalfe: That will grow because
from April this year we will have a new role. We will be measured
on how well we have got business and universities to work together,
and we will be investing in that.
Chairman: We will watch and wait. Thank
you very much indeed.
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