TUESDAY 1 MAY 2007

PROFESSOR SIR HOWARD DALTON, MR TREVOR GUYMER, DR PHILIP NEWTON AND DR MIKE WEBB

  Q20  Mr Newmark: In which case, how much private sector investment is there in marine sciences and research and where is this focused, that is private sector investment?

  Professor Sir Howard Dalton: I do not know the answer to that; do you, for private sector investment? We did have some figures.

  Mr Guymer: This would have to go across all of the oil and gas inputs, and so forth. In terms of marine-related activities, what we quoted, the £39 billion, as Howard has said, most of that comes from the oil and gas. If you are talking about the research element of it, one of the biggest contributors to that, certainly on the private side, is oil and gas, which contributes to the £600 million turnover, or just over £300 million a year in value[1].

  Q21  Mr Newmark: I would think it is the same not just in R&D but I would think the actual investment itself would have to be also oil and gas, I am assuming, yes?

  Mr Guymer: Certainly it would be oil and gas. Despite any downward trend there might be, oil and gas would be still significantly the biggest player.

  Q22  Mr Newmark: Given the whole issue of global warming and everything else, with respect to marine science, have you noticed any trend with respect to private sector investment going into new areas or new sciences, related specifically to marine science, in terms of new technologies, and so on?

  Mr Guymer: So far, I would say that we do not have the evidence on which to say that.

  Q23  Mr Newmark: What are IACMST and NERC doing to encourage knowledge transfer in the marine science field?

  Dr Webb: From a NERC perspective, knowledge transfer within the Oceans 2025 programme has been seen as a critical element of the programme. The Council took a big interest in what was going on, in terms of knowledge transfer, and so for the first time we will have theme leaders within Oceans 2025. Those people's names will be made available to government agencies, so the government agencies can interact easily with the marine strategic science programme; there will be a number of stakeholder events annually, to encourage the policy interaction that is required.

  Q24  Mr Newmark: Is it actually happening? You are saying there is a lot of action to encourage this, but do you see it being followed through, or not?

  Dr Webb: Most definitely; this is a critical element of the delivery of Oceans 2025. At the moment there is an implementation plan which needs to be developed for Oceans 2025, then there will be consultation once again with stakeholders before that plan is put in place, so it is taken very, very seriously.

  Q25  Dr Turner: Professor Dalton, and Mr Guymer, I think particularly, we are all agreed that the whole field is far too fragmented and underfunded, and the Committee has gone further and argues that the Government needs to behave like a coherent commissioner for marine research. If you could persuade the Government to do anything coherently, what would you want for them, in terms of marine research?

  Professor Sir Howard Dalton: We discussed this earlier actually; it is a very interesting point. One of the interesting things that we have discovered, and certainly I have discovered, in IACMST, is the fragmentation that we have, and the way in which marine science is funded in the United Kingdom is still fragmentary. We have got a number of different government departments all putting in various bits and pieces and not necessarily co-ordinating their activities in the way really that they ought to. If you could wave a magic wand and say actually what is going to be the best way, I would try to bring them all together and have some major organisations responsible overall for funding all the various aspects of marine science. At the moment we are beginning to try to get it together but it is still not there and I think it still needs a bit more work to it.

  Q26  Dr Turner: Do you think the Inter-Agency Committee itself could be transmogrified into the body to do that?

  Professor Sir Howard Dalton: If it were properly resourced, possibly.

  Mr Guymer: It is interesting to learn from the experience of marine science and technology in the EC Framework Programmes. In the 1990s there was a dedicated marine science and technology programme called MAST and that was very successful in bringing together different communities across Europe, working together in a much more co-ordinated fashion. It seems somewhat ironic that we have achieved quite a bit in a decade or so while that dedicated programme was running, it is no longer a marine-dedicated programme, we achieved quite a lot there, and yet we do not have any kind of equivalent mechanism which provides that kind of incentive and encouragement for the different parts of the marine science and technology community to come together as a whole across the UK.

  Q27  Dr Turner: The relationship between the Inter-Agency Committee and the OSI obviously is not irrelevant, too. How much do you feel that marine activities figure in the thinking of OSI; does it play a role at all?

  Mr Guymer: I think it does, from time to time. OSI are full members of IACMST and therefore they see all of the trends that are being developed. In addition, when we see a critical issue, using Howard's role and access to the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government, on occasions we have identified crucial elements, and two of them actually are cited in our submission, when we needed to get a UK national contribution to a particular satellite programme. Another one was the Argo profiling programme, where we realised that we were in danger of a lack of coherence, really shooting ourselves in the foot, and so when we have identified specific things we have taken those straight to Sir David King.

  Q28  Dr Turner: Is it a two-way relationship?

  Mr Guymer: I would say that, hitherto, it has tended to be one way; upwards.

  Q29  Dr Turner: Would it be helpful if there was more positive pressure from OSI to encourage the marine contribution?

  Mr Guymer: If OSI were to task IACMST with some specific things to do, and we had reasonable resources to do that, I think, based on our experience in our lifetime, we would be very keen to take on those responsibilities and would see it as a valuable service to the community.

  Q30  Dr Turner: Do you think that is the way forward?

  Mr Guymer: I think it is one way which strongly ought to be considered.

  Q31  Chairman: Could I just follow that up and say we have just completed an inquiry into Space, though we have not published yet, so we cannot tell you what the conclusion was, and we have had similar discussions really about whether in fact we should have an agency, and what you have been describing, over the last few minutes, particularly to Des Turner, is an agency. Is that actually what you are asking for?

  Mr Guymer: There are many agencies.

  Q32  Chairman: I know there are. I think what you are asking for though is to have a specific marine agency actually to co-ordinate all this, to have a central budget and to drive the science, in terms of marine science?

  Professor Sir Howard Dalton: Personally, I think that would make a lot of sense. I think it needs some proper co-ordination. It needs the Natural Environment Research Council to push forward the fundamental science which underpins much of what goes on in the marine environment, and they fund that and they do that, and certainly, through the new Oceans 2025, I think that is a very sensible way. There is a whole series of activities, aside from all of that, which, I think, if it were to come under some sort of agency operation, would make a lot of sense, in trying to bring about the co-ordination. We try to co-ordinate, through IACMST, but we are funded very poorly; we report to the OSI, we try to bring people together, we try to tell people what is going to be the sensible thing to do and what is not, we have brought together some very useful information on databases, which was fragmented before. If we had had resource and teeth I think we could have done a lot more.

  Q33  Chairman: Do you have any links with the Royal Navy, any links into there?

  Professor Sir Howard Dalton: We have few links with the Royal Navy; the MoD are represented on IACMST.

  Q34  Dr Turner: Do they ever offer the use of their ships?

  Professor Sir Howard Dalton: They are used, yes. The Natural Environment Research Council uses them; we use them down in the Antarctic, I do know that.

  Dr Webb: The Royal Navy help support the logistics for BAS down in the Antarctic.

  Q35  Dr Turner: Do they tow plankton monitors; do they help with observations?

  Mr Guymer: They do help with the deployment of Argo floats in remote areas, and that has included the South Atlantic, so we do have access to those ships when we need to but there is more that could be done in that area.

  Q36  Chairman: In terms of a specific relationship, they sit on the Committee but they do not do a lot: yes, or no?

  Mr Guymer: MoD are involved in quite an active way in IACMST sub-committees, to do with data and observations, so there is quite a strong relationship there.

  Q37  Chairman: Are you going to echo that?

  Dr Newton: I wanted just to add that the Oceans 2025 directors met with the MoD in the last couple of weeks and they discussed the possibility of enhancing the use of the Royal Navy and their platforms; it is something which is being discussed actively at the moment.

  Q38  Chairman: There is a lot more that could be done?

  Dr Newton: Yes.

  Q39  Dr Iddon: I want to put a few questions to you on Oceans 2025. Where did the original idea come from and what was the philosophy behind setting it up, and who is involved in it? I know we have got the written evidence but perhaps you would just summarise that?

  Dr Newton: In 2004, NERC took the view that, due to various historical events, our strategic marine science investment was rather fragmented, so we approached five of the Oceans 2025 partners and said that we would like them to start thinking about a more co-ordinated approach when it came to the time to renew their proposals. To help with that, we commissioned a review of NERC marine science, all our investment, strategic and blue sky, so that NERC Council could understand what we are investing in currently and understand why we are doing so, and so forth. That review came out with a number of recommendations, one of which was to ask the Oceans 2025 labs—they were not called Oceans 2025 then, of course—to come into NERC with a much more co-ordinated set of proposals than previously had been the case, where they were much more competitive at the previous round, we wanted something that was a better balance of competition and collaboration. Their response to that, essentially, was to go further than we had asked; we asked for a set of co-ordinated proposals and they said, "No, we can do better than that; we can come up with a single proposal which we will co-ordinate," which NERC Council was delighted with, so they responded very positively to that request. The other difference from the past was, because we had our NERC delivery plan, there were a number of specific targets in that, we specified to Oceans 2025, essentially, "We want you to come back to us with your case for the strategic marine research which NERC should be doing, set in a context of UK and international user needs, but we want the following things to be in it," in our delivery plan, which reflected our strategic priorities. We asked them to develop specific aspects to do with science for sustainable marine bio-resources, deep oceans and some transatlantic monitoring of a large overturning circulation which affects climate; so we specified, which we have not tended to do in the past. I think probably you know the rest; they came up with a proposal and it was seen very positively and funded appropriately[2].

2   Note from the witness: Dr Iddon asked `who is involved' in Oceans 2025. I did not answer this. It is; National Oceanography Centre; Plymouth Marine Laboratory; Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory; Scottish Association for Marine Sciences; Sea Mammal research Unit; Marine Biological Association; and Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Sciences. Back