DR LLOYD ANDERSON, PROFESSOR LORNA CASSELTON AND DR BERNIE JONES

6 JUNE 2007

  Q200  Dr Iddon: I say to the Royal Society that the British Council has a clear difference, which you have just heard, but I have not heard yet a clear difference from yourselves. How would you differentiate the work that you do internationally from that which the Research Councils do internationally?

  Dr Jones: Some of our broad aims are the same as the Research Councils; we believe in supporting excellence in UK science, excellent UK scientists and promoting that science internationally; it is just that we might be doing it a bit more aggressively than the Research Councils are able to at the moment and we have a wider remit in subject terms than individual Councils themselves have. We are firm believers that science should be international and that we should do everything possible to facilitate both international collaboration and contact and also real international research. It is on that final point that we believe the Research Councils could do a lot more.

  Q201  Dr Iddon: We are picking up vibrations around this Committee that the co-ordination is not as good as it should be, although we have seen some evidence to the contrary this morning. How can you, therefore, in the Royal Society be sure that you are not duplicating the efforts of the Research Councils or even occasionally the British Council?

  Dr Jones: It is something that we are very conscious of and we have frequent meetings with all of the Research Councils and with the British Council and other UK stakeholders—other charities, other learned societies—and we do regularly evaluate and review our programmes to make sure that there is as little overlap as possible, or if there is some overlap that we are working together.

  Q202  Dr Iddon: Could you tell us how often you meet with the Research Councils and at what level, is it with RCUK or the individual Research Councils. How often do those discussions take place in a year, for example?

  Dr Jones: I could not tell you the number of all the interactions we have with the Research Councils.

  Q203  Dr Iddon: Is that because they are not formalised in any way?

  Dr Jones: Some of them are formalised and some of them are not but they happen at all sorts of different levels—our chief executive, our president and our vice-president very frequently meet with their counterparts at the Research Councils and indeed many of our vice-presidents and Fellows are on the boards, or are chief executives or chairs of the Research Councils, so there is a very close relationship with them. Our chief executive very frequently meets with the chief executives of the various Research Councils, we meet with them at GSIF, I meet my counterparts who run the international offices at the Research Councils very often at GSIF called official group meetings and their regular Research Council international network meetings, and my colleagues who run our grants programme in the Royal Society frequently speak to their counterparts who hand out funding at the Research Councils. There are many meetings, some of them are to regular timetables and some of them are more ad hoc.

  Q204  Dr Iddon: When you say ad hoc, from what you are saying there is no formality about them.

  Dr Jones: No, that is not true; some of them are quite formal, for example the ones which happen under the aegis of GSIF.

  Q205  Chairman: You did mention other learned societies. Some of them, like the Royal Academy of Engineering, have recently launched major international initiatives; what relationship do you have with those, in the same tenor of Brian's question?

  Dr Jones: Again, we have frequent contact and many fellows in common between a lot of these organisations, but in view of the fact that the Royal Academy of Engineering in particular has recently launched a lot of international initiatives I am intending to set up a regular meeting between the international heads of the various academies in the UK.

  Q206  Chairman: At the moment, in specific answer to Brian's question, the Royal Academy of Engineering could be having an international project in country A and you could also be having a project in country A without co-ordinating your activities; is that true?

  Dr Jones: No, it is not true because there have been meetings between our funding organisations, but you are right that there is nothing formal in place. We do intend to change that.

  Q207  Dr Iddon: Where does your funding come from in the Royal Society, is it all from the Office of Science and Innovation to promote international collaboration?

  Dr Jones: It comes from three different sources: it comes from the Parliamentary grant in aid from OSI—most of that is money that we receive from OSI and we then give out to excellent UK scientists and in order to support international collaboration—the second source is from private foundations, private individuals or corporate organisations who give us money for specific purposes and the third source is from our endowment which we have built up over the years.

  Q208  Dr Iddon: What are the proportions; which is the biggest chunk of funding in those three streams?

  Dr Jones: The biggest chunk is the Parliamentary grant in aid, the money that we receive from OSI and then hand out to fund excellent UK scientists and international scientific collaboration.

  Q209  Dr Iddon: What I am really trying to get at is because the Research Councils have so much international activity themselves, why should they bother to give the Royal Society a small amount of that; what is the advantage to the OSI of doing that, can you tell us?

  Professor Casselton: Could I just stress that the Royal Society is an independent science academy. We are an independent science academy so we are putting money where we think it is most appropriate and that is for funding the best science.

  Q210  Dr Iddon: Let me move on to the interest in your schemes from researchers around the country; are you over-subscribed or do you have to chase people? Perhaps I could start with the British Council.

  Dr Anderson: Can I just come back on a couple of points there? There is an issue in the sense that for a long time there has not been a clear international policy on the part of the Research Councils, a coherent, clear international policy, so it has been difficult to know what their geographical subject priorities have been. It is important to know that to avoid the sorts of overlaps and duplications that can occur otherwise. For the British Council's part we have collaboration schemes and we have very carefully targeted those at the younger researchers, by which I mean early stage researchers, end of post-grad, through post-doc up to a couple of years of tenure, because our feeling was that there is money available for the more established scientist through the Royal Society or through the Research Councils, but there is not much money there to help those young researchers get onto the first rung of the collaboration ladder. Once you have got them onto the first rung there are other bodies which can help fund them and get them up, so in a sense we have differentiated in terms of target audience and taken an attitude that we should be underpinning the work of the Research Councils. We have two schemes, one is International Networking for Young Scientists, which are N+N workshops, where we would pick, say, 15 young British researchers to go to Spain and meet with 15 young Spanish researchers and talk about stem cells or some other subject. Biotechnology and reproductive technology have been other areas that we have carried out workshops on in Spain. We get far more applications to run these workshops than we can fund. We also have just started a scheme called Research Exchange Programme which gives individuals what is essentially a travel grant, a bit of money to be able to go to the lab in the other country and establish some contacts. Again, that was oversubscribed in its first year. We had 300 odd proposals and we could only fund about 70 exchange visits. Going back to the workshop scheme, that is allowing us to fund about 1000 participants a year to take part in workshops, so they are oversubscribed, it makes them competitive and maybe a bit more of a thing to have. Otherwise we have to push people towards professional bodies or towards the EU or towards the Royal Society to see if they have sums of money that would be able to support that sort of work. I would also point out that the British Council manages schemes on behalf of others, so for the DfES we manage a very large scheme of collaboration with India called UKIERI (UK-India Education and Research Initiative) and we also manage DFID's funds for DELPHE which is a programme of collaboration between higher education institutes in the UK and developing countries. Our schemes are oversubscribed, therefore, but we are also managing other schemes and we are aware of what the other players can offer.

  Q211  Dr Iddon: I have to confess I have benefited from both those organisations in the past so if I sounded critical it was just to provoke you. What about the Royal Society, are your schemes oversubscribed?

  Dr Jones: They are oversubscribed. I would say that one of the main things that differentiates our schemes from some of the other schemes—for example those of the Research Councils—is their flexibility. On the international side that means the broad subject scope and also the broad geographical scope, the number of countries that we collaborate with. In terms over-subscription the most recent figures show that our fellowships are heavily oversubscribed, with typically four to ten applicants per position. Our other schemes are also over-subscribed, typically two or three applicants per grant award. We could therefore fund a lot more people with more funding without compromising on the standards of excellence.

  Q212  Dr Iddon: Could I just ask one last question of the British Council. I do not know whether it was a deliberate policy but I went to some quite awkward places with the British Council, for example East Germany when the Wall was up, and it was rather traumatic going to East Germany in those days but it was to establish bridges, obviously, across that difficult boundary. Is that still a policy of the British Council, that you send scientists—

  Dr Anderson: To the most difficult places we can think of? I would not have said it was ever a policy.

  Dr Harris: The most difficult scientists.

  Q213  Dr Iddon: It was not a deliberate policy.

  Dr Anderson: No.

  Q214  Chairman: Could you extend it to MPs?

  Dr Anderson: There is an important point there. We have just recently moved quite a lot of resource out of Europe and into the Middle East because we see it as important in engaging in those countries. So we would very much like to see science being used as a way of building those bridges in the Middle East. It is difficult to get UK researchers to go there because they are going to say the science is not that great in Yemen or Saudi Arabia or wherever, so we would like the UK researchers to have a more international perspective and to think about international relations as much as they think about their science.

  Q215  Dr Iddon: It does sound as if that policy still exists.

  Professor Casselton: I would really like to reinforce that statement. When I was 24 I was sent off to Nigeria to teach for three months; it was an incredible experience and I feel that young scientists, particularly in their early research career, should be encouraged to visit other countries. If they are going to be our scientific leaders, if they are going to be policy-makers they need to understand—I think I have said this before—that these countries do not necessarily run like ours and it is a case of using science as the basis of exchanging this social interaction which I think is very important for the future.

  Chairman: I was sent to Chapeltown in Leeds, and I can tell you that was an international experience. We have to move onto Dr Harris.

  Q216  Dr Harris: Turning to the Royal Society's criticisms of the Research Councils, your written evidence I imagine was prepared by Dr Jones and it says approved by you, Professor Casselton. For each of you, at the time you drafted this and approved it had you in fact read the RCUK strategy and the strategies of the individual Research Councils, as you were alleged not to have done by Professor Diamond when he gave oral evidence?

  Dr Jones: I can answer that on behalf of both of us. Yes, we had read it. The RCUK strategy is not yet published, it is a draft in discussion. The other Research Councils have various versions of their strategies available; some are longer than others, some are older than others and some are more focused than others. Some of them, we believe, are reasonably good, some are almost very good—the BBSRC's is a very recent document, it is very nicely put together; however, we still maintain our original objective that all of these strategies or part strategies or draft strategies are insufficiently well-aligned with each other, insufficiently well-aligned with the rest of the UK stakeholder community and they are insufficiently proactive and insufficiently bold.

  Q217  Dr Harris: Having heard his defence or read the transcript—I assume you have—of the Research Councils' defence in our previous evidence session, do you stick with your view beyond what you have just said, that the international strategies of the Research Councils are not clear, they have yet to incorporate a coherent international dimension into their overall strategy, they need to develop more strategic partnerships with organisations that offer a complementary portfolio, the structure of the Research Councils is overly complicated in comparison to scientific institutions et cetera et cetera.

  Dr Jones: Yes.

  Q218  Dr Harris: You stand by all of those.

  Dr Jones: Yes, but we very much look forward to the publication of RCUK's international strategy later on this year and we hope to be happier with that.

  Q219  Dr Harris: In what ways do you (a) seek them to improve first, and (b) in what ways do you expect them specifically to improve in that new strategy.

  Dr Jones: They are already doing a lot of international work; clearly, we did not say they did not do any at all. We would like to see that strategy, when it is released, showing that the various Research Councils have aligned their strategies, their practices, their procedures for emerging international collaboration, that they have reflected a real buy-in into the GSIF international strategy and are working together with the other stakeholders in the UK, but what we would really like to see is that they have decided to dedicate some of their funding to supporting international collaborative research projects in a way that they are not doing at the moment.