Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240-259)
PROFESSOR PATRICIA
NUTTALL AND
PROFESSOR MIKE
HULME
12 DECEMBER 2006
Q240 Dr Turner: The Chairman has
semi-articulated the sort of criticism which implies a one-size-fits-all
model, that you either have freestanding institutes or we must
be modern and embedded in universities. Could I put to you that
it really should be looked at as a case of horses for courses
and that, sometimes, for different purposes different bodies are
better. The Office of Science and Technology—OST as it was
and OSI as it is now—in their Quinquennial Review of research
institutes states things like their "multidisciplinary capacity"
and "critical mass", things which are difficult to replicate
in a university department and are not necessarily replicated
in many universities even; whereas at Tyndall, Professor Hulme,
you are a much smaller unit, part of a sort of multi-ganglia organisation
which operates in a very different way. Do you agree that in fact
there is a case for different sorts of research institutes and
that they all have a role to play? Would you care to comment on
that?
Professor Hulme: I have not used
that analogy of multi-ganglia for my Centre and it is an interesting
one. I would agree. I think it would be very inappropriate simply
to say there is one organisational model that would satisfy the
diverse needs and requirements of scientific research. Absolutely.
The Tyndall Centre is different from many others. In that sense,
it is appropriate to be rooted across several different universities.
In fact, my understanding of why the Tyndall Centre was designed
in that way was deliberately because one would never be able to
gather together in one single site all of the necessary disciplinary
expertise, the engineers, the economists, the social scientists,
the climate modellers, the hydrologists, the policy analysts.
You would never be able to secure the best expertise all physically
based in one site. Having this distributive model, rooted in a
community of scholars of many different disciplines, is necessary
if the Tyndall Centre is going to do the type of research it does.
Absolutely, I would agree with you.
Q241 Dr Turner: Professor Nuttall,
would you say that the organisational model that you have informs
the work that you do, because, clearly, working on a national
basis, as you do, there would be no advantage to you of being
embedded in a university, would there?
Professor Nuttall: It is probably
more to do with the governance. When you say embedded within a
university, two of our sites are co-located with universities
and there are definite advantages of that, especially when they
are smaller sites, because they benefit from a larger infrastructure.
But, in order to undertake the sorts of core activities that we
do, our organisational model is much more appropriate for the
definitions that you have just quoted of a research centre institute
than that of a university body. You are right, there is not one
model. What you need is the end product. We have a distributed
model because we are looking at the whole of the UK. We are working
in collaboration with many partners in Europe. So that we have
a good spread across the UK and links into the rest of Europe.
Where appropriate, for example, in Lancaster and Bangor, we have
our sites co-located with a university, so we benefit from the
university environment.
Q242 Dr Turner: You do that out of
convenience rather than any sort of dedicated principle. There
are those who argue that co-location is everything, yet there
are massive institutes being built in America which are co-located
with nothing more academic than an airport.
Professor Nuttall: It does depend
on size. Our presence at Bangor is comparatively small. Our target
number is 30. It makes sense to have it co-located with the University
of Wales, Bangor, rather than as a separate institute.
Q243 Dr Turner: Because it does not
have the back-up of your main centre.
Professor Nuttall: Yes.
Q244 Dr Turner: If you were to set
up your work programme starting without your main centre, would
you be able to do it from the university department as well, do
you think?
Professor Nuttall: Within a university
background, where the employees would be university people, I
do not think we could deliver what we are doing now, no.
Q245 Dr Turner: You are really saying
that stand-alone research councils like yours have a separate
role and a very valid role to play.
Professor Nuttall: Yes.
Q246 Dr Turner: As an essential part
of British science.
Professor Nuttall: I would say
there is definitely—in fact, more than ever—a need
for the science that we undertake. The model that has been adopted
is for research councils to fund the sorts of institutes as the
CEH. If there was a different model of funding, then maybe that
would be appropriate.
Q247 Dr Turner: How flexible is your
programme? Clearly you are undertaking a programme which is negotiated
with Defra which fits very much with the basic research council
institute model. Is that degree of flexibility that you have a
part of your organisational model? Do you think it stems from
it?
Professor Nuttall: Flexibility
is obviously a key to sustainability. We have suffered in the
past from lack of flexibility. The restructuring that we are undergoing
at the moment, where we are reducing our infrastructure—because
infrastructure costs money, which means it is not going into science—will
give us greater flexibility and greater critical mass as four
sites instead of nine sites. I think flexibility is important
as long as it meets our mission for looking at terrestrial and
freshwater environments.
Q248 Dr Turner: Obviously the Tyndall
comes from a different organisational perspective. How does the
Tyndall respond, for instance, to a government directive to say,
"Hey, please tell us everything we need to know about climate
change"?
Professor Hulme: If there is a
contract out for tender and it meets our skills profile in the
Tyndall Centre then we can make a decision to pitch for that particular
piece of research. We have obviously done contracted pieces of
research for Defra, DFID, the Stern Review and various other governmental
initiatives. Our core contract comes from the research councils,
and that gives us our baseline funding, but we are able to respond
to opportunistic calls for government-funded commissions. Indeed,
there is an expectation that we would match our core funding from
the research councils with an equivalent stream of funding from
government, civil society, organisations from business and so
on.
Q249 Dr Turner: Could you tell me
to what degree the work of your institutes is laboratory-based
and requires heavy investment in laboratory facilities and laboratory
infrastructure.
Professor Hulme: It is easy to
answer in our case. Very little is laboratory-based research—what
I think you mean by laboratory-based research. I can think of
two examples of our network of researchers using those types of
significant infrastructure, apart from standard ICT stuff. One
is a virtual reality laboratory where we do experiments bringing
citizens into an environment to create virtual futures—and
that has investment costs, but that was funded completely separately
from the Tyndall Centre—and some of our engineers in Newcastle
have a facility—again funded quite separately—where
they can look at scale models of, for example, embankments, to
see how stable embankments are under conditions of climate change.
Generally speaking, the Tyndall Centre is not laboratory-based
research.
Professor Nuttall: We have a mixture.
Laboratory research is very important for us. Sometimes we are
involved in taking samples from the field, bringing them back
to the laboratory, analysing them for biological material or chemicals.
We also undertake molecular work, which requires quite sophisticated
laboratory facilities.
Q250 Dr Turner: For that you really
do need your core establishment.
Professor Nuttall: Yes.
Q251 Chairman: If I have understood
your answer to Des Turner's question, you were saying that you
are a product of history and the governance arrangements which
have grown through that history. You did not say, in terms of
the work which is going on at the CEH institute, what work could
not be done within universities.
Professor Nuttall: Traditionally
universities have found it difficult to do long-term monitoring
studies because of the continuity issues. I know there are a number
of exceptions but they are small exceptions. I do not think there
are any exceptions where there is the spread of monitoring that
we undertake.
Q252 Chairman: There is no reason
why you should not, is there?
Professor Nuttall: Universities
have a different rationale. To undertake long-term monitoring
requires a certain amount of routine analysis and it requires
core staff and core skills to be maintained. Universities are
more flexible in their skills base and traditionally do not tend
to have such a long-term view about the work they do. It is very
investor driven. If there are opportunities for funding, academics
go for the funding rather than think long-term.
Q253 Dr Iddon: I would like to take
a few moments to examine your relationships with the research
councils and Research Councils UK. How do you characterise your
relationship with the research councils? Do you feel you are independent
of them? Do they interfere too much in the work that you do? What
about the balance between core funding that you each receive from
the research councils and the rest of the money that you have
to earn in a competitive environment?
Professor Hulme: Picking up one
thing immediately, I do not feel in any sense that research councils
interfere too much in the research that we do once a contract
is established. We have gone through two contracts with the research
councils: initially a five-year one and now, currently, a three-year
contract. Once those contracts are assigned and established, generally
speaking we are able to operate without undue interference. There
is monitoring and supervision, of course, but that is appropriate.
In terms of the wider relationship with RCUK—and in our
case we have three research councils funding us—the Tyndall
Centre was originally a specific creation: £10 million, ring-fenced,
came through a spending review in 1998. That was clearly released
by the Treasury for a new centre on interdisciplinary climate
change and the Tyndall Centre was created under my leadership.
As we went through a renewal process, trying to secure a second
contract from the research councils, that proved quite difficult
and we were not able to secure the level of funding that we felt
was appropriate. I think therefore that there has been a change
in the way that we perceive our relationship with the research
councils. As we think of the future of the Tyndall Centre, we
are not thinking of our future as pre-dominantly dependent on
research council funding, as we might have done three or four
years ago, and so we are having internal discussions in our organisation
about how we maintain and sustain funding of the Tyndall Centre
into the future. We would argue that the Tyndall Centre brand,
which is a name that is owned by the University of East Anglia,
is one that we are at liberty to do with what we want. It may
be the case, for example, that in three years' time we no longer
have core funding from research councils—that might be a
scenario—but the Tyndall Centre will continue to exist because
we have created something that is durable. In that case, we would
secure funding from a variety of other sources, from government,
from business, from Europe and international agencies, et cetera.
We now see our relationship as now a little bit more distant from
Swindon than we would have done, say, three or four years ago.
Q254 Dr Iddon: Is it because the
three research councils which have been supporting you up-to-date
are silo'd and do not recognise enough the value of interdisciplinary
research that is causing you the problem which you have been critical
of in your written evidence?
Professor Hulme: I do not think
it is quite as simple as saying they are silo'd or they are not
silo'd and it is that which is the primary cause of our difficulties.
I think there are a number of different levels. There is an instinct
within research councils in Swindon and also an instinct amongst
the professional academics who advise research councils, do peer
review, that is still innately disciplinary. There are some individuals
who are exceptions to that but there is a natural instinct still,
I feel, both organisationally and individually within the academic
community, and that makes it hard, sometimes, for the value and
the benefit of interdisciplinary research to be properly recognised.
Also, there is some learning that is still being done about how
research councils make joint decisions and I think the Tyndall
Centre has pushed at some of those limits or some of those obstacles
to making a joint decision. Certainly, when we were negotiating
the second contract, the feedback we were getting from three different
research councils was on occasions different and on some occasions
contradictory. One research council wanted our proposal to move
in one direction and another research council came back and said,
"No, no, we want it to move in a different direction."
Rather than having one steer, we were getting multiple steers,
and of course that makes things difficult. So there is learning
to do. I think that is recognised generally within research councils
but it is genuinely difficult to find good and effective decision
processes and mechanisms to make those sorts of cross-council
decisions on interdisciplinary research.
Q255 Dr Iddon: Research Councils
UK I thought was set up to overcome problems like that. It seems
to me that you are saying RCUK is not working.
Professor Hulme: There is progress
that has been made and there is significantly more progress to
be made but it would seem to me natural that there is some role
of RCUK, as an entity sitting above any individual research council,
to be leading that process. I do not know enough about the exact
relationships between Keith O'Nions, RCUK and the individual remits
of the research councils to be able to identify where new opportunities
might be, but I do feel that that level of oversight and monitoring
and leadership from RCUK seems appropriate rather than the individual
research council having to do it.
Q256 Dr Iddon: Do you think interdisciplinary
research is driving us to a situation where we have to think about
reducing the number from seven even down to one research council?
Professor Hulme: I do not feel
very strongly one way or another about that. I know there is a
debate and discussion and some comparative work perhaps looking
at other countries and the way that is done in other countries,
but even if there was only one research council I still think
that many of the problems of funding the type of interdisciplinary
research that we do would probably remain, so in a sense I do
not think that moving from seven councils to one council would
suddenly solve the problem. It is actually more important to look
internally at the dynamics of decision-making and, as I said before,
it is not just the paid research officers in Swindon; research
councils rely on peer review and the people who do peer review
are the professional academics and scientists in the country,
and there are still instincts that are disciplinary amongst that
community. There is also this question about how do we value—and
I mean value in the broadest sense—different types of research,
and that is a debate as well that is on-going and that we have
not got to the bottom of yet. Do you only value research if it
comes up with four international quality peer review papers in
the journal Nature or do you value research if it leads
to a Government bill on domestic carbon-trading, for example?
How do you weigh those two different metrics?
Q257 Chairman: I suspect that is
a full inquiry which we will need to do at some time in the future.
Professor Hulme: But it is rooted
in the same discussion.
Chairman: Absolutely.
Q258 Dr Iddon: Perhaps I could turn
to CEH and explore the same sort of questions with you, Pat. How
do you regard your relationship with your core funding research
council? Do they leave you to get on—who was the driving
force for the reorganisation? Presumably it was NERC and it did
not come from the grassroots.
Professor Nuttall: There is a
long history, of course, to that. CEH was created in 1994, as
I said, and it was not created on the basis of a business plan
or any strategic plan, it was created more on a political imperative,
so there has been some catch-up. When I took over as director
in 2001 it was very much on the basis of the need to change and
to look at sustainability. That required quite a bit of investment,
and there the deciding factor was when the money became available,
because it does cost a lot—£43.7 million is the budget
that we have got for the change that we are going through at the
moment. I would say it is not totally NERC that has been the driving
force. The senior management in CEH has realised that we needed
to change to be sustainable. In your question on science and the
role of NERC, Council has left that to the peer review process
so it has not questioned the science or tried to drive it, but
NERC Council has obviously been very interested in sustainability
and I think that is perfectly reasonable. I would say our relationship
with NERC is a good one now; it has been through a difficult time
but we now have an understanding, we have a way forward. As to
RCUK, my personal view is one of frustration with the funding
model adopted by RCUK. There is a table produced by RCUK that
shows what funding is allocated by different research councils
to different research centres. For CEH, we obtain funding from
NERC, which is entirely appropriate, we obtained funding from
BBSRC—we were eligible for funding from BBSRC—which
is also understandable because BBSRC increasingly is looking at
environmental issues, agri-environmental particularly. But EPSRC,
for example, will not fund CEH which means we had the strange
situation not so long ago of one our key scientists going through
the peer review with the University of Oxford, to bring a mathematician
into ecology, which is interdisciplinary science. When EPSRC found
that this was funding a CEH scientist we were refused, even though
the application had gone through the peer review process and been
supported. I do not see the reason why research councils do not
fund the best science; I do not understand why they put up barriers.
They will fund some but they will not fund others. MRC, for example,
will not fund us any more so NERC's first spin-out company Evolutec
which is now floated on the Alternative Investment Market, was
spun-out on the basis of the interface between biology and medicine,
and MRC and NERC. That would not happen today because MRC will
not fund that sort of research. I find RCUK's attitude to funding
not helpful, particularly for interdisciplinary science.
Q259 Dr Iddon: Thank you for that.
Can I ask you both now how valuable you think the reviews of research
institutes have been and whether you would like to see any changes
in the mechanism by which those are conducted?
Professor Nuttall: For NERC it
is changing, and I am very pleased it is changing; it needed to
change. I noticed Tyndall estimated they went through 24 months
of review; it must have been longer for CEH. I notice you costed
your review at £400,000. If we had costed our review, it
would have been more—we did not dare estimate what it cost
CEH. NERC is at the moment putting together plans for something
called FAB, which I think is funding, allocation and budgeting
(or words to that effect), which will recognise national capability
as a separate issue. FAB that will look at national capability
of centres like Tyndall, like CEH, like the BGS and BAS and it
will look at strategic programmes in which it will invest; so
it will be a different funding model and we welcome that.
| 
