Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
MONDAY 26 JANUARY 2009
RT HON
LORD DRAYSON,
DR GRAEME
REID AND
MR JEREMY
CLAYTON
Q1 Chairman: Could I welcome in particular
this afternoon to this very first session of the new inquiry,
Putting Science and Engineering at the Heart of Government Policy,
Lord Drayson of Kensington, the Minister for Science and Innovation
at DIUS. Welcome to you, Minister.
Lord Drayson: Thank you.
Q2 Chairman: Graeme Reid, the head
of economic impact of the Science & Research Group at DIUS,
welcome to you again, Graeme, it is nice to see you in the new
year; and Jeremy Clayton, another old friend of the committee,
the deputy head of the Government Office for Science at DIUS,
welcome to you as well, Jeremy. Could I just say by way of introduction
that this particular inquiry really sort of builds on, I think,
three pieces of work which the committee and its predecessor have
done. First of all, in terms of the engineering inquiry we have
just virtually completed, we ran a small case study which was
looking at engineering in government, and there were some very,
very interesting comments brought forward during that particular
session. Secondly was during the science budget allocations, again,
there was some real concern by the committee, and indeed one of
the drivers for this inquiry was what is the juxtaposition between
national science policy and policy within the regions. The whole
issue of the Haldane principle again came up during that inquiry,
which was repeated by Wakeham's review of physics. Our predecessor
committee did a major piece of work about scientific advice to
government in the formulation of policy, and again, that is a
theme which is running through our committee's work, which is
really about evidence-based policy, so that is the background
to it. But I wonder if I could start, Minister, by saying that
your role differs very significantly from your immediate predecessor's,
and indeed, going back to Lord Sainsbury, from his role as well,
and I just wonder how you are using your upgraded position with
a role within the Cabinet as well to put science and engineering
at the heart of government. Do you see it in those terms?
Lord Drayson: Yes, Chairman, absolutely.
I see my role as to be a champion for science and engineering
through government, that is through the promotion of the research
base, the promotion of excellence in research, but to do that
not just through my responsibilities in my own department, but
using the fact that I have been given the task of setting up this
brand new committee for science and innovation to make sure that
science is put at the heart of government policy. We have the
second meeting of the committee tomorrow, so we have had one meeting
so far, but I would say that just from the initial feedback from
that first meeting with my ministerial colleagues and other government
departments, there is a shared recognition across government of
the central importance of science, the importance of making sure
that policy is based around good science, and the importance of
ensuring that government departments have access to the necessary
expertise, the R&D budgets to make sure that policies which
they develop and implement are consistent with policies which
are being implemented in other parts of government, and to make
sure that it adds up to a coherent whole which positions the UK
to capitalise on, I think, its brilliant track record in science,
to make sure that that science is pulled through effectively into
wealth creation.
Q3 Dr Gibson: The fact that you say
that it should be at the heart of policy decisions and so on kind
of suggests it never has been. Are there evil forces around who
believe that it might not be the right place for science to be,
at the heart, but more on the periphery; do you pick that up?
Lord Drayson: I think that there
are examples of real excellence, but there are also examples where
science is not properly recognised, and the role of science, particularly
early on in the development of policy, and that is something which
we need to work on. I think the recognition of that mixed picture
is why I have been appointed to this role, why this role has been
structured in this way. My brief really is to make sure that good
practice which does exist is taken across other areas of government,
so departments learn from each other, and I see my role as to
use both persuasion, exhortation, balanced argument, to persuade—
Q4 Dr Gibson: Vehemence.
Lord Drayson: And vehemence, and
a bit of passion as well, to make sure that all government departments
raise their game on this, and there is never a more important
time to do it. I feel that the current economic environment actually
provides a real focus on this, and the response from government
departments in that first meeting, I would say, has been really
positive. There is a recognition of the importance of this.
Q5 Chairman: Just following on from
Ian Gibson's question there, it is an incredibly confusing picture
of science in government, you know, with some departments having
chief scientific advisors and others not having them; the sub-committees
for science and innovation report to Cabinet through a committee
that considers economics; you have a number of government departments
that have established science advisory councils, and others have
not. For instance, DIUS, the department you sit in, does not have
one. What is all that about? How do you get some real sense of
collective responsibility for science right across government,
or is that your job now?
Lord Drayson: That is my job.
I think that I am actively promoting the development of coherence,
a policy of making sure that these activities the different departments
are taking and the support structures that exist have synergy
between them, that they are effective in working together. One
of the most important aspects of this area for me is that many
of the policy areas require more than one department to work together;
there are a number of really quite important science projects,
of strategic importance for the country, which you cannot just
easily put into one particular government department. Therefore,
we need to develop effective mechanisms whereby multiple departments
can work together, not get embedded in their own silos, to share
information and focus around a particular area. I think climate
change is an area where we are going to see this being increasingly
important, as an example.
Q6 Chairman: But if science is so
important, you are a zealot in terms of the way in which science
and engineering can affect this country's future, how can it be
possible that major departments, like Treasury, for instance,
do not even have a departmental chief scientific adviser? Until
recently, Education did not. How is that possible, and what are
you going to do about it?
Lord Drayson: I am going to strongly
encourage them to change that. I think we should recognise that
UK has been a real leader in terms of international governments
in the way in which it has developed scientific advisors within
government departments. Many countries in Europe do not have any
at all. So what we need to do is raise the game of those departments
which do not have science as a central part of their policy development,
and its implementation, and I think that is a combination of me
being a zealot, as you say, but also pointing out to departments
the benefits. Part of it is breaking down some prejudice about
what science is, so that where you may have pockets of people
saying, "We do not do science in this area", pointing
out to them that they may not think they are doing science when
they are working on this particular area, for example, in particular,
like a social science, they may not think about the scientific
method as a way of development of policy, but there are real areas
of relevance. Part of my job I see as just not accepting the easy,
"We do not do that"; I go back and say, "Well,
let us go through this, let us see how we can change the way in
which you are doing things".
Q7 Chairman: But Minister, the sub-committee
for science and innovation which you head up does not have representatives
from all the departments, nor does it have the government chief
scientific adviser sitting on it.
Lord Drayson: Yes, it does. It
does have the government's chief scientific adviser.
Mr Clayton: I think the formal
position is that Cabinet committees consist of Ministers. For
this particular committee, as with some others, there is a line
at the bottom which says the government chief scientific adviser
is invited to attend, so as a matter of course he does attend
and take part in the discussion. I think he may not be a formal
member.
Q8 Dr Gibson: Scientists work in
teams, they move in groups of people, fielding ideas and so on,
working together across science and so on. What do you think about
civil servants in this area? I think they have quite a bit of
clout, do they not, in areas? You can have all the ministers you
like in the world, you can have a scientific adviser, but at the
end of the day, civil servants can put the boot in quite hard.
Is that true, in your experience so far?
Lord Drayson: I think civil servants
have a major contribution to make, and therefore it is very important
that we have enough scientists and engineers in our Civil Service.
When I was a defence minister, I was very active in the development
of the cadre of scientists and engineer civil servants within
the department, and one of the things I learnt in doing that was
the lack within our current Civil Service career structure for
a parallel career path for civil servants to develop their careers
and stay in the specialist area of science and engineering. You
can do it in certain other professional areas, I am very keen
to encourage the Civil Service to develop this for the science
and engineering profession. That has been developed very successfully,
particularly in the hi-tech industry, in the private sector. We
have to have a situation where to get promoted within the Civil
Service, you do not necessarily have to switch from being a specialist
engineer to being a generalist. That is certainly the structure
which exists in best practice in industry, and it is one which
we need to develop in the Civil Service. I was very pleased to
see your committee chairman ask for returns from departments on
the numbers of graduate scientists and engineers in each department;
I was very disappointed by the returns that came back. We have
to change this.
Q9 Ian Stewart: It is interesting
that you have mentioned engineers several times in the same breath
as scientists. Do you therefore see yourself, when you have got
this cross cutting role, as minister for science, engineering
and innovation?
Lord Drayson: Yes.
Q10 Ian Stewart: So you very much
see yourself as that?
Lord Drayson: Yes, in terms of
championing the science profession within government and the engineering
profession within government, and taking specific action already:
the government chief scientific adviser has set up a professional
group for scientists and engineers, he set up the first meeting
last week, he invited me to come and give a talk to that meeting,
it was an enormously effective gathering, the head of the Civil
Service came and spoke too. So I think what we are doing is developing
a sense of the science and engineering profession within the Civil
Service, this is something which we need to continue and we need
to develop it. We do need more scientists and engineers in the
Civil Service.
Q11 Chairman: Lord Drayson, CST was
clearly set up by the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, as being
a really important organisation, sort of driving science, innovation,
technology, with some incredibly eminent scientists, engineers,
technologists and economists on board. The Prime Minister met
regularly with that organisation. Do you meet regularly with that
organisation?
Lord Drayson: Yes, I do, Chairman.
Q12 Chairman: Because they feel undervalued.
The evidence we had in our engineering inquiry was they felt they
were peripheral to what was happening. They write good reports,
but nothing much happens.
Lord Drayson: I have met with
them, if I am correct, three times in my time as Science Minister.
Q13 Chairman: Has the Prime Minister
met with them, to your knowledge?
Lord Drayson: Yes, the Prime Minister
met with them at a breakfast meeting towards the end of last year.
Q14 Chairman: My final point before
I pass on is: in terms of international intelligence in science
and technology, clearly that is crucially important for us formulating
our policy, forming strategic alliances. Do you feel that there
is sufficient intelligence coming into your department, do you
feel we are sufficiently plugged in to get advice about what is
happening elsewhere in the globe?
Lord Drayson: I think that we
are plugged in, although I think that the literature, if you like,
on the exploitation of science, the whole process of innovation
by government, is pretty patchy in the sense of its scope and
quality. I think there have been a number of very good studies,
for example, on different types of model, the way in which, for
example, the Silicon Valley model has developed; the Finnish model
has developed; a smaller number of studies of what has been happening
in Singapore. But I think we need to do everything we can to make
sure that we are really clear on what is the state of the art
in terms of understanding how an investment in science research
can best be managed and structured to deliver the best possible
impact for the outcomes of the country. How do you get the balance
right in terms of the different elements, in terms of pure and
applied; how do you make good allocations against the different
areas, particularly in an environment where the science is moving
very quickly, and where the economic environment is also changing
fast.
Q15 Graham Stringer: Do you have
a theory of what has gone wrong? We all want to get the best value
out of science that we possibly can, and this country has had
an excellent record on innovation and scientific research, but
it has been less good at turning that to the economic benefit
of the country. Do you have a theory about whether this is a cultural
issue, whether it is a failure of government; what is your analysis,
and how do you intend to improve the situation?
Lord Drayson: I think it is a
hugely complex area, therefore the answer to your question is
multi-factorial, but I do think that we are seeing some key conclusions
emerging. I think that I would agree with you 100% that we have
been truly excellent at science in this country, all the data
supports that, the productivity of our science, in terms of numbers
of citations, Nobel prize winners and so forth, the investment
that we have made over the last 10 years has led to a renaissance
in the science base. The feedback I have had is the quality of
the science in our research base has never been higher. We have
also been very effective in the development of intellectual property
from that science base in a way that we were not 10 years ago.
The technology transfer processes from universities have improved
dramatically. I think what my predecessors, particularly Lord
Sainsbury, did to change that, to understand the clustering effect
around certain universities to develop lower economic costs for
businesses, has all been tremendous. What has happened is that
has led to a really quite significant number of spin-out companies
being created and international comparisons in terms of the productivity
of spin-outs, their numbers, and their quality, has been very
good. The problem has been our ability to convert those increasingly
large numbers of start-up companies into a sufficiently large
number of really substantial businesses, and I think that there
are a number of reasons for this. One of the key reasons is the
economic environment, nothing to do with the credit crunch; the
credit crunch is making it dramatically more difficult now and
bringing all of this into focus, but we have seen that our high
technology companies which have been built on our science base
have tended to get to a certain size, comparably smaller than
you would see, for example, in the United States, and then have
been acquired or have stagnated. Now this has led to a failure
to fully realise the jobs and the wealth that could be created
for those businesses, and therefore I am very focused on what
we can do to address that particular problem. So I think the agenda,
the focus is moving; it has moved from that early stage to more
the mid stage. We have to maintain our investment in science,
we have to maintain this very good track record in spin-outs,
but we have to see more of these spin-outs grow to be substantial
employers of people.
Chairman: I want to return to that later,
Lord Drayson, in terms of your second session this afternoon,
but I think that has been a good opening in terms of actually
exploring that further.
Dr Gibson: I want to drill deeper than
just the successes that we have and say: why do we get these successes,
what happens? Now I happen to believe there are two things about
many young people, they do most of the science in this country
at the post-doc level or at the PhD level, we see that with MIT
in the States, the Massachusetts Institute, where young people
come in and do PhDs and get their spin-out company, because they
are set up to do that; and the second thing about young people,
why they are doing all this great work and getting disillusioned,
is because nobody thinks they are doing anything important. They
want to drill into the process of legislation and making things
happen. They are full of young ideas. You must meet them at meetings,
think tanks, whatever, and there are all these bright young people
that say, "I do not really want to spend six post-doc periods
of my life doing research and getting a citation", which
is one method of judging success, it is not the only way of doing
it, and we often use that in this country as the only way. But
I want to see what you are going to do about making sure young
people stay with science, either the blue sky stuff, or getting
into industry, because I think we have a real problem with young
people in this country who are getting scientific training, and
maybe they will all be civil servants one day, maybe that is where
they will go, I hope not, because they are as bad as financiers.
Chairman: Let the Minister give an answer.
Q16 Dr Gibson: I just want to know,
what are you going to do about young people? If you were a post-doc
today, a Colin Blakemore of the future, where would you go?
Lord Drayson: I would want to
encourage the Colin Blakemores of the future to consider a career
going into teaching, so after having done one or two post-docs,
to consider alternatives to an academic research career, so consider
going into teaching; there is a real need for more science teachers
who have a trained background within sciences as a first degree.
I would want to facilitate your ability to consider going into
industry, in particular going into a technology company operating
in the science area for which you have been trained. Now we have
learnt through the last ten years of some very effective models
as to the way in which post-docs in particular, as you mentioned
them, can be moved from the academic setting into industry. For
example, the relationship between a professor and their post-doc
is one of real trust often, so therefore one of the ways for a
professor's intellectual property to be commercialised is for
the post-doc, or more than one post-doc, to actually move out
of the academic setting and move into the early stage start-up
company. For those two aspects to happen, I think we need to see
a shift in the way in which academic careers are treated within
our universities. To enable those two things to happen, we have
to have an environment whereby it is possible for you to say,
"I want to take a few years out from doing my academic research,
for example to go and work for a hi-tech business, but I want
to have the ability to go back into that academic research in
the future". Now that is something which certain universities,
by no means all universities in the United States—
Q17 Dr Gibson: It sounds like being
a woman in science actually.
Lord Drayson: I think there is
a real value in us facilitating the ability of people to make
that move with their expertise in and out of the academic research
environment, to business, to government policy, in terms of civil
servants, to even consider going into politics, I think—
Q18 Dr Gibson: Good God no. Do not
condemn them to that.
Lord Drayson: I think there is
a role for more scientists in politics, and I think seriously
for us to facilitate people going into teaching at different stages
in their life, not only for teaching to be something which you
would consider immediately after finishing your first degree,
but something which could be made a natural next step for you,
say, in your late 20s/early 30s.
Q19 Dr Gibson: Do you think either
young people or experienced people like Colin Blakemore, who is
in the room, as you know, found it fun to go into legislation,
determination, making decisions and that? Do you think they felt
welcome, do you think their scientific expertise was recognised
in any way, or were they just a nuisance?
Lord Drayson: I can speak for
my own experience, and that is that I became interested in politics
because one particular issue around science, in my particular
case, animal rights extremism, politicised me, I became really
quite exercised and concerned about the issue, and what I learnt
was that getting involved in the politics of science, science
policy, was a hugely interesting and satisfying thing, it really
was. So I think that the fact that the protest group developed
at Oxford relating to support for animal research at Oxford, with
a 16-year old student leading that, is a sign that young people's
concern and belief in the importance of science is alive and well.
Chairman: Can I just park this as an
issue? I think it is an absolutely crucial issue to future science
policy to have a different relationship between what actually
happens in the research labs in our universities and how we get
these career paths, and I know Dr Harris has been pressing us
for what seems like 20 years to do an inquiry on this.
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