Response from Professor Keith Mason
SCIENCE BUDGET
ALLOCATIONS
Thank you for your letter of 25 June 2008. Before
I address in detail the issues on which you have asked for further
information, I thought it would be helpful to update the Committee
on recent developments.
We have now completed the programmatic review,
following a period of extensive consultation with the community.
We have and will learn further lessons from this process of consultation
and will introduce further improvements in our advisory structure.
Our investment plans are ambitious and forward-looking
as well as affordable and will in our view sustain the UK's competitive
edge. To make room for investment in important new opportunities,
there will inevitably be some groups who will not be funded but
we will work with them to manage the rundown of existing programmes
sensitively. We recognise that concerns remain about grant funding
and we are working with the community to address these.
One outcome of the programmatic review is that
we have now reached agreement with the University of Manchester
on continuing investment in e-Merlin at Jodrell Bank and have
resolved positively the future of the ALICE project at Daresbury.
Finally the Committee will be aware that we
have agreed with DIUS to carry out an Organisational Review. This
process of both self-assessment and external scrutiny will enable
us to identify further steps we can take to improve our organisation
moving forward.
Paragraph 53
Both the report of the organisational review
and an STFC action plan in response to it will be published. It
is not yet possible to say when it will be complete as the first
stage of the process is just underway. Copies will be made available
to the Committee.
Conclusion 10
The STFC is not planning to cease investing
in research in fields in which the UK excels. The choice is about
how best to invest in these areas within our allocation to maintain
the UK's competitive edge. The programme which the STFC has decided
to support will enable us to exploit new world-class facilities,
to participate in R&D for future new international facilities
and to continue to exploit those existing facilities and projects
which will continue to be highly productive and competitive. In
order to invest in new opportunities we will reduce or cease funding
in some specific programmes which we now judge are relatively
less likely to deliver the highest scientific impact.
Conclusion 11
Our intent is to pursue the plans set in place
by PPARC in March 2006 ie to invest in the EISCAT facility under
the terms of our international agreement up to 2011 and to withdraw
our support for other STP facilities. I apologise to the Committee
for the lack of clarity about the STFC's position
We have and will continue to encourage the STP
research community to pursue other sources of funding, perhaps
through the Living with Environmental Change cross-Council initiative,
and will seek to play an enabling role in any such discussion.
Conclusions 12, 13, 14, 15
I welcome this opportunity to re-state STFC's
position on the future of Daresbury.
The STFC is fully committed to the development
of the Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus as a world-leading
centre of excellence and leadership in scientific research, in
technological innovation which underpins both advances in science
as well as economic impact, and in knowledge exchange, building
on expertise at Daresbury.
We are in the process of turning this ambition
into "a concrete programme of future activity". Scientists
and technologists at Daresbury are heavily involved in the new
Light Source project. We have submitted plans to DIUS for capital
investments in the Hartree Centre, a new computational science
centre, and in a Detector Systems centre which will bring together
scientific and industrial expertise to develop sensors for both
research and commercial use. We will invest in accelerator science
and technology R&D for the next generation of accelerator
facilities including operating ALICE (ERLP) for the period of
the spending review and to support EMMA, a medical accelerator
prototype. We are pursuing co-funding opportunities with stakeholders
including NWDA to sustain increased operations of ALICE.
The STFC does not preclude a new major science
facility on the Daresbury campus but it cannot commit to it as
part of its strategy. Our rote is to develop the science cases
for future large scale facilities. Decisions on whether specific
capital projects will be supported from the large Capital Facilities
Fund are based on advice to Government from RCUK, which prioritises
bids from across the Research Councils. The decision on where
future facilities will be sited will be based on broader considerations,
including the Government's and other stakeholders' strategies
for the development of the Daresbury campus. Given that a decision
on any future large facility is likely to be some years away,
our focus is on building the scientific and technological capability
on the Daresbury campus as outlined above.
In relation to Conclusion 15, the STFC is a
national Research Council and must base its investment decisions
on what it considers best to sustain the competiveness of the
UK research base as a whole. In doing so we will work actively
with a wide range of stakeholders including universities and the
RDAs to ensure the UK has the necessary critical mass of expertise
in support of science and innovation and public funding is deployed
optimally.
Conclusion 16
The STFC's current view remains that its in-house
programme is best managed coherently across its laboratories.
This enables our laboratories to work both for their benefit and
for the benefit of the UK research base as a whole and avoids
unhealthy competition. Many of the Council's programmes are delivered
by deploying resources from more than one laboratory and the current
management structure ensures that these resources are used optimally.
Within this structure a senior director located at the Daresbury
and Rutherford Laboratories has designated responsibilities as
Head of Site to ensure there is effective engagement with local
external stakeholders, the staff and trade unions.
Conclusion 17
The STFC acknowledges the anxiety in the research
community over the level of our grants investment in the spending
review period. The STFC has not intentionally sought to play down
the effects. It has been clear throughout that there will be a
25% cut in the planned volume of exploitation grants by the end
of the CSR period.
However the situation is more complicated than
this statement implies. We have therefore sought to explain that
the full impact will be felt in different areas over different
timescales. We have also sought to put these cuts into perspective.
As we set out in a briefing note we provided to the Committee
the cut in the volume, as measured by the number of postdoctoral
researcher assistants (PDRAs) funded, of new particle physics
and astronomy exploitation grants is 25% compared with the level
of growth which PPARC had planned. However, in Astronomy, if comparison
were made between the actual number of PDRAs funded in 2005-06
and the number we expected to fund in 2010-11, these would be
essentially the same. In particle physics the situation is further
complicated by the fact that rolling grants contain support both
for the exploitation of and the construction of facilities, so
the number of PDRAs is also affected by the ebb and flow as projects
come and go. Overall it is our view that the planned levels of
exploitation grants will allow a good return on previous investment
and that the balance between exploitation and construction is
correct.
We have separately described the beneficial
impact the additional funding of FEC will have on the number of
staff supported by the STFC. Whilst we believe this analysis is
of value we recognise that it may have overly complicated the
picture and given the impression that we were down-playing the
impact. This was not the intent.
Conclusion 18
The organisational review which will be published
and made available to the Committee will outline our action plans
for improvement in the area of communications.
Conclusion 21
These benchmarking reviews were intended to
provide me with external independent advice on the current quality
and competitiveness of our in-house research activities and help
me take a view on what changes might be necessary to ensure it
was resourced at the appropriate level.
In agreeing the terms of reference with the
Panels, I considered it important that their reports to me should
be in confidence since they were being asked to comment on the
performance of our staff and such reviews must be handled sensitively.
It was never intended that they should be secretive
in the sense that it was always my intention to make the outcome
of these one-off reviews known to the management and staff of
the in-house research teams being reviewed in deciding how we
should plan for these activities moving forward.
I decided and agreed to make them more publicly
available in the interests of transparency but only on condition
that they were suitably anonymised. In conclusion may I welcome
the contribution which the Committee has made in developing our
understanding of the impact of our CSR settlement. There are clearly
lessons to be learned particularly in relation to consultation
and communications and we will do so. I very much took forward
to engaging with the Committee on how we can best support and
develop the UK's research base.
July 2008
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