INTRODUCTION

  1.  The British Ecological Society is the learned society for ecology in the UK. The BES has 4,000 members in the UK and abroad, many of which carryout research within or in collaboration with Research Council Institutes (RCIs). In particular, BES members work in the both the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) institutes.

  2.  The Society welcomes the opportunity to provide evidence to the Committee's inquiry, as they are many changes occurring across the Research Council Institutes. The Society's main points are:

—  RCIs are crucial to maintaining the UK science base, particularly in areas such as large-scale and long-term ecological research.

—  RCIs currently play an essential role in providing the evidence base for making environmental policy and the innovations needed to achieve sustainable development.

—  There is currently no mechanism for ensuring that Research Council and Government Departments take a joined-up strategic approach to RCIs. The Office of Science and Innovation might be appropriately situated to ensure that a joined-up approach is taken.

—  Changes underway at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology have the potential to undermine CEH's core strategic capabilities of scientific expertise, large-scale experiments/monitoring and long-term dataset curation.

GENERAL COMMENTS

  3.  The RCIs support the UK's world-leading role in many areas of ecology. The NERC's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) is the largest research institute carrying out fundamental and applied ecological research in the UK. The NERC's British Antarctic Survey (BAS) carries out important ecological research in the Antarctic. The BBSRC's Rothamsted Research and the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER) carryout fundamental research on agro-ecology.

  4.  In fields like ecology, RCIs are fundamental to ensuring a strong science base that can be utilized by other scientists, government and its agencies, and the private sector (both commercial and not-for-profit).

  5.  Government Departments (such as Defra) and the Research Councils (such as NERC) probably need to develop a shared strategy for the work that falls at the interface between these bodies. Recent discussions over NERC's new strategy as well as some of the consequences of the restructuring at the Centre for Ecology and Hydology (CEH) suggest that this could be very beneficial and cost-effective.

  6.  Research Councils also need to keep a strong link to their institutes because they have mission critical roles in the Councils. For example, in NERC, RCIs have prime responsibility for the long-term large-scale monitoring and survey work that allows environmental trends to be detected and pressures on the environment to be identified and managed.

SPECIFIC COMMENTS

The role of RCIs in maintaining the UK research and skills base

  7.  Research Council Institutes (RCIs) carry out both core strategic science (eg long-term surveying, monitoring and database maintenance, underpinned by applied research) and commissioned research undertaken for clients that enhance the public-good. Although there are some exceptions, this mission is fundamentally different from the objectives of the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) that carry out excellent blue skies research and teaching. There should be complementary but different roles for RCIs and HEIs to ensure the delivery of appropriate scientific outputs consistent with their different missions.

  8.  Britain's presence in the Antarctic would be impossible to maintain under the Antarctic Treaty without the huge scientific and logistic expertise of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). BAS is a world-leader in strategic Polar science, with all the implications this has for climate change, the ozone hole, sustainable exploitation of marine resources etc. BAS conducts work crucial to the UK's interests.

Core Strategic Science

  9.  Ecology needs core strategic science that in most cases only RCIs can deliver. Long-term surveying, monitoring and data management are crucial to understanding ecological change. RCIs do critically important long-term studies and experiments in their respective environments. It would be impossible to understand the dynamics of natural communities in a changing climate without this perspective and therefore impossible to predict impacts and devise mitigation strategies for climate change.

  10.  RCIs play an essential part in the long-term management and curation of nationally important data-sets. For example, within NERC, the Biological Records Centre at CEH Monks Wood maintains long-term and large-scale data sets on biodiversity that have been used to predict rates of loss of biodiversity ("the sixth extinction"). At CEH Wallingford, there are long-term and large-scale datasets that provide crucial hydrological information to predict river flows and flood information.

  11.  Long-term studies are also crucial within the BBSRC's RCIs. For example, the Park Grass Experiment set up at Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire in 1856 has produced the following scientific results:

—  demonstrated that conventional field trials probably underestimate threats to plant biodiversity from long term changes, such as soil acidification;

—  shown how plant species richness, biomass and pH are related;

—  has demonstrated that competition between plants can make the effects of climatic variation on communities more extreme;

—  provided one of the first demonstrations of local evolutionary change under different selection pressures; and

—  endowed us with an archive of soil and hay samples that have been used to track the history of atmospheric pollution, including nuclear fallout.[1]

Commissioned Research

  12.  Through undertaking commissioned research for Government Departments, RCIs play a crucial role in providing the scientific evidence needed to underpin government policy. RCIs are not the only type of organizations that carry out policy driven strategic science, but in the UK, they have special qualities that cannot be easily replicated by HEIs or by the private sector.

  13.  RCIs' commissioned research activities are underpinned by core strategic funding. The core funding provides the scientific expertise and infrastructure to carry out large-scale policy driven science. RCIs also differ from HEIs in that they can direct staff to address national issues, which the research grant mode cannot. For example, NERC and BBSRC RCIs were able to direct staff to mount the Farm Scale Evaluations of GM crops. Another example at CEH, is the Countryside Survey, which is a key activity linked to the Government's sustainable development strategy.

  14.  Commissioned Research is also a very important route for Knowledge Transfer (KT) from the research community to policy makers and environmental managers (including those in the private sector).

Other RCI contributions to the scientific skills base

  15.  Although not a core RCI activity, RCIs play a role in maintaining the national skills base by hosting students studying for postgraduate qualifications at HEIs. The students who have joint RCI-HEI supervision receive a wider exposure to working environments, facilities and training opportunities. CEH currently hosts around 200 PhD students.

  16.  Research by RCIs is often done in collaboration with scientists based at HEIs. There is concern by some scientists in HEIs, that if the RCI scientific capacity is reduced it could reduce their ability to do collaborative issues-led science. In particular, for NERC and BBSRC RCIs this would be in large part due to the loss of large-scale monitoring and long-term datasets that are crucial to the wider ecological scientific community.

  17.  A recent report for the Department of Trade and Industry showed that RCIs typically produce fewer un-cited papers than other sectors of the research landscape and that a higher proportion of their papers published in journals are at the top end of the citation league.[2] The scientific outputs of RCIs are equal to any other research group in the world. For example, international databases show that staff of CEH and BAS made over 70 contributions to Nature and Science in the period 2000-06.

The balance between Research Council expenditure on RCIs and on grant funding and harmonization of practice

  18.  Research Councils are the main public investors in fundamental research in the UK. Research Councils have to decide what the balance of risk and advantage is between funds going to RCIs and grant funding. The BES does not have a view of the exact balance between RCI and grant funding. This is a decision for Research Councils. However, we do believe that RCIs need to receive a sufficient level of core strategic funding to carry out their critically important role outlined above. Due to their contribution to policy-driven science, the question of funding from Government Departments also needs to be addressed (see paragraph 20).

  19.  At present, the approaches for funding RCIs differ between Research Councils.[3] The BES understands NERC reviews its RCIs every five years and that NERC uses a "quality in context" approach to evaluate its entire portfolio, with different criteria used for different parts of it. For NERC RCIs, decisions on future funding are made by NERC Council based on past performance and future plans of RCIs following evaluation of these by a number of expert groups with different remits. BBSRC's procedures differ in detail, but not in principle. BES does not believe that having a common model for all RCIs across all Research Council's would be necessarily advantageous.

The role of the OSI and Government Departments in RCIs

  20.  The Society would like to raise a concern that has materialized over the restructuring of CEH. There has been considerable concern that the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, its non-departmental public bodies, and other purchasers of CEH's scientific expertise will be adversely affected by the restructuring.[4] Although Defra has its own scientific laboratories, in many areas it relies on NERC and BBSRC RCIs to provide the long-term scientific infrastructure to achieve its evidence and innovation objectives. A major reason for the need to restructure (ie down-size) is because Defra's funding for commissioned research in CEH continues to fall. The BES believes that Defra and other departments may need to do more to maintain national expertise relevant to their evidence and innovation needs.

  21.  Decreasing the scientific capacity of RCIs (ie CEH) without replacing it elsewhere could seriously undermine the Government's ability to address fit-for-purpose scientific advice. There needs to be a more coherent strategy between Defra and NERC to ensure that the UK's strategic scientific infrastructure is not undermined by current funding structures. At present, the balance is struck as a result of the interaction a wide variety of market-place pressures and review processes, which may have unwanted and uncoordinated impacts on the national skills base and scientific infrastructure.

  22.  The OSI might be able to take a more strategic approach to ensuring that the UK has the scientific capacity to address future pressing scientific issues as it is responsible for Research Councils and overseeing science in government. The Environmental Research Funders Forum (ERFF) may also act as a mechanism to provide opportunities for discussion amongst many RCI stakeholders.

A review of progress on current reorganisations of the Centre for Ecology Hydrology

  23.  The BES raised three main concerns in its response to NERC's consultation on changes to CEH.[5]

(a)  The BES urged NERC to declare as soon as is possible what science will be cut from CEH. The BES felt that significant loss of expertise from CEH would affect the pool of scientific knowledge available to understand and help address the pressing ecological issues currently faced by the UK and other countries.

(b)  Although it recognized financial constraints on NERC that led to the proposal to close some CEH sites, the BES urged NERC to declare the measures it will take to maintain the long-term ecological research conducted by CEH at key sites throughout the UK.

(c)  The BES was concerned that possible site closures and staff redundancies could threaten the curation and maintenance of CEH's invaluable long-term data sets on the distribution and abundance of the UK's flora and fauna, and of key environmental parameters. The BES sought reassurance from NERC that these data sets will continue to be actively maintained.

  24.  NERC's Chief Executive, Professor Alan Thorpe, has opened a dialogue between himself and the BES, and thus the ecological community, about changes at CEH. The BES welcomes this. Although the Society has had reassurances from NERC that top quality science, long-term data collection from field sites and the Biological Records Centre will be maintained the Society will keep asking questions of NERC and CEH to ensure that CEH's core functions are not seriously disrupted by the re-organisation.

  25.  The BES was somewhat relieved by NERC Council's decision to reduce staff losses by about 40 and to increase CEH's core science budget allocation. The BES understands these resources have been used to boost biodiversity elements within CEH's programme. The BES is also pleased about the announcement to support collaborative work between CEH and external partners through a new £2 million fund.

  26.  CEH has identified the four sites on which its future research program will be based.[6] The BES has been made aware by staff at the CEH that there are concerns that a clear vision for the four remaining labs is lacking at present and that the feasibility of occupying the Wallingford site might mean facilities for long-term research could be lost.

June 2006

2   Measurement of the UK Publicly Funded Science Base: profiles and institute benchmarking (2006) Report to the Office of Science and Technology by Evidence Ltd, 103 Clarendon Road, Leeds LS2 9DF. Back

3   see Costigan review: www.ost.gov.uk/research/councils/revrci.pdf Back

4   www.nerc.ac.uk/consult/ceh/responses-major.asp Back

5   The BES response is at: www.britishecologicalsociety.org/publicaffairs/consultations/ceh.pdf Back

6   Two out of four (Lancaster and Bangor) are on HEI campuses at and the others two (Wallingford and Edinburgh) are on science parks. Back