CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 808-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE

 

 

Chief Executive of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC): Introductory Hearing

 

 

Wednesday 18 January 2006

PROFESSOR KEITH MASON

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1-87

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

 

1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.

 

2. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Science and Technology Committee

on Wednesday 18 January 2006

Members present

Mr Phil Willis, in the Chair

Adam Afriyie

Mr Robert Flello

Dr Evan Harris

Dr Brian Iddon

Margaret Moran

Mr Brooks Newmark

Bob Spink

Dr Desmond Turner

________________

Witness: Professor Keith Mason, Chief Executive, Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, Professor Keith Mason. I will call you Keith, as we have met informally before, if that is okay of course?

Professor Mason: Absolutely. I am an informal sort of a chap.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, and what exciting times you lead. You have only been in the job a few months and suddenly we are going to Mars and it is all down to you, sir. We are very impressed indeed, but we do congratulate you on your appointment, we are delighted that you are in front of us and can we say that the aim of this session is really to get to know you and indeed to find out a little bit about your thoughts. We do not publish a report on this particular session, but every word you say will be written down and could be used in evidence, as they say. I am going to ask my colleague, Adam Afriyie, to begin.

Q2 Adam Afriyie: Thank you very much, and good morning. I will call you Professor Mason because I do not know you quite so well. Welcome to your new job. You have said that there are many things that have frustrated you for so long and now, as chief executive, you can finally do something about them. What would be on the top of your list of things to do?

Professor Mason: As the Chairman has said we live in very exciting times and times of great potential for the future. We are on the verge of opening up the Large Hadron Collider and perhaps solving the mystery of mass; we are going to Mars as has already been mentioned, looking for life on Mars; we are probably going to measure gravitational waves for the first time, opening up a whole new area of astronomy, and at the same time the world is thinking about what the next step ought to be. We are talking in the PPARC area about world facilities, so during my term of office what I would like to do is essentially develop the UK as a centre of excellence in this sort of science. That means playing with the big boys, being at the centre of things, having the UK attract the best minds, the best ideas so that we can actually do fantastic new science, but also benefit from the spin-offs that occur in terms of intellectual property, technology and the economic benefits of this sort of cutting edge activity. There are three things that are at the top of my agenda really. Firstly, we need to reshape physics within the UK because we are playing on a world stage, we have to be competitive on a world stage, and I think many universities in the UK realise this and are already moving in that way across the whole gamut of science. My job in PPARC is to make sure that PPARC is in the centre of that activity so that we can develop centres of excellence within the UK that can compete within the world. The second thing is that most of our business within PPARC is engaged with international co-operation, we are part of our international organisations which are necessary in order to do these large projects. The UK needs to have a strong voice in those international organisations. We need to be at the centre there, we need to make sure that the UK agenda is heard and we need to make sure that PPARC acts as an advocate for the UK in these international organisations. These are European focused organisations by and large - CERN, ESO, ESA - and we need to make sure that those organisations do take a global view and not a European view because we are now in a global environment. The third thing is that we need to benefit from the work that we do - this is the knowledge transfer agenda essentially - and I think we have done very well in reaping those benefits, but we can do better and we need to organise ourselves, recognise that this is an integral part of what we should be about rather than an add-on, make sure we build it in from the start and actually get the huge benefits that come with working at the cutting edge.

Q3 Adam Afriyie: Your three goals are reshaping the area in the UK, international organisations co-operating and the UK taking the lead and then reaping some of the benefits for Britain of those advances.

Professor Mason: Yes.

Q4 Adam Afriyie: Why have those things not been achieved to the extent you would like so far?

Professor Mason: The world is changing. We are living in an evolving situation, so I do not think we have been remiss in the past but we need to keep up with the evolution of the rest of the world; we need to remain competitive. This move to globalisation in PPARC science is something that has been happening over the last decade and will accelerate in future. We cannot just sit back and let it happen, we have to make sure that we are ready and waiting and prepared for it and ahead of the game rather than catching up. Again, the knowledge transfer agenda is something that I know you are looking at and we have been looking at as well. Somehow the UK has perhaps not done this as well as other nations, perhaps, but we can certainly all do that better and, again, it is a matter of recognising that we do not live in ivory towers, that PPARC is not just engaged with pure science and forgets about the rest of the world but also looks at the consequences of what it is doing and advertises the consequences of what it is doing so that other people can benefit. It is making those links and making those links work better which is the key to actually improving the situation.

Q5 Adam Afriyie: You have a challenge to meet the priorities you have set yourself; do you see any other challenges over the next four years, maybe in terms of organisation or maybe in terms of refocusing what is happening at the moment or taking a look at the strategic plan?

Professor Mason: There are a number of challenges that flow down from those top level objectives. For example, looking at my own organisation, PPARC, it is a very capable set of people. Since I have been inside the organisation I am even more impressed with the job that they do but in order to remain competitive with the rest of the world one of the things I want to do is introduce more technical expertise within PPARC, because that is basically what we have to deal with with our international partners. Organisations like CNES, for example, have that embedded within them and unless we can fire with similar ammunition we will lose out, so we need to build up that sort of capability. The other challenge that flows down is to look at our programme very objectively and to keep tilling the ground; we need to make sure we are prepared for the new opportunities that come up and of course we have to do that within a limited budget, so inevitably we have to make room for the new activities and we have to be quite hard-nosed about, if necessary, shutting down existing activities that are perhaps - we are not doing anything that is not productive - on the start of the decline in order to invest in new things.

Q6 Adam Afriyie: Not to put you too much on the spot, but have you identified any areas where you have had concerns like that or you see there is a challenge from perhaps shutting down ---

Professor Mason: One of the things I have instigated since being in the job is something we call a programmatic review and we have a science committee that advises across the whole programme. I have instigated a process which will occur every two years now to take a very strong, hard look at what we are doing and prioritise the various areas. We are midway through that exercise. What is coming out of it actually is that, as I said before, we are not doing anything that is not front rank, so that means that if we want to make room for new things we have to take really tough decisions.

Q7 Adam Afriyie: Are you happy with the priorities you have inherited in the Strategic Plan that takes us to 2008? Are you comfortable with those priorities or are you at a stage now to say which priorities you would like to see changed perhaps?

Professor Mason: The Strategic Plan focuses on the future and we are engaged in programmes that will last 10 to 20 years, so they are not going to change very rapidly. I of course was a member of PPARC Council prior to taking this job so I was involved in producing those priorities and, by and large, I think they are spot on. We continually need to be refocusing, of course, as the world situation changes, but by and large I am happy with them.

Adam Afriyie: Thank you very much indeed.

Q8 Chairman: You talked about building a technical capacity; how are you going to go about doing that?

Professor Mason: There are a number of things we can do. First of all, we have many examples of where PPARC science activities have led to benefits elsewhere. If you have been through Heathrow Airport recently then you will see they are trialling body scanning machines to improve security. That is technology that came from the astronomy programme, that was technology that was developed in order to image planets and now we can use it for what is now called homeland security. This is an example of the sort of benefit that has always been there. Some of it has been exploited, I think more could, and one of the issues that we need to address is to advertise what we have more effectively. If industry does not know that something exists they cannot exploit it.

Q9 Chairman: I misunderstood what you meant by technical capacity. I am going to come on to knowledge transfer later.

Professor Mason: You mean within PPARC, I am sorry.

Q10 Chairman: You said you are going to have to build technical capacity in order to really move forward and I did not quite know what you meant by that.

Professor Mason: Essentially what I am talking about is on-the-ground skills in project management specifically. Within PPARC we have very good administrators, very good programme managers, very good financial people, but in the past we have relied on external expertise for the technical side, so if we want to engage in a technical discussion with our counterparts we are at a disadvantage, so I want to bring that into the organisation so that we have the experts on hand and can have a consistent view across it.

Q11 Chairman: I misunderstood that. We would certainly as a Committee like to congratulate you on winning further funding for the Aurora project from Government. The last time we met at the Treasury it was slightly in the balance, though it did seem to be in the bag, if you do not mind me saying so, at that time - there was a lot of champagne flowing. Did you expect the Government to put forward the whole £74 million?

Professor Mason: That is what we recommended that they do and we won the arguments, I think. The reasons that we advocated that is that we have now gone into Aurora as the second largest contributor, which means that we will be much better placed to win key roles within the organisation and therefore maximise the benefits. Had we gone in at less than the full amount then that would have severely eroded our ability to benefit from the great things that we can do with it.

Q12 Chairman: Where is the money coming from? Is it coming from the Treasury, is it coming from the Office of Science and Technology, is it coming from other science projects, where is it coming from? Is it new money in other words?

Professor Mason: There is new money from the last Spending Review; £40 million has gone in to support the programme up until 2007 when we get the next Spending Review. Beyond that we have a planning provision for the money that we need, but of course we have to make that case within the Spending Review context.

Q13 Chairman: This is what worries me and, to be honest, it worries the Committee, that there is some secure funding roughly until 2009, but thereafter there is real uncertainty. The Chancellor tells us that it is going to be very difficult at the next spending round and perhaps we cannot expect the same level of funding support for science and technology which, to be fair, has been very generous over the last two comprehensive Spending Reviews. How essential is it that you get a long term commitment to the Aurora project rather than working on these relatively short term cycles?

Professor Mason: It is absolutely essential, you cannot do a programme like this unless you know how much money is in the pot and you can plan it properly, otherwise you risk not reaping the benefit. This is a perennial problem, of course, you need to make that long term commitment to do these long term programmes, but virtually every country has a shorter approval cycle than that. All I can say is, yes, it does depend on making a strong case at the next Spending Review and beyond that, at subsequent Spending Reviews. We have a very strong case to make is what I would say, so I am very hopeful that we can be compelling in the need for doing this. If we do not get new resources, of course, we will have to take very hard decisions with regard to our existing PPARC programmes and the place that Aurora has within those.

Q14 Chairman: Do you regard human exploration as an essential part of Britain's contribution, or could you in fact bypass that and allow others to simply concentrate on that area and just deal with, if you like, the robotic aspects?

Professor Mason: There is no element of human exploration in the part of the Aurora programme that PPARC is contributing to, so we are only contributing to the robotic exploration element of that. In fact, within the current ESA programme there is only a very minor part that is focused on human exploration and that is a study for a possible crew transfer vehicle alongside the Russians and the Japanese. For the next several years I do not think human exploration is really going to figure highly. There was a report from the Royal Astronomical Society recently, which you probably have seen, looking at the potential requirements or not of human spaceflight, and I think that actually is a very welcome report because, for the first time, it lays out an adult debate about whether we need humans in space. There may well be scientific goals for the far distant future like deep drilling into the moon, for example, to find out the origin and scientific goals that will require humans, but what we need to do is to look at the scientific case, compare it against the other science that we want to do in terms of value for money and also scientific impact, and then you can make an educated decision as to whether the investment in human spaceflight is worth it or not. Right now we have not had that debate and we are not, but it is something that we should do so that we can be prepared for the future if that is the way the future turns out.

Q15 Chairman: You feel it is something of a distraction though to the main objectives of what PPARC and indeed our European partners are trying to do with Aurora.

Professor Mason: It is a potential distraction; it is not an actual distraction. When the Aurora programme started there were a lot of warm words about human spaceflight and the like, but the UK took a strong line that we should focus first of all on robotic development. That line has been echoed now by most of our other partners and, in fact, we won the day on that agenda and the agenda we signed up to is very heavily focused on robotic activity.

Q16 Chairman: I would just like your opinion on this. There is a slight contradiction for me of saying that those who put the most money in, therefore get if you like the largest slice of action as far as the programme is concerned, irrespective of whether they are best placed to deliver that part of the programme. Do you have a view on that?

Professor Mason: There is a danger in that.

Q17 Chairman: Is it a frustration?

Professor Mason: There is a potential danger in that, but in practice what happens is that we do a lot of preparatory work, so before we actually signed up for Aurora there was a study phase that we contributed to and we had been, for example, very active in just formulating what Aurora should look like and identifying where the expertise is to do it. I do not think in practice, certainly in this particular case, we will be in a situation where people who are paying the money cannot actually deliver the goods, and if we were we would have to take corrective action. It is a self-correcting process, the way we have organised it. The major contributors are Italy and they clearly have technical capabilities. They put the investment into developing the capabilities they want to provide and, similarly, the UK has and the other major partners have. I am very confident that that situation will not arise in Aurora.

Q18 Chairman: Would there be any circumstances in which you would recommend that we actually withdraw from the project?

Professor Mason: There could well be, yes, and we have actually insisted that such a milestone is built into the programme. There is a lot of preparatory work that has been done, but we are still in a definition phase. Over the next year or 18 months we will do some very hard engineering to determine whether our aspirations can be realised within the technical limitations of the mission and also the financial limitations of the mission. We have insisted that there is a review at that stage that says "Okay, is this what we wanted?" If it is not, we have the option to withdraw.

Q19 Mr Flello: Just sticking with Aurora for a few moments, you have talked about what you see from the project, but why did PPARC push so hard for funding for Aurora in the first place? What was the objective behind it?

Professor Mason: You have to go back to realise that our view of Mars has really been revolutionised over the last decade. The earliest probes that went there suggested that Mars was rather a dead, boring, nothing happening sort of a place. In contrast, in recent times we have now superb imaging from the European Mars Express, for example, fantastic 3D images. It is quite clear from the evidence that has been carried from that and from the US efforts that Mars in the dim and distant past had a thick atmosphere and surface water, and that it was very much more earth-like than it appears to be now. We now know that there is volcanic activity continuing on Mars, there is evidence from methane, and we have now seen images of surface ice which ten years ago had been regarded as science fiction. There is also evidence for large amounts of sub-surface water. Mars is therefore an incredibly important place to study, both to see climate change in action, to understand how it got to where it is today from a situation where it was potentially much more earth-like, and also the big question is whether life has ever evolved beyond our own planet. Given the conditions that existed on Mars in the past it is quite possible that life would have developed there. We also have learnt in the last ten years that life is a lot more resilient than we thought it was, we have discovered life in very hostile environments on the earth, it can persist, so one of the exciting things about the Exo-Mars project that we have signed up to is that we will be able to drill below the surface. The surface layers of Mars are bathed in UV radiation so the previous attempts have not shown any evidence of life - that is perhaps not surprising since it has been sterilised. If you go down a couple of metres, however, you are protected, so that would be the place to actually make the first searches, either for existing life or, more likely, for evidence that life did evolve in the past. That would have profound implications for society as a whole, so it is a very important scientific area.

Q20 Mr Flello: Indeed, thank you for that. The funding for Aurora may have come at the expense of other projects. Is that a reasonable statement to make and if the Aurora funding has come at the expense of other projects would Bepi-Columbo be a good example of one that it has come from?

Professor Mason: No, Bepi-Columbo is entirely decoupled from funding for Aurora. The situation on Bepi-Columbo and the difficulties that I believe you are alluding to that we have in funding it in the UK really stem from the Spending Review 2004 and the fact that within the PPARC budget there was a lot of money for science in the Spending Review 2004 but it was all aimed at fixing the infrastructure, which needed fixing, and I am quite happy with that. Apart from this ear-marked money for Aurora there was no increase in the baseline for the rest of the PPARC programme, which effectively means that the volume of the programme is declining by twice the rate of inflation because the subscription element is protected. In those circumstances we just do not have the level of resource that we really need in order to service programmes like Bepi-Columbo, which means that we have to make hard choices, as I said earlier. We are funding involvement in Bepi-Columbo, but only at half the rate that we thought we really needed to.

Q21 Mr Flello: In terms of the capabilities developed by the Beagle project, how can PPARC ensure that they are fed into the Aurora programme?

Professor Mason: Despite the fact that Beagle did not work it ultimately was a huge success in bringing up our capabilities in this sort of area. I do not think we could have really been a serious player within Aurora without the capability that was generated by Beagle, so we have raised the bar in terms of capability, we are using the expertise of the people who developed Beagle and we want to feed those into Aurora to make sure that we have a very strong role there.

Q22 Mr Flello: In terms of the longer term funding of projects and long lead times for many projects, do you feel that PPARC responds sufficiently flexibly to the opportunities, or do you think that the necessary lead time makes that impossible?

Professor Mason: This is a long-standing problem of course and we must put ourselves in the situation where we can both plan for these long term opportunities which will be the ground-breaking opportunities in 10, 20, 30 years time, but also retain sufficient flexibility to be responsive when new developments come up. For example, over the past few years we have discovered that there is a whole new component of the universe that we did not realise was there, dark energy, which actually dominates the whole universe in terms of the amount of energy that is involved, and we clearly cannot be so fixed in our goals that we cannot respond to such a major discovery, and we are doing so, we are adapting the powers that we have in order to take this into account, in order to address these problems and make progress with them. It is a continual balancing act and within PPARC we have to develop the discipline so that we are not short-termists and we are not long-termists but we have some sort of middle ground which allows us to take a considered view of the whole programme and make sure that we are active in all of these areas.

Q23 Mr Flello: It is interesting you referred to dark energy rather than dark matter.

Professor Mason: We still have not solved that one and then we have got another one to solve.

Q24 Mr Flello: I just wanted to return to a point you were discussing a few moments back about the industrial return to UK companies and their positioning and, obviously, the likes of Alcatal in Italy benefit from their largest contribution. There was a deficit in terms of UK companies' return from the ESA subscription; is that still the case and why did that develop, what was the reason behind that?

Professor Mason: First of all let me clarify that for Aurora it is a subscription programme, so there is a very hard link between what you put in and what you get back, so the under-return issue will not arise in Aurora. There has been an under-return in the ESA mandatory science programme, which is improving but it is still not as good as we would want. It is a matter of concern as to why this has arisen and, ultimately, because these contracts are awarded in competition it means there are industries not competing with the rest of Europe and we need to address that. It is beyond the PPARC remit, but we need to seriously look as to what sort of R&D and underpinning investment goes into these areas in industry in order to prepare them to be competitive, because we have a different way of doing things in the UK compared to many other European countries, it is not a level playing field, so we have to look and see what is there. The other issue is just marshalling industry, making them aware of the opportunities and making them aware that they put their resources in, they see the market opportunities, and they see the spin-out benefits to their own performance that can be gained by working in these areas. What PPARC can do is to work in that area to make sure that industry is aware of what our requirements are, what the requirements of the science programme are going to be so that they are in a position to know that they can prepare. We cannot force them to prepare, but we can certainly provide them with the information.

Chairman: We will return to this in just a second, but can I just bring you in quickly, Bob?

Q25 Bob Spink: What a wonderful and challenging concept you just gave us when you said go to Mars and see climate change in action. Do you think that by going up there and investigating Mars we will be able to find any sort of causal process for that climate change, for instance, what part carbon might have played in that? Do you think this is a very useful area of investigation?

Professor Mason: It is, because we are clearly very concerned about the evidence for climate change on the earth, and if you look and see what that evidence is based on, it is both measurement and modelling. People are developing quite sophisticated but still on the scale of nature quite crude models of how the earth's climate system is behaving and how it will respond to a number of stimuli. The problem with doing modelling is that you have got to test those models, you have got to validate them, and the problem with the earth is that there is only one of it and so it is how it is. You cannot tweak it and say what would it be like if I had done this or done that, so the only way to do that is to look at other planets, and both Venus and Mars have a role to play in that. The whole concept of greenhouse warming came from trying to understand Venus - that was where I first heard the term, in the context of Venus in the 1960s. We have a probe that is on its way to Venus, Venus Express, which will begin to examine the Venus climate system and, essentially, make measurements which give you another point to validate our model. So if you tweak things in the way that we see they are on Venus, do our models predict what Venus looks like? Likewise, we can do the same with Mars and say in these circumstances would we have expected Mars to have lost its atmosphere over the five billion years of its existence, what would we have expected to happen to surface water et cetera. That is where the value of these investigations lies, they give us other examples that we can use to validate our models of the earth.

Q26 Mr Flello: You talk in terms of what could be done to change the deficit in terms of the ESA subscription and I was just wondering what is actually happening now rather than what could be done?

Professor Mason: That is what we are doing and this comes down to the knowledge transfer agenda which I guess we will come onto.

Q27 Dr Turner: You have a roadmap identifying the large facilities for the future; how effective do you think this process is? Do you, for instance, think you will be able to fund all PPARC projects that you have got on your list, or are some of them going to have to be expendable?

Professor Mason: The idea of a roadmap is that it is not the list of things you would buy; it is the list of things that allows you to construct a causal programme. The purpose of the roadmap is to identify opportunities and to enable a process which then decides as to which of those opportunities you go after. A lot of factors come into that, for example, timescale and money being two very important ones but also the scientific benefit, the scientific direction that you want to move in. This comes back to the issue that we have that I mentioned at the beginning, that a number of these facilities are actually global facilities, so we not only have to understand what we are doing in the UK but we also have to understand what we are doing globally, we have to build consensus, and unless we have a roadmap which identifies our needs and the possible needs, then it is impossible to go and have a sensible discussion with international partners about what we actually do.

Q28 Dr Turner: If you have to drop anything from your wish list, what would be the first to go?

Professor Mason: That is an impossible question to answer because it depends on the circumstances. Just to give you an example, there are three large facilities that we are thinking about - very large, global facilities - the International Linear Collider, extremely large telescopes and a very large Radio Array. The reality is that the world cannot afford to do all three at the same time, so the issue is what order you do them in and that is something that has to be established by consensus with all the partners involved because clearly the UK cannot decide it wants to go down one road and somebody else decide the other, so it is not a matter of which do you drop from the list, we want to do them all at some stage, but it is a question of what order you do them in. That is what we are working on now; in the case of all three of those projects we are in the stage of actually defining what is required to construct them, what technology will need to be used, what is the readiness of that technology which sets the timescale and, therefore, what is the cost. That will determine when we can do them.

Q29 Dr Turner: The UK is continuing its tradition of building detectors or massive colliders and we are building ATLAS and CMS for the Large Hadron Collider. Are these projects on time and on budget?

Professor Mason: They are certainly on time. The goal is to start operation of the LHC in 2007 and, just as an aside, I had the privilege of visiting CERN just before Christmas and actually seeing these things coming together. They are absolutely amazing; 26 kilometres of magnets to focus this beam which is only a micron wide and these massive battleship detectors that fill these huge caverns. It is absolutely incredible. Enthusiasm aside, they are on track to start operation in 2007, there will be some upgrades that are required to bring them up to the full spec and it is no secret that the LHC is costing somewhat more than was the original estimate, which means that we are essentially going to be paying for it until 2009/2010, but it is such a challenging, technical thing I do not think we should be surprised by that and, in fact, the amazing thing is that it is only 10 per cent over budget, rather than a factor of two like the American project which got cancelled once. These are very, very difficult problems and it takes a lot of bright people a lot of effort to actually get to where we have got.

Q30 Bob Spink: I am going to talk about the International Linear Collider, and I just want to return to astronomy very briefly at the end. Has a location been decided yet?

Professor Mason: No.

Q31 Bob Spink: Where do you think it will be?

Professor Mason: My guess would be in the US.

Q32 Bob Spink: What are the major obstacles to it actually happening?

Professor Mason: We are in the process, as I said earlier, of doing a technical definition. We have chosen a technology and now there is a design study going ahead which, by the end of the decade, will tell us whether it is feasible, what we need to do and what it is going to cost. The main obstacle to getting it done is cost.

Q33 Bob Spink: This design stage, the engineering design, it is targeted for 2008, is it not, and to build it by 2015?

Professor Mason: 2008 to 2009 is when the technical design study is supposed to be finished. Another element that will have to be fed into that is the first results from the LHC because that will fine tune the physics that we think we need to do, which will feed back into the technical development. By 2010 I hope we will have both that plus the initial results of LHC and then we could go ahead and build it; the earliest possible time that it could be ready is 2015, but my guess is that it will be somewhat later than that because of the financial pressures.

Q34 Bob Spink: Is the UK really getting involved in the engineering design phase? Is it being carved up so that little modules are done by different teams, or are all teams looking at everything? Can you explain how that is working?

Professor Mason: A project office has been set up with a project director, so the whole thing is being orchestrated from there, and that is currently located in the US. There is a European centre too looking at specific aspects of the programme, so it is not quite all being divided up but it is being done in logical units. The UK is concentrating on specific elements and the other thing we are doing is developing capacity and capability. We have funded accelerator centres ---

Q35 Bob Spink: Are we going to be able to do that sufficiently to play a continuing part in this when it is properly up and running?

Professor Mason: Yes, absolutely, that is our aim. If we did not feel that we could do that we would not do it at all.

Q36 Bob Spink: When you bang the electrons into the positrons, what actually happens? Why are we doing that? What do we hope to get out of this?

Professor Mason: This is straying beyond my field, I should say, but basically what you are doing is creating a very small region which has a very, very high energy density, so at those very high energy densities you are essentially trying to duplicate the conditions of the beginning of the universe and the Big Bang, where the particles that are stable under normal conditions cease to be stable and you see a different state, you see their components. That is the essence of what you do with one of these colliders, the LHC is the same. You create these very small volumes of very high energy density so that matter and the particles that make up matter revert to their virgin state, if you like, and you can understand where they come from and how they work.

Q37 Bob Spink: The Neutrino Factory is even more complicated. You have the decay of the muon that creates this intense beam of neutrinos.

Professor Mason: You know more about it than I do.

Q38 Bob Spink: Is this going to be located in the UK? Should it be?

Professor Mason: It could be if we played our cards right and those cards would need to be funding to put the infrastructure and the R&D in place in order to give us the world lead on that.

Q39 Bob Spink: The total cost is estimated to be £2 billion. If it is located in the UK it would be about £1 billion, 50 per cent, and if we just take part in it and it is located somewhere else it is £200 million, so the marginal cost to us having it is £800 million. Would that be worth it? What extra value could we get for that best part of £1 billion?

Professor Mason: It could well be worth it; the extra value is essentially that the focus of the activity is in the UK. This goes back to what I was saying earlier, that what we want to do is to ensure that the UK is a centre of excellence in this field so that we do attract all the things that gravitate to a centre of excellence which means the best people and the best ideas. These activities generate an economy all of their own around them, and a good example which I always use, going back to the space business, is ESTEC in the Netherlands. We could have had ESTEC in the UK in the 1960s, but there was a decision taken not to host it. If you see now what the benefit of having that centre in the Netherlands is to the economy of that local area, it is huge. The real benefit is having the people and the activity centred on the UK so that it acts as a focus for our own scientists.

Bob Spink: I would hope that you are pushing on an open door, in this Committee at least on that. Going back to space and astronomy, what is PPARC doing to try to make sure that we get involvement in our secondary schools right the way across this country?

Chairman: Can we just leave that until a little bit later, Bob, because we are going to deal with the whole of science in society a bit later if that is okay. Could I move on now to our financial guru, Brooks.

Q40 Mr Newmark: Professor, a lot of your answers have come down to money and obviously money drives a lot of what your decision-making is about. My first question is as to the impact of the 2004 Spending Review upon PPARC's budget allocations. To give a lead into this, you previously wrote to us that you have had to "scale down ambitions in the short-term"; what has this meant in practice?

Professor Mason: Let me articulate perhaps what the problem is much more clearly. Like I said, the new money that went into science - which we benefited from too and I am very happy with - went into infrastructure. Apart from the Aurora money there was no new money for our core domestic programme and one of the features of the PPARC budget is that half of the PPARC budget goes on international subscriptions to CERN, ESO, ESA and these are NNI related, so effectively they are protected against inflation, whereas the rest of the PPARC budget is effectively flat cash and received no increases in 2004. The net effect is that the spending power of the rest of our programme, the domestic part of our programme, is shrinking by twice inflation per year in round numbers. That is the essence of the problem and that is why we have had to scale back our ambitions to start some of these new activities and why we are having to take an even harder look at the things we are currently doing in order to free up space within the shrinking resource in order to do these new things.

Q41 Mr Newmark: Are you concerned then that the next Spending Review has been delayed until 2007. What impact has this had on your planning and spending?

Professor Mason: The fact that it is delayed is not as important, because the money would not have flowed until that time anyway, but if there is not an increase in volume in our core programme at the next Spending Review then we are going to have to take very painful decisions, we are going to have to limit our ambitions, possibly limit the breadth of the activity that we are engaged in.

Q42 Mr Newmark: Is there anything in particular that you are concerned with that is going to hamper effectively your area plc, the UK, in terms of us being a centre of excellence?

Professor Mason: Indeed, you are having to fight with two hands tied behind your back. Unless you put these investments in, you cannot hope to have a future. The only way to free up money is to stop doing things that we are currently doing, and most of the things that we are currently doing involve international partnerships as well, so not only are you stopping something in the UK, you are also stopping something abroad. That creates a very bad atmosphere; it undermines the UK as a credible partner in these organisations, so it is a very thin line that one has to walk in order to manage a situation like this.

Q43 Mr Newmark: What is happening with regard to restructuring and staffing reductions at your three institutes, and are these changes directly due to these funding restrictions that you have talked about?

Professor Mason: The three institutes that we have are the ATC in Edinburgh and the two small island sites that are run, La Palma and Hawaii. In terms of the island sites, when we joined ESO in 2002 the plan was there to move from essentially a UK provision of ground-based astronomy to work within ESO, so the plan has always been that we would divest ourselves of those facilities as soon as it was financially practicable to do that; essentially that is 2009. In terms of PPARC's spend, PPARC's responsibility for our staff on those islands will diminish over time. That either means that we close the thing entirely and they get laid off or we find some other organisation that might like to take them over - and we are presently looking at such possibilities - so that the centres themselves continue but not under PPARC control.

Q44 Chairman: Can you give us an indication of how much we spend on those centres, just to give the Committee a feel for it? Just to be clear, those are the Joint Astronomy Centre, the Isaac Newton Group and the Astronomy Technology Centre, is that right?

Professor Mason: That is correct. It is mostly manpower so the total PPARC staff is about 320, of which 83 are in these overseas centres and 117 are in Edinburgh, so it is a sizeable fraction of the total staff.

Q45 Chairman: If you could let us have a note after on the costing of that.

Professor Mason: Absolutely, no problem.[1]

Q46 Mr Newmark: You have to play Solomon a bit between astronomy and particle physics; therefore, how do you try to balance the funding that is allocated between those two areas and to what extent are consultations with stakeholder communities of any help?

Professor Mason: One of the things that my predecessor did and I was heavily involved in also was to set up our present science committee. PPARC, as you know, was formed by splitting off SCRC and it had particle physics and astronomy in it, which were two separate activities within SCRC. They continued as separate activities by and large within PPARC for a number of years, but one of the things we have done over the last three to four years is to invent this thing called science committee, which has representation from both particle physics and astronomy and looks at the whole programme and essentially provides advice on this sort of balance. This actually works very well. I was very anxious in setting this up that we did not get to a situation where this committee was polarised and you had advocates from one side and the other just fighting each other; it has not worked out that way at all, we have managed to get a very good working relationship where people are seeing the science across the patch. The other benefit of that as an aside is that it has also brought out the synergy between the two sides. You might think that particle physics and astronomy are poles apart, but in actual fact they are not, there is a lot of synergy between them, both in terms of technical capability and also scientific interest, and so we have been able to develop a consensus across the whole community, at least at the science committee level, as to the directions that we are taking; we need to continue to do that. Inevitably, it is taking longer to achieve that merger of interests amongst the community than it is at the top level, but we are getting there and we are pushing that agenda forward. As a total aside, one of the things I did in my old institution before taking up this job was to convince the vice-chancellor there to set up a laboratory that was joint between the particle physics and astronomy and space science efforts in University College, London. That sort of thing is happening on the ground and it means that people are buying into the other programme, so the astronomers understand now why the LHC is important and the particle physics people, hopefully, are beginning to understand why space science is important.

Q47 Mr Newmark: Am I to deduce from that that funding for the two different areas through one Research Council is not problematic in terms of administration?

Professor Mason: It is something we are dealing with.

Q48 Mr Newmark: How will the forthcoming international review inform your future funding priorities? For example, will you seek to build on the strengths and try and bolster weak areas and what are those? Is there sufficient funding to retain strength right across the board?

Professor Mason: There is in the short term. As I said, unless we get more investment into this area then the long term is less certain, but certainly in the short term it is okay. Projects are always cheap at the beginning and that is where you need to put the investment in actually to keep them as cheap as possible. We are now in those study phases so we are able to afford to participate in those studies. If too many of those programmes move to a big spending capital phase too soon for our budget, then we will not be able to participate in all of them.

Chairman: Do you mind if we move on? That is a classic line; projects are always cheap at the beginning, like children.

Q49 Dr Iddon: Now for something completely different: I want to look at full economic costing which is quite controversial in academia at the moment, I gather. Do you think that all your academics have woken up to the fact that they are going to be operating under this new regime of full economic costing?

Professor Mason: I think they are stretching and rubbing their eyes, so they are getting there, but it is a big change and I am sure that we will not see the full effects or even the full consequences as far as the sociological behaviour of the community is concerned for a number of years yet.

Q50 Dr Iddon: What has your organisation done to communicate with your academic community and has it been effective?

Professor Mason: We have tried to be totally upfront about what the implications are. We have issued very clear guidelines to academics as to how the full economic cost regime will work. One of the consequences, just to give you an example, is that now we will be paying for researchers' time directly, and one of the things I have been very clear to people about is that if we are paying for somebody's time directly, we will expect them to put that time in, so we are not going to be paying for people to do other things. That is one of the consequences, people are going to have to change the way they think about stuff and that is a very beneficial thing because one of the ironies about our university system is that our brightest researchers are engaged in administration or teaching or whatever, when they should be doing research -

Q51 Dr Iddon: Or going out into the community.

Professor Mason: Or going out into the community. One of the consequences of full economic costs will be that universities will be forced to recognise the value of their academics' time, to think about how it is being deployed and not fritter it away on things that are unnecessary.

Q52 Dr Iddon: What is going to be the impact on the work that you fund? Do you think that it is going to reduce the number of applications you are going to receive from your academic community?

Professor Mason: As you know, in this first stage the aim is to pay 80 per cent of the full economic costs. That was a number that was derived by modelling of the grant portfolio across the Research Councils and, given the amount of money that was available, that is what we thought we could fund. Unfortunately, that is a modelling exercise. The reality, certainly in the PPARC area, is that it is going to cost more than we had anticipated from that modelling to actually get us up to the 80 per cent level. That is still a provisional statement, because we have not had very many grants yet going through at full economic cost so we cannot validate this modelling very precisely. We will have a much better idea in six months time when we get some of the big grants through. My guess right now is that we are going to be looking at a 10 per cent reduction in volume as a consequence.

Q53 Dr Iddon: It is going to affect all those projects that we have been talking about, obviously.

Professor Mason: Yes, another pressure in the system.

Q54 Chairman: Ten per cent is pretty savage, given the comments you made earlier about the reducing inputs into various programmes.

Professor Mason: Absolutely.

Q55 Dr Iddon: We were worried about the charitable funding, we thought that it was going to be very difficult for the charities but they would not pay full economic cost. Of course, the Government has made £90 million available now through its agencies to support charity work on top of what the charities can afford themselves. Is that going to be enough in your area, do you think?

Professor Mason: We have very little work sponsored by charities in the PPARC area so I have no direct experience of that. I am not really qualified to answer; my only knowledge comes from my previous life in the university.

Q56 Dr Iddon: Perhaps more importantly the Committee were also worried about the framework programmes. Could you tell us something about the impact of full economic costing on the money that your academics receive from framework funding?

Professor Mason: Clearly, there has always been an assumption underlying framework funding that there is matching funding from the country or institute that is being supported, and inevitably that is going to put another strain on full economic costs. We might well see - I do not know that this is going to happen - that universities essentially have built in the lack of compensation on either charity or framework funding into their full economic cost bids to Research Councils, so it might well end up that we are subsidising that, but I do not know that for a fact.

Q57 Dr Iddon: I would expect the framework funding in your area of activity is quite high; is that assumption correct?

Professor Mason: It is reasonably high, I do not think it is as high as it perhaps could be - it is certainly not as high as in some areas. One of the reasons is that framework funding is good at promoting international collaboration and we already do a lot of stuff by international collaboration, so it is kind of hard to make the case if you already have a working international collaboration going, that you need money from the framework programme to start one up or whatever. There have been very good examples of where framework funding has been won; one recent one is one of these big projects that I mentioned to you, the Square Kilometre Array, the very large radio array, where we in PPARC had put in funding for a design study alongside the Netherlands and we have had some framework funding to bolster that, to add to that.

Q58 Chairman: Could I pop in on this question just to say that as a Committee we are concerned about the whole business about framework funding and particularly we hope that ultimately we can have it as additionality European funding rather than replacement funding which appears to be in some institutions and some programmes. We recently wrote to HM Treasury following the pre-Budget Statement where in fact the Chancellor did appear to say that he was going to relax or change the rules. What is your understanding of what he said in the Budget?

Professor Mason: I am not really in a position to comment on that, I do not think I can add to your knowledge.

Q59 Dr Iddon: Has the academic community in general welcomed full economic costs or is it rather suspicious?

Professor Mason: The academic community is always going to be suspicious of change and there is no difference here. Seriously, it is unwelcome in the sense that in the short term at least it is a big distraction from getting on with the job because there have been new university systems in place, people are having to do a lot of extra work to gear up for full economic costs, but I think the overall impression among the people I have talked to in the academic community is that once it is in place it will be a better system. I have outlined some of the benefits, but you see directly what you are getting, there is no double-counting, there is no double jeopardy, which is even more important. We had got ourselves into a situation where our capability for doing research within universities had been severely eroded by lack of investment. If you are paying for it upfront then it is much clearer and much easier to track to make sure it happens.

Dr Iddon: Thank you very much indeed.

Q60 Margaret Moran: Coming back to knowledge transfer, you indicated earlier on that you felt there was room for improvement in PPARC on this, and you have also said previously that you think there is a need for more "joined-up thinking" along the "science food chain". Where in the science food chain do you think things have not been functioning as they should? How do you think that PPARC can help to encourage that joined-up thinking?

Professor Mason: The most glaring example of the break in the food chain is between the research community and industry; there is nothing very profound in that statement, it is something that people have recognised for a long time. That is where we are working to build the bridges, to put the links back into the chain, and there are a number of things that we are doing in this regard. I strayed into this area earlier and I will just repeat myself for completeness, but one of the important things is to advertise what we have so that people know where the opportunities are. The other thing we are doing is to involve industry at a much earlier stage in the R&D process for these missions. The Aurora programme is a perfect example of that where, right from the outset, we were talking to industry about what the requirements were, what their capabilities were, how we might match those, how we might make a credible bid, as I was saying earlier, into this programme, where we not only had the desire to do it but also the capability to do it so those things are joined-up. What we intend to do is to do that much more widely for all of these programmes so that industry is then geared up to take advantage of the opportunity, rather than you get an AO from ESA saying they want this and that and then they suddenly start to have to think about it, which clearly is not good in a competitive situation. The other thing that we are doing and we are accelerating on is developing knowledge transfer networks. I think networks are a really good vehicle, and basically what they are is that you get to know the people involved with the various parts of the network, you have the contacts in place, so that when an idea comes up you know exactly who to call or you know who to talk to, you know what their interests are. That is a crude way of describing how the network works, but what we are doing is to encourage people to come together, we are running seminars; we are disseminating the information that we have in order to advise people of where they should be working and how they should take advantage of things. The fourth step that we are taking is to embed knowledge transfer - I said this earlier but I will just repeat it - into our whole process, so that people do not think of knowledge transfer as an add-on, but it is there from the very beginning. So we are requiring our proposers, when they make a proposal for a scientific investigation, to provide a knowledge transfer plan alongside that. If they do not have the expertise to generate such a plan we will help them do it, we will provide the assistance that will raise the awareness in this area. Once they have approval for a programme we will work with those investigators to essentially broker contacts with industry that might be interested in what they are doing. A combination of all those factors - I can summarise this by the words that we are embedding this in our organisation and I think we will do a lot better as a result. We are also planning to increase, incidentally, the amount we spend on this sort of brokering, network activity, we are going to double it by 2007 compared to 2004. We are doing what we can, therefore, in this area, but as I said at the beginning it is not all under PPARC's control, we can do our bit but we require the rest of the system, the rest of the chain, to respond accordingly, but there is every prospect that people want to do that.

Q61 Margaret Moran: You talked about brokering partnerships with industry. Unusually, you use an industrial co-ordinator to do that; what are the costs and benefits of doing that and how can you measure the effectiveness?

Professor Mason: One of the jobs of the co-ordinator is to come up with the metrics whereby you can do the measurement, but clearly the most effective measurement is by tracking the number of activities that they get started and how successful they are, and that is what we are doing. It is important to make these quantitative metrics, but it is also important to just take the temperature of the community at various times. One of the programmes we have pioneered a lot of these ideas on is Aurora, and I was impressed, when we set up these meetings where people were invited, just at the level of response from industry, from the academic community and the enthusiasm that you could just feel within the room for this activity. I think that really is the measure of success and we need to keep that spirit going, it is really an entrepreneurial spirit, it is a can-do spirit, and we need to make sure that that is embedded in the system that then gets perpetuated.

Q62 Margaret Moran: Do you think the effectiveness of using an industrial co-ordinator is particular to PPARC, or is it something that other Research Councils could learn from?

Professor Mason: It has been very effective within PPARC and I see no reason why it could not be equally effective in other areas, but of course each Research Council has specific focus, specific requirements, they are all different from one another. I would be surprised if a different Research Council could implement it exactly the same way as we do, but it is the principle of having a facilitator - that is what I like to call these people. They are the people who make the links, so they go out there and do the legwork and actually make things happen. Having such a person is always going to be valuable in my book.

Q63 Dr Turner: You have refocused your Industrial Programme Support Scheme (PIPSS). What made you do that and how are you going to assess the new version?

Professor Mason: It has been refocused into this knowledge transfer agenda essentially; it is just one of the steps we have taken to improve the links and we will assess that in the same way as the whole programme - that is to see what comes out of it. In a sense the refocusing means that we are tracking it better, we are essentially doing what I was describing earlier: people, when they put in a PIPSS proposal now have to have a knowledge transfer plan associated with that, so it is something that is embedded from the outset and we will see, during the course of assessing the outcomes of these things which we normally do, whether it has made a difference in terms of the volume of knowledge transfer.

Q64 Dr Turner: You have chosen to directly fund industry; how does industry respond to this, does it show much interest, and what percentage of the fund is going to be coming from this investment programme? Is this reflecting the gaps in the venture capital market in Britain?

Professor Mason: I could not comment on the latter but first of all industry are very enthusiastic about this but we have to be very careful to realise that PPARC is not the DTI and we should not be doing the job that DTI is there to do. We are very careful about the sort of schemes that we have set up, we are focusing on research and development which serves the PPARC science agenda, so essentially all we are doing is treating industry like a university group. If they want to do something that serves the PPARC agenda, that develops capability that is important for doing our science, then why not fund them because they have the capability to do it. Currently, the amount of money that will be open to this scheme is relatively small, but it is an important fraction of our money where we are looking at future investment, blue skies research, developing new ideas. Like I say, if an industry group can make a compelling case that they can do this job as well or better than a university group, then there is no reason why we should not fund them.

Q65 Dr Turner: Have you had any problems with intellectual property in your knowledge transfer schemes and does it raise itself as an issue when negotiating collaborative projects?

Professor Mason: PPARC does not hold any intellectual property so in that sense it is not an issue for us.

Q66 Dr Turner: Is that a deliberate policy, that you do not hold any?

Professor Mason: Yes, it would make life much too complicated if we did. What we are about is generating intellectual property within other organisations. When you have collaboration between industry and a university, that is a potential minefield, but it is not specific to our type of science and these organisations are developing ways of dealing with this and it has been done very successfully. So I do not see that that is a particular barrier to doing what we want to do.

Q67 Dr Turner: You referred to the terahertz imaging earlier, has it been a problem there, for instance, where the technology is actually going out to a much wider market?

Professor Mason: I am not aware of any problems.

Q68 Chairman: Could I just follow up on that? You said that roughly half the budget goes in international subscriptions; how in fact does the knowledge transfer operate when in fact you are on international collaborative programmes? If you take the Aurora project, for instance, where bits of it are being developed in different countries, do we get access to that intellectual property in order to take advantage of it for the knowledge transfer? How does that work?

Professor Mason: It is much more difficult, and this is why we have been very careful in the case of Aurora to focus down and to bid for elements where we think we have a good opportunity to get the knowledge transfer benefits within the UK. In the more general sense though, our subscriptions to ESA, for example, a lot of that money does go to technology developments and in fact the research that led to the terahertz activity was funded by ESA through this route, using our money essentially. One of the other steps that we are taking to improve the situation is to hold workshops and to have a brokering service that looks to see the things that have been developed within these international organisations and make those available to the UK. We are part of that, we have helped to pay for them, and so there is no reason why we cannot exploit them provided we have the capability. We want to make sure that UK companies take a European perspective.

Q69 Chairman: When we are looking at our thematic approach to the Research Councils in terms of knowledge transfer, this is an area where it would be well worth us getting some response on, as to how in fact we deal with international, global knowledge, and how we get access to that. I am thinking of areas like materials science, for instance, where clearly there are huge opportunities within the space programme of being able to tap into some of that technology as far as British business is concerned.

Professor Mason: Yes.

Q70 Chairman: Could I move on very swiftly to science in society. Obviously RCUK have a major objective of trying to engage society with science, and that is absolutely right. An alarm bell rang in the question earlier about the 80 per cent full economic costing proposals, that scientists would be engaged on their research and would not be taking their research out into society. What initiatives have you got in place to actually engage broader society?

Professor Mason: First of all, to silence that alarm bell, in the same way as we are embedding knowledge transfer into the process we also want to embed science in society into the whole grant, project application process, so basically in the future not only will investigators have to come up with a knowledge transfer plan, they will also have to come up with a science in society plan. Again, the same things apply: not everybody is good at this work, but if they are not good at it we will help them, or we will find people who can help them. It is not going to be an optional extra any more, we are going to require that people actually make the results that they achieve known to the rest of the world because that is the right and proper thing to do. In order to assist that process we are also investing money in developing materials that they can use, multimedia material for example - a film about the Large Hadron Collider is worth 1000 words and it is worth putting some central funding into getting a really good film clip that you can put on the Web or take to a presentation, it pays for itself in terms of effectiveness. The other thing we are doing, of course, and we continue to do, we have invested in a number of specific facilities in the astronomy area and we have invested in the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, they are revamping their whole display area. This is an organisation that gets a million visitors a year so it is a very high impact; we have put £500,000 into developing an astronomy gallery that presents modern astronomy to these people. We have also, as you know, put funding into the Faulkes Telescope Project to bring astronomy to schools, which is a fantastic initiative that really brings the thing alive. One of the things we have done in the past is to fund a travelling exhibit on particle physics to explain the LHC. There are some very difficult concepts, so you really need to put the effort into getting those concepts into a form that you can convey to the wider public, never mind school kids.

Q71 Chairman: You have made it absolutely clear - indeed, Bob referred to it earlier - that in schools the decline in students after the age of 16 studying stem subjects is a big issue for particle physics and astronomy, but it is also a big issue for most of science. I visited the National Science Learning Centre in York last Friday and they did not seem to have much contact with you; if we are not educating the teachers and developing their knowledge - what can you do more to engage with the regional and national learning centres because you have a fantastic tale to tell?

Professor Mason: We have an open door. I gave a talk two weeks ago at Reading at the ASE conference - Association of Science Educators Conference - which had about 2000 science teachers from across the country. We have an annual PPARC lecture there where we bring this sort of thing to attention, and one of the things I said there is that we have an open door, we are there to help you. The problem is that we have limited resources, we are not the Department for Education and we do not have the resources to go out to every school, but what we do have is a willingness to make what we are doing available to anybody who wants to use it. It is quite frustrating sometimes that you send this message and people still say we have never heard of what you are doing, but perhaps it is just a matter of time. We are certainly there and willing to do it.

Q72 Chairman: Could I have a candid opinion from you about whether you feel that RCUK's programme of Science in Society is effective, and how would you evaluate its success?

Professor Mason: This is something we are working on and I think it is moving in the right direction. Science in society is a very broad subject actually; it is not only educating people in schools but it is also informing wider society, enabling them to make decisions about technology issues which are always important. There is also a consultation process, so at the RCUK level you have to worry about the nuclear programme and GM crops and the like, which are very complicated, thorny issues compared to putting astronomy across to the public which is quite benign in comparison. There is a lot to tackle there and I have been impressed by the willingness of the RCUK team to come to grips with some of these issues. I am hopeful that we will all be very impressed by what they do in the coming years.

Chairman: I just have a concern that your door is open, everybody else's door is open, but nobody actually goes through each other's door in this wonderful picture you are painting today. Evan, can you come in on science careers?

Q73 Dr Harris: In respect of science careers, what do you understand by the term "the two body problem"?

Professor Mason: Having suffered from it myself I understand perfectly what it means.

Q74 Dr Harris: Perhaps you could explain first and then say what you are doing to solve the problem.

Professor Mason: The problem is when people have relationships with other people working in usually the same scientific area, so a husband and wife team, for example. The two body problem is that it has been very difficult to find a job in the same institution, because jobs are very few and far between, so you either face a situation where one partner has to give up being paid for what they do - they usually carry on doing research but on a free basis, which is exploitation in my book - or they end up living in some cases on different continents or in a different community. It is one of the many disincentives to get into science, and it particularly afflicts women, of course, since we still live in a society where, for reasons I sort of understand but do not sympathise with, it is usually the man who gets the permanent job and the woman has to tag along. As an academic community it is something that we really do need to tackle; it is not something that PPARC per se has a lot of leverage on, it is really a matter for the universities because we cannot control who they hire. What we can do is provide incentives so there are various fellowship schemes for example - they are few and far between but they do exist - which will support a partner in that circumstance.

Q75 Dr Harris: You do not offer those, the Royal Society provides a few one year arrangements. Given that astrophysics, for example, is the sort of area where you may have to go to another continent in order to pursue your particular research, or you are expected to go to the States, then surely there is a particular onus on your Research Council, given the specialised nature including particle physics, to provide something similar. Is that something you are considering? You recognise the problem, I am pleased you do.

Professor Mason: Absolutely. It is one of the areas I do want to focus on in the near future, but what we have in place currently is that when people do have one of our fellowships we are quite flexible about where they hold it. For example, if a partner was successful in winning a PPARC five year fellowship, they could choose to spend part of that time abroad with a partner or whatever, and we also do not put any limitations on where they can hold it within the UK, so our fellowship holders can move institutions as far as we are concerned quite transparently. It then comes down to a negotiation between individual universities, which we cannot control. We have done a lot in the past to make our schemes as flexible as possible, not just to address this particular two body situation, but the more general situation. What we need to focus on in the future is what more specific things we can do. Again, there is a relatively fine line because we do not want to depart from our underlying principles that we only support excellence, so we do not want to support somebody just because they are a partner and I do not think anybody would want that to happen.

Q76 Dr Harris: The Americans do much more in this area and they do not seem to be backing poor science. Most universities in the United States have specific provision for this because they know they are not going to attract the best if they are not prepared to move.

Professor Mason: That is absolutely right, but that is not something that PPARC can do anything about specifically. We need to maintain our principles and only support excellence, but we would need to create flexibility within our programme so that when there is excellence there are no barriers in place to prohibit this sort of thing. One of the reasons why, in the US, universities are able to make this provision comes back to the full economic cost issue. The costs are upfront and I think as we get into an upfront cost situation in the UK the cost benefit to the university of attracting particular high-flying individuals and therefore maybe subsidising a partner as a result will become more obvious.

Q77 Dr Harris: The Royal Society do fund these things and they also would say they do not sacrifice excellence, so perhaps in a year you will be able to report back on further thoughts. The situation around women in your studentships and fellowships is not great, you recognise that. The figures from your annual report show that in terms of applications it is an expanding number - 18 per cent, then 16 per cent and then in the last year for which figures were available 29 per cent of applications, but in terms of success eight out of 37, nine out of 33 and then only six out of 51. So you may be attracting a greater proportion of women applicants but you are disappointing an even greater number. Do you have a plan?

Professor Mason: This is something that is quite close to my heart because in my previous group at UCL we are one of the few places in the country that is approaching a 50-50 ratio of men and women. There are various ways in which we achieved that, but basically it is by creating the right sort of environment for women to prosper in an academic environment. Our experience in that particular instance is that success breeds success, so what we need to do is provide role models for women, and that is what we did do. We have senior academics who are women who go out and show people what they are doing.

Q78 Dr Harris: Your Council bodies are not overfilled with women; I made a note of a few of their ratios again from your very useful book and they are pretty small, sometimes it is one out of 18 plus someone from California on your Council. Is there anything you can do to provide role models in that respect?

Professor Mason: Absolutely, and that is something I am very keen to do. The issue there is not that we discriminate against women, but that women are just not available. That ratio reflects the proportion of senior women in the subject area in the community, I checked that quite recently because it was an issue of concern to me. What we need to do is work from the ground up. When there are good women candidates we absolutely put them in place.

Q79 Dr Harris: My final point - because you are right, the number of women at the top is low - is that there is a greater proportion lower down and some are clearly leaving. Given that failure could be said to breed failure - because if someone leaves and says I would not let you do this, it is hopeless - do you have any way of doing exit interviews or anything like that with people who have been on your grants, whether that is doctorate, post-doctorate or more senior, to ask them why they are leaving the field when they leave?

Professor Mason: We can do that for our fellows and students, we cannot do it for the grant-supported people because they are university people and we do not necessarily have contacts. You have hit on the problem, what we have to do is stop these people leaving, we have to actually understand why it is that they are leaving and see if we cannot remedy that situation. The two body problem is one issue, but there are much broader issues of culture. A male-dominated culture works in a very different way to a female-dominated group, and our experience in my previous job is that you really have to work at getting that balance right and making sure that you are proactive in listening to the female complement that you have - just listening to what they have to say and not just imposing a male perspective on things is absolutely vital. I really think that the only way to solve this problem ultimately is from the ground up because we do what we can. The chair of our science committee is a woman, but she is the only woman on the science committee. Nevertheless, it is a role model.

Q80 Chairman: We will not have any of this unless we actually get more young people staying in science, men and women, boys and girls, particularly girls, studying some of the stem subjects post 16.

Professor Mason: Absolutely.

Chairman: There is still a culture which is against that. I am going to leave that area, thank you very much indeed for that. The final round of questioning is on national and international co-ordination.

Q81 Bob Spink: Could I ask you first of all about the subscriptions that are currently paid to various bodies like ESA, ESO and CERN, are these going to continue indefinitely, are there any plans to change those?

Professor Mason: Do you mean to modify the level?

Q82 Bob Spink: Or in fact whether you continue to subscribe to those bodies.

Professor Mason: This is always something that we maintain a view on and if it were to transpire that one of these international organisations did not continue to fulfil our needs, then we would seriously look at withdrawing.

Q83 Bob Spink: Do you think it would be better if the subscription was paid direct from Treasury funds rather than through PPARC because as it fluctuates it can make a dramatic impact on PPARC's other operations.

Professor Mason: There is certainly an argument for that and, as I have said, these subscriptions are GDP-related and one of the problems that we have had in recent years is that the UK economy has been doing rather well compared to our European counterparts and therefore the value of our subscriptions has gone up, but at the same time as we are doing economically very well we are less able to exploit it because the rest of our programme has been squeezed by the fact that the subscription is increasing, so we do need to look at that. The advantage of having the subscription within the organisation of course is that you do stare at it and consider its value for money, and you see in countries where the money does come directly from Treasury they take it for granted and they do not really stare at it and stare at the organisation as hard as they might do. That is one of the issues that we have to fight against within these organisations. It could be taken over by the Treasury and that is fine, but we need to continue to consider it in terms of the value for money that we are getting from the programme, and perhaps a better way would be to continue to pay for it through the PPARC programme, but to recognise that these external pressures need to be compensated in some way.

Q84 Bob Spink: Ring fenced in some way.

Professor Mason: Yes.

Q85 Bob Spink: How do you actually achieve co-ordination with a body like NASA for instance when it comes to the timing of financial decisions? How do you do that?

Professor Mason: It depends on what sort of scale we do it. This is a problem in the sense that first of all most of these meshing issues in a major way with NASA are between ESA and NASA as opposed to between the UK and NASA because we do have bilateral programmes with NASA but they are relatively more easy to deal with because they are smaller amounts of money. The problem is that ESA actually has, as you know, a five year financial cycle - there is a ministerial on average every three years and then there is a five year allocation -whereas with the NASA system there are yearly appropriations and approval processes. The trick is to make those two mesh, and it has caused problems in the past when these two things get out of kilter. The best way to deal with it is communication and there is a constant backwards and forwards of traffic across the Atlantic of ESA people and ESO people, discussing these various things for specific programmes. On the Aurora programme we have NASA involvement and we have very close contacts between PPARC and NASA, for example, to understand the pressures on their budget so that we are not taken by surprise. I think the worst situation is when something happens that completely takes you by surprise and you do not have any contingency plan for dealing with it, whereas at least if you can see a problem coming on the horizon you can adapt to it more effectively.

Q86 Bob Spink: Moving on from that, how do you get on with the Office of Science and Technology?

Professor Mason: Very well. My experience is of course relatively limited so far, but I am very impressed with Keith O'Nions, I think his heart is in the right place, he has the right sort of focus, and I personally get on very well with him. His staff also have a very difficult job to do. One of the things I have identified that I would like to try and improve is the interchange, the communication between the OST staff and my Research Council staff. They are physically separated, they have different problems to deal with, but they need to work in concert, so I am encouraging contacts at levels below Sir Keith.

Q87 Bob Spink: Talking about Research Councils, has RCUK improved the co-ordination between the Research Councils, do you think that is working well?

Professor Mason: To be honest I have been very impressed with RCUK. When I came into this job I was rather suspicious of it as a concept, but clearly the Research Councils do need to speak with a collective voice on many issues. The thing that has really impressed me is the important diversity between the Research Councils because they deal with very different subjects, very different communities and one of the things I have come to value is the value of that diversity, so when I have a problem within PPARC I can look and see how it might be solved in a very different situation, get ideas as to how to move things forwards and be able to discuss things at RCUK Executive Groups with my counterparts and get their input. There is a collective wisdom there which is very useful.

Professor Mason: A synergy. We have to look for synergies.

Chairman: That is a good note on which to end. You are supportive of Keith O'Nions and OST and you are supportive of RCUK, we will not go any further. Keith, thank you very much indeed for the time you have spent with us this morning and for the large range of questions you have answered. We very much appreciate it.

Professor Mason: It has been my pleasure.

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[1] Note by the witness: Allocations for the 2005-06 financial year are: Astronomy Technology Centre (ATC), Edinburgh - £11.601 million; Joint Astronomy Centre (JAC), Hawaii - £4.185 million; Isaac Newton Group (ING), La Palma - £2.366 million. Total allocation is £18.152 million.