PROFESSOR STUART PALMER AND PROFESSOR ALAN JENKINS

6 JUNE 2007

  Q160  Chairman: Had you read them before you were invited as a witness?

  Professor Palmer: No, not at all. You are quite right!

  Q161 Dr Harris: Do you think that it is your job and the job of everyone seeking to have international collaborations to read the strategy or are you entitled to criticise the lack of strategy or perceived lack of strategy without having read the strategy?

  Professor Palmer: I think that you have to read the strategy before you criticise but I think that, in some cases, the international strategy is not easy to seek out on the web and, even if you know that you are hunting for it, it is sometimes rather difficult to find, and the international strategies and the content vary quite significantly from Research Council to Research Council. ESRC is very good. Not only does it describe the strategies, it also is very helpful to the academic about how to approach the Research Council to receive international funding or to make approaches for international funding. Other of the documents are motherhood and apple pie, what you would expect them to say without much substance to it.

  Q162  Chairman: Which in particular would you describe as motherhood and apple pie?

  Professor Palmer: It is unfortunate to pick on the AHRC because it is so new but everything in the AHRC strategy is what "we propose to do in the future all being well" without anything that is actually happening at the moment, and I think that the AHRC needs to work hard on its international strategy and I hear this from my colleagues in the arts and social studies faculty.

  Q163  Dr Harris: You have mentioned the need to search hard to find out about the schemes. Do either of you have any experience about how easy or not it is to apply for grants in these areas?

  Professor Palmer: I think that is again another problem that our colleagues raise. It is the bureaucracy, if that is the right way of describing it, associated with the application process for small grants. Even small grants through the Research Councils associated with international collaboration suffer first of all from the problem of perhaps double jeopardy if the funder in the other country is involved as well, but it also takes a significant amount of time. For example, the small grant scheme that the EPSRC mathematics panel run takes at least 16 weeks to give you a decision on a relatively small amount of money and that is a long period of time especially if you get a "no" at the end.

  Q164  Dr Harris: The University of Sheffield told us that " ... the UK is perceived as an attractive place for study by foreign researchers, and it could be assumed that this is due in large part to the work of the RCUK", but they go on to say, "however, the work of the Royal Society, other Learned Societies and the Welcome and Leverhulme Trusts is much more well known in facilitating international research" and that "RCUK would do well to emulate the approaches taken by the charities in promoting international mobility". That is your own university. Do you share their view?

  Professor Palmer: I think in one particular instance certainly. The other funders that you mention do allow in an international collaboration the funding to be used to support the activity abroad as well as the activity at home where that is possible, so you can move their money out of the country if you need to in order to facilitate the collaboration. As I understand it, that is not possible with the Research Councils.

  Q165  Dr Harris: Have either of you heard of the Money moves with researchers' scheme?

  Professor Palmer: No.

  Professor Jenkins: No.

  Q166  Dr Harris: That was a scheme set up last year. Again, it is awareness. Finally from me, coming back to the question I asked about your own researchers, if we were to encourage researchers to have international collaborations, do you think that it is reasonable that the research funders should recognise that individuals are not always single bodies and that, if someone needs to go abroad with funding to work, it might be a wise idea to set up a scheme where their partner might have funding as well or do you think that the money should be better spent on creating more opportunities for individuals?

  Professor Palmer: It is a very difficult question and it is a question that we wrestle with now across the whole spectrum of our activities in universities. Since we recruit worldwide, it is often a two-body problem when we are recruiting worldwide in that, if we recruit somebody from the States or from the Far East or from Europe, they will come with a partner and how do you deal with that problem? I do not see that it is an issue for the Research Councils as such to stretch their funding to a second person when the quality judgment has been made on one person.

  Q167  Dr Harris: It is for the host institution.

  Professor Palmer: Yes.

  Q168  Dr Harris: I have one more point. CEH said that NERC does not provide funding to support long-term strategic research collaboration. Do you want to say something, if it has not been covered already, about follow-on funding and the need to be able to have that?

  Professor Jenkins: Only to reiterate the point that short-term project based funding two to three years focused on a specific project achieves good outputs, delivers good science but it does not promote the kind of collaboration that might make real steps forward. So, it is a bit like what was referred to earlier, the issue of the ministerial visit and the people in the country left saying, "Well, what was that all about?" It is a little bit the same with short-term two or three year research contracts. They are good while they last but they are quickly forgotten and that is a missed opportunity in my opinion.

  Q169  Dr Iddon: We want to finish this session by asking you a few questions about gaining funding from abroad, the main source of course of which is the framework programme in the European Union. I think it was Professor Palmer who was complimentary about the UKRO in Brussels a while ago. Do you think that research councils can do any more to help British researchers gain funding from the framework programmes, Framework Programme 7 as it is now becoming?

  Professor Jenkins: First of all, I would draw attention to the NERC and the funding initiative that they have established under Framework Programme 6 which is a fund to aid coordination for applications to the framework programme, glue money, if you like, to enable researchers to come together across Europe to enable our participation in that because the mechanism of putting together these big integrated projects now which can be 10 to 20 million euros over two or three years takes a lot of coordination. That is a good practice. That could be more widely taken up. I feel that within NERC the understanding is there that they need to help us in trying to be involved in framework programmes. I wanted to answer the first question about the UKRO and comment on that, just to say that, yes, they do a good job but I would argue that they could do a lot more. To me, the UKRO is extremely efficient at gaining information, gleaning information, putting it together and distributing to its subscribers. I would like to see them be much more proactive and putting us in contact with senior Commission officials because that is not easy at the moment for us. So, to get real influence into the programmes and the shape of the programmes, I believe that the UK does not have the same access to some of the senior Commission officials as other countries do.

  Q170  Dr Iddon: May I stay with you for a moment, Professor Jenkins. You have been rather critical saying that NERC does not engage well with the European Commission and you have made comment at the lack of political clout in Europe. Are you standing by those comments?

  Professor Jenkins: Yes, political clout. We appear to lack the influence that other countries have in defining and shaping some of the activities of the programme.

  Q171  Dr Iddon: Whose fault is that?

  Professor Jenkins: On the one hand, one could argue that it is fault of the Research Council who pay the subscription to UKRO but we are part of the Research Council, so it could be my problem in demanding the service that I have just mentioned, a proactive service. I wonder again at a diplomatic level, senior levels, whether the UK has the same approach and the same mindset as other European countries. The Italian equivalent of the UKRO office in Brussels is headed by somebody with diplomatic status. So, it is a slightly different approach.

  Q172  Dr Iddon: We need somebody who knows their way around the political system obviously in Brussels. Professor Palmer, would you like to elaborate a little more on what you said about UKRO and whether it could be doing more through the Research Council to gain this framework funding.

  Professor Palmer: First of all, the Research Councils are very supportive of academics in terms of allowing them to apply, for example, for travel money to travel around Europe to develop their network in preparation for the grant application. They do provide information seminars around the country to provide the information backed up by the UKRO office with those seminar presentations. I say all of that except AHRC. As far as I understand it, the Arts and Humanities Research Council has not yet offered any information seminars and they do not have a travel fund, despite the fact that now FP7, the seventh framework programme, is available for arts and humanities grant applications. So, I think that we do need to do work there. Having said that the money is available and there is travel support and so on, I still think that we need to reduce the bureaucracy and the time and the effort involved to access that funding. In our region in the West Midlands, our RDA, Advantage West Midlands, has a scheme which is quicker and faster than the Research Council scheme and it is not very often we can say that about an RDA, but they really have been very responsive and money is available to stimulate the development of those collaborations.

  Q173  Dr Iddon: We are all picking up comments to the effect that imposition of the track methodology and out of that full economic costing is now beginning to put people off applying for framework programme money. Is that your experience?

  Professor Palmer: We are definitely not discouraging our staff. In fact, we continue to encourage our staff to apply for framework money. We see that the university research portfolio needs a spectrum of funders. Yes, we lose money on the European programmes but that provides funding for research that then will lead to other sources of funding which hopefully will generate a profit to balance the loss elsewhere. So, no, we still encourage our staff to apply for Framework Programme 7.

  Q174  Chairman: But it is a problem?

  Professor Palmer: It is a problem. We lose money on every European grant we receive, significant amounts of money.

  Q175  Dr Iddon: Finally, a question to both of you. Framework programmes apart, can either of you give examples of where your organisations have gained money from other international sources, perhaps the National Institute of Health in America for example or any other organisations. Are there any other pots of money that you can tap into?

  Professor Palmer: We have had some success recently with American charitable bodies where we have had money from the Mellon Foundation for example, in collaboration with American partners. One of the strategic objectives of the university is to develop our American partnerships not only so that we can collaborate with funding from American charitable sources but also from the health funding in the States. We have some money from defence funding in the States as well. That has been enormously valuable to us.

  Q176 Dr Iddon: Professor Jenkins, do you know of any examples?

  Professor Jenkins: We have in the past had funding from the ADB, the Asian Development Bank, for some of our work in India. At this moment, we are unable to accept funding from the US, in particular the World Bank, due to issues to do with unlimited liability clauses in the contracts.

  Q177  Chairman: Would you let us have a note on that, please, because we have not heard about that and we would like to have a brief note about it.

  Professor Jenkins: Sure.

  Chairman: Professor Palmer and Professor Jenkins, thank you very much indeed. I am sorry that we have slightly overrun on your session but we did want to cover our programme. Thank you very much indeed.