Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
WEDNESDAY 10 JANUARY 2007
DR DAVID
WILLIAMS, MISS
PAULA FREEDMAN
AND DR
ARWYN DAVIES
Q100 Chairman: Let us just say then
that some of the NAO's criticisms were valid. Has in fact the
BNSC improved in terms of its effectiveness since that report
and what now needs to be done to improve it further, or is it
perfect?
Dr Williams: The NAO brought forward
a number of issues and since then we have established the UK Space
Board which has the main funding partners on it and allows us
to debate in a controlled environment and an organised environment
how we do things collectively with the major funding partners.
We have the Space Advisory Council beneath that which brings forward
ideas on where to go and that involves the wider partnership and
industry, so organisationally we have strengthened that part of,
if you like, the UK space management system.
Q101 Chairman: But how independent
is the Space Board?
Dr Williams: The Space Board is
very independent. It is chaired by the Chairman of the Particle
Physics and Astronomy Research Council, there is the Chairman
of NERC, there is the Chief of Policy in the MoD, the Met Office
are involved at chief executive level, and I attend as effectively
the executive officer along with staff, so it is independent in
the fact that it is talking about the individual budgets and it
is talking about the collective and how we work together and it
does not have external advisory members on it in that sense.
Q102 Chairman: What I am trying to
get at in this first session of questions really, David, is that
the BNSC seems to be responsible for space policy and advising
the Government on space policy. I am trying to work out how independent
they are as a result of the reorganisation that followed the NAO
inquiry and also the setting up of the UK Space Board. In policy
terms, is it independent and is it effective and, secondly, in
lobbying terms, is it independent and is it effective?
Dr Williams: In policy terms,
it gets independent advice and gives good advice which we take
forward to the Minister, and I think we are all fairly happy with
the way it works as the Space Board. We interact in different
forms with industry, we have the industry group which advises
on technology and we have industry people involved in other advisory
bodies that report, so I think from that point of view we get
good, independent advice coming in to the BNSC. If we come back
to the lobbying, in terms of working the system for money, each
partner works their own corner because effectively each partner
has to go through a mechanism to get funding and, as the BNSC,
we give overall advice to the Minister who then takes it into
the system and works on the political side of the house to try
and improve the overall position for space across government.
It is a difficult task when you work in a partnership and the
Treasury do respond well to joined-up approaches in terms of forward
bidding, and we are putting a document in that all the partners
will submit as a cover document for their CSR bid this year which
shows that they are working within a framework of the overall
space activity and that this is what we are trying to achieve
overall, and individually each partner then has a programme. The
Treasury are receptive to that approach, they do like the joined-up
government approach, so I think we do have a mechanism that works.
There is no doubt it is not perfect, but I am not sure that the
agency would be any more perfect; it would have different problems.
Q103 Chairman: So you have got a
magic wand, it is the new year, what could you do to improve things
further? Space is obviously a very, very important area for the
British economy and it is important for all sorts of other public
service delivery issues, so what would make your organisation
more effective?
Dr Williams: As with all these
things, I think we are very effective today and one of the points
I have always wanted to make is that, although in the UK we do
not contribute to all areas of space, where we do contribute and
where we do work, we are very, very good.
Q104 Chairman: That is not what I
asked. I asked: what would you do to improve things?
Dr Williams: If we wanted to improve,
we would need more money to do new things. To do that, we need
to persuade those parts of government and those parts of industry
to invest more money to achieve those goals. One of the things
I would like to do to improve it is to get more private venture
into funding space, and the other one is to try and work to get
more science vote into space and to get other departments working
on space issues. DfT are very good at the moment, but Defra we
need to work with to get them to bid for funds. It is a matter
of working with the partnership to get more people bringing things
in. On the other side, we could do more, I think, on the education
side and on the skills and science side, and there we are looking
at what we can do in the future to strengthen the use of space
and the attraction of space in attracting people into science.
Q105 Chairman: The Science and Technology
Facilities Council has been established. What impact will that
have on your organisation?
Dr Williams: Initially, it will
bring together the CCLRC and the PPARC capability. It will allow
us to have a focus on the Harwell Business Campus for background
technology and technology support and one of the things we have
done already this year in the process of this CSR bidding for
2007 is to make a bid into government through the CCLRC for a
national technology programme. That bid has gone in as a bid into
the system. It will then merge with the PPARC bidding and, if
it is successful, Harwell will become a focus for the UK activity
of national technology, we will use it to work across the UK,
and it will not all be done there, but we will do it in a good
e-science mode by which the work will be done where the skills
are rather than bringing it into Harwell, and we want to use Harwell
to attract inward investment from Europe and from the European
Space Agency to build the sort of core capability in the UK which
will carry it forward a long way.
Q106 Chairman: It is a positive move,
as far as you are concerned?
Dr Williams: A positive move,
yes.
Q107 Graham Stringer: Dr Williams,
as an outsider coming into this organisation, you must have made
an initial assessment of what was right and wrong. What was the
most surprising thing you found?
Dr Williams: I did know the BNSC
from my previous life and I had interacted with it and in fact
I have worked in it in the past. The most surprising thing for
me was probably the decline in national activity, if we are looking
at the programmatic side, in that we had lost some capability
of the national programme, and that has been recognised in the
NAO report, and this is beginning to impact on our ability to
prepare ourselves to work with the European Space Agency, and
this is reflected in the way we try to put emphasis on building
that area up in the future.
Q108 Graham Stringer: You have partly
answered this question, but I will ask it in a slightly different
way. How do you believe you could increase the effectiveness of
the Centre at co-ordinating the UK space programme?
Dr Williams: We can always look
to improve. I think the way that we have established the committee
structure at the top level is now good. What I want to do is work
more with what I call the departments which are not fully funding
space, but where we believe they have an interest, to try and
strengthen the cross-departmental links in government where we
see societal needs that space can answer, so I think this is important
and I think I would like to work on that. I think we need to do
more on the, if you like, skills in the society side of the house,
trying to bring more of what we do on space into the system as
a whole, and I think we need to work more on getting industry
to recognise that you have to get to the point where private venture
is a recognisable source of money for the development of space
systems rather than it just always being government money and
government money.
Q109 Graham Stringer: In the written
evidence we have received, the criticism is that the individual
parts of the Space Centre act individually and it is a title rather
than an effective, co-ordinating body. Is that fair? Do different
partners just act individually without regard to the overall policy?
Dr Williams: That has not occurred
to me. I see it that, as departments, we interact very well. In
the London headquarters, I have staff from the DTI, I have staff
from NERC, I have staff from particle physics and I have staff
from the MoD and we have people on secondment from DfT and Defra,
so we have got a good collection of people who represent the different
working departments and we have secondees from industry, so we
have a team which works together in a very good way and very well.
When you see the individual people acting, it is more on the publicity
issue because you have always got the presentation of where does
the credit go, and what I am trying to do through the communications
programme is saying that we should be promoting UK space and giving
credit to the relevant part of government or industry, according
to how it works, but the first criterion is to promote UK space.
I believe at the present time, within the constraints of a partnership
and within the constraints that individual spends go through individual
departments, we are working together and we are working harder
to improve that inter-relationship between us and it is driving
forward and going well.
Q110 Graham Stringer: Can you tell
us about the relationship with the Ministry of Defence. Could
it be improved? Are there difficulties?
Dr Williams: The Ministry of Defence
have seconded staff into the headquarters. They help tremendously
in understanding where the MoD work and how they do things and
the policy aspects of the MoD and where we can interact. The MoD
themselves are funding the meteorological systems because they
require those, so they fund a significant element of the space
programme itself and they have their own military programmes for
military use. The difficulty we always have is in the background
technology, that the technology is the same between civil and
military. If you build a sensor, it is a sensor and its application
is a separate issue. There is a problem, which is not the MoD's
problem, it is government-wide, of spending civil money doing
military things and military money doing civil things and how
you get across that interface in a joint environment.
Q111 Graham Stringer: Is that just
an accountancy problem or is it a real problem on the ground?
Dr Williams: It is probably more
an accountancy problem than a real one.
Q112 Graham Stringer: Can you give
us an example of where it has caused practical problems?
Dr Williams: The criterion is
that you cannot spend civil money doing military things, so if
we come up with a specification which is a military requirement,
the civil world is not allowed to go into it and they are not
allowed to talk to us about doing it, so they do it separately
and we do not see that as a civil programme. On the civil side,
we have had some problems on the Galileo programme where at the
European level other countries have been saying, "We want
to use this programme for military requirements", but it
is very clearly a civil application and the UK has a very strong,
loud voice in Europe, saying, "We must maintain this and
we cannot allow it to drift across to the military side".
It has caused, if you like, a lot of good discussion in the UK,
it has caused a lot of discussion in Europe about the technical
specifications and about the application of a civil system in
a military regime and there is no doubt that, if you just want
to use a navigation system to drive down the motorway, whether
it is a civil lorry or a military lorry is irrelevant, it is when
you go beyond that that you begin to run into problems.
Q113 Graham Stringer: That is interesting.
How do you deal with departments like DFID which are not partners,
but potentially have an interest?
Dr Williams: I personally at the
moment have not had very much interaction with DFID, but we know
that there is currently an initiative to improve education in
Africa and in my previous life I did quite a lot of work in that
field in Africa in terms of improving access to capabilities.
We are keen to open discussion with them on how we can supply
a system and supply information that will help them. We have in
the UK a disaster management constellation which is a series of
satellites built by Surrey Satellite Technology which are owned
by different countries around the world, but which collectively
respond when there is a crisis, and we have joined an international
charter on crisis management so that, when a country has a disaster,
we can call that charter into play and the satellites which exist
are turned on to provide information. We are trying to bring that
into the thinking of DFID so that they can bring it into their
mainstream. There has been, I have to say, not a lot of direct
discussion, but that will start in the next two or three months
because it is an initiative in an area which is recognised as
important.
Q114 Graham Stringer: Are there any
problems with departments like Defra, which have a policy lead
and they are interested in statistics and the information flows,
but they are less interested in the hardware?
Dr Williams: Defra, quite rightly,
are looking at the output. They are saying, "What we want
is to deliver evidence-based policy". They currently have
a mechanism to do that which works, but, as is the problem with
all systems, it could improve. What we are doing with a satellite
capability called GMES, global monitoring for environment and
security, is, at a European level, looking at whether in 10 years'
time or twelve years' time we have a more rational and a more
equitable set of information to allow a European-level capability
of monitoring to come into place. That is a fairly big challenge
for a specific department because they are running a system today
and yet they are looking five to 10 years ahead at whether they
can change that system to a new flow of information, and they
are not going to do that until they have full confidence that
that new flow will be real and will be useful and will not degrade
the evidence-based policy-making. Therefore, they are having this
balance of, "Yes, we've got to keep going with the existing
capability. We have to have this ten-year R&D vision of where
we want to be", and then it becomes a matter of priority
for funding and it is causing problems. What it is also doing
is highlighting that a programme like GMES has really got to focus
on what the application-users need and it should not be driven
by the short-term industrial requirements of Europe, which is
where the balance is at the moment, in my opinion.
Q115 Graham Stringer: That is a really
interesting analysis of how the problems arise where there is
a lack of imagination. Can you be very specific about what those
problems are?
Dr Williams: Well, if you want
to build a satellite and you say, "We'll build a satellite
and it will last for five years. Please will you use that and
fund it to do your evidence-based policy", the Department
has quite a good reaction of, "Five years is not a very long
horizon. We have to train people, we have to buy new equipment,
we have to change the system and, in doing that, it will cost
us money and it will cost time and effort. What we want to see
is a sort of ten- to 15-year horizon of the system so that we
have the timescale to switch over gradually and move in and change
the way we do business to this new method in a way which will
not degrade how we provide evidence, but improve the way we provide
evidence". The current GMES proposal is a series of single
satellites which does not do that. If you look at the only parallel
I know on that, you have the meteorological data service and there
the initial programme was for a series of three satellites over
10 or twelve years and that gave the weather services the confidence
to begin to use the data and over a period of 20 years it has
now completely transitioned and the users are now fully funding
and running a system, so we have got to get to that point. Defra
are bringing a real challenge in saying, "Look, it's no use
talking about one-offs, you have got to talk about continuity
and the way forward", and we have to take that into the European
theatre where there is a bit more of a drive for a short-term
industrial return and convert the way they think to the same sort
of argument. Otherwise, I think GMES has problems.
Q116 Chairman: You did mention DfES
within your comments there. Do you have any meetings with the
Secretary of State for DfES in terms of the educational impact
of space and space programmes?
Dr Williams: No, I have had no
direct interaction with DfES. It is a weakness that we recognise
and acknowledge and it is an area that we want to address going
forward in skills in science and science in society to try to
build a bridge across that field. I was very pleased that, when
the astronauts came over, the Secretary of State for DfES was
there and made a short speech and I think he recognises that space
has a role to play in promoting science, but we have had no direct
interaction.
Q117 Chairman: And whose fault is
that—yours or theirs or both?
Dr Williams: A little bit of both,
I believe, and I am determined to try and rectify that as I settle
into the post and move forward.
Q118 Dr Iddon: You are moving on,
Dr Williams, from the UK Space Strategy 2003-06 and beyond to
a new policy which will be 2007-10. Could you perhaps outline
to the Committee please what will be the major changes between
the existing policy and the new policy, as you see it?
Dr Williams: At the current time,
I do not think we know what the absolute change will be. What
we have done is establish a consultation process that was released
this week, having taken quite a while to get into position. What
we have done there is, for all the areas that we currently have
activity, we have asked some strategic questions and asked people
to comment on whether we should focus on these and what we may
change, so the public consultation actually is a very important
stage in getting the widest possible input on what society thinks
we are doing right, what society thinks we are doing wrong and
where society thinks we can improve the way we do space. Whether
it will result in any dramatic changes remains to be seen because
dramatic changes tend to mean extra funding and changes in the
funding base, so it will be difficult to say that things will
change dramatically. I think we are going to keep the focus at
this present time on doing useful things with space and doing
things that benefit either the commercial world, the science world
or society at large, the societal world. It is difficult at this
stage to say that there will be a dramatic change and that we
will go back into launches, for example. I do not see that as
baseline and I do not see us at this stage going into manned space
because of the costs involved, but I do see us being part of the
global endeavours to do exploitation and exploration in the widest
sense.
Dr Iddon: You surprise me because the
new Science Minister is putting it about that Britain is thinking
about returning to manned space and certainly, when we meet astronauts,
they are very keen on Britain getting engaged in manned space
again. Why, for example, was the Science Minister on television
only last night suggesting that Britain might get back into manned
space?
Q119 Chairman: Advised by you.
Dr Williams: I listened to what
the Minister said last night and saw the article on television.
He talked about the UK doing a lunar probe to understand the surface
of the moon and the subsurface of the moon as the basis for people
going to the moon. What he did not say was who was going to go
to the moon. In the new global exploration and exploitation programme
which is being developed by all the nations in the world with
an interest in space, the UK is taking an active part. The way
that that is going to emerge is that, unlike the previous round
of exploration where you shared all the business and you had a
little bit of this and a little bit of that, the new exploration
programme is going to look at the collective of what needs to
be done in the long term, how it can be done and what are the
goals, and then it will be up to each country and, in the case
of Europe, the European Space Agency as well to look at what it
can contribute to that whole, doing something that is useful and
important to meet this global exploration. The UK, in working
in that, is looking at what novel science can do and what technology
can bring into it, so we have seen robotics and communications
in going to the moon as something where we have a skill and a
skill which will contribute to the whole. It does not necessarily
mean that we move to a man in space, but if you look forward 30
or 40 years, and there was a study of whether the UK should go
back into manned space last year with some eminent scientists,
some of whom are very sceptical, they concurred that in the short
term there is probably no need to put man in space for the sort
of objectives of the UK. In the long term, if exploration is really
to take off, then man will go there, so at some point the UK will
have to decide whether to return to that programme, but that does
not mean to say it has to happen in the next year or in the next
five years, but it is probably a long way in the future before
that needs to be reconsidered.
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