PROFESSOR MARTIN SHIRLEY, PROFESSOR IAN CRUTE AND PROFESSOR CHRIS POLLOCK

1 NOVEMBER 2006

  Q120  Bob Spink: Did you divert those people from a longer term thing to deal with this and then shove them back?

  Professor Crute: That is a very good question. It was a combination of taking proportions of people's time to divert them on the basis of priority plus some additional recruitment and training of staff in order to meet those objectives.

  Q121  Bob Spink: Who decides the priority? Who says, "We are going to slow this down and we are going to divert you on to this one because the "red tops" are running it on their front pages this week"?

  Professor Shirley: One of the great things about the institute is that we can take a long-term view and certainly there are opportunities as a consequence of funding streams coming in which are new. I can give you an example with Avian flu. The Institute of Animal Health has had a long-term programme on avian immunology and avian immunology serves many studies on many pathogens. It is now very timely to have that programme embedded within the Institute of Animal Health with the types of poultry birds that we have, so we are in a position then to bid for new money to reinforce our programmes on avian flu. That is one way in which we can move because we have the underpinning capability in place. It has been there for some time. As an institute we evaluate our science programmes on a regular basis. We constantly look at the fit-for-purpose of our programmes. We have the ability to close programmes down if we think they are not going in the right direction or are not productive, but we can also start programmes up if we so wish by using our core strategic grant. We can make those changes.

  Q122  Bob Spink: Do you step back and look at value for money, and fundamentally reassess what you are doing long term? Do you say, "Is there a better outcome we could get for that resource?"

  Professor Pollock: Absolutely. All the time. There is an external assessment through BBSRC, the institute assessment exercise—which used to be every four years and it is now every five—which I believe Professor Goodfellow described in her evidence and you would not want me to repeat that. That provides external validation of both quality and relevance and that is extremely important to us. We must stress that all of us work to a mixed economy. The majority of funding in IGER does not come from BBSRC. It is a question of providing the service that the customer wants, to a significant degree, and that provides another set of external validations. Within the institute there are regular meetings with our governing body and the external evaluation committees that we set up to look at the strength of programmes. I would echo Martin's point that one of the values that you get out of the institute system is a level of resilience to cope with new procedures that come up. We have had a long-standing programme in genetics that goes back to Stapleton in 1919. It is currently being manifested through work funded by Defra to look at gene flow between adjacent crops which forms part of the regulatory framework for potential introduction to GM. It is a combination of capability and opportunity and the job of the director and senior management of the institute is to keep that balance optimum.

  Q123  Bob Spink: On your data sets you mentioned Rothamsted have a 160-year archive of data sets. Do you jealousy guard this or make it available to the research community? Is that in this country or worldwide? Do you see that as part of your mission?

  Professor Crute: The first thing to say is, yes, it is publicly available. People can both access samples, which they often do, and they can also access data. Obviously with a data set you have to use it in an informed way, so we try to maintain contact with anybody who is using it. We have an electronic archive which people can access and if anybody wants anything extra they just have to talk to us.

  Q124  Bob Spink: I see your colleagues nodding, so we will leave it there. Finally, RCIs versus universities. Do you think that research programmes in RCIs are more tightly financially controlled than they would be in the university environment?

  Professor Pollock: They are more responsive to the external modalities of where the money comes from and what the customer wants. They are also more tightly integrated within the institute management because they are driven by the sense of mission.

  Professor Shirley: I would agree.

  Professor Crute: I think so.

  Q125  Chairman: The accusation, then, which universities often make, that you are feather-bedded in terms of your research programmes, is not true.

  Professor Crute: I have not heard the accusation quite put like that.

  Q126  Chairman: I do not expect you to agree with it.

  Professor Crute: Probably the way to look at this is the fact that we all have slightly different proportions of core funding. Rothamsted is about 50:50. We get a grant from BBSRC, which essentially is an underpinning grant which allows us to have the continuity that we have been talking about, and we get 50% of our funding in an open, competitive market exactly like the universities do. To some extent, the analogy with the universities is that our core grant from BBSRC is analogous to the HEFCE grant that would come into universities, you might say, to pay for academic salaries and such like. It is the same thing.

  Chairman: So we can put that one to bed.

  Q127  Bob Spink: Universities have different objectives from you as well.

  Professor Pollock: Exactly.

  Q128  Bob Spink: They are teaching institutions. Do you think research conducted in RCIs is more cost-effective than research conducted in universities?

  Professor Shirley: I think that is becoming clearer with the impact of FEC. We will have clear views on that in due course. It is probably too early to tell. I think the institutes are very much driven to deliver cost-effective science. To pick up on a point that was made by Ian, the IAH has a core grant which accounts for £10 million of our current income and we raise £20 million from outside sources, whether that be Defra, other research councils, industry, whatever, so that is not featherbedding an institute; that is going out and hard graft. The quality of the science that we do and of the people we employ winning grants is a major factor. We stack up, as you probably know, extraordinarily well in the hierarchy of grant-winning income in the UK to BBSRC.

  Chairman: I wanted to give you the opportunity to counter the accusation.

  Q129  Dr Harris: The universities say that for 100% of their research work they have to compete for these grants, sometimes big grants, and that therefore the featherbedding—and it is an expression I have heard used—refers to the fact that you get 20-50% infrastructure costs from your parent institute, whereas the vast majority of all their research has to be funded from grants, which can come and go if they do not win them, and the RAE, which is continual assessment effectively.

  Professor Crute: Again, you have to make sure you are comparing like with like. If you are talking about the university situation, all the academic salaries are essentially paid for. We have to compete essentially for our salaries. Our core grant is analogous, as I say, to the HEFCE funding which would be paying for academic salaries. A huge amount of the infrastructure of universities is paid for through, essentially, income through teaching and other such things, so, if you compare like with like, I think we are now, as a consequence of the FEC arrangement, competing on an absolutely level playing field.

  Q130  Mr Newmark: How do you respond to the comments by some academics that training in RCIs is isolated and substandard to that given within universities?

  Professor Pollock: With amusement. We cannot do training unless we are linked to universities.

  Q131  Mr Newmark: What value-added are you providing in RCIs?

  Professor Pollock: We provide training and facilities that really cannot be done within universities. There is no university that can train plant breeders because they do not have either the long-term availability of experimental material and plots or, in many cases, the quantitative genetics. If you want plant breeding—and the Stern report yesterday made it abundantly clear that plant breeding is a major skill gap—then it has to be delivered through training at Research Council institutes—in collaboration with universities. They are all registered in universities.

  Professor Crute: At Rothamsted, we have at any one time 50 PhD students. A significant proportion of those come from overseas, because they recognise that this would be the place where they would get the sort of training they are looking for.

  Q132  Mr Newmark: You are saying that in certain situations they are centres of excellence.

  Professor Crute: Absolutely.

  Q133  Mr Newmark: They cannot be replicated within a more generic university environment.

  Professor Crute: Absolutely. On the quality assurance side of things, these students are all registered through universities and are not only quality assured through the universities but also through BBSRC's assessment. Certainly as far as my own institute is concerned, the BBSRC assessment, through the institute assessment exercise, rated Rothamsted at the highest possible marks in all the four criteria that were assessed. Wherever the criticism has come from, as Chris says, it has to be treated with some derision.

  Professor Shirley: I would endorse the comments made by both colleagues. We have 40 PhD students. We invest a lot of time in these students through training and we offer them access to facilities and opportunities to study diseases that are not available elsewhere and they are attracted to the IAH for that reason.

  Q134  Mr Newmark: What help have you received from the BBSRC in terms of management training?

  Professor Shirley: As a new appointee to the institute—as director from July and as acting director from November 2004—I was offered and I took advantage of mentoring with an ex-director of a BBSRC institute. Since then BBSRC have introduced management training. The scheme is now beginning to kick off. IAH have been involved in that—both myself and senior colleagues. I have also been offered opportunities to have outside management consultancy input.

  Q135  Mr Newmark: Was it particularly helpful or not?

  Professor Shirley: It was.

  Q136  Mr Newmark: I know you went on it but was it helpful to you?

  Professor Shirley: Yes. I think mentoring is particularly helpful because it addresses needs in a fit-for-purpose way. It is a considerable opportunity to work with somebody who knows the issues you are facing, so there is less abstract about a mentoring scheme than there is if you perhaps go on a more generic training course.

  Professor Crute: I have been on two-week courses at Brunel for management research—a good many years ago now but it was essentially through previous employment in AFRC rather than BBSRC—and BBSRC are continually up-skilling its senior management team through, for example, recently, diversity training and things like interview training, so there are some modules of training which are brought to our attention on a regular basis.

  Professor Pollock: I have very little to add. Training is an obligatory subject for discussion in our annual appraisal all the way through the institute system, from the lowest grade right through to directors.

  Q137  Mr Newmark: It may be obligatory, but is it important?

  Professor Pollock: Of course it is important. Research management is now infinitely more complex than it was. I have been a director for 13 years, so I have seen a huge number of changes. It is more important now than it has ever been.

  Q138  Mr Newmark: Do you think the Research Councils should be doing more to support training?

  Professor Pollock: I think the investment BBSRC is putting into training development schemes via a third-party provider is both timely and proportionate.

  Q139  Dr Harris: One of the purposes of Research Council institutes is to develop scientific careers and career opportunities. How do you see yourselves doing that at the moment? That is an approach that cannot be taken at universities. What do you add to the scientific career path, in general? Obviously at the moment it is redundancy, but—

  Professor Pollock: Over the sort of time we have been involved, it comes down to two lines. First, it comes down on to health of disciplines. There are areas of science that you have already heard about for which the Research Council institutes provide career development opportunities for scientists. Certainly in the whole area of understanding the ecological consequences of novel crops and novel cropping systems, which is going to be extremely important in Europe over the next 20 years, most of the scientific driving forces for that have come out of institute-based research both in England and Wales and North of the Border. So there is a health of disciplines argument and there is also an argument that says there are opportunities that you get within institutes to develop programmes over sustained periods of time and acquire skills and skill mixes that are unique, which is particularly appropriate for the study of whole system processes in agriculture and land use. I would argue that we deliver opportunities that are distinctive from and complementary with those offered by HEIs.

  Professor Crute: May I take a slightly different direction in response to your question. I personally—and I think it is true for the three institutes that you can see represented here—that we have taken a view with regard to short-term employment when the employment regulations changed. Effectively, when I came to the institute between 60% and 70% of the scientific staff were on short-term contracts. Now, something like 95% of our staff are employed on indefinite contracts. It does not mean to say that when funding terminates those people will not leave the institute, but, essentially, we are giving very clear signals to our people now, which is certainly a major change, that, provided the funding environment is secure, we have a training environment and, you might say, a long-term perspective that gives people the opportunity to develop worthwhile and far-reaching scientific careers.