PROFESSOR GORDON CONWAY AND MR DYLAN WINDER

23 MARCH 2005

  Q40 Mr McWalter: I want to ask some questions about this whole idea of the Development Sciences Research Board because I have been pushing that idea. Do you see yourself as having any responsibility for helping to tackle problems faced by the UK development scientists, such as the lack of recognition given to excellent development sciences research by the research assessment exercise?

  Professor Conway: I have had experience. I was the Vice Chancellor of the University of Sussex and Chair of the Board of Institute of Development Studies and, of course, oversaw the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex as well. At Imperial College we have quite a number of scientists who work in the development area, both natural and social scientists. I think there is inevitably a problem with a peer reviewed system that tends to focus on disciplines rather than cross-disciplines. I know that the RAE does have now a cross-disciplinary committee on development. There is a natural tendency for all of us—it may be less for MPs—to retreat into our narrow confines. It is actually a question—and excuse me using a social science phrase—of transaction costs. If you burrow down in a particular area the transaction costs are very small because you do not have to talk to anybody, you just do your own thing. If you are trying to do development science or environmental science, which are very closely allied, you have got to work with other people and that takes a lot of time. It makes it less easy to get a five or a five star, which is what is driving the universities at the moment. Imperial College at the moment is completely driven by the need to have a staff that is entirely five and five star. So there is a real hurdle to be overcome there.

  Q41 Mr McWalter: I talked to people at Warwick University who do some fantastic work in this area as well and their view very strongly was in a sense you could be writing yourself off if you go into the development side and that is partly because the problems that they are seen as tackling are not seen as at the frontiers of knowledge when in a sense they are.

  Professor Conway: I agree with that. My experience is that in the Seventies and Eighties I was a member of something called the joint ESRC/SERC committee. The SERC has transmogrified into other bodies since. That was a committee that was set up by the two research councils to work at the interface of natural and social sciences. It ran for 15 years or more. Professor Howard Newby, who you probably all know, was the head of that committee and it was extraordinarily productive in producing a range of programmes that brought natural and social sciences together. In fact, out of that I created a Masters Degree in Environmental Technology at Imperial College which has now been running for 30 years and has 150 students a year on it. So it is possible to bring together research councils in such a way that they focus on across-disciplinary activity, provided with funding and visibility and then make a difference and that is what I am hoping we might be able to get out of this proposal of yours.

  Q42 Mr McWalter: We have got this idea that there is going to be an advisory Development Sciences Research Board. Is that not more just a way of kicking into touch and a talking shop? If you want real funds for real individuals or teams of PhD students to do something about Mozambique and the railways (which is one of the issues that first got me into this sort of thing) you need engineers, you need people who understand about the landmines and you need people to look at how that structure can affect the economy and access to health and education services. You need, also, to understand cultural resistances and conflicts, sometimes. There is that whole list of problems which looks to me absolutely classically as a wonderful problem, but you need somebody to be shoving money in the direction of the people who are going to be taking on a problem like that. If it is waiting for all the different research councils to all get together and say "That's not such a bad idea", we know what happens: it is too complicated and it does not get done.

  Professor Conway: I think the phrasing there is meant to cover the range from, on the one hand, a better co-ordination of what the research councils do at the moment right the way through to a fully fledged large, semi-independent research board. Where we will end up on that, I do not know. Obviously, a fully independent research board is going to cost money and that means trying to get extra money in the 2006 spending commitments. We do have, at the moment, two agreements. One is a concordat with the Medical Research Council which has been very productive. We are working on a number of programmes in Africa, at the moment, to do with health, and the Secretary of State has just announced a joint programme with the Economic Social Research Council of a total of, I think it is, £13 million. Is that right?

  Mr Winder: Yes.

  Q43 Chairman: Mr Winder, you have been sitting there very passively, but please feel free to answer.

  Professor Conway: That £13 million will be shared between the two, which in particular will enable both developing country institutions and universities to bid as well as UK institutions. So we have got a bit of a precedent, and I would like to see that on a much larger scale.

  Q44 Mr McWalter: As would this Committee, as you know. We have suggested £100 million, but it is also interesting that the £13 million is still going to be targeted. We all know that medicine and agriculture are DFID's real strengths, and also if we go to bodies concerned with development we often find that economics is their real strength, perhaps sometimes to the exclusion of other strengths. The effect of this is to marginalise a whole series of other activities which it is really important are looked at from that wider issue of the problem, rather than: "I am in this discipline and I can do this". It is that problem-orientated research which I think the current structures make very, very difficult.

  Professor Conway: I personally fully agree with what you have just said.

  Q45 Mr McWalter: So are we going to get our £100 million? How much clarity do you have to go down that path?

  Professor Conway: I am not sure. I think all I can say is watch this space. I understand what you are saying and I am personally very much in sympathy.

  Q46 Mr McWalter: We have also heard that, possibly, some of the research councils that, as it were, think that they have got a lot of ownership of these issues, like say the Medical Research Council, might be the very ones who have been most opposed to a Development Sciences Research Council because, in a way, they have got programmes, they do £40 million worth of work a year, they think they know where they are coming from and they do not really want to have these issues generalised in this way.

  Professor Conway: I have met with Sir John Lawton who is the Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council—

  Q47 Chairman: He has just left his position.

  Professor Conway: He has or is just about to leave. I think that is right. I have met with Sir Colin Blakemore, the Head of the Medical Research Council. They are both very similar, and those are the only two so far, but I am meeting with the head of the BBSRC, and so on, over the next few weeks. I think they are all sympathetic to the idea and I think they are all, in principle, in favour. I think you will find that like most heads of institutions they want to know where the money is coming from.

  Q48 Mr McWalter: Sir John, for instance, is very strong on the need for a geological survey and for the consequent effects, both of identifying water resources and of conserving water resources from damage through inappropriate drilling, and yet he cannot get geologists at the sharp end in the way that anybody with any sense would think needs to be done. A Development Sciences Research Board/Council would still have access to MRC and NERC and all the others. One of the interesting things is they do work very well together once they start working together. I do not think we would want to see that as an exclusive preserve rather than a co-operative principle. Who is going to be on this working group of this board?

  Professor Conway: At the moment it is myself, the Chief Scientist and the Head of the Research Councils. What we have done is to ask—

  Q49 Mr McWalter: A bit exclusive, is it not?

  Professor Conway:— the staff of OST and DFID to come together to come up with a set of terms of reference and then, on that basis, we will put together a smaller committee to go forward. The responsibility lies with the Chief Scientist, with Sir David King. It is not my committee.

  Q50 Mr McWalter: Is he strongly supportive of this idea? Or is he sceptical?

  Professor Conway: I think we are at a very early stage of the discussions.

  Mr McWalter: Thank you, Chairman.

  Q51 Chairman: You saw we had a debate last week because you were there (I saw you lurking in the background). What did you think of the Government's response? Did it show it was educated, or ignorant? How did you conceive it? Be very careful—be in your civil service mode, if you like!

  Professor Conway: I think it was a good response. I think my one criticism of the response was that there were not enough concrete examples of what DFID has been doing. They are all there; there are some wonderful stories that DFID can actually tell about agriculture or health or even water, but they were not there in the reply. It was not the reply a scientist would have written. In other words, if it had been given to me to write it would have been somewhat different.

  Q52 Mr McWalter: One of the representations made to us by the Institute of Civil Engineers, for instance, was that even when these good things happen there does not seem to be somehow or other the lessons taken from that understood and then applied and developed; it is almost as if everything starts all over again. I thought that was a very powerful claim that they made, which we did not have time to go into last week.

  Professor Conway: Dylan is head of communications for the Central Research Department. I know that there are some new steps afoot to make this happen.

  Mr Winder: It is an area that we recognise needs a lot of improvement. I think the way in which the existing research programmes were managed in the past by separate departments meant that the knowledge solutions for the DFID programmes are very different. We did struggle when we first joined up to try to actually understand what was going across the different programmes, and the different ways in which those programmes were commissioned out. Now we have a much more common approach to commissioning and we are developing this within the new research funding framework. We are trying to develop a much better system which will generate information across the programmes and, really, put our information in the international domain and influence other international donors in doing the same with their research information. We are also trying to work much more effectively with heads of professions to make sure that our advisory groups are learning from the experiences being funded by DFID research, so there is a common wealth of understanding building up. The heads of profession are very keen to work with us on that. I do think it is an area which we have had problems with in the past but we are really trying to address it into the future.

  Q53 Chairman: How would you look at the state of the research in British universities at the minute, in terms of international development? You have referred to the RAE, so you can keep off that. Do you think we are finding vice-chancellors are serious about it or not? Is it well down their radar scale or what?

  Professor Conway: I think one, first, needs to recognise that probably the standing of development research, both natural and social sciences, is higher in this country than anywhere else in the world. I suppose only the French come anywhere near it; there is virtually nothing like this in the United States, for example. However, I think it is under threat for the reasons that were just enunciated recently. I think from my own experience it does depend on the vice-chancellor. Vice-chancellors can provide really strong leadership if they want to; they can either say: "Oh, I'll go along with the pack" or say: "I want that to happen", and it will happen. When I was at Imperial College Lord Flowers was director and I can assure you that if he wanted something to happen it happened. That is how we got the Centre for Environmental Technology there. I think there is a serious threat to development science, both natural and social science, in British universities.

  Q54 Chairman: Why do you think that is? Because vice-chancellors are offered taster work (?).

  Professor Conway: Some maybe, but I think most of them are being driven by the economic and financial requirements of the post, and all of you know the pressures which British universities are under. I think in that situation you find some things become marginalised because they are not the things that are either pulling in the money or pulling in the students, or whatever it happens to be.

  Chairman: Before the Prime Minister takes us to the country there is a report due out about universities and what they could be doing in these kinds of areas.

  Q55 Dr Harris: I am grateful to you, Chairman, for allowing me a further question which is around evidence-based policy, which we probed earlier, and I would like to probe you a bit further. This Committee has expressed on a number of occasions how important we think it is to agree with the Government in their agreement that policy making should be evidence-based where that is possible, and that there should be attempts to establish that. Can you just explain from your own history how you ideally would like to ensure that you can demonstrate that your department's policy, at least in your areas, is evidence-based and that that is independently assessed rather than you just saying it is. Or the Minister saying it is.

  Professor Conway: Most of my experience of this comes from the Rockefeller Foundation where we were heavily involved in the development of evidence-based policy, not just in this area but in others. For example, we were working on affordable housing, on employment, on public schooling, and in each of those situations we were trying to see what worked and what did not work. We even went to the extent of having experiments. For example, you would take two housing estates (to transform it into a British context) and you would have one kind of childcare system in one place and another kind of childcare system in another and you would evaluate them over five years. There were organisations in the United States that could do that kind of evaluation. In fact, we helped to get the Treasury interested in that kind of organisation and that is now being set up here in the United Kingdom. If you take the development issues, one of the examples would be the treatment of HIV Aids, where, again, what you are interested in is a kind of operations research in which you are studying the treatment protocols for HIV Aids and trying to see which ones work and which ones do not; which ones lead to resistance to anti-retrovirals, which ones produce greater adherence to the drug regimes and so on and so forth. It is that kind of approach; it is a scientific approach that is conducting experiments in one sense or another and looking for what works and what does not.

  Q56 Dr Harris: There is another area, is there not? There is general policy making where you can get someone to do a review of the available evidence as to whether the policy works. I am not talking about operational research or even pure scientific questions, like, for example—I do not know—whether there was any evidence that screening migrant populations for TB had any impact whatsoever on our rates of TB in a cost-effective way. Do you think there is a role for the ESRC, for example, in those non-technical questions where you do not have to do clinical trials? Do you think there is a role for the SRC, if they were agreeable and a good proposition came forward, to look at the policy to see what the evidence base was, and would you be willing personally, at this point, in principle, to co-operate with such an arrangement?

  Professor Conway: I think that is a very good idea. I will be meeting the Chief Executive of the ESRC fairly soon and I want to ask him what his approach is to evidence-based policy. We clearly, in the United Kingdom, need that—at least the development issues.

  Q57 Mr McWalter: One aspect of our report, and indeed of the work of this Committee, is we try to join things up a bit, and the Chairman has already referred to the fact that we are looking at what can be, in some ways, a rather desperate state of science and engineering in UK universities. We want to see kids at school realising that if you do a degree in chemistry you might actually be able to help people have access to water and other such connections. Do you see that DFID could do something to help us with the need to develop some of these skills, both to motivate potential students and, indeed, to get their potential students to be doing some of the work that this country and indeed the world needs?

  Professor Conway: I think that is a very interesting challenge. When I went to South Africa we talked a lot about this because, as you probably know, there is a real paucity of black scientists and technologists in the universities and in government. We went to a high school in one of the townships and looked at the way they were being taught science and technology. There is a real challenge in taking those kids and turning them on to science and technology, particularly in the way that they were doing it. I think that is a major issue. There is an issue of role models too. The teachers talked to me frankly about what are the role models for young kids in the townships. They tend not to be people in white suits. I think that is a big challenge. How much we can do about it I am not sure, but I think it is something that has to be addressed. There is, I am afraid, often in developing countries, a perception that success is becoming a lawyer or a financier rather than becoming a scientist.

  Mr McWalter: That is true here as well.

  Q58 Dr Iddon: Do you think there is enough co-ordination between the individual donor countries? It always seemed to me when I travelled to East Africa or India that individual countries, perhaps, for their own selfish interest, in those days, were just doing their own thing and there was parallel work going on, duplication and waste of effort. Have we improved over the last decades, do you think? Or is there much improvement that is still needed?

  Professor Conway: I think there is improvement at the moment, particularly because it is led by DFID. DFID is playing a major role in getting better donor co-ordination. At the moment, I think I am right in saying, we are working on a partnership with the French Government in which we can both work together in Frankfort, West Africa. DFID has been very keen on this notion of a more harmonious approach and a more joined up approach between the various donors. My understanding is that there is some success in that regard. I agree with you; in the past it has certainly been a very serious problem. It is an overload of those countries.

  Q59 Dr Iddon: Our report was critical of the money that we put into the European Union international aid effort, and we did not think we were getting the best out of that. Will you be trying to improve the record of the European Union? I know you are only one person out of many.

  Professor Conway: As I have said earlier, I want to spend some time trying to understand the European Union and its programmes. Whether I, personally, can make a big difference I have some doubts, but it may well be that one can begin to see ways forward in collaboration with other member countries.

  Q60 Chairman: Gordon and Dylan, thank you very much for coming. I know it is early days but we have thrown the gauntlet down and here you are, and big challenges. I am sure the Science and Technology Committee—who knows what will happen after 5 May, probably?—will always be there to support your efforts in these challenges. I can almost bet you will need more staff and you will need more permanent jobs paid at a higher level than perhaps they are, but we will see. I am sure the next Committee will take up the cudgels and make sure this work carries on. Thank you very much for coming, thank you for your enthusiasm and, please, get stuck in!

  Professor Conway: Thank you for your support, sir.