Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
WORK FOUNDATION
2 APRIL 2008
Q180 Mr Weir: You have already touched
on this question. In your evidence you say that "almost every
member of the OECD thinks it is becoming a knowledge economy and
almost every non-industrialised economy aspires to be one".
On what grounds can the UK claim to be a knowledge-based economy
over and above its competitors?
Mr Brinkley: I do not think anyone
has a particularly agreed definition. Everyone seems to have rather
different definitions. India tends to talk about herself as a
knowledge-based economy when they are really taking about addressing
basic numeracy and literacy. There are various indicators that
we can look at. The World Bank ranks economies according to where
they lie on a particular scale: their share of employment in knowledge-based
industries and the share of GDP in knowledge-based industries,
but there is not a set definition that would allow you to say
whether you are the best or the worst knowledge-based economy
in the world. One of the problems with the Lisbon objective of
turning Europe into the world's most competitive, knowledge-based
economy is that no-one has actually said what they meant by that.
Q181 Chairman: It makes it an easy
objective to meet.
Mr Brinkley: Therefore you can
never say whether you had actually achieved the objective or not.
Q182 Mr Weir: What do you see are
the benefits and costs of a higher reliance on knowledge-based
industries?
Mr Brinkley: The benefits are
that they contribute an awful lot of jobs. Everywhere we have
looked in all the advanced industrialised economies, the knowledge-based
industries and in particular knowledge-based services are big
generators of new jobs. That is essentially where a lot of the
employment growth has been coming from. They are also major generators
of exports. If we were trying to answer some of the questions
about what do we do in the world if most of low wage manufacturing
is going to be done elsewhere, then one of the answers to that
is that we do high value-added services and a lot of those are
generated within the knowledge industries and the UK is rather
good at that. I think the third benefit is helping with the flow
of ideas and knowledge across national boundaries. We are no longer
constrained by what is going on in the UK; we can actually reach
out across the world and engage with what is happening in other
countries in terms of new technologies, new ideas, new innovations.
That of itself I think will speed up the process of innovation
and increase the pace of diffusion. The downside is really one
of whether you create then a two-speed economy, one which all
looks rather positive with these knowledge-based industries expanding
away and creating lots of good jobs, lots of high wage jobs, and
other parts of the economy and other parts of society being left
behind. We have looked at that question through our own programme
and we do not see any strong evidence of that, but it is nonetheless
a constant danger that you will split both the economy and society
into one which is looking rather privileged and pulling away from
the rest and the other which is rather left behind by these economic
benefits.
Q183 Mr Weir: When you are talking
about patents, you are talking about the triad of Japan, America
and the EU. Are there differences within the more industrialised
parts of the EU as to the way that this is acting or would the
economies of, say, France, Germany and the Netherlands be following
a similar route to the United Kingdom?
Mr Brinkley: There are similarities
in terms of the shift in industrial structure, so they are all
moving away from some of the older industries in towards knowledge-based
services, knowledge-based manufacturing. That shift is constant
everywhere. Where the UK is different is that we have specialised
knowledge-based export services more than anyone else. This is
something where we are very distinctive. One development which
I think causes us a little bit of concern is that if you look
at the groups of knowledge-based economies, what you see is in
the Nordics, North America and Asia that they are pulling away
from all the rest in terms of their investment in knowledge as
defined by the OECD. We are in the middle group along with the
rest of northern Europe with some signs that we may be falling
behind countries like France, and then southern Europe is quite
some way behind. From the UK perspective, we ought to be worried
that we are not matching up to those levels of investments of
the world leaders and the gap between us and the world leaders
is becoming wider rather than smaller.
Mr Hutton: There are two more
things I would like to add quickly. One of our colleagues looks
at the knowledge economy on a regional basis through our city
regional idea of this programme and there is a very dense concentration
of the private sector knowledge services, knowledge economy, in
the South-East. In the rest of the country, particularly in the
North-East and North-West (but less the North-West) and the Midlands,
it is much more a public sector-driven phenomenon. There are pockets
of private sector technology around the country. There is the
Leeds gold triangle—Leeds, Harrogate, York—and there
is some really bracing stuff going on in north Cheshire and Manchester
and of course around Edinburgh and Bristol, but substantively
the beneficiaries of it have not been generally shared nationally.
One of the reasons for that is because we are not being as smart
as the countries that Ian cited as using the knowledge economy
as a potential source for re-industrialisation. This has not been
talked about much yet but it is where our thinking is going. We
have noticed that in the United States their exports are increasingly
manufacturing exports, partly because of the low dollar and partly
because of the way they have used the knowledge economy to re-industrialise.
A little known fact for example is the way the United States has
just reclaimed its place in the number one spot as world exporter.
Its exports in February of last year grew by 13% (that is all
exports) and within that some exports of manufacturing capital
goods were growing at 20% or more. That is faster than the Chinese.
They have used the knowledge economy; they have used enormous
investment in R&D, universities and defence to really reindustrialise
and get their exports moving, and of course that is good regionally
because that means jobs in places like Illinois, South California
and New Jersey where there has been a fall in employment. If we
want to spread our knowledge economy out more than it is, we need
to be able to capitalise on the opportunities for reindustrialisation
that this opens up.
Q184 Mr Weir: That is very interesting.
One of the things in our investigation into the new EU Accession
States in eastern Europe is the way that many of them are trying
to leap ahead to this type of knowledge economy. Is there a danger
of the UK being left behind by them using that process of industrialisation
to leap up the scale?
Mr Hutton: The Japanese are masters
at this. You can see what is taking place in the Nordics. Ian
has pulled out some really interesting figures which I do not
think he has sent you. The investment the Americans make as a
share of GDP in R&D, tertiary education (universities essentially)
and software, which is now the heart of the knowledge economy,
is 6.5% of GDP. Of course that is the springboard to this phenomenon
that is taking place in the States, which the Americans themselves
do not recognise. Of course there are parts of America which are
still in dire trouble—Ohio and Pennsylvania. It is a mixed
picture. There are parts of the United States which are really
reaping the benefit from the Japan effect, if you like. The next
up of course is the Nordics. Sweden is spending 6.4% of GDP. We
are only spending 3.5% of GDP. That is partly because we are the
sixth biggest manufacturing power in the world but it is smaller
and so consequently there is a less big base around which to do
conventional R&D in manufacturing and knowledge services.
As Richard Halkett was explaining I think, it is less about R&D
than innovation and we do not measure that well. We do not spend
the same amount of money on software or in the university sector.
If you want to reindustrialise, build it up and do it in the areas
outside the South-East, one of the necessary but insufficient
conditions will be a big investment in our Russell Group universities
that are outside the South-East because you would then get some
knowledge sharing and off the back of that small firm formation
and the beginnings of the reindustrialisation effect. These are
jewels in our crown. It was good to see the Innovation White Paper
talking about it but we need to put some serious money behind
it.
Q185 Mr Weir: You mentioned earlier
about the consumer sector. One of the key drivers you have identified
for a knowledge economy is a strong consumer market for high-end
goods. What impact might an economic downturn have on consumer
demand and business investment in the knowledge economy?
Mr Brinkley: There are impacts
in some areas more than others. The obvious one is the financial
sector, which is part of the knowledge economy, and that will
have a very direct impact, probably less so on some of these knowledge-based
industries because they are exporting to markets do not tend to
be particularly sensitive to either exchange rate movements or
changes in some of the variables we are seeing round the housing
market. I suspect the impact there is going to be much more on
areas like retailing and so on where there is more direct feed
across. Overall, I would say probably having a well-developed
knowledge economy gives us a bit more of a cushion against some
of these changes compared to the previous industrial structure
that we had, with the big exception of financial services where
there is going to be much more of a direct impact.
Q186 Mr Weir: How many of the features
you associate with the knowledge economy could be attributed to
increased prosperity rather than to structural change in the economy?
Mr Brinkley: It is a mix. It is
not just that people are getting wealthier; they are actually
changing their preferences as well as they become wealthier, and
they are shifting much more of their expenditure into areas which
have helped the knowledge economy grow with education and health
services being the obvious ones, but also a lot of the very high
value-added products and high value-added services. Unless people
are actually changing the way they spend their money as well as
having more of it, these certainly would not have seen those changes.
Part of the change is also driven by changes in global demand.
If you look across to the industrialised economies, their exports
at the high end of industries—pharmaceuticals, aerospace,
electronics—are absolutely booming because there is a huge
increase in global demand for these products right across the
piece. In that sense, I think it has been a mixture of both increase
in prosperity and changes in preferences and something which would
have happened any way but at a much slower pace.
Mr Hutton: You might want to ask
the Futures Foundation to give you evidence. They have been tracking
what has been behind this huge demand for over 20 years. They
have a matrix of factors which try to explain people's buying
decisions. Increasingly, ethical questions, environmental questions
and questions about how can this product or service I am buying
actualise or improve my life as a human being are really rising
up the portfolio of buying decisions than just: it is cheap, I
want it, I will have it. Prosperity is a necessary condition for
that, obviously, but what is interesting and what people did not
quite expect is the very rich way that prosperity has allowed
people to express themselves in how they buy. That has produced
this supply response. We have been quite good at the knowledge
service part of it but much less good at the knowledge industrial
part of it.
Q187 Mr Weir: One of the features
of your evidence and that of NESTA was that the UK performs strongly
on a large number of knowledge economy indicators, despite relatively
low expenditure on infrastructure. Perhaps you have answered this
question to some extent in what you were saying about reindustrialisation.
In these circumstances, why make changes to policy?
Mr Hutton: If I was asked to describe
what the Government's policy is on the knowledge economy, or indeed
the Opposition's position on the knowledge economy, I would be
hard put to it to come up with that. Both parties are in favour
of it, and I am sure the Liberal Democrats are too. You are right:
if it is working, do not try to fix it. In some of these phenomena
like knowledge services, Britain's success in auctioneering or
Britain's success in advertising or Britain's success in its university
sector, which is very autonomous in Britain, and that is one of
the reasons why it is so successful, has very much come up from
below. No-one set out to say, "Let us have a successful advertising
industry" or "let us have a successful auctioneering
industry". Interestingly, I think the financial services
sector is one which has had probably most overt support through
the regulations that have been put in place or the tax breaks
for non-doms. One of the things that Ian's numbers show, and I
always like to tweak the financial industry's tail a bit, is that
actually they are simply part of a more general phenomenon which
is the rise of knowledge services. The truth be told, in terms
of employment generation or improving their share of Britain's
knowledge service exports, the story is not that great. The real
story in the last 10 years has been our great teaching hospitals,
our great drugs companies, our great manufacturers like Rolls-Royce
and what is happening in culture and the creative industries and
what has been happening in ICT and in things like auctioneering.
I suppose the Big Four accountancy firms, although they are not
conventional financial services like you think about clearing
banks, building societies and investment banks, is where the action
has been. They have been really just going like a steam train,
really benefiting from globalisation. The much vaunted City has
been doing satisfactorily but it has not been growing as rapidly
as some of these. That is an important point. I think that we
need to understand it better and then start thinking about how
one could support it. Much of this is about allowing it to do
things at arm's length. The state getting involved too closely
for example in the creative industries is problematic. On the
other hand, institutions like the V&A, the South Bank centres
and the BBC, which are at arm's length from the state and have
big public support through things like the licence fee or grants
administered by the Arts Council, have worked rather well. We
have to be much more subtle in the way we think and talk about
the knowledge economy. Obviously one is not picking winners; one
is not interventionist. One has to think about the institutions
that we possess that help it and we really have to make sure that
we identify them, grow them and support them. That is not happening
sufficiently to my mind.
Q188 Mr Bailey: Ian, you touched
on this earlier. Basically, would one of you like to define what
the implications in terms of the labour market are from the growth
in the knowledge industry?
Mr Brinkley: I think three things:
one is that it is absolutely crucial in terms of generating jobs
and getting unemployment down and getting higher rates of employment.
This is where most of the net change has been taking place. Overall,
these tend to be on average pretty good jobs as well, so it is
also improving the quality of employment as well as the quantity.
We looked at two specific questions: is it the case that you are
now driving towards a vast labour market with more of these very
good knowledge economy jobs at the top, lots of these rather poorly
paid jobs at the bottom, and the middle contracting, partly because
of the contraction in manufacturing? Our research suggests that
that trend was certainly true in most of the Eighties and the
early Nineties, but over the past decade it has not become any
worse, so there is some stability there. There is still a basic
problem because obviously it certainly is not getting any better
in terms of the inequalities and divides. The one which is increasingly
on our mind is these regional and local differences, that the
knowledge industries are very much concentrated in the South-East
of England. Although, as Will was saying, you have these pockets
outside, if any government was interested in trying to reduce
both regional differentials and differentials within regions in
terms of both employment rates and prosperity, then we need to
see that map of the knowledge-based industries change. What you
see is a very different map, if you look at both the public sector
and the private sector. The public sector, as you would expect,
is much more evenly spread around the country because it is providing
universal services. It is the private sector which is piled up
in the South. I think the challenge is to try to get that private
sector map look a bit more like the public sector map in terms
of its spread, without losing the advantages that we have from
these knowledge-based services.
Mr Hutton: If you look at the
map, the South-West, Wales and the Midlands are really weak or
comparatively weak compared to London and the South-East. Then
your eye trains north and it is Manchester, north Cheshire, Leeds,
Sheffield, the area I described as the golden triangle (Leeds,
Harrogate, York) that are really quite strong and growing, and
the universities there are doing very well. You can see that.
I sometimes think that is not just about some of the institutions
on the ground there, which are very strong; it is also about the
demand effect. There are a lot of consumers in a belt running
from Liverpool across the Pennines. It is a huge source of comparative
advantage for that part of the world. There are close on 20 million
people there. It is beginning to float. It is the biggest challenge
to the conventional north-south divide in a way. There are strong
numbers in the South-East, an emergent bracing strong knowledge
economy either side of the Pennines, and a rather weak middle.
It is not the conventional way people think about Britain. Of
course, your eye trains north and Edinburgh has a very strong
knowledge economy. It is breaking up old regional culture. The
way all of us—the commentariat in the newspapers, politicians
and officials—think about Britain needs to be slightly re-thought
in the light of the way the knowledge economy has been changing
things on the ground.
Q189 Mr Bailey: Interestingly, if
I can paraphrase what Ian said earlier, basically the polarisation
process has now been stopped but not reversed. My experience is
from representing West Bromwich West, the Black Country area.
I am tempted to ask: what has the knowledge economy got for Tipton?
What are the factors that lead to these clusters of knowledge-based
industries and what can be done for areas like mine which have
totally missed out on it?
Mr Hutton: We have done some work
with the North Staffordshire Partnership which asked the Work
Foundation to look at North Staffordshire and the Stoke economy,
which is very similar. It is tough. Some parts of the West Midlands
do have strengths. It would be wrong to say it is all weakness.
Birmingham University has a very strong engineering department,
but it is absolutely well below critical mass. We will have to
think about the institutions that the knowledge economy feeds
off. These are very strong FE colleges and universality research
departments; they are not just knowledge economy multinationals.
An interesting phenomenon which Ian can talk about is the emergence
of firms between 250 and 1,000 strong which are going gangbusters
in Britain. This is one of the reasons why I am a bit less pessimistic
about the credit crunch and its impact on the economy than I would
otherwise have been because they are very adaptable with high
exports but they are not in your part of the country. Part of
it is about the city governance. What has worked very well in
Manchester is the way Howard Bernstein had actually got Manchester
together to exploit opportunities. Sheffield and Leeds have been
well led. These are well led cities. They have seen what has been
going on around them and they have had the governance structures
to capitalise on it. In the West Midlands I think the governance
structures are very weak and the institutions are not fit for
purpose. The result is that you see what you see. Bristol is not
as strong as it should be, frankly, in my view, but in our numbers
it has a strong university and the aerospace industry. It should
be doing better than it is doing. That is my answer. It is very
difficult. There is no magic bullet.
Q190 Mr Bailey: I knew it was a difficult
question. I wanted to see how you handled it. I suppose it boils
down to: what are the key factors which determine where the private
and public sectors invest their knowledge resources? Perhaps you
would like to say a few words about that and then I will take
it back and make one or two suggestions.
Mr Hutton: We are publishing our
report on Stoke in a few weeks' time. I think it does have implications
for other parts of the West Midlands. The private sector will
only come into areas like yours, to be brutal, if it sees, over
a reasonable planning period, the chance of making some returns.
It might do that if there are existing strengths. One has to be
quite ruthless about looking at the strengths of particular parts
of the West Midlands and saying that it is only really by building
those up and getting the local authorities and politicians like
yourselves to abstain from "I want a bit of the pork"
and to recognise that if you spread the jam around and do not
focus it on a few things that have a real chance of becoming national
institutions, maybe European or global ones, then you have lost
the plot. I find it is very difficult for local communities to
face that. It is a very brutal thing to have to confront. If there
is some money coming from the regional development agency or from
central government, everyone wants to see it spread round equitably,
but the honest truth is that you may have to focus on something
that will allow the regional economic fire to catch and then everybody
will get warm. If you just spread the tinder around, there is
no fire. Do you understand the analogy I am trying to make?
Q191 Mr Bailey: I can understand
it. I have to say it is not all doom and gloom.
Mr Hutton: I agree. I am not being
excessive. I am trying to be balanced but it is less successful
than in other parts. Twenty years ago you would have said that
Sheffield and the West Midlands are very similar. That is my point.
Chairman: We are wandering a bit
away from our main subject.
Q192 Mr Bailey: Could I ask a supplementary
on a totally different angle? Basically, why do women do better
than men in terms of the knowledge economy?
Mr Brinkley: It is partly because
the supply of labour has shifted much more towards women, and
so we have many more women graduates coming in to the labour market.
Women have been increasing their share in particular science areas—the
life sciences and so on. The knowledge economy has a huge demand
for graduate level labour and the shift in the graduate population
has been much more to women. There has been a very big supply
response. Where women perhaps do less well than we thought they
might tends to be on wages. You still see some significant gaps
in wage levels amongst relatively skilled people you might term
as knowledge workers between men and women. That still seems to
be a persistent feature. I think women are doing quite well in
terms of the quantity indicators and perhaps less well on the
wage indicators. There is a broader puzzle about why this expansion
in the knowledge economy has not fed more strongly into some of
the improvements in the equality indicators that we see.
Q193 Mr Bailey: Would you say that
there are certain areas of the knowledge economy where women have
done much better than others and there is some potential in other
sectors?
Mr Brinkley: They seem to be increasing
their share pretty much across the board. Where they come out
particularly strongly tends to be in areas like business services,
but also in the public sector based knowledge industries. Health
care and education are enormous employers of better educated women,
probably less so in areas which have been more traditionally dominated
by men and so the financial services and the City are still very
much a male preserve and so are parts of high-tech manufacturing.
Chairman: As Parliament tends
to be, Julie Kirkbride!
Q194 Miss Kirkbride: At least I earn
the same as you, Peter, or I do not because you are Chairman of
a select committee. Were I to be, I would. Three out of four of
us are Midlands members, so we are slightly sobered by what you
said that we are so losing out. I am not sure what more you can
add to this. Whilst you were talking, I was thinking that in the
South Midlands there is Warwick University, as you said, Birmingham
which is an excellent university itself and there is the A38 technology
corridor. We are trying quite hard. I have said to my own constituents
that there are quite a lot of rich consumers around and yet we
are still not cutting it like others. Is there anything else that
we could be doing?
Mr Hutton: Goodness me, you are
right the East Midlands, Warwick University, Leicester, Nottingham
and Derby are in better shape than the West Midlands.
Q195 Chairman: Warwick is the West
Midlands.
Mr Hutton: You claim Warwick and
Julie Kirkbride claims the South Midlands. Derby is a very interesting
town. Toyota is a big employer there and so is Rolls-Royce and
there is still some of the old British Rail engineering. There
are a lot of industrial apprentices there. I think that with the
fall in the exchange rate, you are going to start to see that
re-industrialisation effect hit Derby. Some social indicators
have determined this very well because of course it is getting
young boys in particular to come into industrial employment. It
is not all doom and gloom but Derby has these assets that it can
build on. Some of those are just the way the dice have fallen
historically. There are possibilities with the lower exchange
rate that Stoke might even do something with its ceramics industry.
It should not just be written off. I am sure if one looked closely,
as I know Liam Byrne who is the Minister for the West Midlands
is doing, and Advantage West Midlands, there is good work being
done. They are keenly aware of these trends. You need to look
hard at the institutions that you possess, private sector and
public sector, and put in not just money but status and maybe
planning support where they need to expand and to try to build
them up so that you have some of the assets in the West Midlands
that other parts of the country have, those who are exploiting
these trends that Ian and I have been talking about.
Q196 Miss Kirkbride: You said earlier
that we need to make more use of our universities and particularly
the Russell Group and it comes down to money. Where and what should
we be building the Russell Group universities with outside the
South-East?
Mr Hutton: That is because I have
noticed in our studies that you cannot tell the story of what
is taking place in, say, the golden triangle in Yorkshire without
thinking about Leeds, Sheffield and York Universities. Those are
strong universities. Similarly, you cannot tell the story about
something in Manchester without the strong universities. These
are very good. Liverpool has had, for the first time since the
early 1920s, a net migration back into Liverpool in the last couple
of years. Liverpool University has one of the finest medical faculties
in Europe. These things are great and they interconnect. If you
look at the international league tables, our Russell Group universities—and
Oxford and Cambridge are always at one and two and the strong
London ones like Imperial are always in the next five or six—like
Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham and Bristol are inside the top 50
in the world league tables. We need to understand why they do
so well because we do not fund them very well. I think it is partly
because they are autonomous; they have autonomous governance structures,
so the vice chancellors have a capacity to build up the intellectual
faculties. They have a capacity to do independent R&D. Some
of them are networking together now. I am slightly concerned about
the way we think about universities. Universities are one of the
most important assets of the knowledge economy. We do not want
to kill the goose that lays the golden egg by thinking of them
too much as sources of economic regeneration or sources of wealth
generation. They are sources of knowledge generation, first and
foremost. I think that should not be compromised. I would like
to see a significant increase in the flow of grants for research.
We probably need to allow them to raise more money, particularly
those in the Russell Group, by putting up their fees. I know that
is difficult politically. We need to get resources into them from
both the public and the private sectors and simultaneously respect
the way they operate constitutionally as independents and knowledge
generators and accept that some of the benefits will be indirect
and if you try to force-feed it, you will kill it.
Q197 Miss Kirkbride: Earlier this
morning you were talking about international comparisons and how
we are in the second league and America, Japan and the Nordic
countries are in the first league, with southern Europe in the
third league and China and India somewhere lower. Why is that?
What do you think the defining characteristics are that create
that list?
Mr Hutton: The US and the Nordics
are out in front. Japan is just tucked in behind them. They are
really beginning to pull away. Then there is a middle tier of
which we are one. Then there are aspirant knowledge economy areas.
The precondition for a successful knowledge economy has got to
be investing in knowledge. That means universities, R&D and
software. Secondly, you do well if you are open and not closed.
Like globalisation, you need to keep barriers down. I do think
it is about support for the institutions, not just the universities
but all the institutions that really drive it. It is about design.
It is extraordinary that the V&A for example or the Design
Council or some of our FE colleges that support design have their
backs against the wall like they do. You do not think of them
as part of the portfolio of things to do but they are part of
the portfolio of things that you have to access. There is more
besides. You also have to have structures that permit your small
and medium sized firms to scale up. I am really quite concerned
about one thing, and I do not know whether NESTA said this. Jonathan
Kestenbaum has drawn attention to the fact that 3i—
Q198 Chairman: He did mention that.
Mr Hutton: I think that is very
serious. I also worry about the impact of the credit crunch on
the banking system supporting and giving the loan finance that
firms need to scale up. That is critical. I wonder whether we
should be thinking about either institutions like a knowledge
bank or, if you do not want to go that far, ways of using the
tax system to help the private banking system support knowledge
firms at that stage of their development.
Q199 Chairman: I am sorry to interrupt
you because that is very interesting. Funding of innovation is
a really important theme, no doubt, and there is quite a lot in
the Innovation White Paper about this. There is a lot about R&D
tax credits and so on but the funding gap of small start-up innovation
companies, up to about £2 million, seems to be almost more
important than having big companies that will probably do it anyhow.
Mr Hutton: It is beginning to
happen in that belt I described—Liverpool through Manchester,
Sheffield and Leeds. You are going to see small firm formation
but you are not seeing that happening enough because they have
demand to help them. In the absence of demand, the pace of growth
is going to be that much slower and consequently you are going
to need more finance to help you through, and particularly in
the first three to five years of your life as a small firm. It
has been a long-standing gap in Britain. It was identified by
a predecessor to you in 1931 as the Macmillan gap, and here we
are in 2008 and it is still there and evidently, more important
I think in 2008 arguably than it was in the 1930s.
Chairman: We are running out of
time and we still have quite a lot of ground to cover.
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