DR ANTHONY HOLDER AND MS EILEEN CLARK

13 DECEMBER 2006

  Chairman: Good morning and may I welcome Dr Anthony Holder who is here on behalf of the University and College Union this morning and who is also the Head of Parasitology at NIMR and President of the Local Association of the University and College Union, and Eileen Clark, the Amicus representative and Chair of the local TUS. Welcome to you both. The context of this inquiry and the session this morning—and I quote from the Committee's terms of reference—is a review of progress and current reorganisations involving Research Council Institutes including the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, the National Institute of Medical Research and the Roslin Institute. We are not having a separate inquiry in terms of the NIMR, it is part of our broader inquiry into the role of research institutes as part of Britain's science.

Dr Iddon: I would like to declare an interest before we begin. I am a member of the UCU.

  Q303  Chairman: I would be grateful if you would give me fairly succinct answers if that is at all possible. I know that that is not always the case. Obviously, a very difficult situation has arisen not just simply over the last months but over the last years between NIMR and MRC. How would you describe the working relationships between NIMR and MRC at the moment?

  Dr Holder: I would like to go back a little in history to the time when the Task Force made its report which was at the end of 2004.

  Q304  Chairman: I really want to know what the state of play is at the moment.

  Dr Holder: I think that the relationship has become markedly difficult as a result of the fact that although the staff bought into the Task Force recommendation that we move to UCL and the opportunities that provided, subsequently we have discovered that MRC itself is backing off from the plan and we look with considerable reservation on the proposal as we see it.

  Q305  Chairman: So, the relationship is still poor?

  Dr Holder: That is correct.

  Q306  Chairman: Is that because there is a lack of trust or a lack of direction or you do not quite know where you are going?

  Dr Holder: First of all, there has been a tremendous lack of communication. We have not been given the information that we think we deserve in terms of what the plans are for the renewed NIMR and, in part, that is because it seems to us that the plans change all the time and that has been driven partly by the limitations of costs and the limitations of the NTH site, the National Temperance Hospital site, which we think are now driving the case rather than the science and that is of concern to us.

  Q307  Chairman: Eileen, would you liked to add anything to that or would you concur with that assessment?

  Ms Clark: I generally agree with that. Staff are particularly demoralised and demotivated at the moment as a result of the recent statement because again, with the business case, staff were very much on board with the idea of a renewed institute with the same facilities. However, with the budget capping and with the consideration of split sites and whatever, staff are very concerned at the moment about a future for the Institute at all.

  Q308  Chairman: What effect is it actually having on the work programme at the moment?

  Ms Clark: On the work programme, I think very little because staff generally are very committed to the Institute and very committed to the science that is there and at the moment I think that the staff generally are trying to be very patient to see exactly what will happen and what will come out of it all.

  Q309  Chairman: Tony, in terms of the arrival of the new Acting Director and the proposed arrival of the permanent Director, has that improved the situation?

  Dr Holder: Part of the problem is that there is a block on any major senior appointments at the moment and that inevitably has an impact on the science and I think that will remain in place until a new director is signed up to the Institute. We do not know when that is going to be or if indeed the designate new director would indeed do that. It all depends really on the financial situation and is presumably going to be some time next year now.

  Q310  Chairman: When our predecessor committee looked at the Mill Hill situation they became quite upset at the lack of cooperation that there was between the staff and MRC. Do you feel that the staff have a significant role to play in the current problems or is it entirely as a result of the MRC's lack of communication with you?

  Dr Holder: We accept that MRC has the right to make its own policy. Clearly, we are employees and we do not make policy but I think that we should have a say in terms of concerns that affect staff which is, to my mind, both the science that we carry out and also the future science that we can carry out. We are passionate and committed individuals and we feel that we would like to have some say.

  Ms Clark: I think that the staff were certainly involved in the Task Force and then with the Project Board and the quinquennial review last year actually commented that senior staff had very much taken on board the idea of a partnership with UCL. So, from the point of view of the science or anything that the staff have been asked to do, they have always cooperated fully with the MRC. I think that the main problem is that the staff in general do not see the logic of spending the money to move the short distance and it is at the very beginning that staff generally are not on board. If the new Institute is as the business case says, the same size and with the same facilities, then staff would be very much on board to move to something like that, but it continually looks as if that is not what we are going to get and that science is really at risk if this move goes ahead.

  Q311  Chairman: Is it unrealistic to always expect an institute to have the same composition irrespective of what the demands on it are in terms of science or in terms of what the nation actually wants to spend in terms of medical science?

  Ms Clark: Science evolves all the time, so there are changes. There are different ways that that can happen. A new director coming in would be expected to have their own interests and their own focus, so staff would expect that there would be changes. We talked about translational research. That can be done again with the shift of focus rather than a change of site.

  Q312  Chairman: Finally, the MRC have instituted a new communication network, set up small user groups and introduced a communication letter. Has that helped a lot?

  Dr Holder: As far as I can recall, there has been one newsletter about the NIMR renewal in July of this year and, quite frankly, that was not particularly informative. It contained statements, for example, about an option which involved a 40% cut without any further explanation and I think that is fairly disconcerting to staff.

  Q313  Dr Harris: You were asked originally about the relationships and you answered about whether you were happy, what morale was like and whether you still had disagreements. One of the things we found in our previous report was that there was a personalisation of the argument. It was not just around the business case and the issues, there was some quite personal stuff going on. Has that become any better? Do you accept our analysis that we had in our report on that without putting any blame but I think we were quite clear? Has it become better?

  Dr Holder: My personal view is that it is really about science and what the future of the Institute is and any personalisation of the issues is actually irrelevant as far as I am concerned.

  Q314  Dr Harris: I am not asking whether you personally have grudges on a personal level. From your knowledge of the staff, is there still the personalisation that there was? Do you agree that there was personalisation between two key players?

  Dr Holder: As you said, in the previous report, there was some personalisation and of course part of that was focused on the previous Director who has since retired, so he is not a player in the current situation. The kind of distress that we have mentioned, which I do not think is personalised, continues.

  Ms Clark: From the point of view of the staff and certainly staff representation, it has never been the case that it has been personalised. The suggestion from MRC was that the feeling was purely from a few individuals who were included in this, but certainly there is a very strong feeling with the staff in general and that is who we represent rather than senior management. There are 700 staff on site and you would be very hard pushed to find anybody on site who thinks that this is a good idea.

  Q315  Dr Harris: In respect of morale, is there any evidence that people are leaving in greater numbers than the usual turnover of good scientists who are looking to progress themselves? Are senior people who you would expect to be there for a long time leaving or threatening to leave?

  Dr Holder: I think that they are not but I do not think we should be complacent about that because people are really waiting and biding their time to see what the future will hold and I think it can be a very unstable situation where once one or two key people start to leave, then you will find that there is a mass exodus. I do not think the fact that people generally speaking have not left yet is any indicator of what will happen in the future.

  Ms Clark: Also, 2012 is still, in terms of science, quite a long time away. Obviously there is a certain turnover of staff and, even amongst the research support staff, there will be some who have strong feelings about the Institute moving at the moment but they will be retired by 2012.

  Q316  Dr Harris: Other than the new proposed Director, do you know of people who have been reluctant to join? I am not sure that you would necessarily be clued into that.

  Dr Holder: There is a block on senior appointments with the exception of two appointments in the influenza area and two within the TB area. Otherwise, there is at the moment a suspension of that, so I cannot answer the question.

  Q317  Dr Turner: Dr Holder, you will remember that this process started with the Task Force and the Task Force recommendation made it clear that they wanted to see an institute of at least the same size with world-class facilities and nothing lost. As I understand it, you have concerns that the site of the old Temperance Hospital, 0.9 acre, compared with 42 acres at Mill Hill, cannot provide that. Is that true?

  Dr Holder: That is correct. As we have said, we signed up to that vision. Subsequently, I think that the development has been driven by cost and limitations on the site rather than by the science. My view is that the Temperance Hospital site, as you say, is very small relative to the Mill Hill site. It is too small to accommodate further developments and potentially too small to accommodate even the business case that was put forward in 2005, at least there were some caveats to that. I do not think that it really is suitable. I also think that now we have been driven by constraints on cost and it seems to me that the current policy is to move from Mill Hill at any cost, but I think that the price of that is too high both in terms of the financial price and also in terms of the scientific cost associated with that move because it is going to be reduced science, in my view.

  Q318  Dr Turner: Would it be fair to summarise it as spending £320 million to get rather less?

  Dr Holder: Considerably less, in my view.

  Q319  Dr Turner: Do you think that that is good management practice?

  Dr Holder: I would not run my personal finances that way and I would suspect that most organisations would not run their financial system in that way either.