Examination of Witnesses (Questions 820
- 839)
TUESDAY 18 MAY 2004
NORTH EAST
WALES INSTITUTE
Q820 Chairman: One of the problems
we have had highlighted to us from the industrial side is that
academia generally works on a much slower timescale than industry.
The one example yesterday was that there was a problem of setting
up a joint venture because by the time academia have got round
to it industry have moved on to something else. It does not seem
to be the case in NEWI but is it not a general problem that academic
advancement is dependent on papers and academic work and that
it is entirely possible that people working in academic institutes
do not get any benefit in terms of their personal advancement
by working with industry? Do you see that as a structural problem
in most universities?
Professor Thomas: Virtually across
the whole of the UK universities the new promotions criteria were
formed about three years ago. It used to be just how good was
your research and scholarly activity, but within scholarly activity
now candidates are asked to demonstrate whether they have external
links. That is one of the criteria and that has altered the perception.
I sympathise with a lot of industrial companies, particularly
SMEs, if they have good ideas. The difficulty large institutions
have, and that is where NEWI is different, is that we are akin
to a rapid response force. We are small but fast, we can move
quickly. We have not got 25 committees that have to approve another
committee's decision. That is in my view the reason why industry
feel that universities are slow. One is because once an idea comes
in at the coal face to an academic member of staff there is a
series of health and safety checks, risk management checks and
funding checks that have to be done which can take several weeks.
As for publishing, yes, the top quality journals, as you probably
know, if you submit a paper they can take 12-18 months to get
that published. The difficulty is the editors of those papers
then keeping up to date with what is going on. In areas like genetics
and proteins you are soon out of date and the editors will not
even publish it after they have promised that they will, which
affects your publishing output. The way round that is to organise
conferences and seminars and present it in public and share ideas
with colleagues and have scholarly activity at the interface between
industry and commercial areas and academia. We do not have that
problem here. I do sympathise with large institutions in that
by the time it gets to the top and having to make a decision very
often they will report back saying, "Thank you for this piece
of paper but I need a full report". For those who just want
to do rather than write about it it is a bit disheartening.
Mr Howard: I would support what
is being said. We do know that SMEs have a very fast timescale
and we are also asking academics to contribute to what is already
a busy schedule of teaching and learning, so adding this third
mission on to their agendas is difficult. Mike mentioned something
about conferences. There is one issue I would like to flag up
and that is with disclosure. When academics are talking about
their idea, that is a real sensitivity for me because once it
is disclosed it is impossible to patent. We set up NEWI Innovations
Ltd to do just that, to be a commercial arm, our more flexible
rapid response unit, as Professor Thomas calls it, to try and
have that commercial outward-looking response that companies will
respect and realise that it is much quicker than the normal academic
curricular committees. We have a fast-track academia as well.
We are trying.
Q821 Mr Edwards: What do you think
you have got that other institutions have not got? I have a background
in higher education myself. My own recollection—and it was
not in the engineering field; it was in the science field—was
that there was an emphasis upon us to be entrepreneurial, that
on top of increasing teaching loads, increasing research pressure,
without the administrative support, we should engage in that extra
activity as well.
Professor Thomas: You have hit
the nail very gently on the head there. That is a major problem
for universities because we hire staff to deliver curricula and
to do research that helps to enhance the institution. To then
bring in other elements you need time. Time is our biggest enemy.
The only way you can deal with time is to get more people to do
two jobs and then of course you are into the resource game because
you need more funding and you then have to look for that funding.
Academics, and I speak as an academic myself, are notoriously
poor at costing a problem. They will cost the job for the cost
of the job without building in a profit margin or overheads, and
they will allow that to be released whilst somebody else does
the job that they are paid to do. There is this ratchet effect,
I would call it, of getting academics to learn that when they
put bids in for activities that they want to do it is not just
the cost of the job itself; it is also the cost of replacing them
while they do the job. It is difficult with the extra stress and
pressure we have got. You get penalised if your students leave,
you get penalised if you do not recruit enough, and you get penalised
if your colleagues want you to be engaged in applied research
when everybody else is in the classroom. If you increase your
students by 50, that is 50 extra essays, you get four assessments
a year, so that you have got 200 assessments to mark. All these
things build up. That unfortunately is the pressure of academic
life and that is no different at NEWI. NEWI is special in the
sense that we tend to have more of a team element and more passion.
We recognise that we are small. To get on to it we have to give
that little extra, at least for the next few years. Hopefully
the reward will be that we will get the larger funding stream
and get more staff to distribute the work a little bit.
Mr Tatler: That is the key to
success, the responsiveness of the staff. They all work together
as a team. If you go to some of the bigger universities they can
have academics there who could be in the next staff room to each
other and they do not even know they exist. You will have had
experience of this, being in higher education. Like you said,
we are special. We have got our responsiveness because we are
a small cohesive team.
Mr Howard: If I could just mention
something about being post-modern and being used to change, change
is the norm for us. We have been doing some talks about mergers
with others. It is obvious that in the situation we are in we
are adaptable and ready to change. We have a very lean executive
management structure which is post-1992 and that also helps make
decisions and smooth things along.
Professor Thomas: That is a really
important point which supports the statement that you made in
that the ironic thing in higher education in the UK is that as
universities become better they get bigger and as they get bigger
they adopt an industrial model of management which is the pyramid
effect, where there is a chief executive at the top and a small
group of people who cannot manage big teams so they departmentalise,
and once they departmentalise then people do not talk to each
other. Once people do not talk to each other you have to have
structures in place to make sure that they do and suddenly the
system starts to slow down and become bureaucratic. I believe
in good administration but I do not believe in over-bureaucratic
systems. Good administration can help you do your job very quickly
and very well. There is this irony that as universities get bigger
they adopt the industrial model which does not help change, as
the big industries have found in the last or 40 years.
Q822 Mrs Williams: Can smaller institutions
survive the future?
Professor Thomas: Without a good
funding stream and not without premium space to grow smaller institutions
have not got a future. That is a personal view. They need to be
bigger, they need the support to grow. NEWI is small. We need
a degree of earning power to have that badge. We need HEFCE to
raise the ceiling so that we can recruit more students and we
need a bigger campus so we need some support there to encourage
spending and investment but we think that is the future for Wales.
That is important for this region, it is important for North Wales
in particular. Our view and our ambition is to be better than
Cardiff. We are unrelenting in that. That means we need size and
power. That is not a flippant statement. We mean it.
Mr Howard: We can have a core
business which revolves around students' teaching and learning
pedagogy that is sustainable and we believe we can sustain ourselves.
We also think that we could become even more efficient and even
more smart by having, for example, less initiativitis it is and
less change and heavy administrative autoculture. These are issues
that sometimes burden us a little bit, if I am being honest.
Q823 Chairman: I will bring in Ms
Morgan, the Honourable Member for Cardiff North.
Professor Thomas: I apologise.
Q824 Julie Morgan: I shall go back
and tell them that you are going to be better than Cardiff. To
go back to your submission on page 1, you say you contribute over
£30 million every year to the local economy. How do you break
down that £30 million?
Professor Thomas: We think that
is an underestimate.
Mr Howard: Yes. We think it is
a very severe underestimate. Glamorgan, for example, estimate
£165 million, so we are quite conservative. We have used
a multiplier of about 1.7 from the early nineties. The economists
used that figure then. If you look at our purchase orders over
the last 12 months we have spent £1.4 million just on the
local economy. We have a £22 million turnover, so there is
a pretty significant contribution just by staying in business,
coming back to your earlier point about can smaller institutions
survive. Just by being in business we are contributing to the
local economy. It is a conservative estimate.
Professor Thomas: That is the
lower end of the multiplier.
Q825 Mrs Williams: To go back to
some points you have already made about SMEs, you say that SMEs
have difficulty in understanding the support that is available
to them. How do you think that could be improved and whose job
do you see that is? Is it yours or the Government's? Should they
be taking more initiatives?
Professor Thomas: I think the
government should slow down on initiatives and just consolidate
the initiatives that they have put in over the last few years.
We would take that as our responsibility. It is comforting and
helpful if we can get some government guidelines and protocols
about how these things should be done and what is the best way
of doing them purely for risk assessment, such as in safety, but
in pure basic practical terms we need people to get in their vehicles
and go out there. We cannot expect people in micro companies and
SMEs to release staff or themselves to come in. We need to have
peripatetic academics to go out there visiting them while they
are at work, very much like the old bank system tried 12 years
ago where they started sending bank managers out to talk to SMEs
in the companies. By "we" I mean the higher education
sector itself needs to have more staff who can do that. That has
serious resource implications elsewhere but we do manage it in
social work and in education and we manage it in health care.
50% of the curriculum is practice based and virtually all the
staff have to have some sort of curriculum or practice case load
where they have to go out on placements. It is just a matter of
adopting a more flexible model that allows academics the freedom
to go out there and, if not academics, people from Greg's department
who are very good at innovation and enterprise to go and tell
them, advise them, inform them where they can go and what help
is required.
Mr Tatler: When you go out into
industry as an engineer and you go to the small SMEs it is absolutely
surprising that they do not know how we can help them. They do
not know what they really want, so we need to go in their and
help them raise their potential. The potential is there. Let us
not play down the potential of these SMEs. There is a lot of help
that we can give them in order to get them to be more productive
and help the staff there but we need to be more proactive as Professor
Thomas says and get out there.
Q826 Mrs Williams: So that is by
means of placements?
Professor Thomas: One would be
to place students in these areas. That helps, obviously, because
you have got an interface. The other is to have staff going out
there talking to the people while they are doing their jobs, working
alongside them or talking to them while they are working rather
than taking them out of their work place, so obviously you need
somebody who knows what they are doing so that they do not interfere
with the productivity.
Mr Tatler: The staff going out
into the industry is the beneficial point for the SMEs; there
is no doubt about that.
Professor Thomas: The other side
is to prepare future micro companies and SMEs by building in a
procedural role in regard to areas like arts, for instance, where
a huge number of people want to go on and develop individual businesses,
to get them before they leave and put in entrepreneurial modules,
put in business planning modules, incubation start-ups, sort out
finance support links with building societies and banks. We need
to build that in—and we have already started to do that—before
they leave as well as starting to go out to existing companies.
Q827 Mrs Williams: But you need more
resources to be able to do this?
Professor Thomas: We do.
Mr Howard: There are other issues,
for example, getting directors of companies on our board so that
we can organise the curriculum and get together more there, this
initiative-itis that I mentioned earlier, for example, KTP and
Knowhow Wales, which have been fantastic for us, and a spin-off
programme GO Wales, Help Wales, centres of excellence, so these
are things we can discuss with companies. I do believe that the
business side initiative is trying to grip that as well, to try
and make it more co-ordinated. If that is the case then it will
be a government role to do that because with WDA reporting to
ministers it is more of a governmental role, is it not, so I think
they took the attitude that the business side would try and co-ordinate
all the initiatives for companies to make it a lot easier for
them.
Professor Thomas: The funding
bodies need to start developing models that will allow initial
bids that are successful to be seen very much like a small company
bid, a small company start-up. What tends to happen is that you
have a one-off bid, you then have the money for some sort of activity,
you then have to bid again, and of course other agents are bidding.
There does not seem to be a follow-up policy of saying, "Once
you have won a bid can we come back to see how you are doing?"
for extra investment like you would do with an SME or a micro
company. The whole of the higher education sector suffers from
that. You are constantly playing catch-up with the existing resources
by putting other bids in.
Mr Howard: The continuity of funding
issue is a really strong one.
Q828 Hywel Williams: If you go out
to organisations my experience is that you ask them, "What
do you want?", and they say, "What have you got?"
Does the traffic go the other way? You are going out. Do they
come in? Do you have a practitioner/teacher model so that they
are contributing to your resources as well?
Professor Thomas: Very much so.
Again, that is across all patches. We have local employers coming
in. We also have local artists coming in, people who are health
managers, public services. That is welcome. Sometimes they ask
to be paid and of course that comes out of existing resources
because at times of the year we have visiting professors doing
fellowships from other institutions.
Q829 Julie Morgan: You bemoan the
fact that the problems that Welsh higher education institutions
face in accessing the range of separate initiatives that are available
to them, and in particular those funded through the European Social
Fund and the European Regional Development Fund? What are the
main hurdles in accessing those funds?
Mr Howard: The main hurdle has
to be the higher administrative burden. Some programmes we have
work very smoothly and are very low cost to run. Others, like
some ESF grants, cost a lot more because they are hugely time
intensive and for somebody who does not like to spend a lot of
time doing admin and paper filling I find it quite frustrating.
That is a big issue for us.
Q830 Julie Morgan: So to make an
application is a huge amount of time?
Mr Howard: Yes. We understand
there are public accountability requirements and we are spending
public money so we need to be transparent and prudent, but some
schemes take a lot more effort than others.
Professor Thomas: There is a lot
of duplication as well, even with the same funding bodies. You
can put separate bids in and the information is the same, so you
put separate bids in rather than have an institutional bid that
says, "Here is the overall institution mission. Our values
are these and these are the bids". You have to do the same
thing for every bid so whoever sits there at the end sees the
same institution coming in and sees the same philosophy, the same
mission, the same values before they get to the action points.
Q831 Julie Morgan: Are there any
particular problems with this in Wales? Do higher education institutions
in other parts of the UK have the same problems? Is it the same
everywhere?
Mr Howard: I think they do. I
am quite impressed with the fact that we are quite ahead in some
ways and maybe a bit behind in others. For example, there are
English universities that I know who do not have policies on these
kinds of things and they have competing bids offered in the same
department and they do not even know they are competing with each
other.
Professor Thomas: I was Associate
Dean for Enterprise at the University of Salford before I came
here and they had the same issues.
Mr Howard: Having said that, the
English system, as you know, has a lot more funds, £50 million,
for example, for knowledge transfer compared to £3.1 million
in Wales. With more funding we could do a lot more.
Q832 Mrs Williams: Do you have any
evidence to show that some institutions do not apply for ERDF
and ESF schemes for the reasons you have stated?
Mr Howard: Yes. I have anecdotal
evidence from a personal contact in the south of Wales that they
have pulled out of certain schemes.
Q833 Mr Caton: In your written submission
you praise the effectiveness of the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.
Can you explain how they work in practice and how they benefit
all who are involved in those partnerships? Perhaps you can tell
us a little more about the partnerships that NEWI is already involved
in or is developing.
Mr Howard: We have a Knowledge
Transfer Partnership that is funded by a range of bodies, as you
probably know. You know DTI, BBSRC, ESRC. There is a whole range
of funding providers. The idea is that we link in the academic
expertise of the student with a company needing a project. There
are a number of benefits to that. The customer gets a project,
they get transferable knowledge from the academic person involved
in the project and the academic who is supervising the project
spends half a day a week so it is a great project that benefits
the company, the associate and the university because we all get
funding for it. The company pays, as you probably know, £16,000
over two years and there is a certain percentage that comes back
as overheads, a certain percentage comes back to the departments,
so we see the KTP programme as a really hugely beneficial one
and we are very much in favour of it. We have had a recent push
to try and do more of that. We have got collaborations with companies
across the border in powders, we have got them in engineering,
we have got marketing projects in computing, we have got art and
design KTPs coming on stream. We have two that are running now.
We have got around 12-15 that are at various stages and we see
it as a great opportunity to do more for companies. We see also
a need to do more KTPs in the public sector and especially with
the NHS. We do a lot with the NHS, Professor Thomas will tell
you. We do some ambitious programmes and we think there is more
scope to do KTPs in the NHS sector.
Q834 Mr Caton: Similarly, you refer
in your written submission to the Patent and Proof of Concept
initiative. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Is this
purely a National Assembly Programme? Is there anything similar
in the rest of the UK?
Mr Howard: That is a real flagship
for the Assembly, to be honest. The Knowledge Exploitation Fund
which, as you know, is now part of the WDA, recently launched
a pilot. We have put in four bids worth £471,000, two in
chemistry and one in new learning and one in nanotechnology. It
was a competitive basis. All the universities and FEs in Wales
could have applied. It is to look at the processes for evaluation
of commercially exploitable leading edge technology, and it is
a funding model which simplifies and consolidates all the best
practice. As far as I understand it, they looked at Scotland and
other parts of England and they came up with this model that is
a systematic approach to funding by funding different elements
of the technology process, for example, technology space that
is required, intellectual property at the early stage before someone
discloses it at a conference, routes to market, proof of concept,
making a prototype, further IPR to refine it further. There are
items in there and costings for that. That hopefully leads, to
answer your question, to an output like a licence, a venture,
a spin-out or a trade mark, some physical, tangible registered
trade mark or something that can commercialise the opportunity.
It is a fantastic programme that the Welsh Assembly should be
proud of. They looked around quite rigorously at other programmes
and came up with this and it is going to be formally launched
in October or November of this year, I believe, with Mr Andrew
Davis, and I have got the phone number of a person you can talk
to if you would like some more detail.
Q835 Mr Caton: That would be useful.
From some of the things that have already been said we have begun
to get the answers to this question, but I will put it anyway.
In your opinion is there a fair and equitable division of funds
between Welsh universities and universities from the rest of the
United Kingdom?
Mr Howard: No, we do not think
there is. You would expect that, would you not? Have you brought
your chequebooks with you? We have done an analysis of this. I
am part of a group in Wales called the Welsh Industrial Liaison
Officers' Group and we have put together a little table that shows
that there are 131 institutions in England and 14 in Wales. If
I could just talk about the 2004 Third Mission and be a little
bit selfish about my area, there is £45 million in the English
system and £3.1 million in the Welsh. That means that the
average fund per institution in England is £344,000 and in
Wales it is £221,000. That means that we have a variant with
England of 36%, which is £122,000. If you look at post-Lambert,
who suggests that we should have £50 million over three years,
so that is £150 million in total, then we are looking at
a continued deficit. There is a huge funding gap between Wales
and the rest of the UK.
Q836 Mr Caton: You mentioned in your
submission that the UK Government has said that it is committed
to the continuation of the "dual system of support for research".
Can you explain how that dual system works?
Mr Howard: I am not an expert
in this but I will tell you what I know. It has to do with the
research councils funding some research and also HEFCW funding
the other elements of research. The four star departments are
the ones who are getting the funding.
Professor Thomas: Under the dual
system the closed pot of funding for research investment in the
UK is done on a six-yearly cycle for research assessment exercise
purposes. Institutions submit their academic standard and the
work that they have done from a given period and then there is
a peer review panel that ascertains that research on a scoring
system of one to five and five-star. Above a four that entitles
you to some funds, a five and five-star means very good funds.
If you are a small institution or a young institution like NEWI
you have to get into that cycle to get that money, but inevitably
it takes about 12, maybe 18 years of probably the second or third
cycle to get into the four or five-star level unless you can have
good investment to bring in existing researchers. If you get below
a four you do not get the money. It is quite a cut-throat business
because you have to start targeting the academics who are capable
of submitting into a four or five-star scoring system and that
has resource implications for the workload. It is also disheartening
for those staff who feel that they might get nominated for the
next round. The other source of dual funding comes through the
Funding Council itself. In Wales they were funding for 3A systems
and some 3B's but that has now ceased or is due to cease very
shortly. For us at NEWI that is quite a blow because that 3A chemistry
that we put forward did not receive some funding from that pot
which will now cease and here we are—the next round will
be 2008 according to the Roberts Report. We now need to put in
four years of investment so that we can get more researchers and
more funding post-2008, so we will move all our efforts into the
RAE pot.
Q837 Mr Caton: What changes or improvements
would you like to see made for the support for research? I think
the RAE criteria are being reviewed at the moment. Do you foresee
improvements which will benefit institutions like NEWI?
Professor Thomas: We did contribute
to the Roberts Review; we sent papers into that. The view we have
at the moment is that if you are going to have an RAE system—and
there is pressure from the Russell Group of universities, for
instance, to ring-fence just to that group, which would leave
the other 110 universities out of the system altogether—there
should be an investment pot that allows institutions with twos
and threes to grow so that they can get the fives and five-stars.
We are utterly against focusing just on the top 20 universities,
first, because you are going to get geographical differences in
research, and secondly, it will affect the local economy and for
a country like Wales it will affect the economy country-wide.
We need to get researchers in with enterprise and that seems to
be a way of stopping that. We need investment in research capability.
We also need investment in research capacity. They go hand-in-hand.
Mr Howard: I would support that
and would also add to the point I made earlier about the KTP programme
which I flagged as such a flagship programme. If they link that
to five and five-star programmes it further disadvantages us.
We think that the projects should be based on merit and not on
the Russell Group or the five/five-star departments. We would
say that, would we not? The other institutions are probably quite
happy with the system. The further disadvantage that comes with
the KTPs with 30% of them being proposed to be focusing on five
and five-star departments means we lose out on those as well and
that is an area where we are really winning.
Professor Thomas: There is an
insidious problem of monopolism going on as well with movements
towards having a five-star university or five-star department
forming into those other institutions which do not match that,
so that they can put joint bids in for the equity of the funding
stream, and they also involve people in two and three levels to
develop their own research without relying too much on five-star.
Q838 Hywel Williams: I appreciate
our inquiry is into university funding but, making a tenuous link
with manufacturing, the system that we have at the moment does
not really seem to me to acknowledge that research goes hand-in-hand
with teaching for the teaching to be useful and for the teaching
then to be useful for people outside in manufacturing. For the
record would you agree with me?
Professor Thomas: Yes, because
there is a tendency in the review peer panel to focus on what
we call blue sky research. The applied research, which is where
we try to be experts at NEWI, that is our goal, means doing it
out there with the companies. With the Roberts Review there is
more movement towards that, thankfully, but in the past we have
certainly been disadvantaged by universities that have put forward
theoretical research which may have future applicability against
those areas that are doing applied research now.
Mr Howard: I would support that
and say that the applied research of course can lead to nice commercial
arrangements as well in terms of contract research and more Third
Mission activity. That would obviously contribute to our degree
awarding powers and that would enhance our profile internationally
as well as nationally.
Mr Tatler: That is the target
we have in engineering. Our approach is to have practical research
rather than the blue sky research which hopefully will have commercial
applications. One of the things that we are doing at the moment
is that we have a number of academics and the best way forward
for is to get practical research facilities to collaborate with
other colleagues in other institutions. That is the way we have
moved on.
Q839 Hywel Williams: Can I move on
to research and development? You say in your submission that R&D
is a significant factor in job and wealth creation, but you also
say "the financial regime in the HE sector means that the
provision of expertise must be paid for". Who pays for this
at the moment?
Professor Thomas: I would say
at the moment HEFCE pays for it.
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