Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-34)
DR ALAN
GILLESPIE CBE
5 MAY 2009
Q20 Mr Marsden: The 2008 RAE, of
course, did show that there was a broad spread of research excellence
in a larger number of universities than some people had understood.
Do you accept that you can have good research environments in
universities that are not themselves necessarily research intensive?
Dr Gillespie: In the space of
the last two weeks I have spent time at the University of Ulster
at Coleraine in Northern Ireland, which is a wonderful institution
but would not be viewed as one of our elite universities by any
measure, yet I have immense respect for the quality of research
being undertaken there, and across many of our universities around
the regions, so I really think you have to use these assessment
exercises to find pools of excellent research, which are in a
very wide range of institutions, not just in the triangle of Oxford,
Cambridge and London.
Q21 Mr Marsden: Pressing you a little
further on that, will the ESRC have some form of equality impact
assessment when it considers the consequences of its funding regimes
for postgraduate research? I say this because the Select Committee
has just returned from a visit to the United States and one of
the bodies involved in science research that we talked to there
said, which I think surprised some of us, that a proportion, I
think 20-25%, of their funding was potentially available for those
universities that were not research-intensive. I am not suggesting
necessarily, and I am certainly not asking you to comment on this,
that we should have a system like that here, but are there mechanisms
within the ESRC to make sure that that golden triangle effect
that you have alluded to is not intensifying?
Dr Gillespie: I will be better
equipped to answer that question a year from now when I have viewed
the process from the inside, and I have not yet begun, but from
the inquiries I have made, and even just looking at the ESRC's
Annual Report, funding is allocated to an extremely wide range
of institutions, from older universities to universities which
were former polytechnics, right across the United Kingdom, and
the ESRC also posts data on applications submitted and applications
which are successful, and you can see who gets and who does not,
and I am just struck by how broadly spread that is.
Q22 Mr Marsden: Finally, Lord Drayson
since his appointment as Science Minister has been extremely active
in promoting a debate about the future focus of the science budget.
What is your understanding of his intentions in that debate, because
he has talked about strategic focusing of the science budget and
how that might have implications for the ESRC?
Dr Gillespie: Quite a number of
the themes the Minister was addressing were to do with the medical
sciences, the engineering sciences and so on, looking for how
you spot winners and bring them through very quickly, and that
is far from the work of the ESRC. What I would seek to do in my
guidance for the Chief Executive and the Council is make sure
that when we go into the next Spending Review ESRC is seen to
be in every sense an utterly professional organisation, fit for
purpose and justifying its budget increase, and I know that will
be a challenge between the ESRC and the other research councils
for a limited budget.
Q23 Dr Iddon: How do you think the
current recession will influence the priorities of the ESRC?
Dr Gillespie: As we meet the ESRC
is in the final stages of defining its strategic plan which will
go for the next five years. To some extent the plan for the next
five years has some follow-through from the plan for the last
five, because you cannot chop and change all the time, but I am
observing that there are aspects of that plan being adjusted almost
as we speak in order to address questions that have arisen out
of the crisis of this recession and the credit crunch and so on,
and, although the plan is characterised around some very broad
headings, when you drill down into it there are many sub-research
themes which are, we might say, scratching where we itch as a
nation, and one of the things I will try to do as I guide the
Council is make sure it is dealing with issues that are relevant
and contemporary. As I said earlier, we indeed must do basic core
research but equally, if we are spending £200 million of
taxpayers' money, the nation has to get some good out of that
in terms of the right questions being researched and the relevant
answers being delivered, so I would hope that, as I get into this
process with the Council and all its sub committees, we will find
that there are topics to do with indebtedness, with pensions,
housing, fear, crime, unemployment—all these things that
are so acutely hurting in our society today, which form the feedstock
for much of the research we are doing. I would hope so.
Q24 Dr Iddon: It sounds as if you
have some faith in the fact that the ESRC has a role to play in
the economic recovery.
Dr Gillespie: I have every faith
that it has a role to play. I look back with some reflection in
my own four years writing a PhD, just one researcher working in
a corner yet some of the things I focused on helped inform economic
development policy in Northern Ireland, and I think every PhD,
every research department, every theme has to have output that
is relevant. It would be to my mind a great shame if we were meeting
five years from now and we could not confirm that the ESRC has
produced research findings which address our needs as a nation
today.
Q25 Dr Iddon: There has been recently
an international benchmarking review of economics research in
the United Kingdom which was a bit critical of some areas in particular,
for example, not strong enough to support the needs of users,
such as in developing applied monetary policy. Are you aware of
those criticisms? Has anyone made you aware of them to date?
Dr Gillespie: I was aware of something
else and that was that we came out quite well in that international
benchmarking, I think overall we came out second behind the United
States, which is not surprising, so in some ways that survey was
saying United Kingdom economics is in a strong position relative
to other nations, but I would say in response to those sub points
you made the following. I have a feeling, and it is nothing more
than a feeling and I will be intrigued to develop this line of
thinking, that in a sense the power of economics in the City has
meant that this has rather overshadowed economics in our universities.
Every big firm in the City of London has senior economists who
are the best out of universities, they pay them well, and they
produce very good research, but it is research with an angle,
it always has a financial connection to the workings of the City,
and for all the intellectual strength of that community they did
not see the present economic crisis coming, and I would like to
see the economist in Strathclyde, or the University of East Anglia,
or Aberystwyth, having clout again in the world of economics and
econometric forecasting and whatever else. I have no data for
this, it is just an impression, but I somehow feel that the game
has shifted in economics a bit from our universities to the City
and that has not worked out, so I will do all I can with my influence
to make sure we re-emphasise the role of good economics across
our universities.
Q26 Mr Boswell: I have been fascinated
by these exchanges, and again this question is not meant to be
angled to things you may or may not have been involved with in
your banking career, but do you think it will be part of the role
of the ESRC at least to encourage academics to get a handle on
what went wrong in what has happened as a bit of a prescription,
or at least to provide some pre-conditions, for looking at what
might go right in the future?
Dr Gillespie: I think the question
that is in all our minds is, very simply, what happened? We all
remember the weekend September 2007 with queues outside Northern
Rock, and all that has happened since then that took every one
of us by surprise, and we need to understand how that happened
and unpack that analytically and intellectually as a basis for
how we go forward in research.
Q27 Ian Stewart: Does that not go
hand in hand with political development and the international
bodies as well? Surely, if there is no transparency at an international
level, the researchers are going to be somewhat limited?
Dr Gillespie: I am not sure, sir,
what you mean by "transparency". There is a wealth of
data out there and the data existed about the financial bubble,
about the growth of mortgages and the growth of leverage. The
data was there; it just was not being analysed. Data is the feedstock
of the ESRC's work. We live in a data-rich world; we just were
not asking the right questions.
Q28 Dr Iddon: In your wide experience,
thirty years I think you said, of the financial sector, Dr Gillespie,
do you think the ESRC-funded research is listened to by the bankers?
You have just said that the economic advisors in the system itself
rather than in the universities were above everything else. Do
you think they have been ignoring the research being done in the
universities? Or has the research being done in the universities
not been focused enough on the possibility of a crisis, perhaps?
Dr Gillespie: I do not know the
detail of what has been done over the last thirty years. I suspect
there has been some very good work that has not seen the light
of day.
Q29 Dr Iddon: Whose fault is that?
Dr Gillespie: Maybe because the
Today programme calls the economist from Credit Suisse
in the City to speak rather than the economist from University
College London. One thing I know Ian Diamond and his team are
focusing on is trying to encourage good scholarship to see the
light of day. It is not usual for an academic department to run
a press conference but maybe there are some findings that are
worthy of a press conference to get the message and results out
and so on, and it is interesting now that, when you apply for
a grant to the ESRC, as part of the impact assessment the applicant
has to address how he or she messages the findings once they have
finished. So I think partly good research has been done but it
probably has not been effectively disseminated.
Q30 Dr Iddon: But could you not,
as the new Chairman of ESRC, do something about that? Is it your
intention to raise the profile of the ESRC and make sure that
the basic research that is being done is noticed by the end-user?
Dr Gillespie: A Chairman only
has certain influence. The Council is run day-to-day by the Chief
Executive and the Chair is there to guide the Council but maybe,
as my answer suggested to you, I have a burden around this. I
think there is excellence in research in our universities around
all sorts of themes to do with society but also to do with business,
economics, government, and we need to encourage a better redistribution
of those findings, and I will encourage that. I also would like
to hear more in the public space about the work of the ESRC. I
am struck any time I am in the United States by the Brookings
Institute which as a think tank is referenced a lot. Maybe we
can go down that path a bit.
Q31 Dr Iddon: I think the conversation
we have just had suggests that perhaps the financial sector has
not been as intelligent a customer of the research that has been
available as we would be. I think we could agree on that perhaps.
But what about the Government? Do you think the Government is
an intelligent customer of economic and social research in this
country?
Dr Gillespie: We are getting into
this question of what happened and what went wrong, and undoubtedly
there must have been signals that the Government missed, particularly
the Regulator, and I think one of the great things that Lord Turner,
who was in this role until recently, is already doing through
the Turner Report is strengthening the role of the FSA and regulation
around our financial system, which was light touch and weak. So
I would fully say there were major mistakes made in banking and
business leadership but there have been major mistakes made in
the supervision by government as well, which in many ways has
encouraged a credit culture that now has come crashing down.
Q32 Dr Iddon: A key phrase certainly
that comes up regularly in this Committee is "knowledge transfer".
Do you think the ESRC can improve the way in which knowledge is
transferred across the sectors?
Dr Gillespie: One way, as we have
described, is through the proper dissemination of research findings,
but another way is through the movement of people. In my own experience
I was a social scientist and then moved out of that into the broader
world, and I would like to see a situation where people need not
be academics for life but can move between the academic world
and the third sector, and the private sector and the academic
world, so that knowledge transfer occurs through people.
Q33 Dr Iddon: I just make this final
comment: I find it astonishing that the academics and the banking
sector did not see the credit crunch coming. That guy over there
was with me at No 10 Downing Street on July last year when I faced
the Prime Minister with the suggestion that the way we were lending
money like water was bound to lead to trouble, and a few months
later it did.
Dr Gillespie: Correct.
Dr Iddon: So I can tell you that the
ordinary people in this country saw the crash coming because they
were being offered credit when they could not afford to pay it
back and that was true of businesses as well, and I just find
it astonishing that the bankers did not and the academics in the
field did not. That is my comment.
Q34 Chairman: Brian, I am sure you
feel better for having said that. That, Dr Gillespie, brings us
to the end of our session with you this afternoon. Can I say on
behalf of all of us how much we have enjoyed this session with
you, and indeed we wish you, subject to our agreeing our Report
later this afternoon, every success with the new role. On a personal
basis may I say, as a Gillespie myself from Donegal, how nice
it is to see a Gillespie in front of us today!
Dr Gillespie: Thank you, Chairman.
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