UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 472-iii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE

International policies and activities of the Research Councils

Wednesday 20 June 2007

PROFESSOR SIR KEITH O'NIONS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 235 - 266

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Science and Technology Committee

on Wednesday 20 June 2007

Members present

Mr Phil Willis, in the Chair

Linda Gilroy

Dr Evan Harris

Dr Brian Iddon

Chris Mole

Dr Desmond Turner

________________

Examination of Witness

Witness: Professor Sir Keith O'Nions, Director General of Science and Innovation, Department of Trade and Industry, gave evidence.

Q235 Chairman: Welcome to this second part of the Science and Technology Select Committee's evidence session this morning, this time on International Policies and Activities of the Research Councils. We are delighted to have as our witness this morning the Director General of Science and Innovation, Professor Sir Keith O'Nions. The Committee agreed that we would look at overarching themes in our review of the Research Councils and this has turned out to be a particularly interesting one. As Director General of Science and Information, what role do you play in actually influencing the UK's international research activity?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Directly, I am responsible for the Research Councils and their budgets and set their performance management. The international dimension and strategy for the Research Councils and RCUK, therefore, are certainly my responsibility. Also, the budgets that go to the Academies - the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Academy - are again from my budget. We set their tasks, and so I have a direct involvement there. More broadly across government, I play a role in GSIF, which is the body that tries to draw the threads together.

Q236 Chairman: In terms of, for instance, the resources you put to the Royal Academy of Engineering and to the Royal Society, are there strings attached to those in terms of international activity?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Yes, to the extent that the Royal Society has a formal UK responsibility for particular international relationships; it would propose to us a budget for that and we would agree that budget. In terms of the detail and the mechanisms of that ---

Q237 Chairman: You leave that?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: We are fairly confident that they know what they are doing. If we felt that they did not, we would intervene more.

Q238 Chairman: You would step in. There is no doubt, and I think that every inquiry we do now really points us in the way of international collaborations and international activities. Science is a global activity, and trying to pretend that it is not seems to be a rather pointless activity. What is your vision, as, if you like, the key person here in terms of the UK's international research activity?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Let me say that I agree totally with the remarks that you make. I would draw on three statistics which I think highlight just how international our activities are. In terms of papers - published papers, cited papers - we are up at close to 40 per cent of those now which are internationally authored from the UK, and that has been increasing quite rapidly. Getting on for half of our PhD students in the UK are international or a UK source. If you look at business R&D in the UK, I think the present number is around 45 to 48 per cent of all of the R&D spend in business in the UK which is through investment of overseas‑located companies. So it is thoroughly international and is becoming increasingly international. Given that, my vision, as it were, is that an international dimension and strategy should really be embedded in all of the delivery agents that we have - the Research Councils, the Academies - and should be a part of normal business, and we should have a very clear strategy from those organisations. This probably needs to be clearer than it has been in the past all round, and we are asking Research Councils to produce much clearer strategies for each of them and an overarching one for RCUK. I therefore think that should be embedded. Perhaps I may add that we are, within a few days, establishing the new Technology Strategy Board, at arm's length in Swindon. Obviously that is occupying a lot of time, but we need quite soon to turn our attention also to the international dimension of its activities, and we have not done that so far. Over and above that, I think that organisations, particularly the Research Councils, need to plan for some financial flexibility; because in numerous cases it will be necessary to earmark a particular increment of money to either start a new relationship with a country where we do not have strong relationships, or jointly to fund a particular project. My vision then is that this is deeply embedded, with enough flexibility to be earmarking particular funds for strategic purposes, for new relationships or strengthening the existing ones. Fundamentally, however, it has to be part of the way we do business.

Q239 Chairman: There is a real tension here, and we have picked it up in this inquiry, between your role and your responsibility, that we only fund the very best science, and yet having international collaborations which, if you like, are seed-corn funding with countries which may not necessarily have the best science, but they are a pathway into collaborations which can have huge benefits later on. How do you actually manage that?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I think that we square the circle. Let me give you a specific example. We have had a scheme called Bridge Funds with the United States latterly, and the aim of this was to make institution-to-institution relationships - the Cambridge-MIT was the grandest of all of these. I think that there is an important role for those, but to meet the requirements by the particular projects that are ultimately funded they really must be of an international standard. For example, the Bridge Programme we have in the US at the moment has particular projects in health research in Texas; it has things on aerospace in composites with Washington; but the projects that are being undertaken are clearly of international standard. I think that is how we square the circle. I do not think that we would ever ask Research Councils or an Academy to be funding things that were demonstrably second-rate.

Q240 Chairman: The other comment that we have received is that sometimes the speed of response, because of the way in which we evaluate research programmes, does not allow you to make the sorts of more immediate responses to international collaborations, and therefore we lose opportunity. Are you aware of that, and is there anything we can do about that?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Yes, I am, and I think that it is a fair comment to some extent. There are two responses to that, looking to the future. There is the one I have pointed to, the vision I have for more financial flexibility in the way in which the Research Councils plan strategically, such that they are able to earmark money and respond quickly. The second thing is - no doubt you have encountered this problem in the inquiry - there is always a risk of double jeopardy. Our Research Councils are working quite hard to develop memoranda with other countries that clearly avoid double jeopardy. Double jeopardy can put enormous time delays in things, and we have numerous examples of them; i.e. funding is available in the UK but the funding source in China is still held up. We have numerous examples of that sort. The only way we can deal with them is by better MOUs and understandings with other organisations.

Q241 Dr Harris: Do you think that we are held back, in terms of creating international partnerships, by the lack of mobility of UK researchers - for example, language skills? There is a separate question about what you could do about that, but I would be interested in your view on it.

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I do not have an analysis of it, but my instinct says that we are not seriously held back, given that English has become pretty much the lingua franca of science. I think that in many organisations around the world one can use English. There are some cultural issues that may impinge on this. Historically, it has been quite difficult to get enough UK people to go to Japan, for example, where there has been a greater uptake and willingness of Japanese to come here. I think that does have something to do with language and culture. It may not affect their ability to communicate with scientists in the lab and do the research; it is the broader difficulty in some countries of surviving in everyday life without foreign language ability.

Q242 Dr Harris: You say that English is the lingua franca of science, but it is more appealing to UK scientists to go abroad if they think that they will be able to communicate with the non-scientists that they come across, and even some of the scientists. Do you speak foreign languages yourself fluently?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: None well; a couple very badly.

Q243 Dr Harris: I am interested in the European angle. There was a debate a couple of days ago in this House, looking at the implications of the Green Paper from the Commission on the European Research Area. Do you think there are particular things that the UK has to do to grasp the opportunities set out in that vision, in order to make sure that our people are as mobile and able to take advantage of levered-in funding through the ERA as other countries?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Are you again thinking in terms of language skills here?

Q244 Dr Harris: I am just talking generally. Moving on from language skills, what about the mobility of young scientists and the ability for them to be able to be funded abroad?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I think that there are a great number of things in place across the Research Councils and across the Academies that do encourage mobility, and I think that the UK community is highly mobile actually. I believe that the evidence you have had from the Research Councils shows that - and they are rather different - each Research Council does have various schemes to promote mobility, mobility in research, to give the opportunity to people to travel. The Royal Society has had a very effective system of grants for conferences and laboratory visits internationally. I think that we have been rather well-off in that area in the UK, even though it is quite disparate perhaps in how it is handled across seven different Research Councils and the Academies.

Q245 Dr Harris: Do you think that we are pretty mobile because in many of the research disciplines we are pretty male?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: We are...?

Q246 Dr Harris: We are pretty male. So if women were better represented in some of the physical sciences, you might find the mobility of scientists restricted because of the failure for there to be mechanisms and funding to enhance mobility of people with caring responsibilities or families.

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I am not aware of serious gender difficulties at the early career stages, PhDs, post-doctoral, early career.

Q247 Dr Harris: I will send some of my constituents to your house to tell you about it!

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Please do. You may have a specific example, but I am not aware of any study or analysis - and I am not saying that you are incorrect. I am just not aware of any study showing that, if you take an area where women are extremely active in science - in the medical and biomedical sciences - there is any significant difference in the mobility, in terms of conferences and so on. There are other sorts of difficulties, further in career for women, where we still have quite a long way to go to sort that out in universities and research institutes, but I do not think it is at the earlier career stage - but that may be my lack of awareness.

Q248 Dr Harris: I note your response.

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: You may be sending your constituents to my front door!

Q249 Dr Harris: Maybe one day this Committee will look into this.

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: It would be a good thing.

Q250 Dr Harris: I think that it would be a good thing too. Finally, the EU Framework Programme - how important is that, do you think, in dictating UK strategy?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Very. The EU Framework has been immensely important. It would be responsible for a large part of the increase of multi-authored international papers, because most of the Framework Programme has funded multiple-country contracts. The amount of money in the Framework, €50 billion, the amount of money that is likely to go into the European Research Council, will have increasing impact on what we are doing and how we should align ourselves in the UK.

Q251 Dr Iddon: Sir Keith, how has the Global Science and Innovation Forum developed UK international research activity, in your opinion?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I think that for the first time it brought together around one table all of those responsible for international activities in science, including DfID. It has helped us get a much better understanding of what we do. I am not sure there was anybody who could reel off all of the activities that we were involved in internationally across Research Councils, other government departments, and so on. I think that has been hugely beneficial. It has pointed the way forward in a number of areas, in which there have already been responses. For example, one of the things that came out very early on was the need for the Research Councils to improve the interface they have with other countries. Not that there was poor science going on, but the interface was not as fluid as was desirable or indeed what other countries have achieved. There is the establishment of the RCUK offices. There is the one in Washington later on this year, almost a one-stop shop if you like, co-located with the FCO science and innovation staff. There will be one in Beijing later this year, and the ambassador in Delhi has been very helpful in trying to establish one there early next year. I would say that has come out of GSIF, plus considerations of branding - which sounds the sort of thing you may not do in science. We have many fellowships across the system, which we do not sell as a single brand - as something comparable perhaps to a Humboldt Fellowship. Having some branding of international fellowships from the Royal Society to Research Councils, therefore, will be helpful and give greater clarity to what is available in the UK to people in other countries. I would say that it has set us off in the right direction, including the much stronger relationships now between international development funding and our Research Councils. There is a grouping that has been formed as a result of that which I think will produce much better alignment. I therefore think that it has been wholly positive.

Q252 Dr Iddon: Are you suggesting by what you have just said that there is quite a lot of collaboration now with DfID?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: The Research Councils are collaborating with DfID research and development, yes. You may have some of the details of that in the submission from the Research Councils, but I am very happy to give you any additional information we have on that.

Q253 Dr Iddon: Sir Keith, what is your role in GSIF?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: A.N. Other! I am a member of GSIF and I participate as one of the members. Clearly, with the budget responsibilities I have, I am in a fairly strong position to nudge the system forward on the back of GSIF recommendations.

Q254 Dr Iddon: Are you aware that there has been some criticism made in the evidence we have received about the low profile of GSIF and also the FCO network? Professor Palmer of Warwick University, for example, has said that GSIF is "so low-profile that it is just not visible to academics and research supporters in universities", and the same gentleman has also been critical of the low profile of FCO networks. It appears that the people who should know just do not know about these matters. How can we increase the profile of both?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I think that is a fair remark. GSIF does not have any executive function. It is rather like Funders' Forum, which brings together the Research Councils, the charities, and so on. I do not think that its profile has been strong externally. It has not done what Funders' Forum has done and had town meetings, put minutes on a website, and so on; but I suspect you would find people who say that the profile of Funders' Forum is somewhat below the radar. The strength of these organisations is what people go off and do, on the basis of their considerations. If Funders' Forum is going to have an ongoing role, then the way in which its profile would be increased would be by having, following Funders' Forum, an open meeting once a year with stakeholders, putting minutes on the website and engaging more in that way.

Q255 Dr Turner: Has anybody assessed the effectiveness of OSI's activities in the international context? For instance, how important in this area are the high-level links, such as visits by yourself or Sir David King?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: It is very difficult to quantify the value of visits, but you know how much you lose if you do not make them. Obviously, responsibility for an international dimension is very central to Dave King's role; to cement relationships internationally and to develop them. I think that is extremely important. In my own role, I tend to make international visits where I think that there are real things that the UK needs to understand from another country, or where deals are to be made. For example, I was in the United States not many weeks ago. We signed an agreement with NASA on a collaborative arrangement for technology development. That was a specific purpose. I also spent time in southern California. I was particularly interested in understanding the way in which universities there engage with the business community in knowledge transfer, how venture capitalists came in. The University of San Diego has a system called CONNECT, which has been extremely effective in developing the biotechnology industry in southern California. Something like that has been enormously valuable to OSI and how we think about the future in knowledge transfer. I think that has been my role - and I could roll off another series of visits, but they are of similar ilk.

Q256 Dr Turner: The Year of Science - a lot of people seem to think that it has been quite successful. What benefits have you seen from it? How do you think we will follow it up and sustain the effort?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: The key point is the second one. I think that it has been successful in profile-raising all over the place. We have very successfully raised our profile in China. I made a visit to China not very long ago. It is quite easy to wind up the system and increase the profile; the challenge is always in sustaining it, because sustaining it usually requires investment and requires a number of organisations to be making these connections.

Q257 Dr Turner: Who do you think should be responsible for that?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Primarily, the responsibility has to be with those organisations that have the resources to develop this. For us, I think that is principally the Research Councils and the Academies. The stimulus and some of the winding-up can come from within government or a government department; but to get any continuity of this, any continuity of funding, or that sort of flexibility of funding that I alluded to right at the beginning, that has to be part of the planning horizon of Research Councils and the Academies. In detail, it requires a lot of experience and knowledge of the research areas and the research opportunities, and that largely is not in government; it is largely there in the universities, the institutes and the Research Councils.

Q258 Dr Turner: What evidence do you have that the overall level of government funding is sufficient for OSI to be effective internationally?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I do not think that being effective, or more effective internationally than even we are at the moment, is a matter of money. I think that we are sufficiently well resourced to do that. Going back again to my first point, I think that it is a matter of having a very clear strategic approach and flexibility in financial planning, in Research Councils and elsewhere, to deal with it. Fundamentally, however, I do not think there is a real problem of money. Almost half of everything that we do already has an international dimension; so it is not that we need a very large increment of additional money to be international. That is actually already there. I think that it is a matter of strategy, coherence and flexibility in planning.

Q259 Dr Turner: One issue that was raised with us by the CCLRC in its dying days was that the Government was not being sufficiently proactive to ensure that international facilities were hosted in the UK, thereby British science achieving the benefits of that.

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Some people do hold those views. I actually disagree with them quite profoundly. I think that the UK has been extremely sensible in the way in which it has approached an area which is becoming increasingly international and increasingly costly. The formation of a Large Facilities Road Map in 2002 has been an example the UK has set which Europe has followed with Esprit - there is an Esprit Road Map with 30-odd potential programmes in it. Aligning the UK road map and the European Road Map is the next task. The CCLRC's advice on a specific area that was of interest to it, on neutron sources, was that we should be looking for a European strategy - which I think is right. My view, therefore, is that we have the correct approach to this. These are very expensive facilities, and you need to have very clearly thought-out reasons for those situations where you will invest probably 50 per cent of the capital and ongoing costs and host them in the UK, rather than contribute to an international source. I think that an ad hoc approach to this is very risky.

Q260 Dr Turner: What you have not told us, Sir Keith, is whether we are likely in the foreseeable future to be hosting any of these facilities, such as the spallation source that CCLRC wanted.

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: As we go into the future, I believe that we will host additional large facilities. There are some big beasts in the road map, like the fourth-generation light source aspiration - a successor. We are already investing heavily in upgrading the capability of the ISIS neutron source at Harwell - the Rutherton Appleton Laboratories. That is the right thing to do. We need to be looking very carefully at where we invest very large sums of money elsewhere. Increasingly, where relevant, we must look very hard at the broader economic benefits of doing so; not only the direct benefits to potential business users, but the economic impact that this would have on an innovation.

Q261 Linda Gilroy: In a way, we have already touched on a number of occasions on the role of Research Councils and international research activity, and the funding of it. Can you bring that together by commenting on this: should they prioritise the funding? How do you respond to the concerns that have been expressed to us, by the Royal Society particularly, that individual Research Council strategies are not well enough aligned to make sense of the funding issues?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Let me start with the latter. I think that they are a bit better aligned than the Royal Society have suggested, but there is a great deal of room for improvement. Let me deal with that part first. The science budget has been settled and Research Councils are now preparing draft delivery plans for an allocation of funds to them at the back end of this year. We have asked each Research Council to produce a very clear international strategy as part of that, and we have not asked them to do that before. So that is a response to that. RCUK will produce an overarching international strategy; and the RCUK offices around the world which I have already mentioned are part of that. I think that will make some change but it will also introduce some clarity and guarantee a better degree of alignment than we have perhaps had before, and I hope will address those comments from the Royal Society. In terms of funding and priority, I go back to my first point. Nearly half of everything that we do has an international dimension. Clearly that is already embedded as part of the activity, therefore, and the strategy should make that clearer. As to the issues to be dealt with in terms of funding - I go back to my point - I would like to see sufficient flexibility in funds, such that Research Councils can find those, often quite small numbers of millions, to make a bridge or a connection with a country on an opportunistic basis. I think that is easily within their capability. The other area is the time effect and the issue of double jeopardy. We could have a perfectly lubricated system that dealt with joint projects with another country very swiftly, but if it is out of phase with the decision-making process there, then the whole thing can collapse. I think that there is a lot of scope there.

Q262 Linda Gilroy: You see the solution to facilitating international collaboration more as being flexibility rather than dedicated funding?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Yes, I do. Given that half of everything we are doing is international anyway, I think that it is a bit beyond the wit of man to say at this point, "We need X per cent of Research Councils' budgets available for international activities". Over the period of the next two or three years, however, there will be opportunities that can be met with some flexibility in resource.

Q263 Linda Gilroy: Again, I know that follow-on funding has been mentioned, and it does seem to be the one thing that we keep coming across. We have come across it in our investigating the oceans: that people can take part; they can go to things, but it is the actual follow-on and making the linkages there that seem to be the weak point.

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: We use follow-on funding in two ways. We use follow-on funding for knowledge transfer, commercialisation ---

Q264 Linda Gilroy: Yes. This is follow-on to having established initial links through international one-off or perhaps one or two events that they have been to, and then following through on links that they have made there.

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: By and large, if you are making links, for example with the United States, as a result of some initiative on climate change and so on, if that research is going to get funded it has to be of top international quality, and it should not just be earmarked so that, whatever the quality is, we will do it. The bigger risk there is the double jeopardy issue. On the last trip I made to the US, I was talking to the National Science Foundation about trying to achieve an overarching MOU for collaboration with the National Science Foundation, for example, that removes some of those things and avoided our having 30 or 40 different MOUs for every project we were trying to achieve.

Q265 Chairman: I think that the one key thing we would take out of this session, Sir Keith, is this issue of co-ordination and the need to drive it. What we constantly come back to with our oversight of the Research Councils is how do we bring these things together, and is RCUK effective enough in driving that co-ordinated, collaborative approach. You seem to be very conscious of that as an issue.

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I am conscious of it. I am conscious of the critical remarks, that have some justification. RCUK was the right move to build that overarching body. It has found its feet very well and I believe that it will produce a "strategy of strategies", if you like, which will move things along. I am conscious of it because it does put the onus on RCUK to produce that level of coherence. It is now quite a well-established body, but quite a lot is hanging on RCUK's ability to pull that off.

Q266 Chairman: You are confident?

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Yes, of course I am.

Chairman: On that very positive note, we again thank you very much indeed, Sir Keith, for coming before the Committee.