UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To
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House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
INNOVATION, universities, SCIENCE AND
SKILLS COMMITTEE
ENGINEERING AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES
RESEARCH COUNCIL:
RECENT developments AND INTRODUCTORY
HEARING
WEDNESday 12 NOVEMBER 2008
PROFESSOR
DAVID DELPY and MR JOHN ARMITT
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 114
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Oral Evidence
Taken
before the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee
on Wednesday 12 November 2008
Members present
Mr Phil Willis, in the Chair
Mr Tim Boswell
Dr Ian Gibson
Dr Evan Harris
Dr Brian Iddon
Ian Stewart
Dr Desmond Turner
________________
Witnesses:
Professor David Delpy, Chief Executive, and Mr John Armitt,
Chairman, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, gave evidence.
Q1 Chairman: Good morning to our two witnesses: David Delpy, the Chief Executive
Officer of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and John
Armitt, the Chairman of the EPSRC.
Welcome to you both, gentlemen, this morning. It is the first time that our Committee has
had a chance to formally congratulate you on your appointments, but also we
welcome you to the IUSS Committee. I
want to be fairly pacey this morning, if you would keep your answers as tight
as you possibly can, please! David, you
came in as a Chief Executive at a time when there was considerable change,
particularly in physical sciences. What
have been the big challenges over the past year as Chief Executive?
Professor Delpy: I suppose there have been internal and external challenges. If I start with the easy one, that is
internal challenges. As a result of the
way that funding has been moved between the various research councils
themselves but particularly because of the development of the shared service
centre and the eventual move of the finance HR and grant-based staff out of the
research councils and into a separate shared service centre, there has been an
internal reorganisation that I have had to pick up although it was largely
planned before I came on board. The
major challenges externally, which are not just unique to EPSRC, have been
finding ways of managing the increased demand for grant funding and the
increased cost of grant funding with the transition to FEC; tackling ways of
overcoming the inherent conservatism of peer review, and therefore enabling
much more ambitious projects to get through the peer review process; and in the
longer term, and particularly for EPSRC, increasing the visibility of
engineering and physical sciences and the impact it has on society.
Q2 Chairman: John, can I just put on record our thanks to you for joining us for
the launch of the e-consultation last week at the Lambeth Academy because we
very much appreciate that! As its
Chairman, is this an organisation that is fit for purpose?
Mr Armitt: Yes, I have been impressed by what I have found. It is an organisation that I believe has a
very good set of top staff - programme managers in David's directorates. I have worked with him and them on the
reorganisation that he has discussed, and we have now got an organisation that
is facing in the right directions, given the stakeholder interests that we
have. I have been very impressed by the
professionalism of the organisation. I
would describe it as an organisation that, like all, could always do with
tweaking, but which is fundamentally sound.
Organising the shared service centre I think is one of the challenges
that we and the other research councils will face in the next 12 months because
that is a significant change in day-to-day operation of the research
councils. Very often, of course, it is
that side of any organisation that keeps the whole thing going, and if that is
tripping over itself with new IT systems and so on, that can be a problem.
Q3 Chairman: One of the things you have both mentioned is the community you are
facing. Can you comment on this issue,
which the Committee constantly has brought to its attention: has the
Government's policy of emphasis on transitional research had a significant
effect in terms of the way in which your organisation views its objectives, and
indeed funds those objectives?
Professor Delpy: I come from an applied science background in the medical physics
area anyhow.
Q4 Chairman: So you are all in favour of it!
Professor Delpy: I am all in favour of it anyhow.
I would argue, to be honest, that probably to all the research councils
this represents less of a culture change to our community. When I came on board, the statistics -
and they have not changed significantly - were that something like 35 to 40 per
cent of all the research that we fund in universities is funded in
collaboration with a user of some sort, whether that be a government department
or an industry. About 40 per cent
of the PhDs that we fund are also jointly or in some form of collaboration with
an end user. I would say that the EPS
community as a whole has historically always been engaged in translational
research anyhow; so I do not really find that it is the problem that it is perceived
to be. There are differences in specific
communities across the whole region.
Q5 Chairman: That is a very fair response.
In your delivery plan you said that there is more to do to reduce the
time of exploitation of breakthrough research; and given your comments about
the Research Council's central mission, what are you doing that is
fundamentally going to change, because everybody says that there is this big
gap?
Professor Delpy: There are a variety of things.
One of the things EPSRC pioneered were the collaborative training awards,
which has now transformed into knowledge transfer awards. Knowledge transfer awards are large-scale
lumps of funding for universities. We
have just got a big call-out, which closed last week, and we will be announcing
that over the next three months or so, having gone through peer review. That is a tranche of funding that is provided
in a very flexible way and enables universities to mix and match the training
that they provide for students, together with support for the transition of the
research that comes out of masters and PhD packages through some small amount
of follow-on fund, and support for the staff, either Rais through what used to
be the old Research Associates Industrial Secondment scheme, which can now be
expanded through to PhD students, being able to move into the university
sector. Obviously, in collaboration with
the TSB, we are involved in a large number of the knowledge transfer networks
and the integrated knowledge centres, and we have a new initiative with a
venture group. John hosted a dinner with
some venture capitalists a month or so ago, to get a collaboration so that they
are involved early on in helping us with our small follow on fund.
Q6 Chairman: John, given your background and the fact that you are a deliverer,
you must be very frustrated about the time it takes to get basic research into
products and wealth creation; so what are you doing about it as Chairman?
Mr Armitt: Yes, I think that perhaps sometimes we expect too much too
quickly. If you accept that what we are
funding and what the universities are doing is largely the front end, in years
one to three in a research programme, and business is unlikely to pick it up
until years ten to twenty, what we are really looking for is how you make that
transition in years three to seven, where business can say there is something
we can pick up and take forward. One of
the things I said a few months ago - but times change rather rapidly - was,
"There is all this money sloshing around in the City; why can we not get more
of it into research, and why can we not get these private entity guys showing
some interest in what we are doing?"
Q7 Dr
Iddon: Their bonuses!
Mr Armitt: The encouraging thing about the dinner we had was that they said
they would be able to bring funds for years five to ten, and I had been afraid
they would only be interested in years nought to five in terms of seeing a
return on their money; but they were prepared to fund things. The key thing was that they would be very,
very critical of course of the decision to go forward with something, so they
would be very probing in seeing whether this is something that really is going
to be possible to bring to market in a couple of years' time - or whether it is
just some academic whimsy that frankly is very nice, but is not going to lead
to product. I was encouraged by
that. The other thing I would add to
David's comment is about these engineering doctoral training centres where we
have 21 universities operating with 500 companies, and in which people are
doing eng.docs where three of their four years is spent very much focused on
business and one year in pure academia; so that is helping to create this
transition. Our links with TSB will be
very important in this whole area but we have to be careful that we do not
stray too much into one another's fields; nevertheless the more that we can
link together at the right time, then we will see some real benefit.
Q8 Chairman: I will come back to TSB because we want to explore that with
you. The split of PPARC and CCLRC was a
major event in the setting up of STFC. There was at the time, and has been
increasingly since then, a suggestion that your research council should take
over the smaller response-mode funding for the physics community. Is that a suggestion you are seriously
looking at? Is it one you should be
looking at?
Professor Delpy: The discussion and consultation on that pre-dated my coming on
board, but the Council at the time of the consultation recommended that the
whole of physics funding for awards should be handled by one research council,
not necessarily EPSRC. We did get the
Council to reconsider that at the time of the Wakeham Review and the evidence
that we put into it, and the Council felt that was still the same, or it held
the same view. To be honest, I see
no real problem in having the physics funding split across the two because they
are very different forms of physics community with much longer-term goals for
the particle physics and astronomy side than perhaps on the rest of physics. STFC and ourselves have obviously got to make
sure that we work together to avoid a real gap, and to enable us to tension the
support across the whole of the physics portfolio in a balanced way. We are working at the moment with STFC to do
that as part of the follow-on from the Wakeham comments.
Chairman: Thank you very much. I want
now to move to funding.
Q9 Dr
Iddon: Good morning, gentlemen. You are having to put some money into the
TSB, which obviously is welcomed; 90 per cent of overheads is funded through
the FEC mechanism, which everybody seems to approve of; and you mentioned the
training centres, which you also have to fund.
The problem with that is that the money available for grants, whether
programmed or responsive, has gone down by 15 per cent, which is a considerable
figure. The research community you are
involved with is extremely worried about the direction of money away from what
I would call blue-sky research or responsive-mode applications towards what you
call the global challenges. You must be
aware of the concern in the academic community: what is your response to that?
Professor Delpy: The total amount of funding that is going into research has
increased. We have had an 18.6 per cent
increase, which enables us to cover our 80 per cent of FEC, the other 10 per
cent coming through the infrastructure fund.
When we were making our bids during the CSR
preparations we consulted extensively with our strategic advisory teams, which
are largely discipline based, with our user panel, which is largely industrial
based, and our strategic academic panel, as well as more widely with our
framework universities. The message we
got, consistently, was that irrespective of the overall level of the funding,
the thing that we must preserve is training.
The thing that we must preserve is research in areas of strategic
priority, and those areas have been identified through that process of
consultation.
Q10 Dr
Iddon: Who has identified them, David?
Professor Delpy: The SATs, the strategic advisory teams.
Q11 Dr
Turner: Who are the strategic advisory
teams?
Professor Delpy: The strategic advisory teams are generally somewhere between 12 and
15 representatives of the research community, so they are active researchers.
Q12 Dr
Turner: Who has appointed them?
Professor Delpy: We appoint them. We advertise
openly for nominations and then we go through an interview process.
Q13 Dr
Gibson: Do you get the nominations or do you
have to pick the phone up?
Professor Delpy: No, we get lots of nominations.
The selection process is more difficult, because we do get a lot of
nominations. These are all active
researchers in their specific disciplines and there are about 14 or 15 SATs
covering maths, physics, chemistry, materials, engineering and so on. That is who they are! The message that we got was that irrespective
of whatever funding we got, we needed to preserve training and funding in the
strategically important research areas.
As a consequence, when we did get our overall £2.4 billion, we set
aside approximately half that budget for both training and the training
associated with the knowledge transfer activities. We are putting £592 million over the
three-year CSR period into what
could largely be called training, fellowships and studentships, and about £480
million into things that we corralled under a knowledge-transfer heading, but
which are largely, again, training and research, which is geared around
industrial priorities. We are then left
with £866 million, our largest single pot, which is for responsive-mode/blue
skies - the open research portfolio. So
it comprises 37 per cent of our total portfolio, that responsive-mode pot, but
about 60 per cent or 65 per cent of our research portfolio, if you remove the
training component.
Q14 Dr
Iddon: Traditionally, research councils were
awarded grants to departments - the chemistry community, the physics community
and so on; however, as I understand it the grants in the future will be awarded
to the universities for internal distribution.
Is that correct; and, if it is correct, why has this change occurred?
Professor Delpy: The quick answer is "no".
Certainly all the responsive-mode grants are awarded in exactly the same
way to the principal investigator - although obviously it is the university
that holds the award, the PI is the person responsible for it. We have for many years now made the
nominations of the doctoral training award, which is the PhD allocation, to the
universities as a whole. It was probably
five or six years ago that we changed the allocation of those from departmental
to a university allocation, leaving the universities with the freedom to decide
strategically how they wish to allocate studentships. The large KTA process that we are currently
going through is again issued to the university, but then it was in its
original format as a CTA award back in 2001, so nothing much has changed, to be
honest.
Q15 Dr
Gibson: You must be selective in a number of
universities and the particular universities that you allocate the funds to.
Professor Delpy: We are indeed.
Q16 Dr
Gibson: Can you tell me roughly - besides
Oxford and Cambridge - how many others benefit from this and how many do not?
Professor Delpy: In terms of doctoral training awards, it is about 28, if I remember
rightly that get a doctoral training award.
The decision on whether we award a doctoral training account is based on
the volume of research funding that the university has attracted from the
EPSRC. When we set up the doctoral
training account mechanism, because there are universities that would not receive
the account we introduced the project studentship mechanism, which enables
individual researchers to apply for a PhD student on their normal
responsive-mode grant.
Q17 Chairman: How many of those are there?
Professor Delpy: In fact, interestingly, that is a mechanism that has driven
behaviour in a way that we had not anticipated.
Out of about 8,000 students that we now support, the largest of any
research council, about 1,800 are currently project students. So that mechanism which we put in place as a
catch-all for those who did not get a doctoral training account has grown
enormously.
Q18 Dr
Gibson: Why is that?
Professor Delpy: Because academics are bright people and if they can see a source of
money and a mechanism, then they will apply for it. It is a general policy of EPSRC not to be
restrictive, and so we did not say, "You can not apply for a project
studentship if your university is in receipt of a DTA"; so if you look at the
distribution of the project studentships, they map pretty well on to the
universities that also have a doctoral training facility.
Q19 Dr
Gibson: Which mechanism do you like
best? Do you want both mechanisms to be
working, or why not go for your 1,800 and increase to 3,600 or whatever?
Professor Delpy: If you ask my personal opinion, I think there are too many going through
the project studentship route. One of
the things we found, and why we have now gone on to doctoral training centres
and large cohort training, is that the message from students who are taught as
part of a cohort - although obviously working on an individual research project
- is that they find it a much better experience and that there is a much
greater degree of coherence in their training.
The universities believe that it is a more efficient way of training the
students and that the students receive a more consistent and coherent training;
and the industries that take these students say that the students who come out
of this larger coherent doctoral training centre are much more fit for purpose.
Q20 Dr
Gibson: What happens to the others, the
1,800 who are on their own?
Professor Delpy: They would have been on their own if those studentships were
restricted to universities that did not have a doctoral training account. In reality, of course, a large number are in
those same universities. I think we are
putting a few too many studentships through the project studentship route but
we are going to have a look at the training and the Council will consider this
later in the New Year.
Q21 Dr
Gibson:
What about universities with cohorts and individuals?
Professor Delpy: It is another mechanism.
Academics will apply for funding wherever it is available.
Q22 Dr
Gibson: I do not blame them, do you?
Professor Delpy: No, of course not, and they are very bright people and put very
good cases so they get them.
Dr Gibson: Well, some are.
Dr Iddon: Can I come to early career researchers about whom a lot of concern
is being expressed at the moment? If
they are not part of one of the large programmes and are trying to establish
themselves independently in academia, apparently it is getting more difficult
because I am told that of the grants that they apply for, less than 10 per cent
are actually funded, which is a very low figure, and that figure has gone down
significantly in recent years. If we get
President Obama in post on 20 January and he starts to fund science and
technology to a greater extent - well, he probably will, I admit, Chairman!
Dr Gibson: Where were you last week?
Q23 Dr
Iddon: Then he is reversing the stem cell
decision that President Bush put in place.
If we frustrate our young researchers and do not encourage them in this
country - can I put it to you, David, that you are going to encourage a
brain-drain like we have never seen before, across the "Pond"?
Professor Delpy: First of all, I would not want to do that, and I would argue in
fact that the brain-drain has been reversed because of the increase in science
over the last ten years. The UK has
been seen as a very attractive place for research. The question of early career researchers is
one that does concern us, and we are currently undertaking a review of how we
handle that. The problem is that we used
to have a simple scheme for early career researchers which was capped at
£60,000, so it was a small grant but it enabled a first-time academic to really
dip their feet into the water. The peer
review of that was a lighter touch.
Because it was a small amount, we checked that the science was not
flawed and that there was a good case made, and then it was awarded at £60,000. With the transition to FEC that went up and
then about three or four years ago, in response to the pressures from the
community, we took the cap off because the argument was that people should be
asking for the funds they required to undertake the piece of research. I would approve that in principle. The consequence of that is that the average
first grant that we now receive from the chemistry community - those are the
ones who raised this in particular - has gone up from £60,000 to £600,000. We have had our first few first grants of over
£1 million, and these are from people who have not yet established a track
record in research. First of all, if we
do not have any extra money and the amount of the award has gone up from
£60,000 to £600,000, we can only fund a tenth of the number. Secondly, the peer review that we would
undertake, and that we ask the community to undertake on our behalf, for a
£600,000 grant is very different to that for a £60,000 grant; so the
peer-review mechanism has consistently stated:
"It has not met that quality threshold for a £600,000 grant."
Q24 Dr
Iddon: Did the research community decide to
take that cap off itself, or was that a decision of your Council?
Professor Delpy: We took it off, but in response to the views of the community that
the cap was inappropriate because it restricted people in the ambition that we
were demanding of them. It was not just
an arbitrary decision chosen at random, but it has driven a behaviour that is
totally inappropriate. I would argue
that is partly the blame of the universities, because in mentoring a first-time
academic - I just cannot understand how a head of department or a research Vice
Provost, Vice Chancellor, whatever the university has - I do not see how one
could sensibly advise a first-time academic to go and bid for something of that
order of magnitude.
Q25 Dr
Iddon: Let me turn now to full economic
costs, which we have all supported - but there might be unintended consequences
of moving in this direction, I suggest to you.
It has come to my notice that universities are expected to bank this
money to keep a well-endowed laboratory going into the future. We all know what pressures universities are
under, and I put it to you that universities are hardly likely to bank full
economic costs so that when a department comes to replace a very large piece of
equipment costing half a million to several million pounds, the money will not
be there in the individual university and they will be coming back and putting
pressure on you to help them out. What
do you have to say to universities that are thinking in that direction?
Professor Delpy: The first thing I did when I came on board, which coincided with
the CSA Award, was to do a series of road shows with the 12 major universities
that take 70 per cent of our funding and with whom we have a strategic
relationship - the so-called framework universities - together with four
regional road shows to cover the others.
In every one of those my talk covered this specific point. I said that once FEC and infrastructure
funding was fully in place, the universities were expected to provide a well-found
laboratory - and those of you who were in research and my age - and that is
most of us, I suspect - can remember that dim and distant past of the well-found
laboratory. I have been telling the
universities that they have got to do this, and framework universities are very
well aware of it; and RCUK in its study of how FEC is being implemented is also
passing that message on. The whole idea
of FEC-based funding, and the JM Consulting report, was to provide a
sustainable research basis and not to provide an increase in the volume of
research. The universities have to put
in place that mechanism. Some of them
have moved very quickly, to be honest.
Unfortunately, they are not always the major research universities but
some have moved and the rest I think are realising that they have to do it.
Q26 Dr
Gibson: They are thinking about it.
Professor Delpy: They are thinking and they have to think very quickly.
Q27 Dr Iddon: We all know
that companies act on a global basis these days, particularly the big ones, and
I am getting vibrations that they are not prepared to give universities a
research grant to support students in a project together with paying their
overheads along the FEC concept to keep a well-founded laboratory going, and
that this is likely to lead to the larger companies putting more and more of
their money into other countries within Europe and probably beyond Europe. That would be a bad thing for this country. Have you picked up this criticism, and what
is your answer to that?
Professor Delpy: We have obviously picked up the criticism. When I was at UCL,
I used to complain from the other side.
Let us be honest about the application of FEC. The requirement is that the universities
cover their full economic costs in the broad and over a reasonable timescale,
so if they believe a piece of research that they wish to undertake with an
industrial sponsor is of strategic significance to them, or that they wish to
share IP rather than just in effect do a contract research activity, then they
can charge less than the FEC as long as over the whole of their portfolio they
balance it out; so there is a flexibility there for universities. I would argue, having worked in industry
myself and costed things on an industrial basis, that industry is as
schizophrenic in its arguments as some of the academics can be. Costing in industry was always done on the
basis of direct materials, direct labour, then add 200 per cent, and that was
your base price on which you then decided upon the profit margin. In fact FEC works out at about 100 per cent
on top of direct labour costs, so I do not think the universities are
tremendously out of line with what the costs would be if industry tried to do
this work internally, and they get better quality research done through the
academics.
Q28 Dr
Turner: It seems to me that there are
perhaps unintended problems lurking around the way that you have restructured
your response-mode funding operations: not only is it clearly a problem for
early researchers in having taken the cap off and funding so few; but I am
getting the message that there is also a problem for the whole response
programme because grant applications are getting very large, and even of those
that are eminently successful in the peer review process, of those - call them
alpha++ for want of a better description - only a small percentage of those are
getting funded. Presumably, they are
focused very much along the strategic priorities, so this is starting to place
basic research into something of a straitjacket. If you are going to do that, you are not
going to get the unexpected breakthrough, are you, because you are almost
designing the system against it? Are you
happy with this, because some people are doing very, very well, but the
majority are being left in the cold?
Professor Delpy: There are several things I want to say on that. The first thing is that we made a specific
decision to try to get the research portfolio structured in a way that included
a much greater proportion of longer-term research. The standard EPSRC research grant has been
three years long, one PhD student, and £300,000-£400,000. Research does not break up into nice little
chunks like that, research projects require large-scale coherent long-term
focus - not all areas, because there are some where it is not applicable, but I
would argue that a large number of really ambitious projects require that type
of funding. If you looked in the
biomedical sciences area you would see that that is the case; that larger term
programme grant funding of five or six years' duration is the norm.
Q29 Dr
Turner: But large-scale products do not come
into being perfectly formed; they start out as relatively small projects that
mushroom, so you are mitigating against the initial -----
Professor Delpy: The intention is to have one-third of our portfolio in these
longer-term more ambitious projects and programmes which still leaves
two-thirds. It is true that what will
gradually happen is that there will be an increasing focus of research in a
smaller number of research groups - not institutions but research groups,
wherever the expertise lies. That has
been the trend over the last 15 to 20 years within university research, and I do
not see that changing. Trying to ensure
that we maintain sufficient funding for the off-the-wall, blue-skies proposals
that come in left field, not from the usual suspects, is part of the balance
that we have to ensure we put in place, but two-thirds of the portfolio is
still to be maintained outside of those larger, longer-term, more ambitious
programmes.
Q30 Dr
Turner: You are making provision for the
left field!
Professor Delpy: Two-thirds is just sitting there.
Q31 Dr
Turner: There is another problem: you have not in the past only funded response-mode
projects, but you have also funded, if you like, national services that are
used by research groups up and down the country, and the obvious example is the
national service for computation of chemistry, which is, I know, highly valued
and last year was used by about a hundred research groups up and down the
country. It is my understanding that
rather than being maintained on its previous funding basis, it was made to
apply as another response-mode grant application, and it did not quite make the
top seven, however the top seven were arrived at, assuming that that process was
totally objective! It looks as though
that highly valued service will disappear.
Do you think that is wise, because it is undermining the rest of your
activities?
Professor Delpy: The first thing to say is that we started funding that particular
service 40 years ago, and I would argue that the requirements of computational
chemistry have changed over that time, and the software is more commercially
available now than was the case. We
cannot afford to fund services and infrastructure in perpetuity; every now and
again we have to tension it against the other demands on our resources. We decided this time round that that proposal
would come in to be tensioned against the other proposals coming in from the
chemistry community. It went through
peer review at a chemistry panel, peer-reviewed by chemists, the panel members
were chemists and they placed it fourteenth on the list, and decided that in
terms of chemistry's priorities it did not make the cut.
Q32 Dr
Turner: How many were on that list? Was it 45?
Professor Delpy: Something like that, yes.
Q33 Dr
Turner: But only the top seven got funded!
Professor Delpy: I am afraid so, in that particular round.
Q34 Dr
Turner: Which is a very small percentage, is
it not?
Professor Delpy: It is, and in fact that is one of the problems that all research
councils are facing; that success rates in terms of all statistics, the number
of applications is falling. We are going
to have to find ways of managing demand.
Q35 Dr
Turner: This is dramatically smaller even
than the success rate when we came into office in 1997, when British science and
the researchers were on the point of collapse through under funding. Now the funding has been doubled, yet we have
a success rate of 7 out of 45, which is about 15 per cent, so it is pretty
dire, is it not?
Mr Armitt: If you look at this - and I accept you might not want to look at it
this way - in a normal supply and demand situation, the money has gone up and
the universities are asking for more for each of their research grants, and the
expectation is higher from the universities; but at the end of the day there is
a competition. It is not our duty to
fund poor-quality applications, and the peer-review process is there to weed
out what is a poor-quality application.
Q36 Dr
Turner: We are not talking about
poor-quality applications; we are talking about applications that have cleared
all the hurdles.
Mr Armitt: You cannot assume that if the success rate is going down that it is
simply because there are wonderful schemes out there that have got to be
funded. It is quite likely that the
universities themselves are encouraging people to put in more grants. The volume of grants is increasing and the
value of grants is increasing. If the
amount of money that is available is not going faster than the applications
that are coming in, then fewer people will be successful. As David says, therefore we have to sit down
with the universities and say: "Clearly,
this is not a satisfactory situation; it is a waste of your money; it is a
waste of our money in peer-reviewing this large number of applications; so we
have to get into a balanced situation where a sensible success ratio is
achieved." A successful success ratio
might be one in three. If you are a
commercial organisation - and the universities are increasingly shaping
themselves as commercial organisations - FEC drives them into being more
commercial in their approach - then they have to take some of the
responsibility for ensuring that what is coming forward is likely to lead to a
sensible rate of success. At the end of
the day, the pot is limited and what we want out of the end of that pot is the
highest quality and excellence of research - not lots of research, but the
highest quality and excellence of research.
Q37 Dr
Turner: But your policy of focusing on
larger grants in the more strategic areas is contributing to this process, is
it not?
Professor Delpy: Maybe, but if in fact, as a consequence, it is resulting in better
quality research and more research coming through which will lead to economic
benefit for the country as a whole, then that surely is a preferable outcome?
Q38 Dr
Turner: Can you be certain that it is
leading to better quality research?
After all, this is a relatively recent development and it takes a little
time to assess the results.
Mr Armitt: Some of the criticism is being made on a few months of lower
success rate. If you look at success
rate on chemistry, which people talk about a great deal at the moment and if
you compare chemistry and physics from 2003 right through to 2007/2008, the
success rate of the announced grants for first grant schemes for physics and
chemistry disciplines is 70 per cent.
It has stayed pretty well at that level right the way through. This year we have placed a slightly greater
volume of grants in chemistry than we had by this point last year. People will say that we have got fewer
success rates. You cannot just determine
a success rate on one year's rate of applicants; you have to look at it over
several years. If you look at the moment
at our success rate over several years, it is still sitting in the
thirties. There has been a short-term
change. What we will do is look at what
is causing that short-term change and what we should be doing about it.
Q39 Dr
Turner: We cannot take that perspective
because you have changed the policy. We
cannot look back over the years because you are not comparing like with like.
Mr Armitt: We have changed the policy after listening, and one thing that
surprised me as an outsider to this debate, because I expected when I came in
to see distinct differences between users and universities, is that the user
group and the top group have come forward with consistent messages about the
need to focus and concentrate on the important areas, and an acceptance that longer/larger
is on balance better. So the considered
view is that longer/larger is very worthwhile and that we should continue to do
that.
Q40 Dr
Turner: How much extra cash would you need
to bring the success rate back to a more reasonable level?
Mr Armitt: I do not think that is the right question to ask.
Q41 Dr
Turner: It is the question I am asking.
Mr Armitt: I know it is. I am saying it
is not a question I am able to answer because we are at the early stages of
this change in the success rate. Six or
twelve months is not sufficient to determine an absolute trend. We can get under the skin of what is
happening there and talk to peer-review groups and others about precisely what
is happening. Maybe we are going to have
to bring a cap back on some of the grants.
Perhaps universities are just going a bit too far in trying to develop
the ideal project with the ideal resources when the ideal resources may not be
available.
Q42 Dr
Turner: Can you be sure that this is not
being driven by a few powerful individuals or well-placed individuals?
Mr Armitt: In the universities?
Q43 Dr
Turner: Yes.
Professor Delpy: I feel very confident, having now been through a complete cycle of
consultations, that it is inconceivable that EPSRC - and, to be honest, the
communities that we consult - would be easily swayed by a small number of
powerful individuals. It does not happen
that way. EPSRC is an incredibly
consultative organisation.
Q44 Chairman: We take you at face value on that.
Mr Armitt: Yes.
Q45 Dr
Gibson: I find it exceptionally hurtful that
you suggest that people at universities are putting in grants under pressure
from vice chancellors or others. They
have got to do that research to stay alive; they have got to get it for the
universities to stay alive. You are
suggesting that some of them are putting frivolous grant requests in -----
Mr Armitt: I am not suggesting they are frivolous.
Q46 Dr
Gibson: ---- because they do not; they put
them in seriously. I think they get good
ratings and you turn them down because you are short of money. You should not be taking them. I do not know how you do the job. This is something that has been going on for
years. The MRC at one time, through this
Committee, doubled its request for a budget and they got it because they were
in exactly the same position as you are now and they fought to get that money;
and I think that is what you should be doing.
You should be creating merry hell about these bright young people not
getting the support they need. I think
that should be the way forward. Let us
talk about bright young people! These
young people, these PhD students, are driven by the need to get money to do
research, because they are the fount and they provide what is needed. They do most of the work in the labs anyway,
if you are honest about it. If you do
not have PhD students, you do not have research programmes. Are we getting less research PhD studentships
now than we did in the fields that you are in control of?
Professor Delpy: The total number of PhD students that we are supporting in
2007/2008 is 8,200, back in 2005/2006 it was 7,600. The number of students that we are supporting
has continued to increase. Last year it
was 8000, it is 8,200 in this current year.
Q47 Dr
Gibson: I have letters here from academics
saying that they have less students in the fields that you cover now from
different universities; so overall you may be doing that, but probably all at
your university actually?
Professor Delpy: I do not belong to a university now. I resigned from UCL.
Q48 Dr
Gibson: Right. You may have to go back!
Professor Delpy: I may have to.
Q49 Chairman: We have some very confusing figures, which we would like you to
clarify. For a start, since 2005/2006
the UK Atomic Energy Authority, which was getting £29,221 from you in 2005/2006
suddenly gets nearly £51 million in 2007/2008 out of your total grant
allocation.
Professor Delpy: The fusion research grant was transferred to EPSRC and that is a
two-year figure.
Q50 Chairman: What confuses me is that some figures you have provided to Research
Fortnight as part of an investigative piece of work they are doing into grant
allocations, and these are figures from your office.
Professor Delpy: They are from our grants on the Web.
Q51 Chairman: They indicate that in 2005/2006 the net grants after UK were
£926 million. In 2007/2008 it has
gone down to £644 million. It is a huge
difference; it is about a 30 per cent drop over those two years, despite the
fact that your accounts, which you have produced for us, show that your grant
allocation overall is going up. It is
not surprising, if these figures are correct - and they are your figures - that
the comments that Dr Gibson has just made very passionately - and it is the
first time I have ever heard him make that passionate plea about young
researchers coming in - they will not get those grants, particularly if the
large research-intensive universities are getting these huge £600,000 outreach
grants as well. We are confused - or
perhaps it is just me that is confused as the Chairman - about the figures you
are providing for us.
Professor Delpy: I cannot answer your question about the data that Research
Fortnight has compiled.
Q52 Chairman: These are your figures.
Professor Delpy: Sure, but it depends on what the question was that was asked.
Q53 Chairman: It was asked about grant allocation.
Professor Delpy: What has been included in the grant allocations? You have to remember that if you want to
compare year on year you need to look at spend.
Commitment is a different matter.
This year, for instance, we will be committing £250 million into
training through the doctoral training centres - 40 of those - and that is a
five-year commitment, so there will be a sudden tranche of funding but we are
going to be committing about £1.3 billion this year, so although on average we
have added £800 million per year, there is a large chunk this year because of
the commitments to KTAs and DTCs; but that spend will be spent over five years.
Q54 Chairman: David, it would be useful if you would let us have a breakdown of
this whole issue because so many figures are being presented in different
formats, and we would like to know the basis of individual grant allocations
and the size of those allocations and where the other grant resources go.
Professor Delpy: Yes, I can do that.
Q55 Dr
Gibson:
How many doctoral schools are you going to have? How many are planned within this £250
million?
Professor Delpy: We are hoping to fund about 40 doctoral training centres.
Q56 Dr
Gibson: All over the country?
Professor Delpy: Wherever the peer review says the quality is appropriate.
Q57 Dr
Harris: Quality of volume?
Professor Delpy: No, quality both of the research they are proposing to do and the
quality of the training that they will be putting in place.
Q58 Dr
Harris: You cannot have a training centre
for two people!
Professor Delpy: There is a minimum.
Q59 Dr
Harris: That is what I mean, so there has
got to be a volume. So small departments
are not going to get those!
Professor Delpy: The small departments have access of course to the project
studentships anyhow.
Q60 Dr
Gibson: Are they graduate schools by another
name? Yes.
Professor Delpy: I would say that most universities that hold doctoral training
centres now have graduate schools, but we do not award them on the basis that a
graduate school is -----
Q61 Dr
Gibson: How is it different from a graduate
school, a doctoral school or training centre?
Professor Delpy: We award doctoral training centres to some universities that do not
have graduate schools. What we are
looking for is coherence in the way that the students are trained and the focus
on the quality of PIs who are going to be working with those.
Q62 Dr
Gibson: So if you have a graduate school -
they are not going to get anything!
Professor Delpy: It is not an either/or. Some
graduate schools will and some without graduate schools will.
Q63 Dr
Gibson: It is selectivity by another
name.
Professor Delpy: It is peer review and quality I am afraid.
Q64 Ian Stewart: The Technology Strategy Board has a budget
for 2008-2011 of £711 million, plus it has a line funding from the Regional
Development Agencies of £180 million and at least £120 million from the
research councils. When our Committee
did its report into budget allocations, we highlighted that the increase in the
size of budget does not fully cover the increased expenditure on FEC for the
new bodies, including TSB. The questions
I want to press you on revolve around what proportion of EPSRC's budget is
committed to the Technology Strategy Board and the Energy Technologies Institute
because we do understand now that what is happening here, as has been
highlighted by previous questions, is that you are having to move budgets,
which means that some lose out.
Professor Delpy: The headline figures, the
simple figures, are that EPSRC is committed to spending £45 million over the
three years of the CSR in collaborative projects with TSB. Obviously, we are committed to provide 60 per
cent of the public sector funding for ETI projects, which, when ETI is fully up
and running, would be £30 million a year.
In fact, over the CSR period it is probably going to be somewhere
between £21 million and £29 million, because it is only ramping up. Our headline figures, we would estimate, to
be about £21 million to £29 million for ETI and £45 million for TSB. To put the TSB figure into context (and in
response to my very first question about translation), EPSRC's academics have
always worked with industry. In fact, hitting
a target of £45 million is not a challenge for us. In fact, I would argue that our academics
would have been involved in probably research of that sort of volume with the
TSB over the period anyhow.
Q65 Ian
Stewart: David, Dr Paul Golby and Dr Alison Wall told
this Committee that funding for the ETI had reduced the funds available to
support pure research. You heard that
implicit in the questions before. How
will this change in the future and what difference does it make?
Professor Delpy: ETI is funded out of our
overall energy portfolio, to which we are committing about £220 million. So about £20 million to £29 million of that
energy portfolio is going through to ETI.
Was our budget cut as a response to ETI allocation? To be honest, I would say that, probably, the
amount that we would have wanted to spend on energy has been reduced
slightly. However, our overall energy
allocation has increased over the period, or will increase over the CSR period,
and I would argue that, in fact, the demonstrators that are going to be funded
via ETI will become a really valuable resource for the academic research base
to use and enable them to undertake basic research on a scale which they could
not do individually within universities.
So there is a long-term benefit once those demonstrator programmes come
about.
Q66 Ian
Stewart: How does that top-slicing impact on the funds
available for responsive mode grants?
Brian Iddon was pressing you on that earlier.
Professor Delpy: The energy programme is
separate from that responsive mode pot of £866 million, although I would argue,
in fact, that the so-called managed programmes, that everybody calls managed
programmes, like energy, nanotechnology, digital economy and health and so on,
are very broad programmes. In fact, we
always encourage academics to feed responsive mode into those. So they are not tightly constrained
programmes. Our energy programme does
not have a single narrow focus with a project manager who restricts the areas
of application. So I would argue that
the vast majority of our energy budget is available for responsive mode bids in
the energy - or they have a potential application in the energy - area.
Q67 Ian
Stewart: So you are redirecting budgets to, for
example, the TSB. How are you monitoring
that to see how effective the redirection of that money is being implemented?
Professor Delpy: Obviously, the calls that are
put out, the academic component of those calls goes to our standard peer review
anyhow, and then is followed up in our standard way through peer review. What we have done is look at - because this
is precisely a question that comes up when I go to visit universities - the
academic groups who have been most successful in getting our standard
responsive mode blue skies peer review grants, and those who have been most
successful in bidding into what you would call the managed programmes (like
energy, nanotechnology and so on) 70-75 per cent of people who are most
successful in managed programmes are the same academics who are most successful
in our responsive mode. So it is the
high-quality academics who are not just undertaking basic responsive mode, pure
blue skies research, but they are also the most successful in translating that
research and applying it. It is not two
separate communities.
Q68 Ian
Stewart: Can you give us some examples of what
collaborative projects you are doing with the TSB currently?
Professor Delpy: Obviously, there is a recent
one on low carbon cars. I have a list of
them here: there is a low-impact buildings programme; a network security
programme. I think, in fact, of all the
calls that have been issued by TSB this year, EPSRC has been involved in every
single one of them.
Q69 Ian
Stewart: When will you know that the transfer of funds
to do collaborative work with the likes of TSB was the right thing to do, and
how will you know that?
Professor Delpy: I would actually disagree
with the question. You are implying that
we ----
Q70 Chairman:
You
are always disagreeing!
Professor Delpy: Of course we do. You are implying that we have transferred
funds specifically to work with the TSB.
My argument, right from the outset, was we were already doing that level
of funding jointly with the user base (?), in fact, through the TSB's
predecessor.
Q71 Ian
Stewart: For your benefit, I will pose the question the
way you want it to be posed. Now give me
the answer.
Professor Delpy: The answer is: are we
actually reducing the accessibility of research funding by working in
collaboration with industry?
Mr Armitt: We know because the quality
of the outcome is better.
Q72 Ian
Stewart: How and when?
Mr Armitt: How long is a piece of
string? That is the whole problem, is it
not? On the one hand, the Government,
quite rightly, I think, wants to understand what the impact is of research. There are people working on models and we
will continue to work on models to try and understand and follow through: can
we actually identify what is the consequence of the money in and what is the
result coming out at the end of the day in improvement to the UK's situation of
holding its own in research competency around the world, where we currently
hold a very high level. We are highly
regarded for our research around the world.
That has not been diminishing.
What the Government is seeking is to see that Britain retains and
improves its competitiveness around the world, and science and engineering are
clearly absolutely fundamental to us achieving that, but to say: "Have we done
that" (in ten years' time even) "as a consequence of the ETI or the TSB, or the
continuing work with the research councils?" I have to say I think will be not
easy to answer. You might be able to
pick a particular project which was promoted - let us take the low-carbon
vehicle; low-carbon vehicles are being researched in every country across the
world; Britain
wants to be part of researching low-carbon vehicles and the TSB is putting some
money to that. Some people might say:
"It is a complete waste of money; just leave the Japanese to get on with it and
we will pick up the technology". No, we
are going to invest in it and we are going to seek to be there, alongside and
ahead of the Japanese. However, when you
get there, and given the degree of collaboration which will be taking place
over the next 10 to 15 years in this area, to be able to say that it is because
we allocated £30 million in 2008 towards the generation of a new low-carbon
vehicle, and if we had not put it in would we have been better off or worse
off, or are we where we are because we put that £30 million in, frankly, I do
not think anybody will be able to accurately answer.
Q73 Ian
Stewart: What do you say then to those who assert that
you are too closely following the Government agenda?
Mr Armitt: At the end of the day I would
assert that we have a responsibility to ensure that for UK society as a whole,
regardless of who the Government is, we are doing our bit in promoting
excellence in science and engineering, and the research councils are there to
ensure that we continue to be at the cutting edge of that. At the end of the day, as with every other
element of government expenditure, there is a limit to the amount of money we
have. Therefore, I think we have an
obligation to ensure that that money is spent as efficiently as possible and
that we are supporting the best - at times at the expense of the mediocre or
the medium. So being a medium-quality
researcher is not necessarily going to add value to the UK economy. What is going to add value to the UK
economy are the best researchers. We
have a responsibility to seek them out and make sure that that is where we
direct our money. Ask all the academics
and ask all the users what they see as the priorities; perhaps not surprisingly
the answer is not very different to government policy because government policy
has been asking the same people the same questions. So there is a bit of a sort of circular
argument here. We held a session only
last week, a SAT session at Loughborough, where we asked people to just tell
us: "What do you think are the real issues for the next 20 to 50 years? What are the key research areas that we need
to be focusing on and that you want to focus on?" Nothing new came out of that question.
Q74 Chairman:
With
great respect, it will not come out, will it, because the TSB really is a soft
organisation ----
Mr Armitt: I am sorry; this has got
nothing to do with TSB.
Q75 Chairman:
Just
let me follow the argument. Lord Carter,
when he appeared before us last week, basically said that this is an
organisation that needs to be sharpened up; that, in terms of its five major
priorities, these are areas which, as Ian Stewart has said, are very much
government led, which are involved in significant government procurement. This was an organisation, together with the
research funds which you are putting in, supposed to pull in private sector
funds to drive far greater commercialisation.
This is why, with respect, you were appointed Chairman of this
organisation as well, to bring that focus in.
You have gone back to this nice, cosy nest of government procurement and
government funds. Is that fair comment?
Mr Armitt: No, I do not think it is fair
comment at all. I am probably slightly
to the right in this debate in terms of believing that this should be a cosy
government-funded environment; I do not think it should be at all. There is an enormous challenge in saying:
"How do you get industry?" When I have
been out and talked to, for example, some of the trade associations of
industries which you would say are at the cutting edge of technology, they will
say to me: "John, we are not interested in doing blue skies stuff. We do believe that is your job in the
research councils because we are looking to pick it up later on." If we only did nothing but blue sky I think
we would have difficulty in identifying what is the right blue sky to do, so I
think we have got to have a mixed portfolio.
However, I do totally accept that we do have a duty in the blue sky
area. David made the point at the
beginning that one of our concerns there is whether there is a level of
conservatism within our peer review process which perhaps means that sometimes
the blue sky stuff does not get through as well as it might. The Council does intend, in the next 12
months, to look at the peer review process as we currently operate it. Many people say it is good; maybe it is, but
it could probably be better, and so we are going to look at it to see whether
it is delivering what it should deliver, and, particularly, whether it is
delivering what it should deliver on the blue sky end.
Q76 Dr
Iddon: In Spring of next year you will be undergoing
an international review, I understand.
If that international review makes significant recommendations about
your operations and the way you allocate money - for example, the balance
between responsive mode and programme grants that we have been discussing this
morning - would your Council be prepared to accept those recommendations and
act on them?
Mr Armitt: The Council has a duty to
look at any recommendations which come through from any group; it would not
necessarily blindingly accept them but it would take them on and consider the
value that it should give them, and the weight of evidence which, clearly, it
had been possible for that review to look at.
It certainly would not ignore it.
We would take it seriously and if it needed to be reflected in what we
did, then we would take action.
Professor Delpy: Can I be just a bit more
positive about that? We would not
undertake these reviews if we did not believe that we ought to act on any
problems that they have identified.
Chemistry is the next one which is on board, we have just had one on
materials, and maths will be the last in a five-year cycle. I would argue, and I am quite happy to
provide the evidence if you want, that the recommendations that have come from
those international reviews have been considered by Council and, in large part,
those recommendations have then been implemented - often in a subsequent CSR
period because of the way that our forward commitment does not give us the
flexibility to switch something on or off at short notice. I would say that we have, in general, always
seriously taken on board what the international reviews say. That is why we have them.
Q77 Chairman:
Continuing on the international theme, EPSRC
is the managing partner in the US RCUK office in Washington. You have also got a significant part to play
in the collaborative projects in China and, also, in Delhi. What role do you have, as a research council,
in actually setting the UK's international research priorities in terms of
international research?
Professor Delpy: The first thing to say is
these are RCUK offices; they are not EPSRC.
Individual research councils have taken on a responsibility for managing
a particular office.
Q78 Chairman:
So
you manage the US one but not the ones in China or India?
Professor Delpy: We manage the US one. No, those are handled by ESRC and the
MRC. We have a straightforward
management responsibility. The
priorities in terms of collaborations with those countries was determined
within RCUK, both through our research directors' group, which is the research
directors from each of the councils, then feeding advice in to the chief
executives of the research councils. So
the priority areas were determined by RCUK as a whole and, in the first
instance, since the amount of funding available is limited, we have tried to
identify a small number of key areas for each country but, also, some general
strategic principles as to what we wish to get out of those. The two strategic principles are that we want
to use those to engage the best of researchers in the UK with the best of researchers in
those countries. So it is a
best-with-best policy, and that is therefore necessarily selective. The second one is through the mechanism of
the office to try to reduce the risk of double jeopardy. The problem with working across countries is
that you finish up, inevitably - or have done in the past - with grants having
to be reviewed through two separate peer review mechanisms, which, if you have
a 20 per cent success rate in each and you multiply your statistics together, means
that it is very hard to get both panels to agree funding and to agree it at the
same time. So we are trying to put in
place mechanisms through MOUs with the funding agencies for single peer review
of the research that is going on between the best researchers there and the
best researchers here.
Q79 Chairman:
In
terms of quality research, the one thing that the UK prides itself on is its
peer review process being incredibly rigorous.
You are seeking to lower the peer review barrier for collaborative
projects. How does that maintain the
high quality? Or have we misunderstood
that?
Professor Delpy: I would disagree
totally. With America, I would say the
American peer review mechanism is as equally rigorous as ours, and with the
programmes that we have got in place with both India and China, the influence
that we have and the presence that we have on those peer review committees - in
some instances it has been agreed that we will handle the peer review ----
Q80 Chairman:
Let
me just stop you there, David, because I am quoting now directly from your
annual report. "A barrier to
international collaboration can be the 'hurdles' encountered when applying for
support when working with overseas funding bodies. EPSRC is in the forefront of working with
agencies around the world to seek lower peer review barriers to collaboration."
Professor Delpy: Yes.
Q81 Chairman:
That
is, really, what we are wanting you to explain.
Professor Delpy: That barrier is that
double-jeopardy barrier; it is not a quality barrier. The quality threshold has to be paramount in
everything that we fund.
Chairman: It was important to get that
on the record.
Q82 Dr
Harris: I just wanted to catch up on a couple of
things, rather than trying to interrupt the flow from my left. In respect of Ian Stewart's question, would
it be a fair summary to say (and I am just reading this from what someone else
has said): "The increase in the science budget does not fully cover increased
expenditure on FEC and the new bodies, OSCAR, ETI and TSB, which means the research
councils will have to redirect money previously earmarked for research
grants." Is that a fair statement, as
far as you are concerned?
Professor Delpy: We got an increase of 18.6
per cent, top level value or single number in the CSR period. If we try to strip out the FEC component of
that ----
Q83 Dr
Harris: And the contribution to ETI and TSB.
Professor Delpy: Let me come to that. The first thing to do is remove the FEC
because you can then look ----
Q84 Dr
Harris: I do not want a long answer.
Professor Delpy: We reckon that our overall
increase was about 1.5 per cent, having removed the FEC. Now, 1.5 per cent of our total budget of £2.4
billion - our commitment to TSB is £45 million over the period and, let us say,
£30 million for ETI - so £75 million.
One per cent of £2.4 billion means that, in fact, those two commitments
still left us, in principle, with a small overall rise in budget, but very
small. Essentially flat.
Q85 Dr
Harris: So it is not right to say that the reduction
in research grant funding in any area is due to those pressures. That is helpful to note. Secondly, when you removed the cap, what
consultation did you do? This is on
first time grant applications. What
consultation did you do with the community?
That is a big decision. You did
not raise the cap; you just removed it completely.
Professor Delpy: We had raised it previously
from £60,000 to £120,000. The
consultation occurred before my time, so I may have missed some of the
consultations that did take place. We
have a regular meeting with the Royal Society of Chemistry and their people
come in at least once a year - usually twice a year. We also have a regular meeting with the Royal
Academy of Engineering and then obviously through our strategic advisory teams,
top-and-up. We also, of course, have our
programme managers and university interface managers who are out in the
universities - at 22 universities we asked specific interface managers dealing
with them. So we did not hold a single
open town meeting to arrive at this decision, but there was a general
consultation ----
Q86 Dr
Harris: Can you show people calling for this or
supporting it? Could you show that? Or would you say that Council has to make a
decision in the end, after consulting, even if it is not supported?
Professor Delpy: We did not hold a poll so I
cannot come up with a figure: "75 per cent of the community supported
this". I may have some evidence from the
feedback that was presented both to Science and then, through top-and-up to
Council, that led to that final decision.
In the end, Council has to decide on the basis of the evidence coming up
through the community.
Q87 Dr
Harris: I think you ought to be able to answer the
question: "Was there support or calling for it in the community" because it has
been quite controversial. That is why I
asked the question and maybe you can let us know whether there was a call for
this outside the Council.
Mr Armitt: I cannot remember
specifically whether it was a decision which was made before I became Chairman,
but given the way in which Council works I would be amazed if it was a decision
made by Council which was not strongly recommended from the officers. The officers' recommendation is as a
consequence of what they are getting from top-and-up, particularly. Top-and-up are on Council, so if there was
any disagreement I am sure - why would we do it? It is hard to imagine that would have taken a
cap off unless there was a request to do so.
Q88 Chairman:
If we
could have a note on that, that would be very useful.
Mr Armitt: We will give you a note on
it.
Q89 Dr
Harris: David, you said that the brain drain had been
reversed. Could you let me know where I
can find that published research demonstrating that, or is that just your
hunch?
Professor Delpy: That is my feeling based upon
my period at UCL, prior to this, as research vice-provost and as research
vice-provost representative on the Russell Group.
Q90 Dr
Harris: It can be weighed against the feeling of other
people sitting there who say it has not been reversed, or it is variable
different levels.
Professor Delpy: It could. I am happy for you to consult with the other
Russell Group representatives.
Q91 Dr
Harris: I would be happiest to see data, actually.
Professor Delpy: There may well be.
Q92 Dr
Harris: In our field - or your field - we like to have
data. On this PhDs thing, I do not
understand. I understand, and I am not
criticising, your move towards these national training centres. However, let us take small departments, which
have good work but who want to train PhDs in a small department. They may not have the threshold of overall
funding that is required, and therefore they would rely on the PhD funding
allocations inherent in the smaller grant funds. Why not restrict that element of that funding
to those places, universities mainly, that do not benefit from the large clump
of funding that you are giving? That
would make sure that people felt that you were not rewarding and then rewarding
again those universities, like the one I have in my constituency, which get a
huge amount of this funding anyway.
Would you consider that?
Professor Delpy: Yes. As I said, Council is undertaking a review of
training in this coming year, and that is certainly one option that we would
look at. I think I need to correct a
misunderstanding, which is that the allocation is based on the overall
universities' income from EPSRC exceeding the threshold rather than individual
departments. In fact, many of the
doctoral training centres that we fund - in fact, most, I would argue - are made
up of bids from a group of departments coherently coming in
Q93 Dr
Harris: I understand, but then it is for the
university to allocate. Also, this is
universities that are already getting a lot of funding and they are getting the
national training centre on top - and if they have got ten times as many grant
applications successful they stand to get ten times as many of the responsive
mode ----
Professor Delpy: They could, in principle.
Q94 Dr
Harris: It just seems that "To those that have, more
shall be given".
Professor Delpy: Yes, but every one of those
studentships that is allocated on a project grant is a project grant that has
gone through peer review ----
Q95 Dr
Harris: I understand that.
Professor Delpy: --- with the community doing
that peer review, not the officers in Swindon.
Q96 Dr
Harris: But the national training centre is not; it is
just an extra lump of money that is not linked directly to a peer review. It is to go with volume. I am not criticising
it.
Professor Delpy: There is a very rigid peer
review of the DTC applications. We have
a threshold to enable you to bid but then out of 280 applications we have had
it will be short-listed down to 88. It
is peer reviewed.
Q97 Chairman:
I
think you are actually agreeing with each other. The point that Dr Harris is making is: are
you prepared to consider the issue which he is raising about, if you like, the
triple funding of the research-intensive universities against those who, in
fact, are emerging stars of the future, which seem to get left out - going
right back to the question that Dr Gibson raised.
Mr Armitt: You would still come back to
the quality issue.
Q98 Chairman:
You
cannot develop quality, John, in an emerging department unless there is some
method of being able to get in on the game.
Mr Armitt: I agree, but I am not sure
that we can easily have a policy which says that there are 142 universities and
we are going to ensure that everybody gets something, because I am not sure
that that would actually deliver.
Dr Harris: What I am saying is once you
have passed peer review and you get your grant you should be able to get a PhD
within that. Is it fair that the bulk of
those go to universities that have already got PhDs allocated on the basis of
peer review because of the volume they are doing and because of the national
training centre? There is an argument to
say that to avoid "for those who have shall be given more in plentiful" ----
Chairman: I think we are going round
the houses again.
Q99 Dr
Harris: I have just one question on the NSCCS. In your response of 31 July you explained
that these things have to go through peer review, and unless you are a big
facility which is STFC-linked you are going to have to go for renewable
funding. When we looked at research
institutes we recognised that there were some long-term projects that were
worth giving long-term funding to which were not necessarily big
infrastructures - national datasets, for example. My first question is: NSCCS maybe, but is
there any other that could never therefore have the reliability of long-term
funding - people put their careers into it - because they will always think:
"Every three (or five) years I'll have to put in and, even if my quality is
still good, if there happens to be higher quality coming in from elsewhere I cannot
be assured of continuing my work".
Professor Delpy: In part I would come back to
John's answer: it has got to be quality.
There has to be some tensioning.
There are things which we have funded for significant periods. That particular example was funded for the
best part of 40 years via us, and I think had run its course. In fact, the community, in peer review, said
that it had run its course compared to other things that they wished ----
Q100 Dr
Harris: In general, you are saying that in future all
the national services that have received support will be required to make their
case through responsive mode, and these are distinct from larger, more
capital-intensive national facilities.
So what you are saying, and clarity would be useful here for people listening,
is that if you have an idea of doing some long-term research, you are still
going to have to compete every three to five years, unlike some other research
councils which have provided long-term funding for high-quality, long-term data
collection, for example.
Professor Delpy: They also undertake a
quinquennial review anyhow, and I would disagree with it having to be three to
five years. Many facilities we would
want to fund for ten or 15 years before we then undertake a review and tension
it against the priorities, because science changes, priorities change, and the
communities' ideas and priorities change.
Q101 Dr
Gibson: Do you accept that the community is pretty fed
up with you?
Professor Delpy: Part of the community is
inevitably going to be upset with change.
I think EPSRC has to be able to demonstrate how it has taken on board
advice both from the community and what the strategic priority is across the
research councils - and internationally are - and provide a degree of
leadership and guidance in that. That
does mean that priorities will change.
Q102 Dr
Harris: This is my last question on this issue of the
NSCCS. You said in your reply to them
that they could charge their users in order to fund themselves. What lead time did you give them, in making
clear that they would not be funded, to enable them to set that in place? Their open letter suggested that you led them
up the garden path with a five-year call in July 2007, then that was changed,
and then another in October 2007, that you would need to respond to an OJEU
call issued in November 2007 - that call was never issued. So then, only in January 2008, which is seven
or eight months after they were first told what the approach would be, were the
goalposts finally positioned for them.
Is that fair? And then expect
them to set up a user fee in good time.
Professor Delpy: It may not have been our
finest hour. I do not know if the exact
details of the timings, as you have read them out, are actually ----
Q103 Dr
Harris: It is in that open letter.
Professor Delpy: It might be in the open
letter but the open letter was written not by us.
Dr Harris: You did not rebut it - yet.
Q104 Chairman:
Please just answer.
Professor Delpy: The answer is that we may not
have given them as much time as they would feel they have had. I would argue that in running this service
for 40 years they should have been putting this mechanism in place anyhow. The message has been going out consistently
to universities - I got it myself, as research vice-provost at UCL - that one
had to put in place a mechanism for charging and recovering costs. That is precisely what the FEC when it was
allocated enabled you to do. The fact
that the academics who were running this service did not do it - they did have
40 years in which to try to do this - I would argue, indicates that they were
also not really anticipating that in the long run they will not get funding in
perpetuity from us.
Q105 Dr
Harris: Let me ask you about public engagement. Which aspects of your research activities do
you feel would most benefit from increased public engagement?
Professor Delpy: All activities, although if I
express a personal choice it would be those that would bring an increased
visibility, particularly, to the engineering work and research that goes on in
the UK and the value that engineers bring, not just to the manufacturing side
of the economy but, also, to the service side.
That CBI report which said that 76 per cent of gross value added (or
whatever) is in the service sector - if you dig inside it, 30 to 40 per cent of
that service sector depends upon STEM subjects, and engineering is a key
component. Visibility of engineering -
if you ask me for a single topic.
Q106 Dr
Harris: Your annual report is part of your public
engagement and has very interesting pictures and stories, and good coverage for
naked scientists (page 44). On page 45,
if you have a copy there, you give the proposed budget for Science in Society
expenditure. In 2005/06, £2.9 million
outturn; 2006/07, £3.9 million, and then there is a chart above - £4.2 million
for 2007/08. On page 20 in your actual
budget headings it gives the same two figures: under "Public Engagement", the
very bottom item of the top table on page 20, £2.9 million for 2005/06; £3.9
million for 2006/07 and then £3.5 million only, not £4.2 million, for
2007/08. So those figures are otherwise
equivalent. I cannot find the other
missing 0.7 and, as I understand it, in the briefing I have, the £3.5 million
is the correct figure. There is a drop
this year.
Professor Delpy: As John has pointed out, the
table on page 20 is net grant expenditure, whereas the Science in Society
programme expenditure is the table that you were referring to first of
all. The other major difference may, in
fact, be the inclusion of some of the fellowship or engineering stage awards.
Q107 Chairman:
Could
you let us have a note?
Professor Delpy: I can let you have a note as
to what goes into the two tables.
Q108 Dr
Harris: It is not clear because there is no commentary
on the figures in your public-facing document.
Can I just refer you, while we have your annual report, to your facts
and figures on people on page 37? You
set out how many people you are funding (very interesting) and we have gone
over the overall numbers. I just wanted
to know if you had a gender breakdown of those, because I cannot see it here
and I would have thought that was an interesting issue for your annual report,
given that you yourself, I know, personally, are committed to doing something
about, as perhaps our Committee should as well, the gender imbalance.
Professor Delpy: I am not sure if I do have a
gender breakdown table. I am surprised
that we do not, in fact, include it in our report.
Q109 Dr
Harris: So was I.
Professor Delpy: That is a correction; if it
is not there we will have to ----
Mr Armitt: Certainly it is data we have
because I can recall seeing it in the last 24 hours, but I cannot lay my hands
on it. If I remember it was roughly
50/50.
Q110
Dr Harris: Coming back to this issue of
the importance of peer review (if it is my last question), your contribution to
ETI is not peer review; it is just a top slice.
That is right, is it not?
Professor Delpy: Yes.
Q111 Dr
Harris: It was not your decision, was it; you were
told you were going to have top-slice funding ----
Professor Delpy: We are the route through
which the public sector funding goes into ETI, yes.
Q112 Dr
Harris: That is just a decision made for you, not peer
reviewed.
Professor Delpy: It is, although we are
heavily involved in the process that was put in place to select the programmes
which are going to be funded through ETI.
I am on the board of ETI, together with Ian Gray, anyhow, but I would
argue, in fact, that the majority of the process that has been put in place to
set it up was driven by our energy team and Alison Wall, in particular. So although you are correct that we do not
have a control over the peer review mechanism that is used - and ETI is not
funding in our space, it is not funding in the technology levels 1 to 3; it is
funding in the 4 to 6 range - we have, in fact, helped them to set up a
rigorous peer review mechanism similar to that that the TSB uses for its part
of the industry funded grants. Yes, it
is not a peer review that we control.
Q113 Dr
Iddon: Do you recognise this, Sir David: that we have
squeezed more and more research funding into a smaller number of elite
universities? We would all support
excellence, but would you accept that there are pockets of excellence in
universities like, may I say, the University of Bolton, in my constituency, in
material science and flame retardancy work?
However, if an application came from a research group in the University
of Bolton side-by-side with a similar application from Imperial College, do you
really believe that they would taken on their merit?
Professor Delpy: Absolutely. In fact, what I said was that there had been
an increasing concentration of research in a smaller number of groups, not
institutions. In fact, if you look at
our framework universities, they are not all the Russell Group; we have
specific areas of strength at Loughborough and Cranfield - and Bolton, as you say.
There is work on particles and emulsions at Bradford
that was of incredibly high quality. So
I would agree there is an increasing concentration, but I would argue that it
is in the research groups where excellence is shown. Inevitably, a large number of those research
groups are in the larger institutions.
It is an open transfer market, and if there is excellence somewhere then
one of the larger institutions will make a bid for an individual to transfer
their research group to the university.
However, we will fund on the basis of the excellence of the group, not
the fact that it came from Oxbridge or UCL or Imperial.
Mr Armitt: Chairman, could I come back
for two seconds? On page 49 of our
annual report there is actually a summary of success rates by gender.
Q114 Dr
Harris: I saw that for grant applications; I was
interested in doctoral students.
Mr Armitt: "Standard research grants";
"First Grant Scheme"; "Partnerships for Public Engagement", young researchers,
fellowships.
Professor Delpy: It does not have the student
number there.
Mr Armitt: We will look at those and if
there is some more information we will let you know.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. On that note, could I thank very much indeed
David Delpy, the Chief Executive Officer, and John Armitt, the Chairman of
EPSRC? Thank you for a very interesting
morning.