PROFESSOR COLIN BLAKEMORE, PROFESSOR IAN DIAMOND, PROFESSOR KEITH MASON AND DR RANDAL RICHARDS

9 MAY 2007

  Q60  Mr Newmark: Is that more of a problem, for example, in China and India than the US?

  Dr Richards: I was talking to a Chinese scientist last week and they are now, from what I understood, becoming more alert to the fact that they have to agree IP rather than, if you like, put it to one side in these issues. If they are going to join the global sisterhood of nations they are going to have to conform more with their behaviour.

  Q61  Mr Newmark: But if we are allocating resources and IP is the ultimate end game with a lot of this work here, is our money best spent continuing to forge ahead with continuing to develop relationships with the US because they understand what needs to be done? Is the educational challenge in China educating them on the need to get with what goes on elsewhere in the world too much of a challenge, or do you think they will generally get there?

  Professor Mason: I do not think there is any more or less of a threat from the US in terms of IP than China or India.

  Q62  Mr Newmark: Tell that to the music industry.

  Professor Mason: Right, point taken, but certainly in our areas. The key thing is that if you generate IP the issue for us is that we have to have the resources to capitalise on it and no amount of lawyers or whatever will protect IP that you are not using, so that is the key thing that we have to recognise.

  Q63  Mr Newmark: How will international offices be supported—and this again comes down to money? Will money be taken from other budgets or not, or is the government effectively widening the amount of money it is giving for these sorts of projects?

  Professor Blakemore: The research councils have agreed to share the cost of these international offices on the grounds that there are benefits to all of us from doing so.

  Professor Diamond: We have taken a judgment.

  Q64  Mr Newmark: Is the pie bigger or is it the same size pie but you are just reallocating money.

  Professor Diamond: It is strategic reallocation of our budget because we judge that there are significant potential advantages to having these offices in these countries for slightly different reasons, as Colin has explained, and that therefore great British science and indeed the opportunity, as I stated right at the beginning, is to encourage the very best scientists to collaborate with us and to make it easy for them so to do, and then after they have perhaps spent time in the UK to have, if you like, a focal point where they see their relationship being nurtured and maintained over time; that through that there is a very strong strategic use of our budgets and across all the research councils the amount of money being spent is not hugely significant, I would have to say, although it is clearly enough to make the operation happen.

  Q65  Mr Newmark: So if it is a fixed budget there are clearly users. Is there any area of concern that you have as to where money is being taken from or are you saying that the amounts are so small it is not going to have an impact?

  Professor Diamond: I am not saying the amounts are so small but in any organisation you have a budget constraint and at any time you have to allocate your resources so as to maximise the impact that you think you are going to have, and the judgment that we have all taken at the moment in conversation is that the best way to allocate these particular resources at the moment is to put them into these offices because there will be measurable benefits in the medium-term in terms of increased collaboration with those countries, which we really need to do.

  Q66  Mr Newmark: Just changing tack slightly, do you envisage a change of direction for the UK research office in Brussels to enable a horizon scanning function?

  Professor Blakemore: The UK research office in Brussels already of course does horizon scanning and it has been very useful in advising the research councils on new developments in Framework Programmes particularly and new opportunities.

  Q67  Mr Newmark: Is it appropriate to limit UK research office services to universities and other organisations who actually pay a subscription and will this model be run in the Beijing and Washington offices on a similar basis?

  Dr Richards: I think our sister council, BBSRC might be better placed to answer that sort of question; they manage UKRO on behalf of all of the research councils.

  Mr Newmark: You must have an idea whether it is going to be a subscription based service or not?

  Q68  Chairman: You all pay into this, do you not? Are you saying that you do not know what you get out of it?

  Dr Richards: No. The actual question was with regard to the policy I thought might be better answered by the BBSRC.

  Professor Diamond: Very simply, we all subscribe into UKRO, we are all subscribing into Beijing and we are all subscribing into Washington; it is a joint agreement across all the research councils that this is a good thing to do. All research councils are part of this and it was a decision taken—

  Q69  Mr Newmark: So it is global, it is not just limited country by country.

  Professor Blakemore: We are certainly in discussion with UK universities about their interest in using the office in Beijing and we would formalise that arrangement if it placed demands on the office that could not easily be met and were not clearly in the interests of the research councils to support. So we anticipate and hope that UK universities either collectively or individually will be joining the work of the office in Beijing and therefore contributing financially to it. Exactly what form that contribution takes has not yet been formalised.

  Q70  Chairman: So if you do not pay the subscription you do not get access to an office which is being paid for by the British taxpayers?

  Professor Blakemore: I think we have to judge that on a case by case basis initially. We do not have a policy yet for how we will interact with UK universities, although of course one has to say that the work of the research councils is largely delivered into UK universities, so our just being there, in China, will benefit them. But we anticipate that many UK universities, if not collectively, will want to use these offices to get access to the local expertise, knowledge about applicants for places to work in UK universities and so on. If they do so, and if it stretches beyond the clear interests of the research councils to support that effort then of course we will negotiate charging.

  Professor Diamond: One could not simply say that our resource will provide, if you like, unlimited access for 140 universities or whatever. If the demand was such for us to employ new staff to be able to take some of these agendas onwards then we might have a sensible conversation, for example with Universities UK, about how the resource could be made available to meet demand.

  Q71  Mr Newmark: I have one final specific question, which is how do you monitor developments which may have a negative effect on UK research, and the example is the EU Physical Agents Directive, which obviously had an impact on the whole MRI sector and how could this be improved?

  Professor Blakemore: Can I say that the research councils were quite active in responding to the challenge of the EU Physical Agents Directive. It is actually true that we did not have advance warning of the potential impact on the use of MRI in clinical research, but I have to say neither did anyone else who was affected by it elsewhere in Europe—it rather came out of left field. Actually I think that the Commission had not fully realised what those impacts would be before they passed that Directive. I hope you will agree from your own inquiry on that issue that the MRC, indeed the scientific community as a whole in this country was actually very agile and effective in mobilising arguments which perhaps mitigated the potential damaging effect of that Directive.

  Q72  Chris Mole: Brooks took us to Brussels just now. The European Framework Programme is the third largest element of European Union general spending. How important is it to research in the UK? I note from the statistics in FP4 and 5 that the UK took the biggest slice of the cake, but Germany has an FP7, if I have the numbers right.

  Dr Richards: On the industry side, yes.

  Q73  Chris Mole: Is that something about which we should be concerned?

  Professor Blakemore: The Framework Programme is a very significant funding mechanism in Europe. However, it is, I think, only 6% of the total expenditure on publicly funded R & D.

  Q74  Chris Mole: In the UK?

  Professor Blakemore: In the whole of Europe. So 94% of funding is actually handled through national agencies. As you say, the UK has been disproportionately successful in previous Framework Programmes despite some of the difficulties with which everyone is familiar in dealing with the Framework Programme processes. The Framework Programme remains the principal mechanism of collaboration within Europe and therefore is extremely important to the research councils. However, my own view is that the research councils should be looking for other mechanisms for working with their colleagues in Europe, and they do so in parallel with and complementary to the mechanisms that are offered through the Framework Programmes. So I am sure that all of my colleagues will be able to cite many examples of fruitful interactions with European colleagues outside the Framework Programme.

  Q75  Chris Mole: Do you think they have begun to address those concerns about engaging with the Framework programmers? Are there any problems that exist with other European funding programmes where the auditors come round and take the money away after the event, after you have spent it?

  Professor Blakemore: There are features of the seventh Framework Programme, which we are now just entering, which certainly are intended to address some of the criticisms about bureaucracy and too intense monitoring and so on in previous Framework Programmes, but the most significant development is of course the emergence of the European Research Council, which will draw an increasing fraction of the Framework Programme budget and which is intended to be a relatively independent executive agency, less cluttered by the bureaucratic baggage that is familiar in aspects of the Framework Programmes.

  Q76  Chris Mole: What are the challenges of the ERC for you all?

  Professor Blakemore: There are several challenges. First, the scale of its agenda compared with the scale of its budget. The ERC is intended to operate as a response mode-funding agency funding the highest quality research without barriers, without juste retour, without the need for networking across the whole of Europe in every scientific area, yet its starting budget is less than €300 million. That is a real challenge to demand management, a challenge which has not been very well met, we learn from the latest figures, with something like 9000 applications for the Starting Grant scheme, which is only one of the instruments offered by the ERC. So the first problem will be demand management. The second will be the fact that the ERC, although it has been granted initially a very significant and unusual degree of independence—with a Scientific Council of considerable standing, with its own internal management structures and so on—it is in the end, an Article 169 executive agency of the Commission, and legal advice implies that at any point the ERC could be taken back into direct ownership and direct control by the Commission. That is something to be nervous about and the nervousness, I know, is shared even by Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, who is the new Secretary-General of the ERC.

  Q77  Chris Mole: Are there concerns about overlap with the work that you do because I was going to ask you how much overlap there is between the thematic priority areas of FP7 and those of your own research councils?

  Professor Blakemore: Perhaps my colleagues also on advisory panels for the themes within the Framework Programme. I am certainly on the advisory panel for the health theme, and I have to say that I am still a bit bemused about the process that leads to the identification of these thematic areas, and I think that we should be pressing for more involvement of national agencies at an early stage in working up proposals for the thematic areas, rather than just being brought in to comment on them after decisions have been made.

  Q78  Chris Mole: Can anyone shed any more light on that?

  Professor Diamond: I think that is very true. One of the other areas, of course, as I am sure you are aware, with the Framework Programmes, has been the extent to which overheads are paid, so that one of the reasons of course is that some universities are not over keen for their researchers to prioritise European funding over funding which brings in more money for the same grant, so to speak.

  Q79  Chris Mole: This is if we push FEC on them?

  Professor Diamond: Yes.