Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 110-119)

PROFESSOR SIR ROY ANDERSON, MR TREVOR WOOLLEY, MR MARK PRESTON AND DR PAUL HOLLINSHEAD

28 NOVEMBER 2006

  Q110 Chairman: May I welcome you to the second part of the morning. I wonder if you could perhaps introduce yourselves for the record and tell us what your role is. Professor Anderson, would you like to start.

  Professor Sir Roy Anderson: I am Roy Anderson, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence. Sitting to my right is Trevor Woolley, who is the Finance Director, and beyond Trevor is Mark Preston, who is the Director in the Business Delivery Group within the Ministry of Defence, reporting to Trevor, and to my left is Paul Hollinshead, who is the Policy and Planning Director within the Science Innovation and Technology part of the MoD.

  Q111  Chairman: Could you describe to us, please, your role as the Chief Scientific Adviser in the Ministry of Defence in terms of research, particularly in relation to Dstl.

  Professor Sir Roy Anderson: Within the Ministry of Defence, the Chief Scientific Adviser's position is the oldest one within all government departments, established during the Second World War. Responsibility is as a top-level budget holder for the science and technology budget. That is the first responsibility, and that is to ensure that the Ministry of Defence gets sound technical and scientific advice on both capability today and also looking into the future about the strategic capabilities required. The second area is to do with the deterrent, other more strategic technologies in that area, and the third responsibility is as Chairman of the Investments Approval Board for the category A projects and, as a consequence of those two, I sit on the Defence Management Board of the Defence Council.

  Q112  Chairman: The category A projects are which projects?

  Professor Sir Roy Anderson: They are the big ones, as it were, which are over a certain value.

  Q113  Chairman: What is the value?

  Professor Sir Roy Anderson: About £300 million.

  Q114  Chairman: How many scientists do you have in the MoD, not including Dstl?

  Professor Sir Roy Anderson: Within the Science and Innovation top-level budget, that is, within the main building at Whitehall, then we have a subsidiary site at Shrivenham, which is the Research Acquisition Organisation, the current total is roughly 240.  It varies between 240 and 270.  Half are based at Shrivenham and half in the main building in Whitehall.

  Q115  Chairman: How do you decide which work goes to Dstl on which work those scientists do?

  Professor Sir Roy Anderson: We have a Board, a Science and Technology Board, which is populated by the customers, equipment capability and so forth, and the Services themselves, and we have discussions at the Board about the policy of directing research towards Dstl. The management of that is largely undertaken by the Research Acquisition Organisation in Shrivenham. If you think of a research council in the civil sector, research councils like the Medical Research Council and so forth have a body of staff who procure, monitor, and peer-review the quality of research and that is the function of the Research Acquisition Organisation.

  Q116  Willie Rennie: We received a note from the MoD recently about the DDA, and it said the DDA was established in 1999 to facilitate defence technology transfer into the civil sector and to broker civil technology back into defence. As you will have heard, in the previous session we heard that the Dstl had a light relationship with the DDA and there would be no gap to fill if the DDA were to go. Why is that the case, when they were supposed to take technology transfer out and in, and the Dstl is one of the main holders of technology?

  Professor Sir Roy Anderson: I am going to ask Trevor, as Finance Director, largely to answer this but I want to stress the point that Frances is made. A deep understanding of the research that is going on in an organisation is absolutely crucial to deciding what bits might be exploited, and I think it is more appropriate that Dstl, being best placed to make those judgements, has this intimate relationship with spinning out small parts of the organisation. That is the point I want to stress which Frances made.

  Mr Woolley: I think the key facts are that events have moved on since the Defence Diversification Agency was originally created. It was originally created as part of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, DERA, which of course has now subsequently evolved into Dstl and into QinetiQ. As Professor Anderson says, in terms of the spin-out of technology, as far as MoD-owned and funded technology is concerned in Dstl, the Ploughshares arrangement is the one that we think is most effective, and that is the route through which the spin-out is going. QinetiQ are heavily engaged in the civil and commercial sector anyway and are well placed to spin out technology there. As far as the spin in side is concerned, MoD procurement policies now encourage the pull-through of civil technology directly into the defence supply chain through the prime contractors, and it is therefore less clear what role there is in technology brokerage for the Defence Diversification Agency, and that is why its role has been reviewed, that is why it is the subject of a consultation document and a consultation period, in the light of which Ministers will take final decisions on its future.

  Q117  Willie Rennie: But the relationship has never really been there, from what we heard earlier on, so it is not really that the landscape has changed; the relationship was never there in the first place. Is that not the case?

  Mr Woolley: I think the landscape has changed. As I say, originally DDA was part of DERA, as part of the Department's in-house research and technology organisation but events have moved on. There is not a clear requirement from customers within the Ministry of Defence for the services that the DDA provides and there is not an evident requirement in the defence industrial community for that service and therefore we had to ask the question whether this is the best way of spending defence money, which of course is, as always, extremely tight.

  Q118  Willie Rennie: So the DDA were successful in the past, under the old structure, in getting spin-in and spin-out?

  Mr Woolley: What the DDA has come to be is a technology brokerage service. It is not directly spinning in or spinning out.

  Q119  Willie Rennie: It is facilitating the process.

  Mr Woolley: It has facilitated it. It is a sort of dating agency. The question is, though, whether it is essential to that process and whether the value it adds to that process is commensurate with the cost to the Department.


 
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