UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 281 - viii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Welsh Affairs Committee

Globalisation and its impact on Wales

Wednesday 9 May 2007

PROFESSOR MERFYN JONES and MS AMANDA WILKINSON

Evidence heard in Public Questions 603 - 652

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Welsh Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 9 May 2007

Members present

Dr Hywel Francis, in the Chair

Mr Stephen Crabb

Mrs Siān C James

Mr David Jones

Albert Owen

Hywel Williams

Mark Williams

________________

Memorandum submitted by Higher Education Wales

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Merfyn Jones, Chairman, Higher Education Wales and Vice-Chancellor, University of Wales, Bangor, and Ms Amanda Wilkinson, Director, Higher Education Wales, gave evidence.

Q603 Chairman: Good afternoon and welcome to the Welsh Affairs Committee. Could you please, for the record, introduce yourselves?

Professor Jones: Professor Merfyn Jones, Chair of Higher Education Wales.

Ms Wilkinson: Amanda Wilkinson, Director, Higher Education Wales.

Q604 Chairman: Could I first of all thank you very much for your memorandum, which we found most useful in preparing for this session. You will appreciate that this is an inquiry on globalisation and I would like to begin by asking you what appears to be rather a rhetorical question, but it is a seriously intended question, and that is what role does higher education in Wales play in addressing the whole issue of a "fortress Wales" mentality rather than building what we all aspire to achieve, and that is a global Wales?

Professor Jones: Could I try and answer that by emphasising two or three aspects of higher education, which is not just higher education in Wales but is part, as it were, of the overall economic basis of our education. First of all, higher education has to operate in the global market. In a sense higher education has always had an international edge and international character to it, but these days all of us have to operate globally. The second point to emphasise is that we operate within a global and a European market, but also within a UK market, and that there are very large flows of students from Wales who go to England and students from England who come into Wales. We could perhaps discuss the implications of that later. Thirdly, higher education has to recruit in order to keep a very significant income flow, revenue stream, going. Higher education has to recruit students globally and increasingly has to recruit staff globally. For all those reasons plus, I suppose, finally one could also make the more philosophical point, which is that higher education is concerned with global issues and with international issues. Truth is not compartmentalised, we have to address it in an international debating society, if you like, a scientific society across the world. So for all of those reasons it seems to me that higher education, by its very nature, has been and is international and is increasingly engaged with the whole process of globalisation.

Q605 Chairman: Are there specific challenges for higher education in Wales in relation to globalisation?

Professor Jones: Yes, I think there are specific challenges. Attracting larger numbers of international students is a challenge because we are competing with very well funded institutions in England. But it is not just that we are competing with institutions in England, we are also competing with institutions from particularly Australia and the United States in the English-speaking world. Increasingly, as the Bologna process takes hold, European universities are providing three-year degrees through the medium of English, so European universities are also competing globally in a way which they have not really been doing until fairly recently, and increasingly in the home countries of the students, such as China and India in particular, but elsewhere as well, in the Gulf, institutions have been created to cater for the home demand in those countries. So the competition for students is intense and it is a genuinely global market. The competition for staff is also global and academics in this country and in the United States are an ageing group of people. There will come a point when I think there will be a tipping point, where there will be a huge demand for academics, and they will come from all over the world. The assumption that they will come from Wales or from the United Kingdom will not be sustained. They will come, and are already beginning to come, from all over the world because universities have to go for the best and most talented people, whoever they are and wherever they are.

Q606 Mr David Jones: Good afternoon and could I thank you for your very helpful memorandum. In paragraph 23 you note that Higher Education Wales is "working to ensure that Wales can turn the tide of globalisation to our collective advantage." I am not sure that is the happiest of metaphors because we all remember what happened to King Canute! But ignoring that, what degree of success would you say HEW has had so far in turning the tide?

Professor Jones: There are some examples which Amanda can elaborate on in terms of our initiatives on an all-Wales basis in recruiting students so that we have a consortium of all the Welsh universities which helps to popularise Wales as a destination for students. I suppose primarily it is the success of our institutions in terms of the research and the teaching which we provide and the reputation we have globally which is our major contribution to harnessing globalisation to our benefit. Of course, there is a bottom line here. There is a financial implication which is pretty significant. International (ie non-EU) students pay some £54 million worth of fees in Wales. They probably then spend another £50 million, and if you round that up we are looking at well over £100 million pounds coming into the Welsh economy as a result directly, just for students. Then, of course, there are international research contracts and collaborative links with universities in China and India, and the Gulf, and so on, which are increasingly becoming important. I do not know whether Amanda has something to add to that.

Ms Wilkinson: There is also, obviously, the knock-on tourism impact from international students and visitors, which is reasonably significant. As a sector we are trying to work together more collaboratively in terms of how we present ourselves to the outside world. One example of that is how we go about recruiting international students. Another, for example, is the recently set up office in Brussels which we have based in Wales House, which is fundamentally about creating linkages between our institutions and other institutions in Europe through some of the European programmes. So we are making some progress in terms of how we work together in order to address what is a very significant competitive challenge for us.

Q607 Mr David Jones: That is very helpful, because my next question is to what extent would you say that the higher education sector in Wales is engaging directly with those who are most directly affected by globalisation and the changing patterns of employment?

Ms Wilkinson: Do you mean in terms of businesses, individuals?

Q608 Mr David Jones: Yes.

Ms Wilkinson: Obviously HE does play a role, for example if there is a business closure, for example, the closing down of Corus in Llanwern. Certainly Newport University is still involved in the programme which sprang out of that particular closure. At the other end, also, we are involved in trying to attract higher value work in, so for example working with the Matrix Consortium, the St Athen deal, where a number of institutions are looking at what they can do together collectively to support that inward investment and to support jobs growth in that area, to mitigate for the job losses which inevitably are going to come through.

Q609 Mr David Jones: I am particularly grateful for that answer, because once again you have anticipated my next question, which is to what extent are you engaging with employers from outside Wales who are contemplating moving into Wales? That was a very good example. Are there any other examples you can think of?

Ms Wilkinson: There are a lot of different sorts of examples of how HE interacts with businesses which are already in Wales and businesses which might come in. If we look at creative industries, then the cluster of our higher education institutions in south-east Wales are working with the Sector Skills Council on quite an exciting project around creative industries, for example. Swansea University recently, a year or so ago, attracted some investment from IBM into the University. So there are different ways in which higher education is working with existing and new employers to both sustain and to increase economic activity.

Professor Jones: Could I just add a North Wales dimension, if I may. Clearly the contribution of higher education to the two techniums, the one in St Asaph and the one in Bangor, has been crucial recently in attracting companies to move in, including one quite significant company moving from London to Bangor. It is because there is a reservoir of skills - computer sciences in this case - in the university to do research but also graduates who are available for employment. So the fact that there are students available to be recruited by these companies is a very important component in their investment in Wales, but so also is their ability to develop research projects with local universities. In that specific area of North Wales, the coast area, there is the Mon Menai Initiative in which the university is very centrally involved in addressing the issues of the closure of Wylfa I do not know whether that is or is not a symptom of globalisation or not, but clearly the grave economic implications in that part of north-west Wales are being addressed in part at least by emphasising the importance of higher education in attracting inward investment but also in offering training, we hope, to workers who find themselves out of employment.

Q610 Hywel Williams: Can we turn to investment in higher education in Wales. The UK Government funds the science base. You welcome the Budget announcement that funding for science has increased from £5.4 billion to £6.3 billion in 2010-11, but you also have reservations. You say that without complementary adequate funding from the Assembly Government through the Welsh Funding Councils the benefits of this additional resource cannot be exploited in full. Can you tell the Committee a little bit more about this? What are the inherent problems?

Professor Jones: It is a very complex area, funding for research specifically, and yes, the UK Government funds the Research Councils, which are an extraordinarily important part of the picture, but there is also the so-called QR element, which is funded through the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and which actually supports the basic science research investment in Wales. The fundamental problem for higher education in Wales is what has been identified as a funding gap, which has been identified not by Higher Education Wales but by the Funding Council as a funding gap. I am sure you will have seen the paper they produced. If you have not, we can certainly make it available to the Committee. It is a very complex area and they cut it in different ways, but whichever way you cut it there is a very significant funding gap in terms of the funding per FT, per student. Granting a per FT, the difference between England and Wales on the basis of those figures is something like £40 million, £41 million per annum, and if you compare it with Scotland it is getting up to almost £100 million per annum, the funding per FT. Having said that, it is a very complex area and there are all sorts of caveats. One needs to be careful about this issue, but it seems to me that however many caveats you build in, the core of the case still remains that higher education in Wales appears to be under-funded compared with England, and considerably under-funded when compared with Scotland.

Q611 Hywel Williams: You say it is about £40 million and you identify in your paper complementary adequate funding from the Assembly Government. Is that the way it will be solved then?

Professor Jones: We are all struggling with how to address that issue, but fundamentally, yes, it is about getting more money out of the Welsh Assembly Government budget for higher education. Of course, you could do more with student fees, which is a very controversial area. You can increase certain categories of students, but there are issues also about growing student numbers, which make it difficult for the higher education sector to grow their way out of this, because if the student numbers grow too high then there will be repercussions.

Ms Wilkinson: It is very difficult to get away from the bottom line need for more public investment, particularly given the points we have already outlined around the fact that in effect there is one England and Wales student market and ultimately we have to be competitive in that market. There are one or two other more peripheral issues around how one looks at funding streams, which are very difficult for us to trace. Science funding is a good example of that, particularly funding which comes through Regional Development Agencies, for example. Although we now have a science policy in Wales, we do not have a defined science fund and so there are some difficulties in other areas of funding which would not be considered core higher education funding which do impact upon us.

Q612 Hywel Williams: You have said a number of times that it is a complicated field to fund. Is there anybody, in your opinion, who has a grip on this, for example the DTI, somebody who could give us a clear explanation? It is a detailed one because of the complexity, but is there somewhere where we can actually get a way of understanding the difference between funding in Wales and England? Is it a matter where the DTI funds Wales less favourably directly?

Ms Wilkinson: The difficulty for us is in knowing how the consequential funding from various UK initiatives is actually feeding through. It is very difficult to see. Perhaps there is someone in the Treasury who does know about that, but certainly we found it very difficult to try and track.

Professor Jones: There are issues with DTI funding and perhaps there are issues of performance in Wales as well in terms of accessing Research Council funding which we need to address as a sector, but there is also the fundamental issue of the distribution of funding through QR, which is not a DTI responsibility but which is a Welsh Assembly responsibility or Funding Council responsibility, and that is fundamental to the research base in Wales. The research base in Wales is, it has to be said, somewhat fragile, research and development generally is fragile, and it is absolutely imperative, it seems to me, if we are going to create the knowledge economy that we grow that research and development base. One of the ways of doing that, maybe not the only way but one of the ways, is public investment, because I think we can demonstrate - and in the literature we have produced recently I think we do demonstrate - that investment in this area brings a tremendous return, both in terms of employment, high level skills, good jobs and in economic development. So it is an investment. We are not just asking for a greater level of funding just to keep us in the comfort to which we are accustomed, we are actually seeing this very much as an investment with a very, very significant return. To be fair, some of that has happened around the margins, but it still leaves this central issue of what is perceived to be the under-funding. Just to answer your specific question about whether anyone has got a grip on it, I think the Funding Council report is actually a very authoritative piece of work.

Q613 Albert Owen: Just to follow on from what Mr Williams was saying, you mentioned that fees are controversial and in a previous response you mentioned that foreign students were bringing in £54 million extra, so are you concentrating on that sector for two reasons, firstly because you want to get their skills, obviously, into the area but also to fund the gap. Are you concentrating your efforts more on that, and could you expand a little on the controversy over the fees?

Professor Jones: Let me take the overseas issue first, if I may. Yes, I think all institutions in Wales are very seriously investing in the recruitment of international students. I need to emphasise that is non-EU students, because EU students are treated just as if they were home students. So there is a considerable effort going on and there are lots of examples we could go into of the ways in which we are all trying to increase that presence of international students, for a number of reasons. Yes, for the funding stream, and the whole of HE in the United Kingdom and in Australia and in the United States, and so on, depends on that funding stream because international students do bring a tremendous amount of money into the system, but it is more than that. As you quite rightly said, I think it is to bring able people from other parts of the world to contribute to the local economy. If they stay and contribute there are issues, of course, about the contribution they make to their home communities, and so on, but attracting people from all over the world to work in Wales is something we desperately want to do. But there is a third element as well, which is that I believe - and perhaps this is a personal view, but I am sure it will be shared by all of my colleagues - higher education does need an international dimension. We do not just do it for the money, but you are quite right, it is an absolutely crucial funding stream and it is one that we can grow. So you can grow the number of international students without any hit on the Welsh Assembly budget and it is therefore very attractive to somebody like myself who has to balance the books at the end of the day. But there are other reasons for doing it, I think, other than simply to increase the funding stream. Just very briefly on fees, it has been a very controversial issue. It was in this place a very controversial issue and has been in Wales. I think the only point I would make here is that whatever one might think about student fees, the truth of the matter is that they do bring revenue into higher education and if you have in England - and this I think has been acknowledged by pretty well every one - a massive influx of revenue into the English system through fees, Wales would not be able to compete unless you have a similar influx of money. Now, either it comes from students or it comes from some other public source, and you have got to have a debate about that, but what we must be very, very careful about is that Wales is not disadvantaged here and that Higher Education Wales does not find that it just does not have the money to provide the halls, the accommodation, the laboratories, the teachers, and so on, which people just over the border have. Do not forget - and I am sure you do not - that wherever you are in Wales you are not very far from the border, from institutions which can be very competitive to us.

Q614 Hywel Williams: UK investment in higher education is 0.8%, but as the European Union and the OECD figure is 1.1% and the European Commission has decided on 2% there is quite a difference in funding. This is a wish question. If you had the extra funding, what would you be prioritising for the funding?

Ms Wilkinson: We have a number of what one would describe as funding priorities and clearly there is quite a pressing need for capital investment in the learning and teaching infrastructure, and that is a competitive issue for us, both in terms of equipment and building maintenance and development as well, because I think expectations are rising and we need to be able to keep pace with that. It is extremely difficult at present. I think HEFQ's latest study indicated there was about a £200 million historic capital deficit in terms of Welsh HEI funding - it may have been £168 million, something like that. So that is a very pressing issue for us and Merfyn has already touched on the need to put much more investment into research. I think we are going to need to have a debate. That would allow us to do two things: it would allow us to fund excellence, but it would also allow us to fund some basic research. As we look forward and we look at the limited QR funding we have at present, that is going to be a real issue for us because if institutions do perform as they would like to perform in the 2008 RAE then we are going to have some real issues about what research is currently funded in Wales and we may find ourselves in a position where we are only able to fund research at the top and we are not able to pump prime research which will get there over the next cycle. That is another very pressing issue for us. Also, there are areas where it would be good to see some growth in terms of student numbers. Foundation degrees is a good example, where one is looking at intermediate level, where we have had very, very little investment in foundation degree numbers and England is steaming ahead, looking at 100 foundation degree places. We have precious few of those. If we are looking at bringing people through, at raising standards and bringing more people into higher education, as Leitch says they would like us to do, then I think that transition phase is going to be very important and some more funding for that transition phase will be important.

Q615 Chairman: In your last answers you have been concentrating mainly on funding. In your memorandum you refer to "some policy issues" which the UK Government and the Welsh Assembly Government need to address if higher education is to optimise its contribution to the Welsh economy and to Welsh society. How would you characterise those policy issues beyond funding and, without repeating the question I posed at the beginning, is it the case that higher education institutions in the last decade have over-concentrated on their relationship with the Welsh Assembly Government and have had a blind spot about other matters beyond Cardiff Bay?

Professor Jones: Let me just comment on the general policy area, because I think you are right, Chairman, that it would be a pity if this discussion was simply focused on funding, important though that is, because there are big policy issues here. I think the key is how do we ensure the development of the Welsh economy, the regeneration of the Welsh economy, and how do we address the issues to do with social inclusion and deprivation in Wales? It seems to me that higher education has a crucial role to play in those two strategic policy areas. In terms of economic development, clearly you will be familiar with this whole argument, which I think we quote at the end of the paper here, that in the 21st century thriving economies will be built around universities. That is actually a quote from Alan Johnson. It does not say so here, but actually it is. I think it is that widely held view that universities can attract talent, including entrepreneurial talent, into an area and that around that you can then build a sort of hub of economic activity. It is not easy and it is not just a matter of spin-off companies, and so on, but it is about knowledge transfer effectively and operating at the high level of the knowledge economy which can transform, and is transforming, the world as we know it. So there is that whole policy agenda and if there was one thing I would really like to get across it is that message really, that higher education is not the sump for public funds, as it were, that you just put in more and more money into higher education as if it were a public service only. It is a public service, of course, but it is also a generator of wealth. I would very much like the political debate in Wales, the policy debate in Wales, to be centred around that, around what extent universities really deliver on that, because I think we want to deliver but it is very challenging. We need a change of public perception in a sense as to what the role of universities and higher education is in terms of developing the economy. That is one policy area. The other policy area is the one of social inclusion. We are doing better in Wales than in England in terms of recruiting students from backgrounds where they have traditionally not gone to university. I think there is miles more to do. Again in that context, Amanda mentioned Leitch earlier and the whole debate about skills, basic skills, intermediate skills and higher skills. I do think we need to be absolutely sure that that debate is not somehow informed by the belief that higher skills are appropriate for certain sorts of people and basic skills are appropriate for other sorts of people with different social backgrounds. There is a danger, perhaps with the best of motives, of the debate slipping in that direction. It seems to me that higher education has to say that high level skills are there for everybody and that then, I think, really addresses the social inclusion issue. As to whether we have been too concerned with the Welsh Assembly, well, too many people in this room were involved in setting it up so it is hardly surprising, of course. Of course we are. We have been very involved with the Welsh Assembly. That is where our funding comes from, the initial 40% or so of funding. The other point is that in my own institution, for example, 40% of our funding comes from the Funding Council and 60% of it we have to raise competitively ourselves in different ways.

Q616 Mr David Jones: A brief supplementary question on that point. I noted in your memo that you made that point very forcibly about social inclusion, but you went on to say, "This will be crucial as a countervailing force against the negative effects of globalisation which can lead to unemployment or employment in low paid, low prospect jobs." Presumably that, therefore, is the outlook you have for those whose intellectual capacity is not sufficient to take them through higher education?

Professor Jones: I think higher education has the ability to expand massively in terms of the number of people who can take it up, and Leitch, as you know, has advocated that it goes up from 29% to 40%. In England there is a target of 50% of the population up to 30 being acquainted with it. So I think a huge percentage of our population can benefit from higher education. I think the point we were trying to make there, though, is the point which Leitch makes effectively, which is that yes, we need basic skills, of course we do, and we have got to address that issue and we have got to address the issue of intermediate skills, but if we are to survive in the global marketplace we have also got to have a competitive edge and the competitive edge comes from higher level skills.

Q617 Mr David Jones: I understand that point, but that is not essentially what your paper appears to be saying. What you appear to be saying, and forgive me if I am wrong, in paragraph 13 is that those who are fortunate enough to have sufficient intellectual capacity to take them to higher education will succeed in the higher paid jobs, but that for the rest of the population we have the bleak prospect of unemployment or employment in low paid, low prospect jobs, or am I putting it too starkly?

Professor Jones: That may be one way of reading it. I will ask Amanda to come in on this. I think I would counter that by saying that actually there is, as you know, the Futures report, which does indicate a growth in unemployment being possible actually in Wales and it seems to me that the way to address that is to generate economic activity, and the way you generate economic activity is through generating the business potential at the higher level. So the more people you have operating at the higher level, the more opportunity there is actually to employ those who do not have those levels but who do have the basic and intermediate skills.

Ms Wilkinson: Just to add to that, obviously evidence points to the fact that we have a fewer number of jobs at the lower skills end and actually a lot of jobs at the lower skills end are replacement, they are not new job creation. I think that is a very important point to consider.

Q618 Mrs James: You have already mentioned in your evidence, and in the evidence you have submitted to us, the knowledge economy, growth industries and clustering around universities. Can you tell us which of those growth industries there are in Wales, how strong they are and what particular links they have with universities, and have there been any successes that you can tell us about?

Professor Jones: There have been quite a few activities in Swansea, as you will be aware. Certainly the investment by IBM in Swansea and the Life Sciences Institute in Swansea I think are superb examples of that, and the work we have been doing with others in partnership around St Athen is another example. I think some of the work which is coming from the Centre for Advanced Software Technology, for example, in Bangor and Opto-electronics in St Asaph are all examples of that kind of high level clustering around research and development, which is linked to the university and dependent upon the university but of course involves a great many other partners as well, particularly from the private and public sectors.

Q619 Mrs James: Do you think they are sustainable? Are they drawing in other smaller clusters around those, support industries, service industries, the need for other companies to relocate where the bigger companies are? Are you seeing much of that?

Professor Jones: The only point I would make is that it is difficult to generalise about the whole of Wales in this regard because the economy works in slightly different ways in different parts of Wales and obviously there is this great concern about the kind of take-off which you can get in urban areas and which is more difficult to attain in non-urban areas in terms of clustering, in terms of service industries, and so on. But it does seem to me, partly because Wales has higher education institutions also in non-urban areas, that actually we have the opportunity in Wales to demonstrate that it can be done in areas other than in large cities, because Wales is unusual in that regard. I think we are seeing that, certainly.

Q620 Mrs James: Do you think we are doing enough to actively foster these growth industries? Should universities be more pro-active, for example?

Professor Jones: I am sure we should be more pro-active, yes. We all like to think we are, but I have no doubt that we should be more pro-active. It is a new challenge for us, the whole idea of the third mission, the mission of teaching, the mission of research and then the mission of linking with the economy and the community. It is an area where the Funding Council has been quite supportive, but it is an area which I have no doubt we should be more proactive in.

Ms Wilkinson: Just to add to that, obviously there is evidence from universities that you do get smaller business growth clustering and if you look at our spin-out rate, for example, compared with other parts of the UK we are at 17% of the whole UK higher education. Given we are only just under 5% of the whole of the UK higher education, quite clearly we are doing a good job in terms of universities, setting up businesses, good rates of graduate start up, good rates of staff start up. All of that evidence, which comes through the Higher Education Business and Community Interaction Survey, shows that Wales performs above the average for the higher education sector as a whole in the UK, which we take to be extremely positive. But yes, there is much more to be done and I think that comes back to the previous question around policy and drivers.

Professor Jones: If I could just support the home team for a moment, Bangor two weeks ago won the award for the best knowledge transfer partnership in the United Kingdom. So there is a lot we are doing, but I still think we should be more pro-active.

Q621 Chairman: Congratulations!

Professor Jones: Thank you. We are very proud of it.

Chairman: I am sure your Vice-President will be very proud of it.

Q622 Hywel Williams: Just a supplementary. I could not see anywhere in your paper reference to the fact that higher education in Wales is provided bilingually and is in the bilingual context as well. However, I know from personal experience in Bangor, for example, the Centre for Technology and those who have worked with Microsoft for their developments in psychology, criminology, where this is a significant factor. In fact I noticed in your paper, at paragraph 17, you develop the argument about visual media, animation, all those sorts of industries which have a very strong presence, if I may be parochial, in my own constituency of Caernarfon and in Bangor. Do you think there is any mileage in this, given that we are going to be looking later on in this investigation at the media in general? Would you like to make some general comments, or some specific ones?

Professor Jones: Two points on the Welsh medium and the creative industries, as it were. In the Welsh medium, I think there is a huge challenge for us because the numbers following courses through the medium of Welsh actually have not increased very much over the last few years.

Q623 Hywel Williams: If I may interrupt you for a moment, it is not the challenge of providing courses through the medium of Welsh but what opportunities that gives to the universities in Wales to reach out internationally with something that is interesting and useful.

Professor Jones: Absolutely. In that case, let me give you what I think is a brilliant example of precisely that, which is the new Bilingualism Centre, research centre, which we have established in Bangor, which is being funded by the Welsh Assembly Government and HEFQ and the Economic and Social Research Council, which is a £5 million investment. One of the key reasons it is in Bangor is partly because we have the world-class people who can do the research into this area in various dimensions, but it is also because we have a bilingual population which is, as it were, a living laboratory which can be used by the researchers. But the actual researchers are going to be from all over the world, from the United States, Germany, Holland or wherever. They will be looking at bilingualism as a phenomenon, but in a sense because Bangor University and the area is bilingual it is able to contribute in that bilingual way. That, I think, is also a feature of the creative industries and there have been huge developments recently in the creative industries, certainly in a number of universities, the work they do in Aberystwyth, the work we have recently started doing in Bangor, but very dramatically, of course, the work that is being done in South Wales with the new developments between Glamorgan and the Welsh College of Music and Drama and the setting up of the film and creative centre with the support of the Skills Sector. That is a huge development and sometimes I do not think we have attached sufficient significance to its importance, its economic importance, and the fact that it needs trained people, and of course it is a totally global industry. I think higher education has recently started to make real contributions to the creative industries.

Q624 Mark Williams: Returning now to the skilled workforce, we have touched on this before but this gives you a second bite of the cherry. You paint a picture of what you want to see, but what is your assessment of the current skills level of the workforce in Wales, in particular in your studies and work what differences have you identified between different age groups and again, fundamentally, how have you been responding to those different needs?

Professor Jones: I am sure Amanda has got a lot to say about this, but let me just try and raise something which I am trying to work through myself in terms of the question, which is how does higher education respond to demand, because the Leitch review indicates the demand comes from employers, so you work out how many engineers you need, how many physicists, how many nurses, how many teachers, and so on, and you provide those places, but actually higher education does not work that way because the way the whole funding happens at the moment is that our customers are not directly businesses, our customers are students, and students decide whether they want to be nurses or engineers, or physicists, or whatever. So higher education can, of course, have a sense of what the labour market requires and where that is in the public sector, in nursing or teacher training, there is a very clear sort of negotiation with government about how many places you provide, but once you are outside of that I think it becomes more difficult to provide the training which the labour market may or may not require, because it is an incredibly difficult thing to gauge, while at the same time you have to cater for students, and if students do not want to be engineers ---

Q625 Mark Williams: One thinks of the example of the much maligned leisure, sports degrees, or media studies, which are not necessarily as responsive as some of the things we have talked about today.

Professor Jones: They are growing sectors of the economy, though, and students are getting increasingly conscious of where they are likely to get careers, so you are seeing a growth in some of these areas. Leisure management and the creative industries, these are all growth areas in the economy and in terms of the forecasting it appears they will be growing sectors in Wales as well. So to some extent I think we are addressing the labour market needs but through a mechanism which is imperfect because the mechanism at the end of the day is student choice.

Ms Wilkinson: Obviously there is a lot of work which is done in schools. Different universities will work with a group of schools, potentially with a professional body, for example on mathematics courses for children who are interested in that, to try and encourage that.

Q626 Mark Williams: How widespread are courses like that and collaboration like that between the schools sector and universities?

Professor Jones: Quite widespread.

Ms Wilkinson: Every institution has had some sort of arrangement and it will be different. Some run summer schools, some will run one-off courses, but I cannot think of a university in Wales which does not have relationships with its schools in one way or another, which is about positively trying to encourage young people to think about not only coming into higher education but what they want to do. In essence, the major role here is for the careers advisory services, all the way through the system actually.

Professor Jones: I think the point is worth remembering that at the end of the day students, some at the age of 18, decide what they want and we have to provide what they want. They are the customers, especially if they are paying for it.

Ms Wilkinson: There are things that we will look to do together. We have recently set up a forum with the CBI. We have only had one meeting, it is a very recent initiative, but I think there is quite a lot we can do. There is obviously quite a concern amongst some of the larger employers in Wales regarding certain skills and I think there are things that we can do together to try and promote the value of those areas through higher education and into employment, and we will try and do those sensible things.

Q627 Mark Williams: That partially answers my next question, which is the Leitch Report has identified a figure of 29% up to something in excess of 40%. What factors would let you achieve that target? That is obviously part of it, the collaborative approach and other things. How else do you see the higher education sector being in a position to meet that figure, or indeed a more ambitious one in England, which you mentioned as well?

Professor Jones: Leitch is a particular take on it, and of course Leitch is out for consultation, so I think there is a good deal of discussion to go on Leitch, but I think it is a very interesting idea that he proposes, that this expansion should be paid for through public investment from the student and from employers. That is a huge challenge for the whole sector in the UK going forward as to how you engineer a situation where employers actually do fund the skills base they then require. I think it is very early days as to how that will work out, but it is a very interesting package which Leitch proposes, but it is posited on his very clear view that there is a huge skills deficit in the United Kingdom, and that includes Wales, of course, at all levels, basic, intermediate and higher level skills. It does seem to me that the Leitch agenda will dominate discussion for a long time to come and it is driven by precisely what you as a Committee are looking at, which is globalisation. How can the UK and how can Wales compete in a world in which the labour market has been transformed by the arrival in particular of China and India into the world market?

Q628 Albert Owen: You have covered a lot of what I was going to ask, but two specific things. First of all, you mentioned the role of higher education in fostering social inclusion, but are you not going after the soft targets, people coming to you, your customers? Are you really trying in these areas through the schools with people from underprivileged backgrounds? What kind of work are you doing with the schools there to encourage more people to look towards higher education and to an extent are you encroaching on further education colleges?

Professor Jones: I think we are doing a great deal. I have no doubt that we can do more, but it does take you into a crowded area because, as you say, you have also got further education and you have also got the schools, and higher education in a sense comes into this at quite a late stage in a young person's development. My own university is not the only one which is working, as Amanda said earlier, actively with children in schools. We work with children in Communities First areas in North Wales from year nine and with their parents to try and get them to think about higher education as an objective.

Q629 Albert Owen: Do you receive additional funding for that?

Professor Jones: Yes, it is part of the widening participation funding. We use it for that particular purpose. I suppose we could use it for something else, but we choose to use it for that particular scheme, and it is a very successful scheme and it is clearly bringing people in and it has been nationally externally looked at. It is clearly bringing people into higher education who would not be in higher education otherwise. But there is no question that we can do more than we are doing. Communities First areas is one area, but obviously you have people who are disadvantaged in all sorts of other areas actually and Wales does very well in terms of disability, for example access of the disabled to higher education in Wales, but there is no question that we should be doing more. Just one further point is that we should not just be thinking in terms of the progression of younger people. The other key point about Leitch is that we are all going to need to be re-educated as we go through our working lives. It is not just the people entering the labour force who will need these higher skills and new skills, it is people already in the labour force and in your own constituency there are, I think, some very good examples of that where there may be major economic change and people will need to move on with repackaged skills.

Ms Wilkinson: We are relatively well-placed given the emphasis within the Welsh higher education system on part-time learning, but we do have some advantages in terms of where we might be moving and in how we currently deliver. So there is quite a bit we can build on there, I think. Just to give you a different flavour, it is not just about what institutions can do to encourage young people into higher education, for example Glamorgan has got a great learning mentor project which is about helping young people understand how they can learn, so it is doing some of that sort of thing as well where I think higher education can contribute. But as you say, it is a crowded marketplace.

Q630 Albert Owen: Just one final point. I hear what you say about the students being your customers and they have the choice of what course they want, but surely higher education as well as the careers service and others you mentioned have a responsibility to get the right skills base for the area? Are you involved in skills audits as a university? Do you conduct them or do you work with other agencies and bodies to ensure that the skills levels are brought up to what is expected of the area?

Ms Wilkinson: Skills audit in terms of the region, the locality, information?

Q631 Albert Owen: You could pull that information together, but I mean in each university as an institution or on an all-Wales level.

Ms Wilkinson: Certainly we are involved on an all-Wales level through Future Skills Wales, which is the initiative that all the stakeholders buy into in terms of looking at mapping skills demands, although what we are looking at now is perhaps a slightly longer timeframe, so we will have to see how that initiative might develop in the context of what comes out of Leitch. Primarily we have to be responsive to our market and we have to be responsive to what young people wish to learn. The issue is how you inform what young people want to learn and how we play our role in that whole process. We have already articulated some of the ways in which we are seeking to do that. It is a difficult area. We mentioned Welsh media earlier and the demand for Welsh media education, and there are lots of issues around the needs for Welsh media speakers with particular sorts of skills there and we are doing quite a lot together as institutions now. We have come together and formed a new grouping and we are looking at what we can do to work across institutions to try and stimulate some supply to see where we can get the demand coming in. Frankly, we are not at all sure about that, but there are things we can do. But of course we are taking a risk, because instead of increasing the numbers studying through the medium of Welsh what we might end up with is spreading jam very thin indeed. That is a big risk for all the institutions involved, but we are doing it in that area and we have made a commitment to doing that so that we can increase our offering through the medium of Welsh, for example. But that is not easy stuff.

Professor Jones: I think the point which was raised is a very, very important one about this idea of student demand and the needs of the economy. We do need a planning mechanism, I think, which will allow us to marry those. Having said that, I do think that universities in Wales are really defending subject areas which are very difficult to sustain financially because there are so few students who want to do them, but which are seen as being crucially important to the economy. In a sense we are battling to defend those subjects, which are crucially important economically but which attract fewer students.

Q632 Mr Crabb: How concerned are you about drop-out rates at Welsh universities and what analysis has your colleagues made of the figures of students dropping out at either year one or year two, and what correlation is there between the numbers dropping out and the socioeconomic groups from where those students come? You talk about social exclusion and broadening the net, trying to reach a wider population of young people. Is it fair to say that some of those young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are arriving at university and are actually ill-equipped for the courses they have selected and are therefore more likely to drop out?

Professor Jones: First of all, I think our retention rates in Wales compare favourably with the rest of the UK and many institutions do extremely well in terms of retention, but it is an important point you raise, I think. There does appear to be some correlation between the fact that the more you widen access, as it were, the more difficult the retention issues become, but that can be for all sorts of reasons. Students drop out for a whole range of issues. It is not at all because they are ill-equipped for the course. It may be for financial reasons, personal reasons, family reasons or travel reasons. All sorts of issues arise, but it is a worrying area and it is something which I think is a cause of considerable concern because we do not want a system in which huge numbers come in and then huge numbers drop out. One of the great virtues of the UK system actually has been the very high levels of retention which have characterised British higher education compared with Continental Europe, where the tradition has been for everybody to go in and pretty well everybody to fall out. So the issue of retention is a very, very important one and I think all universities are working very, very hard to try and tackle it in terms of hardship funds, counselling, support, personal support, and so on, for students.

Q633 Mr David Jones: At the risk of inviting you to shop your colleagues, would you say that every higher education institution in Wales recognises the skills and access challenge?

Professor Jones: Yes, I think so. I think all universities have slightly different emphases in terms of the skills they provide, but yes, I think so, certainly, because a great deal of the discussion, of course, is about the skills challenge in terms of the development of the private sector, quite properly, but one should not forget also that universities also provide the trained teachers, the graduate nurses, the midwives and the doctors for Wales. So I think in one way or another we all have to address the vocational and skills issues. The Leitch review was only published, I think, in December and that is obviously going to get a whole debate going. The kind of work which this Committee is doing on globalisation I think again raises quite fundamental questions about the kinds of skills we will need in order to compete globally. So it is not just what skills do you need to plug into the existing economy, we need to be thinking what skills will we need in 10, 15 or 20 years' time.

Q634 Mr David Jones: On that point, are Welsh HE institutions measuring their success against one another or in a UK context, or in a European context, or indeed globally? Would you say that they think globally?

Professor Jones: Yes, I think we do think globally. I genuinely think we do, because it is a global business and it is also highly competitive.

Q635 Mr David Jones: So when you are measuring your success you may be measuring yourself against the University of Tokyo?

Professor Jones: Yes. If you want to be in the top 500 in China then that is exactly what you do.

Q636 Mrs James: I want to go back and talk about the spin-off rates and the start up rates and the contribution which universities are making to financial growth in Wales. Can you expand a little more on the contribution which Welsh universities are making to the Welsh economy, both on a national and regional basis?

Ms Wilkinson: In terms of the return on investment to Wales, it is reasonable. For every £1 million we are looking at about a 4.6 multiply on the investment, so the return on investment in higher education is pretty good and our contribution there is fairly solid. We also obviously create quite a reasonable export value, I think, about £100 million worth of export value. Locally the contribution varies. I hesitate. Clearly when you look at some areas where some of our HEIs are based they are the largest employers, or it is the higher education institution and the local authority. They are major drivers of that local economy in terms of the development and sustainability of a range of smaller businesses which depend on the institutions' activities for their very survival. So I think that element is very important, as well as the other aspects we have touched upon, which is what we do with businesses, how we create added value, and the knowledge and research that we put out into the wider economic community. It is easy to forget the contribution that each institution makes to its individual locality, and of course increasingly we see wider partnerships between different public sector players where higher education again is playing its role with the development of local services in Wales. We are looking at what higher education can do to partner with other public bodies in terms of the whole value for money agenda. So in terms of their impact on the localities, it is very significant.

Professor Jones: The point is, I think, extremely well made and it is an important one to grasp, that universities are businesses in their own right in that they have to compete in order to survive and that means competing in a UK and global environment. But it is a very, very competitive business. We have to go out there every day and fight for students, for research monies, for consultancies, for staff, and if we fail then clearly there are major implications in terms of employment. As Amanda was saying, in many parts of Wales universities are major, major employers in their own right and they have a big impact on the local economy. Quite apart from all the other activities, the university also has a major impact in that regard. Also, I think universities are able to attract people - this is something we have not mentioned so far, but it is not just for growth in business locally but it is for services like the Health Service, for example. The existence of higher education is a major inducement in terms of recruiting highly qualified staff into the health service.

Ms Wilkinson: Just to follow on from that, we cannot be complacent about our hinterland. Even the smallest businesses these days can shop around for the services and the consultancies they want. They will not, as a matter of course, necessarily go to their local university, they will go obviously to the best deal, so we do have to be competitive in order to serve our regional economies.

Q637 Mrs James: You mentioned going out looking for students, looking for sponsorship and finance and you touched upon non-EU students. How successful and how important do you see that element of the market?

Professor Jones: Non-EU students are absolutely crucial to the sector and ensuring that we recruit more of them, which is why we do work together as well as separately to try and recruit more. EU students, of course, are interesting, and I am aware that the Committee has been looking at Poland and the Czech Republic, and so on, but clearly within the EU there is a whole new market which has appeared in what used to be Central and Eastern Europe, the new Accession States, which I think we are only beginning to understand the importance of. They would not be paying the extra fees, but the point is that non-EU students pay more fees. Clearly, it seems to me that in terms of internationalising higher education there could be a big market in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the normal markets in Western Europe.

Ms Wilkinson: There is also the issue that you cannot be complacent. In a situation where you have students paying fees, you cannot be complacent about your home market because they also will look at the fees charged elsewhere on other English speaking courses. You could say from that point of view the world opens up students' options.

Professor Jones: Yes, it does. You could go to the United States and do your degree.

Q638 Albert Owen: The 2004-05 Wales Tourist Board Annual Report estimates that the conferences and meetings market is worth over £225 million a year to the economy of Wales. How do the higher education institutions promote the conference facilities internationally? You told us about the spin-off from universities and this is certainly one area.

Professor Jones: Yes, it is. I am not sure I have a very full answer to the specific question of how institutions market that - all in their different ways, I suspect - but what is certainly true is that it is an extremely important market for all institutions, the conference market. There are times of the year when students are not in residence and so you have facilities, halls of residence, meeting rooms, lecture rooms, and so on. Certainly in our case it is a major, major part of our business. It is attracting not just conferences but tourists who actually just use our facilities to stay and we have a very aggressive marketing campaign to try and achieve that and push the benefits of Wales and why people should visit Wales. You do not just sell it on the basis of how many seats you have got in a lecture room because most universities in Europe will have similar facilities, but you can sell it on being next to the Menai Straits or looking over the Gower Peninsula, or the Brecon Beacons. So I think in that sense at that end of the business, as it were, it becomes very close -

Q639 Albert Owen: But it is an important revenue stream?

Professor Jones: It is an important revenue stream and it should be bigger, in my view. It does then take one very much towards the tourist market and it has long been my belief, actually, that we should be working much more closely with the rest of the tourist market in terms of working together to attract people to Wales.

Q640 Albert Owen: Can you explain to the Committee in more detail the reasons why you state in your paper "higher education lies at the heart of Wales's competitive advantage in the global economy"? You have mentioned certain things, but why do you place so much emphasis on higher education?

Professor Jones: There are lots of reasons which I have already touched upon, but I think the fundamental one is that there are so many reports now and they all come to the same conclusion, which is that what gives the UK and Wales a competitive edge are the high skills we are able to provide. If you then look down the road awhile and see what the economy is likely to look like, we have got the Working Futures report which has looked at that and the areas where they see growth are in managerial, professional and the technical and associated professional areas. If you dig a little deeper, within the professional group, for example, they think the biggest group of new jobs will be in teaching and research, health professionals and science and technology. The associate professional groups will be in culture, media and sports, health and science, and health and social care is another area which figures. All of those are areas in which higher education trains people to a very high level and if we do not provide people with the skills to occupy those positions then I do not see how we can compete, and either they will come from outside or it just will not happen at all, which is much more likely to be the case. So I see that as, in a sense, being the fundamental part of the case for higher education, the way in which the economy is developing, the way in which we can compete in Wales, and indeed in the rest of the UK, in the global economy. It is not going to be as it used to be, particular in Wales, in terms of raw materials and then manufacturing, it will have to be by being, as the Welsh Assembly Government has emphasised, the small, clever country, and that means high level skills.

Q641 Albert Owen: But is not every country saying that?

Professor Jones: Yes.

Q642 Albert Owen: You cited the fact that we went to Poland and the Czech Republic and they are saying exactly the same thing, so what is different in Wales that you think can give us that advantage?

Professor Jones: I think we have a very fine higher education system, and that goes for large parts of the UK generally, I think. Higher education in the United Kingdom is seen throughout the world as a quality product with very high standards and that still gives us an edge. If you look at the number of scientific papers which are produced, for example, it is only the United States which in a sense competes with the UK. Despite the relatively low levels historically of funding for science there has been this tremendously high level of science research in the UK. So I think it is a quality system that we have and it is a jewel in the crown.

Q643 Mark Williams: In relation to the development of the European higher education area, your memorandum states that Wales has been taking a leading role in its development. How is that progressing and what are the key priorities for that group in the context of globalisation?

Professor Jones: I think with the Bologna process there are tremendous opportunities and, by the way, the whole Bologna process fits very neatly into the whole Lisbon agenda, does it not, which is also driven by this idea of Europe being a high skills area and powered by innovation and a knowledge base? So the idea that you have, as it were, a common European area in which standards are comparable I think is tremendously exciting, so that people could move for part of their degrees. It already happens to some extent with the Erasmus and Socrates programmes, but part of the rationale for it is to encourage labour mobility, to get people to move around Europe and take their qualifications with them. I think that is incredibly exciting and encouraging. There are big challenges for us, however, in that as the European degree structure becomes more like the British in terms of First degrees they then become more attractive, I think, internationally. Secondly, there are big issues about the Masters degree in the UK, which is a one year qualification usually in the UK and which in Europe will be required to be two, and there are issues also about the British PhD, so it is bumpy.

Q644 Mark Williams: So they are some of the pitfalls and things to be dealt with. The Declaration was signed in 1999. How advanced are things currently?

Ms Wilkinson: Obviously the crucial thing we need to complete is the credit matching so that we can compare what is awarded in Wales with what is awarded elsewhere in Europe. So we need to match the credits that we award to the Bologna credit framework, if you like. It is a fairly technical area. Scotland is already there. We were quite ahead on this in Wales and we slipped back a little bit, and I think we really need a good push on this in the next year so that we are amongst the first nations who have successfully transferred our own credit and qualification system and mapped that onto the European credit and qualification framework, because that will allow us to compete.

Q645 Mark Williams: But at least we have got the framework in Wales!

Ms Wilkinson: Yes, quite. We are somewhat ahead of England in that respect. In practical terms, that is the big thing we have got to do to ensure that we are in there competing early on.

Q646 Mark Williams: Practically, what effect has had that on numbers of students from other institutions coming to Wales?

Professor Jones: I am not sure what the exact figures are, but there is a constant flow of students from the rest of Europe. I think the big challenge, as I said earlier, will be the new states which have joined and the markets there.

Ms Wilkinson: Some institutions, certainly Swansea, will already give an indication of European credit value, for example.

Professor Jones: That is right.

Ms Wilkinson: Some institutions have done it off their own bat, if you like, but what we need is to do it on a pan-Wales basis.

Professor Jones: And indeed Swansea was the venue for the last --

Ms Wilkinson: We have been very active players in the whole Bologna process.

Q647 Mark Williams: When do you envisage that process of credits being resolved? You mentioned that England has not even started yet, so there is progress there, but what is the timetable for this?

Ms Wilkinson: It is not within our control. The Welsh Assembly Government has recently reappointed somebody as the credit and qualification framework coordinator, so we are hoping that we will see some progress on that within the next year. It would be nice for us to be able to complete it over the next year, but I am not in a position to say whether or not that is going to happen.

Q648 Mr Crabb: I just want to come in on that question. The rhetoric around the Bologna process is excellent, "in order to enhance the employability and mobility of citizens within Europe," and you mentioned the Erasmus programme, which has been a fantastic tool and lever to help achieve some of that. The barrier which Welsh students are going to come up against, though, is that fewer and fewer of them are coming out of schools with any meaningful qualification in French, German or Spanish. So how are Welsh students going to access Erasmus and Socrates and be part of this common European higher education space when they cannot actually benefit from spending six months or a year abroad at a foreign university?

Professor Jones: I am not sure I have the answer to that, but you quite rightly raise it as a major issue. The provision of modern languages and the recruitment to modern languages in the UK is --

Q649 Mr Crabb: Woeful.

Professor Jones: Yes, it is very difficult and it is because students are not coming out of schools with competence in those languages and not choosing to have competence in those languages. I think it is a very difficult cultural issue really. This is just speculation, perhaps, but I think many people in Britain assume that if you speak English then you are okay and what they fail to understand is that if you speak English and German, or English and Finnish then you have a competitive edge, whereas speaking English on its own does not give you a competitive edge against people who speak English and Mandarin. To be fair, I think the Welsh Assembly Government has been very aware of this issue and very concerned abut this issue, but it seems to be embedded within the culture that you do not need foreign languages. Actually the, upshot is precisely as you say, that far more students come from the rest of Europe to Wales and to the UK than go from the UK to the rest of Europe, which I think sums up the fact that we are not maximising the opportunities.

Ms Wilkinson: There is the issue of the increasing number of degrees taught through the medium of English within Continental Europe, which might have some impact aside from our own language performance. HEFQ has recently sponsored a project looking at modern foreign languages within higher education and it will be interesting to see what comes through that. It is not something I have seen any result on as yet. I expect it is something which might report later on this summer. Certainly that work was very much focused on looking at what we can do to improve the throughput of young people who want to study modern foreign languages at higher level, because obviously that is a real issue for us.

Q650 Chairman: Could I end by asking you a question from a historian's perspective, yours rather than mine? Fifteen years ago one of the world's greatest professors of chemistry, a Welshman, Sir John Meurig Thomas, came back from Cambridge to be a leading academic within the University of Wales and he attempted to bring together the various higher education institutions in Wales, greater convergence, particularly from the research perspective. Could you give your observations on whether, had he been successful, we would now be better placed to address the kinds of globalisation challenges which we have been discussing this afternoon?

Professor Jones: I was not in Wales when all of that happened, but let me be quite frank. It does seem to me that there was in that approach a great deal of merit but that it was extremely difficult to achieve given the relative autonomy of institutions. However, I suppose since the review of higher education which the National Assembly conducted and over the last eight years I think there has been a great emphasis on reconfiguration and collaboration in Wales and one of the successes has been collaboration in research. Just to give you one example, the Welsh Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience put together two five star departments, graded as five star, one in Bangor and one in Cardiff, and a department in Swansea which I think was graded four. Apart they are brilliant departments; together they are world-beaters. Together they are one of the best centres for neuroscience and psychology anywhere in the world. There are great difficulties in collaborating across institutional boundaries, but it does seem to me that we are doing it now in Wales and that does allow you to compete not just with your neighbour in Liverpool, or wherever, but it actually allows you to start to compete with Stamford and Harvard, and wherever else. If you can actually put together groups like that in Wales, I think you can achieve something of global significance.

Ms Wilkinson: Just to come back to the opening point about "fortress Wales," it is what you can also do to match those excellent research departments with other institutions elsewhere in the world which could really create some drive for our Welsh institutions and the economy. The danger is just to look at what Welsh institutions can do together. It is a much bigger picture than that, it is what they can do with others as well.

Professor Jones: Yes, that is absolutely right. The neurosciences will be working together and they will create something in Wales which I think will be very exciting. They will compete with people internationally, but they will also be collaborating with them, because that is the nature of the academic endeavour, to come back to where we started. We have talked a lot about funding streams and markets, and so on, but at the end of the day higher education is there actually to emphasise universal values and therefore whereas borders are, of course, important and exist, in terms of academic discourse they are often pretty transparent.

Q651 Chairman: So the answer to the question is yes, in the sense that if Sir John Meurig arrived today rather than 15 years ago you would have had a much warmer response?

Professor Jones: I think there is a whole move towards collaborative work in Wales. There is a much greater appetite for collaborative work, particularly research work, now in Wales than used to be the case.

Q652 Chairman: Thank you very much for your evidence this afternoon, and once again thank you for your written evidence. If you feel, in light of the discussion this afternoon, there is something which you or your colleagues across the higher education sector wish to add, we would be delighted to receive it, particularly as we move on later on in the inquiry to population movements, food and the creative industries.

Professor Jones: Can we thank you, Chairman, and all the Committee for your time and to be able to give evidence in what I think is a very timely investigation you are conducting into the impact of globalisation. Thank you very much.

Chairman: Thank you very much.