DR LLOYD ANDERSON, PROFESSOR LORNA CASSELTON AND DR BERNIE JONES

6 JUNE 2007

  Q180  Chairman: Dr Anderson, is it just a question of funding then? Do you accept this premise that the Research Councils put forward that we are very good at international collaboration, it is just a matter of funding and if we put more money into it we will be absolutely brilliant?

  Dr Anderson: No, I do not think that is right. I would just say for the British Council our purpose is to build long term relationships and trust for the UK, so we see science as an important tool in being able to build those relationships alongside the arts or English or education. We are coming at it slightly differently than the Research Councils because, in a sense, the Research Councils are saying what can international relations do for the UK research base, whereas I would say the philosophy behind the British Council is what can the UK research base do for international relations, it is the other way round. You can always throw more money at the problem and we hear Lord Sainsbury talking about 5% of the world's science being done in the UK, therefore 95% is not, we need to access that 95% and, clearly, the more money that is there for international collaboration the better. There are all sorts of issues which we may unpick about the international perspective of UK researchers and their willingness to get involved in the international scene.

  Q181  Chairman: What about you, Dr Jones. We are very good at it.

  Dr Jones: We are reasonably good at it—historically we have been very good at it. I would say that UK scientists themselves, research practitioners, are very good at going out and making those contacts where they can but what we are not is good at is presenting a united UK front when we go overseas and then being able to fund the follow-up large projects which come after the relationships have been forged by the researchers themselves.

  Q182  Chairman: We heard from the previous panel about this perceived lack of co-ordination; do you know if there is a lack of co-ordination between the different organisations involved in international science collaboration?

  Dr Jones: Yes, almost certainly there is; that is why Sir David King set up GSIF (Global Science and Innovation Forum) in the first place, years ago, and that has been working to better co-ordinate the various UK stakeholders who are involved in this. It has done reasonably well so far, but it could still do better and particularly it could do better when we are actually sitting around a table overseas with the Indian or Chinese ministries of science.

  Q183  Dr Harris: Could I just ask on that, the Royal Society is a member of GSIF and you heard the members of the previous panel say that they had barely heard of it and it hardly impacted on them. I notice that the higher education institutions are not represented in any way through Universities UK or the Department for Education on GSIF; I presume it is a problem therefore.

  Dr Jones: Hearing the evidence of the previous panel clearly there is a problem, but whether that is a problem of them being represented on the Global Science and Innovation Forum or whether it is a communications problem in that all of us as members of GSIF have not adequately communicated what that panel is doing.

  Q184  Chairman: There seems to be little point in having the Research Councils on GSIF if in fact their members, the people who actually take the grant funding, do not know what is happening. is that a fair analysis?

  Dr Jones: I would say that is half of it, there should be better communication, but even without being able to communicate it out to the wider UK science community there is still great value in all the principal players who are on GSIF all co-ordinating their activities and pulling in the same direction.

  Q185  Chairman: And effectively communicating.

  Dr Jones: Firstly between themselves but then communicating it to the wider community.

  Q186  Chairman: Professor Casselton, what are the main barriers to international research activity?

  Professor Casselton: I hate to say funding, but it is long-term funding. As many people have said to you this morning there are funds, particularly from the Research Councils and even from the Royal Society for short-term inter-actions to establish collaborations, but science is international and it has also been pointed out this morning that if we are to do cutting edge research, which we hope is going to be used to address many of the real global problems that we are facing at the present—climate change, disease, health problems, water problems and suchlike—we need the cutting edge research of all the countries involved, so we need long term funding. It is all right to set up the collaboration by visits, but what we need to be able to do is to say yes we can put money on the table to now establish a long term collaboration.

  Q187  Chairman: So this is a role for Government.

  Professor Casselton: We feel that the Research Councils should be able to have money that is dedicated for international collaboration; the money is still funding UK researchers but it is ensuring that they can then make contact with overseas groups who will equally have dedicated funds to do that collaborative research.

  Q188  Chairman: If we could just come back to GSIF for a second, what are the main mechanisms or methods which the Global Science and Innovation Forum uses to enhance international collaboration?

  Professor Casselton: I am not so familiar with GSIF and I am going to kick this to Bernie.

  Dr Jones: I would say there are a couple of mechanisms. One is that GSIF and the members of the various project teams that sit beneath GSIF over the last couple of years have been working on the international strategy which was launched last year which sets out a modest roadmap for various UK international science stakeholders. So the strategy is one thing and active co-ordination of all of our activities is the second one and to my mind, purely personally, is actually the main value. If we can ensure that whenever, for example, there is a ministerial visit we do not just agree things but that all the principal stakeholders are there as well to provide a single united front for UK science, that will make a far greater impact and portray the UK science brand far better internationally.

  Q189  Chairman: Did you feel depressed hearing our previous panel talk about ministerial visits, preparing stuff for them and then nothing happened as a result? Have you had that experience?

  Dr Jones: I slightly recognised where they were coming from. We are in a privileged position because we do not sit too far away from Whitehall so our communication with the FCO, the OSI and with the Research Councils is relatively good, although even then there are things that we do not hear about. I can imagine how much more difficult it is to be sitting in a lab or sitting in a university where the channels of communication are even longer.

  Q190  Chairman: Dr Anderson, what benefits do you think we have had from the Year of Science scheme?

  Dr Anderson: Would you mind if I just went back a bit? I somewhat disagree with the Royal Society about co-ordination because on the ground co-ordination works quite well; the Foreign Office and the British Council in wherever, Beijing or Thailand, are working well together and in fact it is a mutually beneficial relationship, each side can build on the work of the others and I would say that the Council adds value to the work of the Foreign Office and vice versa. Sometimes it looks different here in London because you see this plethora of funding bodies and people involved and therefore there is a worry that somehow it is a mess, it is not co-ordinated, but in some ways I feel we should celebrate the diversity of the sources of funding that are available and recognise that where delivery is taking place on the ground there is a joined-up approach. The co-ordination activities here in London that are most useful are about information sharing and I suspect that that is what we were hearing in the last session, simply that the information was not getting through about what other people were doing and if there were better channels for information sharing then people would feel it was more joined-up and more co-ordinated even if there was a plethora of sources. Also on the point about feedback, I have heard that the other way too, that we bring over visitors to the UK and they go and have talks with the DTI or the British Association, then they go back to their country and the people here never hear another word about it.. There is, therefore, a problem with our feedback and there should be proper reporting-back to the people who prepared briefs in the first place.

  Q191  Chairman: Let me bring you back to the Year of Science; was that not a good focus for international collaborations?

  Dr Anderson: You mean the Year of Science in China?

  Q192  Chairman: Yes.

  Dr Anderson: These big awareness-raising campaigns are good; because it allows you to have a large impact you can raise the general level of interest and the level of engagement. The problem with these big campaigns is that they are not necessarily sustainable and we have seen this in the past—not specifically in science but I am thinking back to the big campaign that was run in Australia called New Images which was about reconnecting Australia with the UK. It was a fantastic year, lots and lots of activities, great media interest, great enthusiasm, but it was not really followed through and so you just saw the thing die away again in successive years. The same happened in Canada, there was a general public diplomacy engagement, so whilst the Year of Science has been successful in China I am concerned about whether there is a long term commitment to keeping up those engagements.

  Q193  Chairman: Would you prefer to have a longer term commitment with fewer countries rather than, for instance, having a year in China and next year in Japan or Korea?

  Dr Anderson: The Years of Science have tended to be in the countries that we see as the next big players—the emerging economies—where they have suddenly started to increase their investment in research and development and so they are fairly targeted as to where those Years of Science are to be placed. I suppose I am coming at it from the point of view of long term relationships and a worry about short termism in having big campaigns.

  Q194  Chairman: Professor Casselton, do you share those concerns?

  Professor Casselton: I come from a slightly different angle in that we as the Royal Society would really like to see the Research Councils have a more aggressive policy towards funding international research, we would like to see them committing a small percentage of their funding. They have about £3 billion and just a few per cent of that budget being dedicated to overseas collaboration would make a big difference.

  Q195  Chairman: Do think this focus on picking a country like China and having a major focus there and then moving on to somewhere else is the right approach, and if so which other countries would you want to see as having that focus?

  Professor Casselton: That is hard for me to answer because the Royal Society has various policies towards different countries, but over the past two days we have had meetings with the Chinese in the Royal Society, we have had a meeting of the European ERAnet called COREACH and it is very obvious that there is a tremendous amount of exciting research going on in countries like China and there is UK engagement, but we would like to see the availability of more funds to develop that.

  Dr Jones: It is actually a combination of all the points that have been made. The Years of Science are tremendously successful and they are very good opportunities to really try and sell the UK brand in these priority countries which, for one or two countries, some of the various stakeholders in the UK might disagree on, but for most of them we are agreed on 80% of what our priorities are. Lloyd is right and wrong to say they lack follow-up; the FCO and the British Council in country are always very keen to follow up those years; they put in a tremendous amount of work to bring about some of these things, to raise the profile of UK science there and they continue doing it, and indeed the team in China is continuing to do that this year. Where he is right is on the point that there is no greater follow-up, and this is the point that Lorna was making: having spent a whole year promoting UK science in the country, forging literally thousands of connections between UK research practitioners and those in country, we then have no central UK funds to actually support real research projects between them.

  Dr Anderson: There are two things here: one is about the commitment of the Research Councils to relationship development rather than reactive, individual project funding, and the Years of Science do not necessarily lead to more relationship development on the part of the Research Councils. The other thing is that it is therefore a geographical focus and one could take a thematic focus, and I would mention climate change in this context because maybe the UK wants to raise the game in climate change and it wants to do that across the globe. The problem with the geographical approach is that you throw everything into it, all areas of science, and say we are going to target this country and then we are going to move on to that country. I would have thought that strategically for the UK it was important that certain issues or certain themes were explored globally.

  Q196  Dr Iddon: Anyone listening to this conversation from outside who did not know enough about your organisations might say it is all a bit of a mess really—and I am deliberately saying that to provoke you, obviously. I ask, therefore, why do the Research Councils promote international activity when we have got the British Council, we have got the Royal Society to do it. Lloyd, you said we celebrate that diversity so you presumably agree with all this complexity, but why can we not have something simpler?

  Professor Casselton: They have the money.

  Q197  Dr Iddon: You have the money.

  Professor Casselton: No, they have got the money, the Research Councils have the money, we have not. We have a small budget compared with the Research Councils and we devote something like 15 to 20% of it to international activity.

  Q198  Dr Iddon: If the Research Councils have got the bulk of the money why should they not be left to get on with it.

  Professor Casselton: You mean in terms of international?

  Q199  Dr Iddon: In terms of promoting international activity.

  Professor Casselton: Because we say we feel they should be devoting more of their funds to ensure that UK groups and overseas groups can work together.

  Dr Anderson: I would say that the British Council and the Research Councils are working to different outcomes. The outcomes of international promotion of science to us are about global security, a more peaceful world, a more prosperous world as well, but we see science as a culturally neutral area a way of crossing what can be quite large cultural divides. Because of the common language of science and because it is fact-based and people can work together it allows us to cross very large cultural divides and enable relationships to be built. Those are the outcomes we seek and the outcomes that the Research Councils seek are really quite different, they are about the excellence and strength of the UK research base and about economic returns to the UK. I do not think it is a mess, we are trying to achieve different things; we happen to be in the same area of work.