Examination of Witnesses (Questions 679
- 699)
WEDNESDAY 16 MAY 2007
PROFESSOR IAN
DIAMOND AND
PROFESSOR OLE
H PETERSEN
Q679 Chairman: Can I welcome Professor
Diamond and Professor Petersen to the Committee's proceedings;
we are very pleased to have two people of such outstanding reputation
in the field of research. You are very well-known to us by reputation,
but I do not think either of you have actually given evidence
to the Committee.
Professor Diamond: I gave evidence
to the Committee three or four years ago.
Q680 Chairman: I know you reasonably
well, but I could not remember whether it was from the Committee
or on other occasions. It was four years ago when we looked at
universities before, so a return performance, Professor Diamond.
Professor Petersen, you are also very welcome. You have an option
here: we want to look at the long term stability of higher education
and part of that is, of course, the research side of that. We
want to hear from you how we can ensure that this country does
have a viable research programme in the long term, not just in
the short or medium term but in the long term, and how do we bring
that about—who are the key people who could bring that about
and if there are challenges, problems and concerns we want them
really to be dragged out into the light of day so that we can
think about them. You can say something for a couple of minutes
to introduce your background and your knowledge and expertise
in a way, as a thumbnail sketch, or we can get straight into questions.
Which do you prefer?
Professor Diamond: Whichever is
easiest for you.
Q681 Chairman: Why not say how you
think we can have a sustainable higher education research programme
going into the future?
Professor Diamond: As you know,
I am the Chief Executive of the Economic and Social Research Council,
but I am also privileged and have been since 2003 to chair Research
Councils UK, which is the consortium of all Research Councils
working together to ensure and enhance UK research. We do so very
much in partnership with the Funding Councils, with the higher
education sector and indeed with all other stakeholders including
business, government and industry. It is terribly important that
this is a holistic issue, that we really have to work together.
The Research Base Funders' Forum, which has now been going for
three or four years, is actually a good way of bringing all the
stakeholders together and there is, if you like, no one place
where all research is funded from or strategised from, and that
is entirely right and proper. At the same time what we have to
do is ensure that we are complementary in the way that we look
at things and that we are agile and able to identify barriers
to great research taking place in the UK and then to remove them
very quickly.
Q682 Chairman: In a sense you have
described a very interesting scene, if you like. We are very used
to, as a scrutiny committee, scrutinising things for which the
Department for Education and Skills has sole responsibility. This
is a much more difficult area, is it not, because we have a whole
number of organisations and departments involved in the research
programme—indeed, the most recent is that we have seen the
Treasury taking a great interest in this—but is there not
a bit of you that would say that somebody somewhere has to have
the overarching view, not interfering in research but having the
kind of concept of looking at international competition, what
is happening in terms of research in other competitor countries
and having a kind of holistic view of what the future looks like?
Professor Diamond: That is what
the major stakeholders have to work together very carefully and
very closely to do—that is what the vision was behind the
Research Base Funders' Forum and it is actually making good progress
and doing good things. At the end of the day though we have to
remember that research is undertaken by researchers and the great
ideas bubble up from researchers; what we have to do, as the organisers
of the funders of research, is enable an environment where great
researchers can (a) be developed, (b) flourish and (c) have the
facilities and the access to the facilities in order to make that
happen. That simply requires that we do accept that there are
a multiple number of stakeholders and that they are complementary
and co-ordinated in a coherent way.
Q683 Chairman: Your organisation
has that role and you feel comfortable that that is a good way
of protecting the research budget and the research programmes
for the future.
Professor Diamond: I believe the
Research Councils as a whole have a very important role to play;
we do not have that role alone. We are a very important stakeholder,
undoubtedly, as are the Funding Councils—that is why we
attempt to work very, very closely with the Funding Councils.
We believe very much in the dual support system. The higher education
institutions themselves are obviously critical as autonomous institutions
and in a number of very, very important research areas in this
country the charities also play a very important role. That is
why we must be absolutely clear in working together.
Q684 Chairman: If someone was looking
at the capacity, the potential, the holistic approach that I have
described, it is going to be up to the Prime Minister politically,
is it, he is the only person, the apex, who has that sort of responsibility
across all departments?
Professor Diamond: That is perhaps
taking it a little high. What we do absolutely need to do is ensure
that the right people meet together under the right leadership.
I have mentioned the Research Base Funders' Forum three or four
times already and I believe Keith O'Nions has done a very good
job in chairing it. That fora does bring together the Research
Councils, the Funding Councils, the regional development agencies,
industry, government departments—DfES and DTI—and
I am sure one or two other people whom I neglect to mention, not
in a pejorative way but simply because my brain is not functioning
that well.
Q685 Chairman: Can I switch it to
you, Professor Petersen, if all is well in this science realm
why change it, why change a system that seems to be working relatively
well? Why do people want to change it?
Professor Petersen: You are referring
to the proposed new system for research assessment?
Q686 Chairman: Yes.
Professor Petersen: I guess the
Royal Society's view is that it should not have been changed,
not changed as radically as the present proposals seem to imply.
The basic point that we have made very clear when the responses
were made to various relevant consultations, is that there is
something intrinsically right about the present research assessment
exercise. One may certainly worry about the details and the somewhat
excessive bureaucracy around it, but the idea that you send a
message to individual researchers, show us you four best papers,
they will be read by your peers and evaluated by your peers, that
is giving the right kind of message to individual scientists.
Now it is supposed to be replaced by some formula-driven quantitative
indicator, the type of situation in which citations or papers
come in and these are secondary things now that are supposed to
be assessed in the new system rather than the primary thing, the
real research. There is something intrinsically right about it
at present, for all its somewhat bureaucratic faults, and there
is something intrinsically wrong about the new method of assessment
that is being proposed. Of course, we have not seen the details
and we are certainly eager to be involved in discussions about
how it could still be operating as one way of informing peer review,
but we do believe that there is no way you can really assess research
outside what you may call the classical peer review process. It
has faults, of course, it is a little bit expensive, it is time-consuming,
but nobody has really come up with a better method of assessing
research.
Q687 Chairman: With the greatest
respect is that not a little bit complacent between the two of
you, Professor Diamond and Professor Petersen, because you are
saying, Professor Diamond, we have this broad church where all
these players come together and perform the relevant tasks, and
Professor Petersen is saying we have a very good system, do not
let us fix it. Surely there are people who have been giving advice
to ministers, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and other people
who must differ with you.
Professor Diamond: I certainly
would differ a little on behalf of the Research Councils with
regard to the RAE, and if we wish to spend a little time on that
I would be happy to give their view. I would not want to say that
everything in the garden was just absolutely lovely and brilliant,
leave it alone, but having said that we have to recognise that
the UK science base at the moment is incredibly competitive globally;
on any count, it is second only to the United States across the
entire piece and in very many areas, sub-areas and areas of science,
leading the world. We have to accept that as a really good place
to be; there has been incredible investment in science in the
last few years which we can really see the pay-off from, so it
would be absolutely wrong, firstly, to say let us throw the baby
away with the bathwater and start again. Having said that, there
are incredible challenges coming down the road at the moment and
if we simply said we are the best in the world or nearly the best
in the world, let us just sit on our laurels and stay there, then
we would be (a) making a huge mistake and (b) letting the very
people down who are paying for this in the first place in the
main, and that is the people of this country. We absolutely have
to believe, as we do in the Research Councils passionately, that
the only chance this country has got to become the country we
want to be in 15 to 20 years time is to invest in science and
for science to have the pay-off. There are a number of areas that
we have really got to work in over the next few years in order
to get there. One of them, if I may say so, concerns the RAE because
we all recognise that the RAE over the last 20 years has played
a role in increasing the quality of UK research. Having said that,
the view of Research Councils is that as currently formulated
it does not encourage and reward areas such as inter-disciplinary
research, areas of research related to professional practice—I
am thinking, for example, of education research which might have
a real impact on educational policy or social care research having
an impact on social work practice, for example. It does not reward
properly innovation into industry, where one might spend a relatively
large amount of time taking forward the results of a piece of
research and turning it into something which might have impacts
either on government policy or taking some new piece of exciting
kit into the marketplace, but if you do that, that might be at
the expense of your next academic paper, and we need properly
to reward those kinds of areas. Those are challenges for changing
and for updating the research assessment exercise that we really
believe have to be taken. The Research Councils' view is that
there is a role for a metric-based approach but one that maintains
a degree of light touch of peer review in some of those areas
that I have just described to you, and that is why we believe
it is very important that we work hard across the piece with the
Funding Councils, as we do, to ensure that the mechanism that
is proposed to go forward post-2008 is one that all stakeholders
feel comfortable about and which rewards the things that the nation
wishes to reward from its research base.
Q688 Chairman: Professor Petersen,
do you agree with all of that?
Professor Petersen: Not entirely.
First of all, let me take your question about whether everything
is wonderful. That was certainly not the implication of what I
wanted to say; there are some serious problems about research
in this country and first of all I would question that we are
at this point in time the best country in the world in which to
do research, which has been the stated objective of the Prime
Minister and the Chancellor. I do not think it is the case. It
is true that by many indicators we are doing very well; however,
if you express these things in relation to the size of the country
we are not number one. In Europe, in the biomedical field for
example, Switzerland is by many accounts doing better than the
UK, if you relate it to size. We forget that very often when we
talk about the US being the best and we are number two or in some
areas number one. It is not quite true; it depends on whether
you look at the size. The amount of money that is spent on research
in this country is absolutely insufficient to sustain that basis,
one has to be absolutely clear about that. The Government is very
proud of the increase in the amount of money that has been given
to research over the last years; my personal view is that it has
to some extent compensated for a number of very bad years under
the previous Conservative administration, but in terms of funding
rates we are by no means amongst the best. In relation to GDP,
if I remember correctly, we are number 17 or something like that,
so we are punching about our weight, we are doing relatively well
in relation to the relatively poor level of funding, and by the
poor level of funding I mean that in my own area, the biomedical
area, an individual scientist who applies to the Medical Research
Council for a grant has an 80% chance of being rejected, so four
out of five grants are rejected at this point in time. This is
an incredible waste of time for everybody. These are people who
have been appointed in great competition to do their jobs. People
say it must be competitive to get grants, but you can look at
it the other way around and for a person who has been appointed
to a job to do research, it is not an unreasonable expectation
that this person who has been appointed as a lecturer in a university
actually can do the job that he/she is appointed to do. Increasingly,
he or she will be spending an enormous amount of time on repeat
grant applications and so on, so there is not enough money in
the system in relation to the number of people who work in the
system, so there is a clear mismatch there which is inefficient.
That has very clear implications for the sustainability of future
research, which is the remit as I understand it, of this particular
inquiry, so in that sense I would say to your question is everything
rosy, no it is not. There is a need for a substantial increase
in science funding and, considering that it is a tiny, tiny proportion
of what the Government has to spend overall, it seems that it
would be quite clever actually to substantially increase the science
base.
Professor Diamond: Can I just
take the opportunity to say that right across the research base
I would agree with Professor Petersen's point about success rates.
Success rates are incredibly low right across the research base
and the research that is not being funded includes an awful lot
of research that would be absolutely impeccably world class and
which, in past times, might have been funded, it would have delivered
world class research and would have other academic and non-academic
impacts on the economic development and quality of life in this
country, so there really is a lack of funding still, despite the
great advances that have been made in the last 10 years.
Q689 Chairman: Should that extra
funding only come from the Government or should it come from other
sources?
Professor Petersen: It could probably
come from a combination of sources, but as far as basic research
is concerned one has to recognise that there is an absolute need
for government funding, there is no other way. I still want to
come back to the other part of the question, namely the research
assessment exercise in relation to some of the points that Professor
Diamond made. I do not quite see how a move to metrics will help
with some of the problems that Professor Diamond highlighted—inter-disciplinary
research, education research, innovation and industry. All of
these things will not be helped by metrics at all. In fact, it
will be more difficult to assess them through metrics than it
is in the present system, so I do not really understand that argument
as an argument to move away from the present peer review system
to a metrics-driven system. The present peer review system has
much more inherent flexibility in terms of assessment and in taking
up some of these points. We feel in the Royal Society that the
best way would be a somewhat lighter touch than the present, but
we must retain the subject-based panels and they can use certain
quantitative indicators as a way of informing them, but the idea
that you will be able to create a formula based on data in the
public domain that could be used for the calculation of QR I think
is basically flawed.
Chairman: You do know that the Chairman's
role is to warm you up. Everyone has warmed up so, David, would
you like to continue?
Q690 Mr Chaytor: You both defended
the system of dual support but you have not said exactly what
its strengths are or how it compares to the systems in some of
our competitor countries, for example Switzerland. Do they have
exactly the same system of dual support? What other models are
there in Europe?
Professor Petersen: It is true
that not every country has a dual support system and certainly
the biggest player, the US, does not have a dual support system,
but it is generally recognised by many people that this is perhaps
one of the particular advantages of this country, that we do have
a dual support system.
Q691 Mr Chaytor: What are these advantages?
Professor Petersen: You have got
to have, whatever you call it, some way of having a certain degree
of stability in the system. If you were to base yourself exclusively—and
the US model comes closest to that kind of situation—on
money from grant bodies, from the research councils or from charities,
you would potentially be in a quite vulnerable situation in terms
of short term changes, since grants are given for three years
or for five years—most are given for three years in most
of the areas—which is a very short time. Grants are lost,
grants are gained, people need time to do research and that time
in a sense has to be paid for by the main employer which, in our
country, is essentially the universities, and the universities
need to have money in order to do that. In a sense dual support
does exist in a way, although in most of continental Europe they
do not call it that, in the sense that the universities have a
certain amount of money, but the difference between our system
and most of the continental European university systems is that
we have a clear separation between teaching funding and research
funding. Most of the continental European universities do not
have this sharp distinction, which indeed we did not have a number
of years ago. As soon as you introduce this distinction between
teaching funding and research funding then obviously you have
to create a mechanism whereby your research time is being paid
for by somebody, and that in a sense is what the dual support
system does at the moment. I mean, most of the QR money is simply
salaries for people who spend their time doing research, so if
you were to propose as an extreme example to abolish it and say
we do not need it any more, since we have full economic costing,
I understand the argument behind that, why do we need it, but
then of course there is an immense problem in the sense where
do these salaries come from and can these salaries be provided
in a sustainable form. It is a reflection of the special system
we have had here in this country which has considerable advantages,
I have to say. The complete separation of teaching and research
funding gives a degree of transparency about where money goes
and how it is accounted for, and it has actually made universities
much more efficient than they were before. In the old days when
I came to this country from Denmark and became head of department
in Dundee first, most people who were not actually researchers
could say "I am working on this and this and results will
come in eventually and I do not want to do more teaching than
person C who does a lot of research because my things are on the
way." There was no assessment in that sense so everybody
did more or less the same amount of teaching irrespective of whether
they were very research-active or not. Now we have a system where
it is quite transparent who is delivering in one area and who
is delivering in another area, so we do need the dual support
system in one form or the other, otherwise I simply do not see
how research-intensive universities will be able to sustain themselves.
It is a very substantial amount of money, it is between one-third
and two-thirds of university funding that comes through QR, at
the moment driven by the research assessment exercise. It is not
a small amount of money and so it is quite important, and this
is why it is important to think about the research assessment
exercise, which actually drives it.
Q692 Mr Chaytor: Could I ask Professor
Diamond specifically, is there a sense that it leads to fragmentation
and have we ever been able to provide a unified approach to the
development of research? Is the dual support system holding us
back in that way?
Professor Diamond: I do not think
it does. One thing that is absolutely inherent on a dual support
system is that you do not have, if you like, silo-based funding,
so if the Research Councils did not talk to the Funding Councils
I think you would have potentially some problems, but the one
thing it can assure you of is the Research Councils spend a lot
of time talking to the Funding Councils and I can point to four
or five examples at any time where there is joint activity because
we believe it is necessary so to do. The other areas that are
important for the dual support system are that in some way you
have to have some kind of flexibility within the higher education
system for things like seed corn funding to happen and for people
to develop new ideas. That is what the QR allows. One area though,
to return to something we have already discussed, which has in
some areas been a negative aspect has been the extent to which
the rewards mechanism by which you get QR funding has privileged
and rewarded those places which appointed new staff because something
is staff-based. If you appoint someone new then you get funding
based on the output of that person and that, I believe, potentially
has led to people being appointed rather than, for example, the
more strategic approach of using the money to build a new team
or something. Certainly, some researchers have argued to the ESRC
that it is very difficult to get on the ladder in the first place,
because until you have got some publications you cannot actually
get higher and there is a real challenge to us in developing the
new generation to ensure the dual support works. Dual support
works in this country because the Funding Councils and the Research
Councils work together and both believe in it.
Q693 Mr Chaytor: But if they work
together so well, why do their respective reforms of the funding
methodology appear to have been done in isolation? The Research
Councils reform of its peer review method does not seem to have
taken any account of the reforms to the RAE. Is that a fair criticism?
Professor Diamond: I do not think
it is. They are doing different things in many ways so that the
RAE looks backwards at work which has taken place, it is peer
reviewed in a way by a group of learned people. The Research Councils
look forward and try to pick the best opportunities, again using
peer review, and the final report on the Research Councils' peer
review exercise comes out in the next six or seven weeks or so,
I am happy to talk about the results of that if you so wish to.
That has involved consultation with the Funding Councils during
its work in exactly the same way as the consultants to the review
of the RAE and the HEFCE manager managing it are currently meeting
all Research Councils and will be meeting the director of the
Research Councils' peer review project in the next week or so.
Q694 Mr Chaytor: Given the extraordinarily
high cost of the processing of applications through the Research
Councils and the very high failure rate, do you think the review
of your methodology will inevitably lead to a reduced share of
funding going through the Research Councils?
Professor Diamond: It is a very
good point and a very interesting point that you have raised there.
Many people might disagree with your statement that the cost of
the Research Councils' peer review was high; certainly I think
many people would disagree that it was high relative to the RAE.
Certainly one thing on which I would agree with you is that there
is no way that you can compare the costs of peer review as found
by the Research Councils with the costs of the RAE as currently
publicised, it is apples and pears. It will be a very, very different
question to compare the two and that piece of research, was there
a need to do it, could be done, but it has not been done, so we
do not have those data first of all.
Q695 Mr Chaytor: If I can just say,
you are spending £196 million to allocate £1 billion,
so your administrative costs are 20% of the total.
Professor Diamond: Let us just
think through what that £196 million is. All except just
under £10 million of that takes place in the higher education
sector, so the actual direct administrative costs of the Research
Councils are under £10 million per annum. The rest of it,
the great majority of the rest of it, is the cost of developing
and preparing the proposals; in other words the time that academics
have reported to us in a large survey that was done, that they
spent, thinking about and working with their teams on, the new
research that they are going to do. Let us just take a hypothetical
example where we took all of this out and we simply said to a
university there is some money, give it to team X to do some research,
to do what they want. If you did that they would still have to
spend that time, I would suggest, from my experience of a little
under 25 years of research, thinking about and developing the
proposal, so that has been built into the model. At the same time
what we have done is looked at our processes through this peer
review report and said are there areas where we could make life
easier for researchers, could we increase the amount of money
and the amount of time that we give research grants for, could
we increase the use of outlines, could we think about resubmission.
Could we streamline and simplify the final report process? We
have reviewed all those and we are definitely going to streamline
the final report process, we are reviewing across the councils
at the moment the possibilities for a number of other areas including
what we call consolidation—in other words enabling some
groups to have longer or bigger grants. I suspect that all councils
will take on some of those aspects where appropriate, and the
expectation we have at the moment is that when we release the
results of the report, as well as celebrating UK peer review—because
the one thing that came to us from all our consultations, consultations
with the Council for Science and Technology, consultation with
the Funding Councils, consultation with all the higher education
sector, was a real confidence in UK peer review as the best way
of allocating competitive research funding and a real belief that
the UK peer review system stands up extremely well against anywhere
else in the world. However, at the same time we have identified
efficiency savings and we will, through this report, be able to
reduce somewhat that £190 million.
Q696 Mr Chaytor: Finally, would you
expect then, following the changes you have described, that the
success rate will increase from 28% or thereabouts, or is that
still a major problem for you.
Professor Diamond: Many Research
Councils, including my own, are below 20%.
Q697 Mr Chaytor: Do you see that
as inefficient or does that give thinking time and preparation
time for researchers?
Professor Diamond: It would be
nice to increase success rates. The one thing that Research Councils
can do a little bit about is the numerator of the success rate;
there is not an enormous amount one can do necessarily about the
denominator. I understand that people who have talked to you have
said the one thing they would not like us to do—for example,
I know that Alan Gilbert said this, reading your transcript—that
they would not be in favour of universities having quotas. That
came very strongly across to us and we have taken that out of
our options. I cannot say, therefore, that we will see an increase
in success rates.
Q698 Chairman: When someone applies
unsuccessfully that is part of the cost, the 80% of the effort
in producing the projects and programmes.
Professor Petersen: It is not
quite a waste of time, one has to say.
Q699 Chairman: Obviously it is not
a waste of time.
Professor Diamond: It is not completely
and one of the things that, as a senior research leader, one gets
used to is sitting down with one's junior colleagues sometimes—it
is a really sad experience for people to get a grant rejected—and
saying how are we going to take this forward, let us look at the
referee's comments, is there somewhere else we could get this
funded, and if it is a very, very good idea then you have to work
to try and get it funded, so it may not be completely wasted time.
There is wasted time in then having to revise and send it somewhere
else.
Professor Petersen: If I may make
one point really in relation to the peer review, it is very, very
difficult to apportion exactly the amount of time spent on peer
review in different spheres, but what one has to realise is that
peer review in all it forms means a very major amount of time
spent by academics. In fact, probably, most of the peer review
time is spent in the world of publication which is not accounted
for by anybody but is a very significant amount of time for individual
scientists; every time you submit a paper to a journal these days,
mostly it comes back asking for revision and if you are unlucky
and it has rejection you have to rewrite it for another journal
et cetera. It is part of the whole scientific process and there
are clearly overlapping spheres here in that a lot of the time
spent dealing with peer review in the journal world is of course
overlapping with the amount of time you are spending on peer review
in the grant world, so a lot of the data that you have about how
much time is spent on peer review for one particular type of activity
if you added them all up probably would be more than 100% of an
academic's time, I guess. The data we have in terms of what is
actually spent on peer review—I would certainly think it
is very difficult to get the right amount. One has to simply understand
that peer review in all its different forms is an intrinsic part
of the academic world.
|
