Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)
PROFESSOR SIR
ROY ANDERSON,
MR TREVOR
WOOLLEY, MR
MARK PRESTON
AND DR
PAUL HOLLINSHEAD
28 NOVEMBER 2006
Q140 Mr Borrow: The Executive Chairman
of QinetiQ made a comment that research spending needs to be increased
by 25%.
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: And
it should all go to QinetiQ—is that right?
Q141 Mr Borrow: From what you have
said so far, I assume you are not necessarily going to agree with
him, although I assume you would not be unhappy if there were
a significant increase.
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: I
think my prime task is to open up defence R&D to a broader
community. In fast-moving areas of technology industry is often
not at the front; it is other people who are at the front, and
there are some very fast-moving areas of defence technology, as
we are seeing, sadly, with improvised explosive devices. The Web,
in the notion of the flat Earth, as it were, has made technology
move very quickly so we have to be exceedingly agile and we need
to bring in some of the best and brightest minds from university.
If QinetiQ wants to collaborate with some of those and come in
and compete for moneys, fine, but to believe that we should favour
QinetiQ over others—we choose the best people.
Q142 Chairman: If I may interject,
I think you are being a little tough on QinetiQ there because
I think the context in which that answer was given by John Chisholm
was the long-term decline of research in defence, and I do not
think he was suggesting that it should all go to QinetiQ, although
obviously he would like that. But do you accept that there has
been a long-term decline in defence research?
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: The
statistics are in the Defence Industrial Strategy document. There
is a graph in there which shows the percentage spend over time.
I stress the point I started with, that I am a research scientist
and it is my case to argue the point that we should look at this
and analyse the trend very carefully.
Mr Woolley: I think it is the
case that there was, from the late 1980s, a policy decision by
government to spend less on defence R&D. So there has, since
the late 1980s until around 2002-03, been a decline in real terms
in spending on research. That has now flattened out and over the
last few years the defence research spend has been broadly level,
or slight real growth in the last few years actually. Development
spend is much more related to the phasing of projects in the equipment
programme and, depending on the particular phase a project may
be in, there will be years when development expenditure is a high
and then subsequent years when it is a bit lower and then subsequent
years when it is higher again. So it tends not to be as constant;
it tends to be slightly more volatile for that reason.
Q143 Chairman: But heavily prioritised
towards the current theatres?
Mr Woolley: Development spend
is related to our procurement process. In terms of research spend,
it is for the internal MoD customers of the research budget to
prioritise research expenditure and, yes, obviously, some of the
spend in recent years has been focused on research in support
of operations.
Q144 Mr Borrow: One final question.
The Defence Technology Strategy talks about a wider debate on
R&D investment in defence and the need for that. When is that
likely to happen and what would your role be?
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: That
is very much going on at the moment. We have done two things.
First of all, you will have seen that we did the capability alignment
study of our £500 million more R&T spend and I was very
keen that we set an example for other government departments in
having external peer review of that research for its quality and
alignment, despite the fact that there are some sensitive areas
in it, and that we successfully managed to do. We have a Defence
Science Advisory Council of about 240 individuals who are national
authorities in various areas of science and engineering, and we
are the first government department to subject our research to
that degree of scrutiny, the same that the research councils do,
and that will be an integral part of our practice now. By the
way, one of your sister committees, the Science and Technology
Committee, failed to pick up that we have been doing these things
for some time. The second point is that for the broader £2.6
billion R&D, we are very much looking at the detail of how
better to manage that at the moment and there is quite a broad
debate on the management and direction of that going on right
at this moment within the Ministry of Defence. We also need to
bring in our industrial partners to that very intimately in relation
to my earlier comment about providing joint investment R&D
road maps. Chairman, someone asked about a comparative figure
in the previous session about what Britain spends versus other
countries.
Chairman: We are just coming on to that
actually.
Q145 Mr Jenkin: What do we spend
in comparison to other countries? How does it compare in quality
and objectives? You mentioned the United States but, obviously,
we are in a completely different category from them but a more
accurate comparator might be France, for example.
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: First
of all, David King has made this point many times. Britain hits
hugely above its weight and is second only to the United States
in terms of science citation and international prizes and so on,
so we start from a privileged position. This is in my view a jewel
in the crown and Dstl, in my view, is a jewel in the crown in
terms of its capability. This capability alignment study assessed
something like 90% of the projects to be world class or high national
class, and I think most universities, including Oxford and Cambridge,
would have been delighted if the external peer reviewers had said
that, so I want to stress that point; there is real quality in
Dstl, so it is a jewel. In relation to France, as far as we are
currently aware, France can be a little more coy about some areas
of its defence R&D, particularly on the deterrent side, but
we are approximately equivalent to them. The United States we
are behind. China is very difficult to obtain figures from but
we are certainly well ahead of them at the moment. Russia, again,
the figures are somewhat hidden but we suspect we are ahead of
Russia at the moment. We are second equal, somewhere in that domain.
Q146 Mr Jenkin: The impression one
gets is that we seem to lose technology, intellectual property,
faster than we are generating it, that we are going sub-critical
in terms of what we contribute to our own procurement programmes.
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: I
think that is an older mantra. If you look at the university sector
and you look at some of Dstl's current activities, I think we
are in the process of regenerating. Frances talked about the encouraging
recruitment at the graduate and PhD levels. I go down there quite
a lot, I go to their conferences, and I am always impressed by
the young people who come in there. There is this capture business,
which is, as Frances mentioned, aged 25 to 30 or perhaps a little
beyond, that may have bigger opportunities in industry but that
is not an area of my worry at the moment. The area of my worry
is that we have to keep Dstl as an open organisation which has
very intimate collaborations with the university sector and the
small and medium-sized companies to capture these fast moving
areas of technology.
Q147 Mr Jenkin: You paint a very
positive and rosy picture. Are we spending enough to maintain
that position? When you say that we need to spend more, do you
think we are at a critical juncture? Are we at risk of losing
this position?
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: I
think not at the moment. It is early days from the split from
QinetiQ, it is early days from the settling down of Dstl; it needs
very careful monitoring and nurturing. Frances also mentioned
that we have this age distribution where you have a set of individuals
who are very highly skilled areas of great importance to us who
might be in the 50 to 60 year age bracket. Another one of my main
tasks, working with Dstl, is to ensure that we are recruiting
and growing, keeping the next generation of deep specialists.
If I comment on some of the areas, even with our American competitors,
there is a set of fields at Dstl that we are regarded as the world
authority in. That is not a bad position in some sensitive areas.
It is something to carefully watch and something to carefully
nurture but at the moment I am moderately comfortable.
Q148 Chairman: Professor Anderson,
in answer to where we were in competition with other countries,
you said we were behind some, level with others and ahead of others,
which sounds vaguely unscientific as an answer. I wonder if you
can possibly give us your best estimate of the amount of that.
It might be best to ask for this in writing.
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: I
have the figures.[3]
Q149 Chairman: What I would like is the
amount that several countries spend, both in the public sector
and in the private sector, on defence research and those countries
I think should include the United States, France, Russia, China
and India and if you are able to give us those broken down, if
you have them to hand, that would be fine and we would be grateful.
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: China
and India you may struggle a little bit with because the figures
are more difficult to verify.
Q150 Chairman: Presumably, you in
the Ministry of Defence, with all your clever technology, make
assessments of what these figures might be, so please give us
your best estimate.
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: The
top three, for your information here, is 15% spend of essentially
defence expenditure in the US.
Q151 Chairman: Fifteen per cent of
what?
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: Fifteen
per cent of total defence expenditure. In the UK it is 9% and
in France it is 8.2%. So when I said we were roughly equivalent
to France . . .
Q152 Chairman: Total defence expenditure
in the United States is what?
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: I
do not know off the top of my head. It is a big number.
Q153 Chairman: It is a lot, and 15%
of a lot is a very great deal more than 10% of rather a little.
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: £2.6
billion R&D spend.
Q154 Chairman: I am being unscientific
myself now. Do you accept the point that not only are we behind
the United States, but we are falling further behind because of
the proportion of their much larger budget that they put into
research into technology?
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: That
would be true of every other country.
Q155 Chairman: Yes, but it does not
make it right.
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: No,
but I would still make the point that £2.6 billion at 9%
is not a bad figure and I also make the point that it is my role
to argue for that to be increased.
Chairman: All power to you.
Q156 Mr Hancock: You talked about
the unusual circumstances of this country being engaged in very
intensive fighting in two separate areas. No amount of increased
expenditure on research and development would essentially help
the situation there immediately. It really leads me to believe
that some of the solutions that you are seeking on behalf of those
men and women are off-the-shelf solutions that are readily available.
What does that do to your organisation when that pressure will
not decrease but will increase, so the pressure on you is not
to research and develop your own but simply to find out what is
the best product for the men and women who need it virtually instantaneously?
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: You
have a series of horizons. The question to the Services with R&D
is "What would you like very instantaneously, in other words,
six months?" There is research very much related to solving
problems on that timescale.
Q157 Mr Hancock: Can industry react
to that?
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: Yes,
we can, very much so.
Q158 Mr Hancock: You might, but can
the defence industries then fulfil what you come up with?
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: Very
much so. If it is an urgent operational requirement, when we get
through the research into the capability provision, there are
a number of specific examples where that has been achieved.
Q159 Mr Hancock: Could you give us
one that has come about in six months?
Professor Sir Roy Anderson: Yes:
improvised explosive devices counter-measures, and I am not going
publicly into details but there is a continuing evolution of the
technical capability there on a very fast time scale.
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