PROFESSOR JULIA GOODFELLOW CBE, PROFESSOR COLIN BLAKEMORE AND PROFESSOR ALAN THORPE

28 JUNE 2006

  Q40  Mr Newmark: Are there any resource implications to what you have just said or not? Given the amount of resources available is it better to have them embedded in universities because of greater benefit of resources?

  Professor Thorpe: I would say that the facilities that institutes provide for the university sector, which is an important aspect, they provide to all universities that can use those facilities. Although there may be a special relationship with their local university, for example our Antarctic facilities are used by many UK university groups not just local to Cambridge.

  Q41  Dr Turner: Research institutes have a value and give a service to the whole wider research community as well as just to their specific area particularly in providing support facilities and maintaining databases and this kind of thing. A real example of that is the Sanger Institute. Clearly this is very important to the wider sciences community. What measures do you take to ensure that when you are shifting the pieces around you maintain these important facilities?

  Professor Thorpe: In the case of environmental science this is a critical factor because one of the major roles of our institutes is long term monitoring of environmental change. For example, in our CEH restructuring it was the number one issue for us to be able to maintain the integrity of long term records that are used about environmental change. We spend a significant amount of funding on data centres. For example NERC has seven or eight designated data centres in specific areas particularly to deal with the issue that you are referring to. In terms of our mission this is a really critical factor.

  Q42  Dr Turner: Do you think the Research Councils are the best place to carry out research that is done in response to government policy?

  Professor Blakemore: I think it is horses for courses. If the question that is being asked requires the expertise which is present in an institute and only in an institute or access to facilities or sources of data or to populations that are available only to an institute then the answer is obvious. It is certainly—potentially anyway—easier to imagine focussing a request for a policy driven need within the institute system because it is more easily accessible, questions can be asked directly, the details of the facilities and staff available are more directly known to the Research Council than for its wide investment in the university sector. It simply depends on what the question is and what expertise or facilities are needed to answer it.

  Q43  Dr Turner: They do have an important role then.

  Professor Blakemore: I think they do and actually one of the areas of discussion and consultation we are now carrying out in the context of the proposals for a single fund for health research is around the issue of how the intramural programme might be more responsive to policy needs and questions within the health service.

  Professor Goodfellow: I agree with that.

  Q44  Adam Afriyie: There is competition between universities and research institutes. The MRC aside, the evidence we have received seems to indicate that in some areas universities carry out better research than the Research Council institutes. Alan and Julia, do you think that is a fair statement?

  Professor Goodfellow: No. I think if you look at the areas of animal health and welfare and sustainable agriculture and land use which are the predominant areas that our institutes do, they are areas in which universities are not the major player. The institutes tend to be the major players in these areas. We do review the quality of the science there and we have just, for instance, reviewed the Institute for Animal Health and they have got absolutely excellent scores for the science that they do this year, as they did four years ago in line with that which would happen in a university. We have also got this tension when it comes to grant income as well; we can measure how well they do. I think at the BBSRC we only have one institute that is really doing cell biology when the majority of cell biology is out in the university sector or in MRC institutes. There that is actually very, very high quality but it is very small, a drop in the ocean of the cell biology that is done in the UK.

  Q45  Adam Afriyie: We have been to the British Geological Survey and we are very impressed with the on-going monitoring that goes on. Alan, do you think that my previous statement was a fair statement?

  Professor Thorpe: I think I would distinguish between the two parts of the institute's role. One I would classify as the capability to do research so that the long term monitoring, the data sets, the infrastructure of facilities and I think we look to our institutes to be absolutely cutting edge at that in providing that. I suspect it would be rather difficult for universities to do as well by the nature of the structure. The individual research programmes we certainly test for quality in our research institutes by their reviews every five years both in terms of what they have produced but also in terms of their forward programme by them going through the same peer review system that university research grants go through and, as we have said also, in many cases for their commissioned research income which BGS is particularly successful with. Then you have a direct measure of scientific quality because they are competing with universities on some occasions. I think the strengths reside where they reside and I would like to think we certainly drive to get our institutes to be the highest quality in their fields, but universities are also strong in other fields as well.

  Q46  Adam Afriyie: Alan has mentioned peer group review and five year reviews. Does the same apply to the BBSRC?

  Professor Goodfellow: Absolutely. We have been doing four-yearly reviews—I do not know whether that is better or worse—for many, many years and we are about to move to five years; the next one will be in five years. We do that and we have peer review panels and we get international referees; the panels visit the institutes for three or four days; we also look at knowledge transfer and innovation; we look at training and we have looked for the first time this year at Science in Society, what they are doing on public dialogue. So we do a complete review. We also look at quality in two ways. We recognise that papers in Nature and Science may not be what other policy funders want. If you look at work on the agricultural side they actually may want a bit of paper that can go out to a farmer and that might be the right output so you have to look at quality fit for purpose. We actually gave them two scores this year, we gave them the score for the BBSRC science on the same rating as we would for any university coming in. We also gave them ratings on their knowledge transfer, on the output for other stakeholders and was that what they wanted? Was it fit for purpose, better than they thought it was going to be or less than expected? This is all in the public domain.

  Q47  Adam Afriyie: I think we have to face the fact that there is definitely competition between universities and Research Council Institutes in some areas. If a university begins to conduct research in an area which a Research Council Institute is already conducting a research in competition will arise. What is the general policy? Will the RCI withdraw from that area or will they compete more vigorously? How do you resolve that sort of conflict?

  Professor Thorpe: In our case it would be increasingly competitive I would say. As part of the CEH restructuring we have actually provided, associated with that, a £2 million a year funding initiative which is open to universities and CEH to bid into. Increasingly we see this as collaborative research between the institutes and the universities but clearly there will be more proposals than we can fund so there will be a competitive element as well. I think it is managing the balance between competition on quality and also driving the collaboration agenda which I think is very important for our institutes and the university sector. I want to see them collaborating together to deliver the outcomes we want.

  Professor Goodfellow: I would certainly agree about the collaboration. We have just removed the cap for the institutes when they come in for competitive funding with universities. As long as there is a university partner with them then it will not be part of their limit under their cap; this is to encourage that sort of collaboration. If you look at our institutes like John Innes I would say they are pre-eminent in plant science in the UK. They are, together with a couple of others, leading the UK in plant science. If an institute was in an area and we reviewed it in four years' time and it was not up to the university sector then there would certainly be strong recommendations to the director to consider what was going to happen to that area.

  Q48  Adam Afriyie: Colin, when you are making those funding decisions between a university bid and a Research Council Institute bid, clearly in MRC most of your bodies are pre-eminent in their area and there is very little research carried on in those areas in the universities, but when you are looking at these competitive bids do you bear in mind the effect or impact the decision may have if you award a bid to a university research department rather than one of the bodies that you control?

  Professor Blakemore: The comparison is not quite as direct as you portray it. Can I say that it is not quite correct to say that the research which is representative of MRC institutes is not representative of the universities; there is excellent work in all the areas of science that are covered by institutes also in universities. It is simply the concentration of critical mass in the institutes which distinguishes them from the university sector. We, like NERC and BBSRC, have tried to devise mechanisms for tensioning the bids from institutes and the bids from universities for grants directly so that it is a transparent process of comparing quality. When proposals come to boards for renewal, the quinquennial review of institutes or units, their quality is expressing precisely the same terms, the same ranking mechanisms, peer review and so on as the grant applications that the same board is looking at in the same session. I think this transparency is very important to convince the university sector that continuing investment in institutes is worthwhile, the quality of the science is exceptionally high and therefore in the long run it is in their interests that that investment should be continued.

  Q49  Adam Afriyie: What is the general difference between the research carried out in the Research Council Institutes and the research carried out in universities? In your own areas can you define a key difference between those types of research?

  Professor Blakemore: I do not think there is a key difference; there are a variety of usually quantitative rather than qualitative differences but a significant one I think is the capacity for risk taking. In the institute or unit environment, the expectation of long term funding—usually ten or fifteen years—encourages scientists very explicitly to think about taking more risk in their research. To give a particular example, between the work that Fred Sanger did on the sequencing of insulin—the first sequencing of a protein for which he won one Nobel prize—and his work on sequencing of DNA—for which he won another Nobel prize at LMB several years apart—he published very little. One could say that he might not have survived in the university sector; he might not have been able to attract grants and obviously that would have been ludicrous. I think the capacity to take risk is important.

  Q50  Dr Iddon: Is it more cost effective to carry out research in a university or a research institute?

  Professor Blakemore: That is very difficult to answer but we will be able to do so very soon when we see the full analysis of FEC (Full Economic Costs). Perhaps it would be easier for MRC than the other councils because our institutes are wholly owned so we are effectively paying the full economic costs for institute support in the past. Our impression is that there probably will not be much in it. When we see the full costing from universities it will not be that different in terms of value for money compared with the institute sector. Of course that analysis depends very much on what you mean by value.

  Q51  Chairman: That is not the impression of the universities is it?

  Professor Goodfellow: We will also be able to look at this as they come in for responsive mode grants because obviously institutes have to put FEC on their grants just like a university. We are in the first year of that but after a year we will be looking and comparing so we will be able to see. I think it is a bit mixed. I do think that some of the institutes, once they go below a certain size, will find the infrastructure costs are going to be too high for the amount of science you are getting. We were very aware of that with the Silsoe Research Institute where we withdrew funding and we have a rule of thumb that by the time you get to below about two hundred people the way our institutes configure we worry very much about sustainability and that is why in Edinburgh we are going for this new Easterbush Research Centre which will bring the Roslin Institute and the neuropathogenesis unit which is part of the Institute for Animal Health in with the university. Both BBSRC and the governing body of Roslin see that it is not sustainable in the long term with the number of people there are at the moment.

  Professor Thorpe: I would agree with my colleagues. My impression is that there will not be a substantial difference in terms of the cost.

  Q52  Dr Iddon: On 22 March this year Research Fortnight produced a table which I hope you have seen. It ranks all institutes—including higher education institutes and yours—according to their success in grant applications on the responsive mode. I am pleased to tell you that Plymouth Marine Lab comes top with a 53% success rate. We have the Babraham Institute, the BBRSC John Innes Institute, the Proudman Ocean Lab and so on. The success rate of your research institutes seems to be above higher education institutes in many cases. Do you have an explanation for that?

  Professor Goodfellow: Yes, we have. Our institutes are capped with the amount of money they can come in for in responsive mode, so they are limited. Each year they have an amount they can apply for. We have seen on average 8 to 10% above the average success rate for the institutions funded by BBSRC as a whole, so our institutes on average have a higher success rate than the university sector. We think this is because they do a lot of internal work on their grant applications. We think this is quite important and I have been going round universities talking to senior management about their own internal procedures before they sign off a grant to come into the system for peer review. That is why we think the institutes get a higher success rate.

  Q53  Dr Iddon: Is that reflected in the MRC and NERC?

  Professor Thorpe: I would be careful about statistics; remember that is just one year. The best of our institutes compete very well with some of the best departments who are competing for NERC funding. Those tables, if you look at them department by department you will find departments with those sorts of success rates in terms of NERC funding. I am pleased that we have institutes that compete at the same level as the best university departments but there is a range and I would caution against looking at just one year because there is a lot of variability from year to year.

  Q54  Dr Turner: How much of that is the quality of the science and because they know how to put good applications together?

  Professor Thorpe: I think those that win, whether they are in universities or research institutes are able to put in good proposals. As Julia says, the variation between university departments is substantial. Those that perhaps have a mechanism to help colleagues to write good proposals get good success rates so I think one's skills in writing proposals is important.

  Professor Goodfellow: We think internal mentoring, especially of junior staff coming through the system, is very important. We all know that whenever we write something it is always good to show it to somebody else and get a second opinion or even a third opinion on what you are doing. If universities have mechanisms they can not only improve the science but also improve the way they are explaining what they are trying to do as well.

  Q55  Dr Iddon: Colin, I guess it is the same with the MRC but I will not prolong that answer, but what happens to the people who get left behind in this process, who are not regularly putting grant applications in perhaps because they are doing long range research? What happens to those people, do they survive in your system?

  Professor Blakemore: The situation is a little different in MRC institutes as I explained before because they are not eligible to apply for response-mode funding through the normal mechanism to the MRC itself. The situation might change with the new arrangements that now allow them to apply to the BBSRC and Wellcome and so on. They have high success rates in applications, for instance the European Union and other international funding agencies where they can at the moment apply. In general we expect core support for the institute to be providing the wherewithal for the basic work of all the scientists in the institute. It is not an issue; scientists do not depend on external grants in order for them to continue their work. They can be sustained by the central core funding that is provided for the institute.

  Professor Goodfellow: The BBSRC is a mixed model. The directors get a core strategic grant so those people within the BBSRC remit—the high quality science—can be funded from that. They may also apply for this limited amount of money in competition with universities but that will not define whether they succeed or not; it will depend on their outputs, the papers they publish and then the four or five yearly review. However, because of the history of the institutes several of them have a history of almost half their funding coming from Defra. If they do not have the Defra funding coming in then we have a redundancy situation.

  Q56  Dr Iddon: Alan, when we looked at your proposed closure some months ago we expressed concern to you about projects falling by the wayside, projects which were measuring changes in bio-diversity for example.

  Professor Thorpe: As part of the consultation for CEH the council recognised that they wanted to strengthen those areas so the actual decision included an extra £1.3 million a year specifically to make sure that that danger which was identified by a number of consultees was not realised. The only point I would make that I think is relevant here for NERC is that NERC made a change a few years ago to categorising its funding into ten categories. That sounds a large number but a number of them are specifically focussed on the long term monitoring and capabilities of research institutes and other categories on more basic research. For each of those ten categories we have specific criteria when we are assessing the research proposals. I think I would be worried about people falling by the wayside but as long as we are applying the right criteria in the areas we want our institutes to work in then that drives the quality in the direction that we want.

  Q57  Dr Iddon: All your institutes do research which can drive government policy, but my concern is that government also has other laboratories: Forensic Science, although that has changed recently; the Laboratory of the Government Chemists was privatised; Home Office still have a laboratory which we visited recently at St Albans. What is the difference between your research institutes and government laboratories? Why do we not review the situation and rationalise it?

  Professor Goodfellow: Could I answer that by way of example which is the Veterinary Labs Agency which is very close to the Pirbright lab which is part of our Institute for Animal Health. They tend to focus on monitoring and surveillance with a very much smaller part of basic research; that is their reason to be there and that is why they are primarily funded. However, we do recognise there is overlap and in fact the new build at Pirbright—the £121 million for a new infectious disease centre—is joint with Defra recognising that the VLA and BBSRC employees will be working in the same building.

  Professor Thorpe: Another example for NERC which is quite similar is that we work closely with the Hadley Centre which is part of the Met Office and funded under contract to Defra. They have a rather specific and distinctive mission to predict scenarios for future climate change or for Defra policy making. Our institutes work very closely with the Hadley Centre in terms of translating the science that is done in our institutes so that it is incorporated within those predictions for climate change. Where possible we certainly try really hard to link with other laboratories funded from elsewhere. I think that would be the major example for us in our case.

  Professor Blakemore: I would agree with Julia that the basic difference is the way in which the scientific questions are framed and conceived. Perhaps a caricature of this situation is that in institutes and units the scientists themselves are generating scientific ideas and pursuing their own questions whereas I presume in most government institutes the questions are being delivered to the scientists in the form of commissioning.

  Q58  Chairman: Before we finish this section could I ask you one question that I would like to put on the record. Is there any pressure from OSI or other government departments to move more resources to competitive bidding to allow universities greater access to funds from each of your Research Councils?

  Professor Blakemore: I certainly do not feel that in MRC. The Quinquennial Review of the Research Councils reaffirmed the freedom of Research Councils to fund in whatever way they decided was appropriate to support the science. The Review did, however, require the Research Councils, if they choose support through institutes, to conduct strategic reviews of those institutes always asking, "Is this the best way of delivering the science? Could this work be done equally well or better in the university sector?" If the answer to that question is "Yes" then it should be and we do ask those questions of our units at every strategic review.

  Q59  Chairman: There is no pressure from OSI to do that?

  Professor Blakemore: Not that I have felt.