Science and Technology Committee 

Oral evidence: Nurse, Grant and Tickell Reviews and Horizon Europe, HC 1296

Wednesday 19 April 2023

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 19 April 2023.

Watch the meeting 

Members present: Greg Clark (Chair); Aaron Bell; Dawn Butler; Tracey Crouch; Katherine Fletcher; Rebecca Long Bailey; Stephen Metcalfe; Carol Monaghan; Graham Stringer.

Questions 1 - 97

Witnesses

I: Sir Paul Nurse, Director, Francis Crick Institute; and Professor Adam Tickell, Vice-Chancellor, University of Birmingham.

II: Sir Adrian Smith, President, Royal Society; Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, Chief Executive, UKRI; and Professor Irene Tracey, Vice-Chancellor, University of Oxford.

Written evidence from witnesses:

– [Add names of witnesses and hyperlink to submissions]

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Sir Paul Nurse and Professor Adam Tickell.

Chair: We are very pleased to have a session this morning looking at some of the recent reports that have been issued on the research environment and to consider some questions around the UK’s prospective association with Horizon Europe.

For our first panel, we are very pleased to welcome two authors of reports—two people who have been very helpful to the Committee in the past. We are pleased to welcome back Sir Paul Nurse, the director and chief executive of the Francis Crick Institute and, as everyone knows, a Nobel laureate. For our purposes today, he is the author of the review of the research, development and innovation organisational landscape. Thank you very much for coming, Sir Paul.

We also have Professor Adam Tickell, vice-chancellor of the University of Birmingham and author of the independent review of research bureaucracy. Thank you so much for coming.

We will also be considering some questions around a third review—a review conducted by Sir David Grant into the organisation of UKRI. Unfortunately, Sir David cannot make it this morning, but we will have some questions to UKRI later in this morning’s session.

Q1                Rebecca Long Bailey: Sir Paul, your review offers a large number of important recommendations. What are the key findings and recommendations that you deem critically important?

Sir Paul Nurse: Do you want one minute or five minutes?

Chair: Three minutes, I think.

Rebecca Long Bailey: Be as succinct as you possibly can. It was an extensive review.

Sir Paul Nurse: Okay. First, thank you for the invitation to come and speak to you. I will give you something between one and five minutes.

I do not need to stress to this Committee the importance of the RDI endeavour for increased productivity, sustainable growth and strategic and societal benefits. In other words, it is not just about science—it is about the country as a whole.

We have done quite a comprehensive review, with 270 consultations. We have identified that there are significant problems with the RDI endeavour, some of which are long standing and serious. Those need fixing. It is not simply a matter of application—it is also the endeavour itself.

The UK discovery research engine is in okay shape, but it is vulnerable. I want that to be the first thing we are aware of. The reason that I emphasise it is that there can be a certain complacency that we are a world leader. I would say that that is actually somewhat vulnerable.

The sentence that summarises everything is that it is a revolution of RDI through adoption of a range of evolutionary changes. I want to emphasise that. It involves building on what we have, but you cannot cherry-pick. It requires across-the-board attention.

I turn to the main findings. First, the UK Government are underspending on the research that they both perform and support—something that I did not fully recognise, I have to say, until I undertook this review. We calculate that the R&D performed by the UK Government is only 0.12% of GDP. That is less than half the OECD average of 0.24% to 0.26%. The amount of R&D funded by the UK Government is 0.46%. The average for the OECD is 0.6%. It puts us 27th of 36 OECD nations—27th. Performers such as the USA, Germany and South Korea are at 0.66% and 0.96%—again, double what we are spending. In short, more investment is required.

Secondly, that investment needs to be better delivered. I sum that up with the phrase “attention to complete end-to-end funding of RDI”, rather than just direct costs. That includes proper investment in sophisticated technical cores and facilities, wellfound labs, lab buildings and even just administrative and other support. We expect researchers to do lots of things that could be done by others, and much more cheaply—trivial tasks. Doing high-quality research is difficult. Researchers need time to think. They should not be filling out forms and writing letters, which is what they are being asked to do. There should be more full end-to-end funding.

Thirdly, we need to consider greater diversity of research-performing organisations. I gave an analysis of them. There are universities. There are PSREs, with which you will be familiar.

Q2                Chair: Sir Paul, would you explain the acronyms for those viewing who may not be familiar with them?

Sir Paul Nurse: I am sorry. There are public sector research establishments, which we call PSREs. They could do with a better title, I think. There are research institutes and units, such as the one that I run, and then a whole set of other institutions: academies, museums and translational-promoting organisations.

Over the last 30 years, we have seen a dramatic shrinkage of Government-supported PSREs, institutes and units. They are now at one third of the level they were at 30 years ago. That needs to be looked at. International comparisons show that 80% of non-business R&D in the UK is in the universities. In other countries, the figure is 45% to 60%. This needs to be looked at. Universities need support, by the way—that is not in question—but there is an increasing lack of diversity.

The fourth thing is that there needs to be increased knowledge of, and permeability between, the range of research-performing organisations in the landscape. Different sectors tend to be self-referential. They do not talk to other sectors. They consider only themselves when RDI is discussed. This way of working is reducing permeability of ideas, technologies and people, which we absolutely need to have a fully functioning RDI system.

I also recommend that universities take on a special role in levelling up, if I am still allowed to use that term; I am not quite sure whether I am. Universities should communicate and connect organisations in their local geographical sectors to wherever research is being carried out in the UK, rather than simply thinking of technical transfer for things in their own departments.

We should reduce excessive and unnecessary bureaucracy. I think that we have an expert here, so I will not touch on that. Talent is critical and needs nurturing at every level, from technicians through to advanced researchers. We need to do that. We also need to make the country attractive for overseas talent, because it is rare.

Finally, you need to have in place international RDI arrangements that work. Central to that is association with Horizon Europe, which you will talk about later in the session.

I do not think that it is appropriate to cherry-pick within that summary. Within it is a blueprint, I would suggest, that will bring about the changes, over years. We need planning—we cannot expect the money to drop from heaven—and we need to get started now. That is a summary of where the review was.

Q3                Rebecca Long Bailey: Thank you. That was very succinct.

One of the staggering findings you have just referred to is that our world-leader status is vulnerable. You mentioned our comparison with other OECD nations in the Government funding being provided for RDI. Have the Government woken up to the situation we are in, as 27th out of 36 OECD countries? Have you seen any action at all from the Government since your review was announced?

Sir Paul Nurse: I was actually surprised—I said so—that we were so low down. I do not think that we can just blame Government. I am afraid that we have to blame our academic colleagues in policy as well, including myself. I did not pick up on this when I was president of the Royal Society. It has been hiding in plain sight for 10 or 12 years. I am afraid that the Office for National Statistics has made mistakes in the way in which it collected data. That was first indicated in 2012. There has been a lack of commitment to having the knowledge about the sector upon which good policy has to be based. I think that the Government have noticed it now, but it may have taken them by surprise as well.

Q4                Rebecca Long Bailey: Specifically, many stakeholders have welcomed your proposed review of quality-related research funding and full economic costing of research. How do you think those funding mechanisms should be reformed?

Sir Paul Nurse: This is part of what I call the end-to-end funding. It applies across the whole research endeavour, but it is particularly relevant in universities. My conversations with researchers at the coalface indicated that they do not feel that they are properly supported in all the infrastructure that is around direct support. The universities are struggling to deliver that.

There are some perverse incentives. The more money you attract for direct support, the less support you have for peripheral. QR is meant to deal with that, but there is a rather unfortunate lack of transparency about quite what QR is spent on. I think that attention needs to be paid to both FEC and QR, so that it is delivered.

I think that it may need radical treatment. I did not deal with it specifically because my thoughts about it are that UKRI and Research England, working with the new Science Department, need to look at FEC and QR entirely, in a fresh way. They must be advised by scientists on the ground, not just Treasury officials, for example, on how FEC should be done. What do we need to produce good, comprehensive support for end-to-end funding? We can do it. We just need to have the will to undertake it. Those are the bodies that should consider it, I suggest, but they must talk to the scientists who have to deliver the research.

Q5                Rebecca Long Bailey: You mentioned that the Government perhaps did not know for a period of 10 years how seriously our research and development landscape was being underfunded by Government. Given how long it took to carry out this review, how do you propose to collect further data on the nature of the research and development landscape in the UK so that future Governments cannot be put in a similar position, where they are not aware of how serious the situation is?

Sir Paul Nurse: The first thing I would say is that there were some attempts about four or five years ago to collect data. It started—I even saw some of the accounts of it—but then for some reason it stopped and was not continued. Frankly, if we want a decent RDI endeavour, we have to know what the endeavour is, where it is, what it is doing and what the level of funding is. That is critical to proper policy development.

What needs to happen now is that we must have a high-level body—I am not a politician, so I do not quite know the best way of delivering that, but it could come through the new Department—working across Cabinet, because science is in every part of Government, that actually looks at the review and sees how it can be delivered. I have not produced a review of lots of bright, shiny new things, which is sometimes what happens in these circumstances. I have produced what I hope is an analysis of the issues. Now, we need to have in-depth analysis, over the coming months and years, that can produce a plan that will guide us for a decade, I would say. I honestly think that we can deliver it. We are a mature nation and are sensible about it. Let us not go for bright, shiny new things. Let us get this right. That needs effort and commitment across the board.

Q6                Stephen Metcalfe: Good morning, both. It is good to see you. Thank you for joining us.

I want to carry on from that, and the quite disturbing figures for the amount that we spend as a percentage of GDP. Do you think that that is a purely monetary issue? Is there a capacity issue? What I mean by that is that from time to time we hear that the gap between the public sector research establishments’ pay levels and those of the private sector has been increasing over the last few years—and, potentially, longer.

We had an example of that through our inquiry into AI. Someone working in that area 30 years ago might have expected to earn double in the private sector, but they may now earn 10 times the amount.

First, do you identify with that problem? Secondly, what can we do to help to address it to keep people in the public research area?

Sir Paul Nurse: The first thing to say is that the landscape of the RDI endeavour spreads from publicly supported research, of course, to privately supported research. It is very important to support across that whole landscape. That means that positions have to be attractive across the landscape.

We are seeing unfortunate problems with publicly funded research—perhaps across the board in publicly funded activities. We have certain rules in place that, for sure, are just bureaucratic. We may hear more about that from Adam later. It is to do with the fact that if you want to pay more than the Prime Minister, or whatever, you have to go through some labyrinthic exercise. I offer somebody from the United States a place at my institute the same day that I interview them. We do not wait three, four, five or six months and then expect them still to be wanting to come.

There is a capacity issue, in the sense that we have introduced bureaucracy that makes it difficult to cure the problem. I think that it will be more cost-efficient if we take off some of those limitations, because we will have more effective organisations, even if we pay higher salaries.

On AI, we have Google DeepMind next to the Crick. It is putting its labs in our institute. One of my graduate students is working there. It pays far more than we can pay. It is a different situation. We are an academic institution. It has got out of kilter in these areas, as I think you are hinting. The life sciences are another one. They are not quite as trendy as artificial intelligence and so on, but obviously they are very important.

We compete with industry, and we compete across the world. I cannot offer anything like the salaries that I could have offered when I worked in the United States, where I ran Rockefeller University. I can and do attract to the Crick significant and increasing numbers of US scientists, which we have never done before, because they are attracted to the way in which we do research, but that is about the way in which we are delivering research in the institute. We do not have to pay those sums of money, but we must have an overall package that is attractive.

Stephen Metcalfe: An attractive proposition.

Sir Paul Nurse: Yes.

Q7                Chair: At the Crick, the research institution that you run, do you have the flexibility to pay what you want? Is it a question of managing your budget as director, or are you subject to external limits on salaries?

Sir Paul Nurse: We have freedom and flexibility. I am subject to my board, which has representatives from MRC, UKRI, Cancer Research UK, Wellcome Trust and universities, so I am subject to what we do being looked at. We are not subject to the same rules—mainly of Treasury origin, I believe—that are restricting the PSREs, for example, or research institutes such as the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which has suffered greatly from this. We have the freedom to do that.

We have to be sensible—we are not going crazy—but we can become competitive, particularly because of the way in which we operate and the support that we give for research itself, which counters just the salary.

Q8                Chair: You have to manage your budgets, and your reputation probably attracts people more than the salary. Do you think that that regime should apply to other research institutes, including the public sector research institutes?

Sir Paul Nurse: I absolutely do, because it gives me greater flexibility in end-to-end funding. I have taken money out of individual research groups and put it into the infrastructure. That is hugely transforming. We have technical cores that I would say are the highest in the world. Researchers want to come and work for that, although they get less money to control themselves. We have perverse incentives that push all the money into a particular activity and not the infrastructure to support it. Because I had the freedom to do it in the Crick, we could break that way of working. That was really important.

Chair: Having interrupted Stephen, I must ask Carol whether her point is relevant to the answer that Sir Paul has just given.

Q9                Carol Monaghan: Yes.

Time and again, we hear about the uncertainty and short-term nature of research contracts. You have talked about having more autonomy and taking a pile of money and managing it yourself. Does that allow you to provide more certainty and long-term stability for researchers?

Sir Paul Nurse: I think that it does. I do not want to draw too much from the Crick, as we have been in existence for only five years. No doubt there are things that we are doing wrong and things that we have not come across, but what it did allow was a completely fresh look at how to do things, which is reflected partly in what you have read here. We had the privilege of being able to do that because it was a merger of three institutes. We recruited the core budgets that went with that but could apply them in different ways. We can look at all these issues, and the ones you have just referred to, with a fresh pair of eyes.

Q10            Stephen Metcalfe: You mentioned infrastructure. We will talk about Horizon itself a little later, but its alternative, the Pioneer programme, listed infrastructure as the fourth pillar and suggested that further support be provided to PSREs. By the sound of it, you would agree with that. How wide would that proposal go, if implemented?

Sir Paul Nurse: I did not quite catch which proposal you were referring to.

Stephen Metcalfe: Pioneer—the alternative.

Sir Paul Nurse: Oh, plan B. Do you want me to talk about plan B?

Q11            Stephen Metcalfe: No, I do not want to talk about plan B. What I want to talk about is that you mentioned infrastructure and how you have changed the way in which you deliver it. There is a proposal to do something about that.

Sir Paul Nurse: Yes. Plan B mentions infrastructure. Of course, some infrastructure—in fact, significant amounts of infrastructure—came from the EU Horizon programme. It is presented in plan B as if that were not the case, but that is simply wrong. It does come.

I think that you have to deal with this more at the level of institutions, and the way in which money is delivered to institutions, to allow greater support around direct research. Of course we need research infrastructure, but sometimes in these statements we are back to bright, shiny new things. They think that research infrastructure is a big synchrotron or something. It is often much more trivial near the coalface. That is what researchers tell me. That sometimes gets missed off the political agenda because it is not quite as shiny.

Q12            Stephen Metcalfe: Can you give us some tangible examples of what infrastructure needs improving—of what we mean by that?

Sir Paul Nurse: I will give you one example. Until very recently, my daughter was a professor of high-energy physics at University College London. She ran the PhD programme. That PhD programme at University College, one of the great universities in the world, was half the size of what we run at the Crick. She had zero administrative support. I put three to four people in there. They are not paid the same amount of money, and it is infinitely better supported, infinitely less stressful for the academic and much more successful as a consequence. That is just one, slightly homely example.

Q13            Stephen Metcalfe: Yes, but that is the practical sort of thing that we need to do.

Sir Paul Nurse: Yes. Adam is actually in the thick of it. You might ask him about it later.

Q14            Stephen Metcalfe: I suppose that that brings me to my final question, which is around the challenges of implementation of your recommendations. As you say, it is not all about glossy and shiny new things—it is about getting on and doing it. What are the challenges to delivering it? What can we tell the Government to get on with now?

Sir Paul Nurse: Normally, people like me say, “We need more money.” We do need more money, but I do not start there. I start with analysis of the situation. We have ways of doing that, through UKRI, the new DSIT and others—the academies and so on. We have ways of analysing that and testing things out. I said at the very end of my review, “Let’s spend the next year or two testing some of these things in situ, to see what will actually work, and work most effectively.” We should not simply do the same things.

What it really needs is will—the will to deliver. It needs political will, from our political leaders, to say that this is a problem, that it is important for the country and that it needs to delivered. We need that first.

Secondly, it cannot be shallow. It has to be deep. It must also have constant attention across all of Government, which the new Department can deliver. I think that that can happen.

Finally, it needs to involve all across the RDI endeavour—the universities, of course, but not just the universities. It must also involve the PSREs, industry, institutes like mine and all these other organisations. We need to be much more permeable across the sector to find these solutions. If we are dominated too much by one part of the sector, we will get solutions for only part of the sector. Implementation has to embrace all of the RDI endeavour.

Q15            Stephen Metcalfe: Is there any work going on yet in Government to deliver on this?

Sir Paul Nurse: I am a born optimist. I am always looking on the bright side of these things. I think that the new Department will handle responsibility that can be put across Government. I have trust that, properly managed, that can deliver.

Stephen Metcalfe: Deliver your recommendations.

Sir Paul Nurse: Yes. The Secretary of State has read the review very carefully, has responded very positively and, I believe, is putting work together to think about how to implement it. I am fairly optimistic.

Stephen Metcalfe: Excellent.

Q16            Chair: I have some questions on your report. Its gestation period was curiously long. You have written important reports for the Government before, but this was conceived, if I can put it in that way, in July 2021 and not published until last month, in 2023. Why did it take two years?

Sir Paul Nurse: The first thing to say is that it is 165 pages, so there is quite a lot of stuff in it. I consulted widely, at 270.

Secondly, I never said that it could be delivered by July. I said that it could be delivered by October. That buys me four months.

Thirdly, there were some changes in Government during this period of time. You may have noticed. It was commissioned by Kwasi Kwarteng. We had some chaos in Government for a while, which did not help things. We then had a new Government Department.

Last August or September, I became more fully aware that we did not have all the right figures in place to grade the comparisons. Because the OSTS said that it could not do that, we had to do it in the Department. The figures that I have put here need checking. I should have said that when I gave them. They are the best that we could do. I am sure that they are more or less right, but they need checking. That delayed us by one or two months, because we had to do that extra work.

Finally, it sat in BEIS from the beginning of December, for at least three months, without any response. The response came only with the new Department.

Q17            Chair: During this time of multiple Ministers, did they make any representations? Presumably they saw a draft of your report some time ahead of publication.

Sir Paul Nurse: Yes. I communicated it at various stages, of course. I had fantastic support from the civil servants and from colleagues whom I consulted. I take responsibility for everything in here. Unusually, I did write it all. That is perhaps another reason that it was slow. I did write the whole damned thing. A huge thing was correction.

Although it was not really spelt out like this, I felt that there was a certain disappointment that I did not come up with bright, shiny new things like a new series of institutes spread across the land that were going to work in particular ways. I focused a lot on process and mechanism to deliver the best things. It does not come out as a political document. It comes out as a document that is going to provide a blueprint for the endeavour over 10 years. There may have been a little disappointment that I did not satisfy that particular political need.

Q18            Chair: As a connoisseur of your reports—indeed, I should declare, as a commissioner of some of your previous reports, which did make some radical recommendations—I was a little surprised at some of the modesty of your proposals.

Let us take something you referred to—QR funding. You make an analysis. You say that is rather opaque. This is very substantial money, and, as the word implies, we do not really know how it is being spent, but you do not make a recommendation on what to do about it. You have told the Committee that you think that a review might be undertaken by UKRI. If that takes two years, it will be five years from when you were commissioned before we may do something about it.

Sir Paul Nurse: Yes. Let me comment. First, my language is quite measured throughout. That is because I did not want to annoy everybody across the entire RDI endeavour. I was certainly annoying the universities, or some in the universities, who, as I think I mentioned, said that they did not want to report on what they spent QR on because the Government would then interfere. Others said, “We need to report on it, because in that way we convince Government to do it.” I am in the latter camp.

I wanted to use careful language, but, mainly, I do not want to be arrogant. This is complex. I have been in this trade for nearly 50 years. It has been more or less the same for half a century. I am suggesting—you heard the words—revolution by evolution. I want to engage colleagues. We can do this quickly, once there is the political will that it needs to be delivered and once we have the resources, not just one man and a dog. I am sorry. Where is my support? You see what I am saying. If we have a Department behind it, the Cabinet behind it and colleagues behind it, we can move fast.

Q19            Chair: Let me go through a couple of other areas in which you make an analysis but do not really follow through with recommendations. You note, for example, consortia of universities. The example you have given is a geographical area. You commend the GW4 Alliance—the universities of Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter and Bath working together. We know that regionally we have a lot of strength in our universities, but sometimes, as you compellingly analyse, they do not cohere; they do not pull in the same direction, but you do not make a recommendation on whether universities regionally should get together and whether they should be given any incentive, nudge or requirement to do so by the funding authorities. What is behind your thinking on that?

Sir Paul Nurse: I do not, because I am not arrogant enough to say I know all the particular ways to do it. I am telling you that it needs to be done and it can be done, and that is why I have not gone into detail. If I had tried to do it, it would have been a 500-page document. We have to be realistic about that.

On the question about regional matters, I say two things; you did not ask about one of them, but it is relevant. Yes, there are regional strengths. I am chancellor of the University of Bristol and am familiar with that. It is a powerful way of working that is different from the more generally recognised power of Oxford, Cambridge and London. I wanted to emphasise that there are regional possibilities. I myself have worked in regional universities. I wanted to draw attention to that.

Do we put more money in there? I think that, if we get the end-to-end funding right, Greg, it will happen itself. What I am doing is identifying root causes that will have consequences, because if there is QR support this will happen. We do not have to have a new commission or to say they should spend it. They have the flexibility to do it.

The second thing, which was regional and I did criticise, was the way of setting up research institutes always on some hub-and-spoke model, because usually it is an excuse for not having them properly funded. There has been a variety of failures in recent times with new institutes that are not properly funded and have hubs and spokes where the spokes tend to suck money out of the hub. They are an interaction-type group, which serves a purpose, but in no sense is it an institute with a concentrated focus of the best minds and abilities in the country in one place, which results in something very different.

A hub and spoke connects. Concentration in an institute that puts the highest accomplished people together across disciplines often, because it is more interdisciplinary, means you get something different from it. In my institute, half of the senior people are fellows of the Royal Society. I have four Nobel laureates there. There is no other place of that type except maybe somewhere like the Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

Q20            Chair: Your advice to the Government and UKRI would be, if not to avoid, certainly to question the adoption of a hub-and-spoke model rather than having a single powerhouse of research.

Sir Paul Nurse: Hub and spokes are important for establishing interactions. You can do it with a small office and just connect it. Do not pretend it is an institute. An institute is very expensive and the decision to do it has to be taken with great care, which was why I did not want to refer to lots of institutes around the country. It was impractical, but you get something back from that which is attractive across the world.

Q21            Chair: One part of your analysis, which I thought was very striking and compelling, was your view of where UK public funding goes for research. What you say on page 35 of your report is that the UK concentrates non‑business R&D in universities, which accounts for about 80% of non‑business R&D expenditure. That is a much greater proportion than in competitor countries, where the average is between 45% and 60%. You have a chart showing since the early 1990s a big increase in the proportion of research funding that goes through universities, either directly or through UKRI, and a reduction in what goes through PSREs and others.

Q22            The comparative analysis you make is very striking. In the leading countries, Israel, Korea, Japan, the United States and Germany, there is even greater participation outside universities. With that analysis, I thought there might be some recommendation to come out of it, but I did not see it.

Sir Paul Nurse: The recommendation was there; it would say that we should consider diversification because it has certain advantages. To be very clear, our university system is very strong, partly because it does attract more of the money. On the other hand, over those 30 years you have to know that the university system has expanded and research has expanded with that, so it is a bit more complicated than just the naked figures.

I think we have lost the plot in just concentrating on one way of delivering RDI. We could talk about the PSREs; they do a variety of things that universities just would not even consider—technical services, data collection, regulatory standards, sovereign expertise in atomic energy and so on. They do a whole load of things that are important for Government and, together with institutes and units, they can also do very focused mission-oriented, high-quality research that can attract around the world.

The universities have a more diverse mission. They are very high quality. Do not misunderstand me: they need better end-to-end funding, but we have lost the plot in thinking of other ways of delivering that can really up the highest quality of research in the land.

I do not want to talk just about the Crick. We have been there for five years—talk about the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the numbers of Nobel prizes won there. It was a concentration of the highest ability that does lead to differences and moving the needle. We need to consider it but with care, which is why I am so careful in what I have written, because they are expensive and, if we just place them around and do not properly fund them, we will waste money. We are wasting money. I think there is an opportunity there, but it has to be explored with care.

Q23            Chair: Since we are devoting a comparatively high proportion of our research funding through universities it is very important that that research funding should be deployed with efficiency and effectiveness, which is what Professor Tickell was commissioned to look into. My colleague Dawn Butler will put some questions to Professor Tickell, but, in the way Rebecca did with Sir Paul, perhaps you could just give us a précis of your headline conclusions.

Professor Tickell: I will be relatively brief, but before I get there I want to stress something that is certainly in Sir Paul’s report, which is that, even allowing for QR, research in universities requires investment from universities—we do lose money on research. We must not think that looking at QR is the solution to the problem; the problem is underfunding of research.

I had a much less broad-ranging brief than Sir Paul did. The impetus started with the premise that UK science is exceptional in that, allowing for the relative funding, we get a lot of bang for the buck. Over the years, we have accreted bureaucracy in the research system and some of that is unproductive and unnecessary for the main effort of producing high-quality science. Therefore, we need to improve value for money and see efficiency as a competitive advantage. One of the ways we attract scientists from around the world is by having the most vibrant intellectual environment we can possibly have rather than simply around funding. If the frictional cost of doing science is lower in the UK than it can be elsewhere, that is clearly a great advantage.

Finally, I want to stress that bureaucracy can be a gate that advantages people who can play the game rather than be necessary to the research endeavour.

We took a two-stage approach. One is to say that we need to look at the principles. Rather than a simple set of recommendations, we had a principles-based approach that we would ask all funders and, indeed, users of research funding to look at fundamentally to make sure that policies and procedures are harmonised; that they are as simple as they can be; that they are proportional; that they are appropriately flexible; that they are transparent; that they are fair; and that they are based on principles of sustainability, by which fundamentally we mean financially sustainable in the research system.

We took six or seven main areas of focus and had a series of recommendations, which I will not go through in my opening remarks, around the assurance system. For us, the assurance system is a very significant barrier. In particular, among some funders there is a fear that at one end of the spectrum the Treasury will ask them for things and build bureaucracy into the system, and at the other end there will be concerns from the National Audit Office or the Public Accounts Committee and people will build in bureaucratic measures on a just-in-case basis rather than anything else.

Q24            Chair: Dawn has some questions that will hopefully draw out further some of those recommendations.

Professor Tickell: Would you like me to pause there?

Chair: Shall we pause there and Dawn can go to her questions?

Q25            Dawn Butler: I want to ask about efficiency, which I think you were moving towards. What do you see as the biggest challenges to making the R&D landscape more efficient, and how can we reduce bureaucracy?

Professor Tickell: It is very complex; I do not think there is a big bang. A lot of it is about how in universities and research organisations we manage ourselves. It is very important that we do not resile from that and say, “It’s all the problem of…”, and then fill in the name of the funder or regulatory agency. Therefore, there is a root-and-branch look within ourselves to make sure we do not put unnecessary barriers in the way of producing activities.

As I was just mentioning, there are whole areas that are probably overburdened with assurances. I give you an example that is analogous. Last year, my university received capital funding through the Office for Students. It is not a research effort, but it is a really nice example. We were chosen for a dipstick audit and had to provide the purchase orders and invoices for every single item in a £500,000 project, including screws that cost less than £1. That was driven not by the Office for Students but by the National Audit Office.

If you think about that across the whole system—it is not just in education; it is across research—that drives a huge amount of activity that is utterly unproductive. It is a really good example of how overweening assurance systems can create problems.

There is a whole series of nuts and bolts things about the application processes that we can make much more effective.

Q26            Dawn Butler: Do you think it is possible to establish a single unified research system? It sounds very complex.

Professor Tickell: In all honesty, I do not think it is, which is why we do not recommend it, because whenever the sector or system has tried to create a single response to anything we have ended up with greater complexity and cost. That is why for us it is important that funders and institutions look at the principles and ask, “Is this necessary?”, and, on a detailed basis, at each individual process.

Q27            Dawn Butler: Some in the research community disagree with your recommendations, which I suppose is a healthy debate. For example, the Wellcome Trust suggested that a single-stage grant application was quicker and easier for applicants and evaluators than the two-stage process you recommend. What is your response to the Wellcome Trust?

Professor Tickell: You are talking to an academic, so the answer to most things is that it is complex.

Professor Tickell: I do not think there is a one size fits all. Other funders have tried dual-stage applications and have found benefit from them. NERC does it in some of its schemes to great effect; Wellcome has tried it and it has not always succeeded, so I do not think there is a simple “It works for everybody”.

Secondly, what we are trying to do is get everybody to look across the whole endeavour rather than the bit that just impacts on them. In many grant schemes you have a 10% or 15% success rate, so you have 85% or 90% of effort wasted. If half or a third of the grant application is not about the scientific case but about what you are going to spend the money on, and making sure you have all the costings appropriately done and the impact case appropriately made, that is not about the fundamental scientific case.

What we are really suggesting is that there are lots of advantages in having the scientific case looked at originally and initially and then, if it has merit, it goes to a full application. I do not think Wellcome is entirely wrong, but I do not think it is entirely right either.

Q28            Dawn Butler: You recommended that institutions with a strong track record should be able to bypass certain assurances to access funding. Do you think that would create a two-tier system benefiting more established institutions? Would that double-down on any bias towards those institutions, so how would new institutions get a look in?

Professor Tickell: There would be risks in it, which is why we are very clear that you would have to have dipstick testing as well as anything else. We are certainly not thinking of the former Ofsted regime where you get a good score and that is it forever. The funders know those organisations they are most concerned about and there is no sense that it is the old-established, stronger research institutions that always get a clean bill of health and newer less-established research institutions that do not. I suspect that it is about the strength of process within an organisation rather than the names you have already heard of. I know some of them and obviously I cannot refer to them in this Committee.

Q29            Dawn Butler: How will the bypass work?

Professor Tickell: What you need to understand is that there is a huge amount of assurance that takes place with regular audits. The regularity of those audits takes a lot of time and money, and the question for me is whether that is entirely necessary to meet the public policy objective around effective and efficient use of funds. Are we reaching the public policy objective by having very frequent audits? I think the evidence is that we are not.

Q30            Chair: Professor Tickell, in one of our other inquiries into research integrity a proposal was made by several witnesses that there should be registered reports—people register their hypothesis at the beginning of a research endeavour and compare it without, so you cannot change it on the way, as it were. Is that something you have considered? Do you think that would increase or reduce bureaucracy in the research funding environment?

Professor Tickell: We did not expressly consider this. I have a lot of sympathy with it because it speaks to the fundamental integrity of science. To be very clear, the review of research bureaucracy does not say that we should not have bureaucracy around research. There are lots of good reasons for thinking that we need to have bureaucratic oversight. We are trying to say that over time we tend to add and never look back and subtract. On research integrity, another area of real importance is trust and perception. We are certainly not saying we should not have oversight in terms of security, either.

Q31            Graham Stringer: Has your report had any impact so far, apart from stimulating discussion and support and criticism?

Professor Tickell: It has had some. Surprisingly, the two areas in which it has had the most impact are within universities themselves. Quite a number of universities are conducting, or have conducted, very substantial reviews of their own bureaucratic purposes. For example, my own house, the University of East Anglia, has done a very good fundamental review and has taken or is taking out quite a lot of work.

The second area is within the national institutes for health research, which, in their language, have very strongly embraced “busting bureaucracy” and are working and will continue to work to reduce the amount of bureaucracy.

The Government response to my report is imminent. I have read only one draft of it. I have spoken to the Secretary of State and she is enthusiastic; indeed, her only reservation at the moment is whether they are going far enough rather than not, so there is strong impetus. It landed last summer during a period of some turbulence in politics, as Sir Paul said.

Q32            Graham Stringer: On 24 January, Kate Bingham took the exact opposite approach to Sir Paul in terms of diplomacy. She launched a pretty devastating criticism of the civil service’s and the Government's response to science, in particular biological sciences, in this country. To paraphrase what she said, they were cavalier with tax credits and small businesses; they were driving large businesses out of the country; they simply did not understand the commercial relationship with research. How does your recommendation sit against Kate Bingham's criticisms?

Professor Tickell: First, I should say I am not entirely sure I share all of her analysis. She took a very jaded view of the civil service response, but, if we look back at the pandemic and the way the whole research community, in particular the government-funded research bodies through UKRI, responded to that pandemic, it was extremely agile. If we could return to a permanent war footing and reduce a lot of the bureaucratic processes, as we did during that period, we would be in a much better position.

Q33            Graham Stringer: I think that was the point, was it not? Everything that had been learned during the epidemic was being quickly unlearned by the civil service.

Professor Tickell: I am not here to speak to the civil service. I think quite a lot has been learned; it is just that it gets learned in slow time. In truth, we cannot operate on a war footing all the time. People became exhausted. There are important checks and balances, particularly around safety in medicine.

I am not here to speak for the civil service. I do not think everything is perfect. If some of our recommendations get implemented we can move forward, but we need to have some checks and balances.

Q34            Graham Stringer: Sir Paul, would you like to comment on what Kate Bingham said in January?

Sir Paul Nurse: I think we did learn something. I ought to say that Kate Bingham is one of my bosses. Kate has strong opinions and is happy to express them, and I think there is a lot of truth there.

We could learn even more from covid. As you probably know, the Crick set up testing within three weeks and at one stage we were doing 15% to 20% of all testing. When I wrote to Minister Hancock and said that if he rolled this out across all university institutes he would have 100,000 within weeks, it took them three months to reply—and then I got an answer from a civil servant. You may have looked at some of this earlier. Therefore, it was not always agile and there was a certain amount of arrogance there, which I think needs to be corrected. Kate was very familiar with that as well and so it was perhaps in the back of her mind.

Q35            Graham Stringer: Sir Paul, perhaps I might ask you directly—Professor Tickell might like to respond. One of the delights of being on this Committee is meeting some of the world's most eminent scientists such as yourself, but you have written a very long report; it is not the first report you have written. Do you think it is a wise use of the country's brilliant minds to be writing reports and not be in laboratories?

Sir Paul Nurse: I did volunteer. I was asked. I am near the end of my career and I have had a lot of experience. I still have research activity. Better to use me than somebody at the height of their career, frankly. I am still close enough to the coalface, as I call it, to have something to communicate. I do not mind; I think it is good that they use old people like me for that purpose.

Q36            Graham Stringer: Professor Tickell, do you think we use our most distinguished scientists in the best way, or do we put them into bureaucracies and join them to the great and good rather than letting them do what they are good at?

Professor Tickell: In all honesty, there is a lot of truth in what Paul just said. Sometimes, the very best ideas come from people at an earlier stage of their career in terms of the intellectual environment. As you go through your career you develop wisdom and understanding of the system as a whole. I think it is a good use of people to use the capabilities they have at that stage of their career.

Q37            Chair: You are a vice-chancellor running a very successful research university that takes some administration, and your report is all about bureaucracy—some of it good and some of it not good. Does Graham’s question apply in your university? Are you taking people from research to run the university administratively, at the cost of our research excellence?

Professor Tickell: Truthfully, there is a risk of that. One of the reasons we want people in areas of research leadership to have research strength is that that is how they get both an understanding of the system and the respect of their colleagues. That respect of colleagues in research leadership is important, but it does mean we do lose some great scientists to research leadership. We are doing that at the moment in my university.

Q38            Graham Stringer: If I may ask some questions on Horizon, I absolutely do not expect you to respond on behalf of the Government. I put this to both witnesses. Do you expect there to be a deal?

Professor Tickell: At the moment, I do. Obviously, I am not party to any of the negotiations, but all the indications are that there is good collaboration between our side and the Europeans. I feel optimistic that we will get a deal, but clearly it has to be a deal that works for both sides.

Sir Paul Nurse: I think that the Secretary of State, Michelle Donelan, has talked to a lot of scientists and has got the message. The almost universal message is that association with Horizon is crucial for the success of UK science and, therefore, the future of our country.

Let me say a little more about it. There are three major groupings of science, blocs if you like: North America, Asia, with the focus on China, and Europe, where we are fully engaged and indeed have a major leadership role, albeit an informal one.

My understanding is that the EU financial deal is generous and recognises the two-year hiatus, which was a possible sticking point. I see no excuse whatsoever not to associate. If we do not associate, I see us drifting off into the cold north-east Atlantic rather by ourselves. I just do not think it will be any good to us at all. Frankly, we are dithering too much and giving mixed messages with plan B. To misquote, the Government should just get association done.

Will it happen? If I can be frank about it, I think the Prime Minister may be dragging his feet. I was one of 15 Nobel laureates who wrote to the Prime Minister in February to say this was extremely important. I am afraid our letter was not even acknowledged, let alone replied to, so I suspect he may not be listening as well as the Secretary of State.

Q39            Graham Stringer: It is still not acknowledged?

Sir Paul Nurse: It is not acknowledged and there is no reply on one of the most important issues for science that we are facing today.

Q40            Graham Stringer: That is extraordinary.

Yesterday, in Westminster Hall there was a debate on Horizon which travelled over most of the well-known arguments with which you will be as familiar as members of this Committee. One of the arguments, which I had not heard expressed as strongly before, was that we would lose a seat at the table if we were not part of Horizon, not just on grants and research co-operation but in setting the agenda for future research. Is that a real concern? Does not the nature of problems determine what comes next rather than a committee across Europe?

Professor Tickell: The framing of the question is really important. There are numerous strategic priorities; the way they get framed through those negotiations is very important.

Sir Paul Nurse: I concur completely with Adam. We had enormous influence before, obviously not political but in the committees and discussion groups. The UK is respected and we had influence on all the activities happening there. We will lose all of that. To be perfectly clear and frank about it, plan B does not substitute for it. That is why I say we will get very lonely and we will not have the influence on the world that is appropriate for a science superpower, which I think all political parties and scientists absolutely want. We are losing out if we do not do that in exactly the way you describe.

Q41            Graham Stringer: This country has a disproportionate number of the world's leading universities; there are more in this country than in the European Union. It is an extraordinary achievement. I understand the arguments about collaboration between research units and the benefits of that, but is there not an alternative view that because of the nature of the EU we are collaborating with universities at a particular level and maybe we should be collaborating with Harvard, Caltech and some of the equivalent universities to Imperial, Oxford, Cambridge, etc.?

Sir Paul Nurse: Of course we should and we do, but the reality is that 70% of our contacts at the moment are with countries in the European Union, not just universities. Remember what I said earlier. There is much research outside the universities—for example, the Max Planck institutes, and in France CNRS, Inserm and the Pasteur and Curie Institutes, all of which are powerhouses with which we have interactions. We need to have outreach around the world, but most of our contacts are more local with countries that are culturally similar to us and with which we have learnt to work and have set up over many years productive interactions and ways of working.

I am afraid that all of that is now in jeopardy. It is extremely important that we deliver this. There will be deep depression if it does not happen. That has to be recognised. It is not just all about money; it is about interactions and talking, even lower-level interactions that it is so difficult to put a finger on.

Every time as a group leader I hire somebody from anywhere in the world they ask whether we will be connecting to Horizon. It is a sticking point for them. I will lose people. Last year, my institute won £15 million from the ERC. It is a different, diversified way of providing money. I will have a big budget hole in my institute if we do not connect. Plan B does not provide any substitute. It will damage very important institutions if we do not connect.

Q42            Chair: Sir Paul, on the point you made about there being three international blocs, you mentioned North America, Europe and the far east. You are someone who in his career has had substantial engagement with the United States. You were at Rockefeller in New York. Is it feasible for us to be part of the North American bloc?

Sir Paul Nurse: Of course, it is feasible because we have all these connections at the level of research groups, and that is what we should have. In setting the agenda—this was the point Graham asked about—we will have almost no impact on North America; we will be irrelevant to it and we will not have that connection.

Q43            Chair: Is it organised as a bloc in the sense that Horizon organises Europe in a bloc?

Sir Paul Nurse: North America—it is mainly the United States, but I do put Canada in there—is self-referential. I was there for seven or eight years and ran the university. They talk only about North America. At the level of a research group, I would talk to people, so that is there, but not in the big picture in any sense of the word.

There is a secondary point. Let us talk briefly about China. I also have strong connections there. I am an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, for example, so I am familiar with that as well. There, we are in difficult political circumstances, but, just like in the cold war where science kept the door open to the Soviet Union in the 1950s with Pugwash and so on, it is science that can provide something on the diplomatic stage to keep open those connections, which we will eventually need to open fully. We should not forget the relationships there, but China will look to the European Union, not the UK. In the big picture, North America will look to the European Union, not the UK.

Q44            Chair: It is fair to observe that this Committee has taken lots of evidence over time and that sometimes with China it is the scientific interaction that is most problematic.

Sir Paul Nurse: It is at the technical level, but not the discovery level. The work I do is pretty useless in the short term, so it does not cause a problem.

Q45            Carol Monaghan: We have been hearing similar arguments for the past couple of years about the importance of association. When does it become too late?

Professor Tickell: I think we are close. It is never too late. In some respects, it is regrettable that we were not in from the outset because the pattern for pretty much every framework programme is that UK scientists tend to be very successful at the beginning of the programme and then it tails off. Missing the first two years is regrettable, but for all the reasons Paul and others have given over the years the scientific advantages of re‑association are very strong. Clearly, there is a negotiation going on. My own take on the publication of the Pioneer prospectus is that that made the Commission think we were serious that, if we could not get a deal, we would go away, so in some respects I think it was politically the right thing to do.

Sir Paul Nurse: I have to disagree with Adam. I think they think we were posturing. I do not think they took it seriously at all because it was rather weak and was not a good bargaining chip.

In terms of time, we are now at the right place. They will take note of it; they will not charge us for the two years. Although that was mentioned a lot in plan B, it is a paper tiger; it is not an issue. We can do it. Believe me, it will be a fantastic boost to the morale of all scientists in this country.

Chair: Time will tell which of the hypotheses advanced by our two witnesses is right. We hope not very much time will elapse before we know. I thank Professor Tickell and Sir Paul for their evidence this morning.

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Sir Adrian Smith, Dame Ottoline Leyser and Professor Tracey.

Chair: Sir Adrian Smith is president of the Royal Society. He has helped this Committee substantially over the years. As well as being president of the Royal Society, he is chief executive of the Alan Turing Institute and a member of the Government’s AI Council.

We are very pleased to welcome back again Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, chief executive of UKRI and regius professor of botany at the University of Cambridge.

We welcome for the first time, but I hope not the last, Professor Irene Tracey, the relatively new vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford and professor of anaesthetic neuroscience in the Nuffield department of clinical neurosciences at that university. Thank you very much indeed for joining us.

We have a lot of questions pertaining to the various reports that have been issued, but since we ended the previous panel talking about Horizon I want to take a few minutes to ask some questions on that. My colleague Aaron Bell will lead on it.

Q46            Aaron Bell: Let us start with the same question that Graham put a few moments ago. Is there a deal to be done? Do you expect a deal to be done? What have we lost to date, and can we get that back?

Dame Ottoline Leyser: There is certainly a deal to be done. There is very widespread consensus that that would be the best option for the UK. It does need to be contextualised by the two years that have gone by in the meantime, so negotiating a good value-for-money deal is critical, recognising that the value of Horizon goes well beyond money, so it is explicit.

In the original decision to associate, the amount we put in would be more than the amount we get out, in monetary terms, but in value for the research and innovation community in the UK it would be very well worth it because of all the non-monetary benefits that come from that big collaborative bloc and our ability to contribute to and benefit from the much more collective working opportunity we would get across the European Union and out from that into the wider global environment.

Sir Adrian Smith: I think that we will get a bit repetitious.

I am president of the Royal Society, but we talk across all the four national academies. There is an enormous consensus that this is the desirable outcome. Are we going to get it? I think we are much closer to getting it now than we have been. There is a mood of optimism much heartened by the personal commitment to achieving this of the new Secretary of State in the new Government Department. I do not know how many fingers we have in this room, but if we crossed them all perhaps it would get us there.

Professor Tracey: I completely agree; I could not be more in sync with what Sir Paul Nurse and my colleagues here said. We are all scientists and so are deeply involved. We have lived and breathed this for 35 years, at least in my case for grants, so we can speak from the coalface about the importance that goes beyond the monetary sense.

I am optimistic that we will reach a deal. It is fantastic and welcome to see the commitment made both in the report of Pioneer and orally. It is very simple. When the whole of the scientific community, which knows what it is talking about on this, is telling you this is what we want to do, that is a resounding thing to bear in mind.

Q47            Aaron Bell: Would associating during the life cycle of Horizon pose any particular challenges? We heard from the previous panel that it may have lost us some influence already in the way the committees are structured and so on. How can we mitigate that, and what preparatory work is being done by the academic community ahead of a potential agreement?

Professor Tracey: You asked previously what the damage was. I can speak from the context of the UK. I am obviously representing universities and I can speak specifically about Oxford.

We have already seen a reduction in grant income because of that lack of clarity around association in terms of applications coming in and the free flow of talent between our laboratories, which is absolutely imperative to continue our world-leading status. There has been an impact and we have seen it already, but it is early.

It is obviously undesirable that we have lost a couple of years, but because of the desirability of being associated again with us, because we have that excellent base in science, I do not doubt we will have all the capacity rapidly to get up to speed again. Colleagues will be able to say what has been put in place to mitigate that, so we will be ready at university level.

Dame Ottoline Leyser: It is worth emphasising that all the way through this it has been entirely possible and we have worked hard to encourage the UK research and innovation community to apply to all of the Horizon schemes. That has been supported by the Government’s underwrite guarantee, which we have been operating at UKRI. More than 2,000 grants and £1 billion has been committed through that activity, so it is not as though we have been out of it.

Q48            Aaron Bell: Do you think that has worked pretty well?

Dame Ottoline Leyser: It has worked pretty well. I agree there is still an impact on overall volume. The uncertainty and anxiety around the whole attitude of the UK to its participation has had a chilling effect overall. It would be great to get through that and out the other side and go full steam ahead if we could get through the negotiations with a good financial deal for the UK. In terms of ramping up, things have slowed down, but they certainly have not stopped; it is just a question of driving back up the momentum.

Sir Adrian Smith: The other point for the Committee to know is that our colleagues in Europe are enthusiastic about having us back in, so there is momentum there. It is not as if, “Oh, well, the Brits haven’t been with us. Too bad.” They care about it. The academies in the UK kept in touch with sister academies across Europe, so re-entry would not be painful.

Q49            Aaron Bell: What are the potential road blocks? Sir Paul referred to the Prime Minister who was quoted back in March in The Times as being a little sceptical about the value of Horizon and whether we might be better off doing things ourselves. I do not know who might be best placed to answer whether an agreement might require reopening the trade and co-operation agreement we signed with the EU in December 2020. Nobody in Westminster is particularly keen to reopen any of the Brexit debates we had at the time, but is that a potential road block as well?

Sir Adrian Smith: I think it would be a stupid complication.

Q50            Aaron Bell: You think we can just find a way to do the deal.

Sir Adrian Smith: I am sure we can.

Q51            Aaron Bell: Do you sense any political unwillingness to do a deal?

Sir Adrian Smith: I have not had personal discussions with the Prime Minister—Paul seems to know his mind—but certainly I have had one-to-ones with the new Secretary of State and the new Department. I totally buy that she is committed to getting this through.

Professor Tracey: That is absolutely right. It has been a very welcome message to the community that the Secretary of State is quite explicit in the Pioneer document that the preference is to associate, so hopefully that can be persuasive if there are doubts in the Prime Minister's mind. I would just urge him to listen to the community, which is universal in its desire to associate.

Q52            Aaron Bell: On the timeline, obviously the sooner the better. Would any of you care to make a prediction? Are we talking about the next couple of months? Do we think that is a realistic timeline for an agreement?

Sir Adrian Smith: There is one timeline already in place: the Treasury underwrite of the ERC grants. That has been extended to the end of June. Whether that is a significant bit of the timetable, I do not know.

Q53            Aaron Bell: You think that June is a realistic date for an agreement.

Sir Adrian Smith: If it went beyond June we would need to extend the underwrite guarantee.

Q54            Aaron Bell: Are there any thoughts on the timeline?

Dame Ottoline Leyser: We are not directly involved in the negotiation, so it is very difficult to comment on that.

Professor Tracey: As soon as possible. The academic year for us tends to start in the September/October period; that is when we tend to induct all our new people, so in terms of the welcome arrival of talent it would be fantastic to have it resolved in the next few months.

Professor Leyser: We have focused a little on the academic community. A huge amount of this goes directly into businesses, and the business community is equally committed, and there is equally strong consensus on the importance of association.

Q55            Tracey Crouch: Your optimism for a deal is encouraging. In the meantime, the Government have published Pioneer. It has been broadly welcomed, I think, by the scientific research community. Why do you think that is so? Dame Ottoline, why has it been welcomed so much? Obviously, everyone is hoping for a deal, but is it a case of just welcoming an alternative?

Professor Leyser: There are two elements to that. One is that it is important that there is an alternative in place if it comes to the point that we are unable to reach a mutually agreeable deal. It is very important that we have something very rapid that we can put in place, because it would be a real knock to all kinds of things, including to the confidence that Paul talked about in our research and innovation system. It is really important that there is something to go fast and that the community understands and rapidly engages with. That is one thing.

The other element is that it is part of the real focus of the Government on research and innovation as a critical element of policy in supporting the future prosperity of the UK. It is critical that there has been consideration of the strands that would be required to deliver that, whether we are inside or outside.

One of the things that you will have seen emerging from the publication of the prospectus is an ongoing discussion about which elements of it we would want to prioritise if additional funding became available in the future.

That careful consideration of what UK research and innovation needs for its future success is critical, because the timeframes over which we need to invest in research and innovation to build long-term success for the UK are long, with long run-up times to get everybody aligned and ready to deliver. The opportunity of the prospectus to have those strategic conversations in either a non-association or an association context is really important.

Q56            Tracey Crouch: Which strands would you like to develop further if the funding became available?

Professor Leyser: There are a lot of really good ideas that we can take forward at various scales even within our current funding envelope. In the context of building stronger collaborations right across the globe, we already operate a number of so-called co-investigator schemes, where in a bottom-up way anyone who wants to write a grant can add an international co-investigator up to a certain percentage of the overall funding. There is a lot of interest in expanding that scheme in a way that would be financially sustainable. There is that option.

Then there are some of the more innovative things that I am very enthusiastic about like how we better support team research, and I would be very keen to prioritise, if there is new money, piloting some of those approaches to supporting teams as opposed to just individuals.

Q57            Tracey Crouch: Sir Adrian, do you have anything to add?

Sir Adrian Smith: I think you said that the Pioneer prospectus had had a warm welcome. I forget what words you used.

Tracey Crouch: Broadly warm.

Sir Adrian Smith: There is a grown-up recognition and acknowledgment that it is right and proper and prudent to think through alternatives. I do not think it would be right to say that there is enthusiasm that some of those alternatives would be sensible substitutions. In particular, with the ERC fellowship awards in the EU you have 30,000 academics and 34 countries as a resource for reviewing applications. Setting up a rival scheme, practically, is very difficult. You are up against an existing thing.

There was a reference in the previous panel to the letter that the Nobel laureates had written to the Prime Minister. I orchestrated that and was part of the signature. I think it right and proper, since it was stated that there has been no reply, that there has been a reply two days ago, but it came through me as the co-ordinator and is now being passed on. In that letter, the Prime Minister stated his preference for association.

Q58            Chair: Thank you very much indeed for clarifying that, Sir Adrian. Would it be possible to share that letter with the Committee?

Sir Adrian Smith: I will check the terms on which it was written to us.

Chair: Thank you very much.

Sir Adrian Smith: It came back to me with the encouragement to share it with the co-signatories. I will check.

Chair: We would be obliged. Thank you.

Q59            Tracey Crouch: Professor Tracey, do you have anything to add to follow on additional funding strands?

Professor Tracey: To follow on from Adrian, I would not overinterpret the relief that Pioneer produced in the community as a reflection of the preference. There is a reason it is referred to as plan B—plan A is to associate. None the less, the strong support for Britain to maintain its scientific integrity and excellence is great to see, with the various elements that they have touched on like the talent pool. We spoke about the infrastructure earlier. There was a caveat with that, subject to spending review, so there are question marks about the surety of some of the funding.

As Sir Paul Nurse said, infrastructure is, of course, part of what you can get with Horizon, and, of course, you have access to infrastructure in Europe, too, whether that is national patient databases or physical bits of kit that our people can go out and use.

There is relief there. It is good to see that there is a good slug of money to support the research and maintain our standing, and the pillars are fairly straightforward and obvious, but I would not overinterpret the relief that that has produced as enthusiasm.

Q60            Tracey Crouch: So, in summary, the preference is that you hope to associate to Horizon, but it is grown-up government to publish something like Pioneer. Great.

Sir Adrian, obviously you are very close to the civil service and the workings of government. Are you happy with the level of Government consultation as they developed Pioneer?

Sir Adrian Smith: It has only just been launched, so I am not quite sure about the nature of that consultation—

Tracey Crouch: In the process of producing.

Sir Adrian Smith: I have previous form because Graeme Reid and I wrote a plan B, but it was written in the context of an assumption that it was not guaranteed at all that we would get association. When the association was announced on Christmas eve 2020, or whenever it was, that we were going to associate and the hiatus has been the final sign-off, that changed very much the context of the plan B.

There has been consultation with the academies. I am not quite sure what the wider consultation from the civil servants and others was, but it certainly has not been at a level of publishing something that we have recently done with Pioneer so that everybody can think hard about it. Perhaps there ought to have been more encouragement of a debate earlier.

Q61            Tracey Crouch: Would anyone else like to answer the question in terms of Government consultation?

Professor Leyser: The opportunity we have now that this document has been published is precisely to use that as a foundation for a much wider consultation than has been possible in the context of developing the work. That is useful, regardless, as we look towards the next spending review, to understand what the priorities are of the research and innovation community and how they can be best brought together to deliver collectively more than the sum of the parts. We are looking forward very much to that active consultation in the context of plan B.

Obviously, UKRI has very wide stakeholder engagement and interaction continuously—that is part of our job—so we are always able to use that in developing our offers and funding portfolios, but this provides a focal point to anchor some of those discussions.

Q62            Carol Monaghan: We are hearing positive noises from you in terms of your expectations with association, and I think most of us here would share your enthusiasm for that. The best-case scenario is we get association, but we have this Pioneer plan with its four pillars. Are there any aspects of Pioneer that should be taken on board even if we get association, and what would be the benefits of that?

Sir Adrian Smith: Shall I have a first go at that? If you look at the current landscape—and people will have different views—one of the gaps has been the lack of what you might call an agility fund to respond opportunistically to opportunities that come up bilaterally and multilaterally. I remember being visited in the Alan Turing Institute by a group of Israeli academics who had £10 million in their back pocket to put on the table if we found another £10 million to do a joint Israeli AI. There was no sofa. There was nowhere to look for that—

Q63            Carol Monaghan: Would ARIA not deal with some of that?

Sir Adrian Smith: I think the concept of ARIA is not that it would be dishing out small amounts of money from the back of the sofa, but that it would be looking at really big, moonshot investments. That is a different category. It is interesting that ARIA has been set up with a lot of rhetoric about removing the usual bureaucratic constraints, which leads some of us to think, “If that is great for really big, important moonshots, why isn’t it important for everyday science?”

Q64            Carol Monaghan: Okay. I would love to have the sofa that you have, Sir Adrian. The agility to fund, you think, would be useful.

Sir Adrian Smith: There are many bilateral and multilateral opportunities in addition to those we seek in the European association.

Q65            Carol Monaghan: You mentioned Israel, which has association. Would other countries within Horizon have the agility to find money?

Sir Adrian Smith: Both within the EU and more generally—a large number of the other countries that Paul Nurse and the Chair referred to in terms of percentages of spend like Japan, Korea, etc. At the moment we do not have substantial international co-operative funds generally as opposed to what we would get out of Horizon.

Q66            Carol Monaghan: Thank you. Any thoughts from any of the other panellists?

Professor Tracey: It is sort of in parallel and maybe linked. I wrote a report for the Treasury to discuss the role of the university sector in contributing to the innovation spin-out culture and how that can be really boosted, what would be best practice-sharing and what would be some bold things that we could do. I am co-chairing that report working closely with the Treasury.

Part of the opportunity is to think about what might be some elements of the Pioneer programme that would really help scale up that opportunity, which is there and there is a thirst for it. We have some great success stories in some of our universities that have been long in the game of doing spin-outs and innovation, but we really need to ramp that up because the opportunity is huge for us, and it will be a very direct contributor to economic growth.

There will be really interesting elements that speak to the agility issue and broader collaborations as well as access to funds that would really help do that next piece of scaling up and creating more innovation spin-outs. That is one thing to say.

This is not to limit at all the breadth of what Paul said around the need to have a suite and a menu of different ways of doing research. Obviously, I can speak from the university sector. As I have said quite publicly recently, there is a need for a root-and-branch review of just how we are funding our whole university sector for its surety. If that is your pipeline to drive some of the training of the talent pool that is going to go out and work and feed intellectually to the economy, and be part of that research endeavour, we have a real problem, because we are having to massively cross-subsidise for research and undergraduate teaching through international student fees, and this is coming to a point of a crisis.

There are some very important funding problems that we have to address. The Horizon thing will deliver for us the research to go, but then, within our own house, we have to sort out what we are doing and how we are making sure that we have a solid footing for the university sector to survive going forward, because they are going to be your engine room of not just the research but the talent pool that you train that goes out into every sector.

Carol Monaghan: Thank you. I think that is probably part of a wider discussion.

Professor Tracey: It is, but it is linked. All these things link.

Q67            Carol Monaghan: Thank you. Dame Ottoline, do you have anything to add?

Professor Leyser: I can comment on a number of these issues. Having the right diversity of funding mechanisms, institutions, people and career paths across our system is critical, and then properly incentivising connectivity between those. Those are the core elements of the UKRI strategy. Through that diversity you build resilience, and with resilience comes a little bit more agility in the system. In the context of a back-of-the-sofa issue, there is—

Carol Monaghan: It is a big sofa.

Professor Leyser: There are two points to that. One is that there are a very large number of people—internationally, even—arriving with opportunities hoping for a response quickly, and it is very difficult to prioritise those even if you have a very big sofa.

The other element that I think is very relevant, particularly for this Committee, and we have not touched on it yet, is the way UK Government budgets work, which are strictly annual. Although our budget is committed multiple years into the future—it has to be; that is how research and innovation works—we have to deliver on our budget every year, not a penny over and within 1% under. That means you cannot have pots of money sitting down the back of the sofa, because at the end of the year they disappear. That constraint on how research and innovation funding works is quite difficult, and it maps on to a broader constraint that you have already mentioned, which is subject to spending review.

If the UK is absolutely serious about its future built on research and innovation, we need to get into legislation some long-term stability that allows long-term planning for investment in research and innovation that provides the opportunity for the agility that Adrian talks about and the security and sustainability that Irene mentioned. That is difficult to do politically, but there seems to be very broad cross-party consensus now about the importance of research and innovation for the UK’s future.

It is one of the few things that we really can trumpet about and provide nationally a coherent, shared endeavour to build prosperity right across the UK. There is now a window of opportunity to get into a position where, as a nation, we think more seriously and long term about investment in research and innovation, and that is actually reflected in our legislative machinery.

Q68            Carol Monaghan: We have heard some good ideas from you all about what could be taken forward in the best-case scenario if we get association. Let us look at the worst-case scenario: we do not associate. How well prepared are Government and the research community to implement Pioneer?

Sir Adrian Smith: Just take the example I referred to earlier of the prestigious ERC fellowships. Behind the scenes, there is a huge reviewing process. How are we going to replicate that process in competition with an already existing scheme? The tone of Pioneer perhaps underestimates the implementation difficulties of a lot of those strands.

Q69            Carol Monaghan: Sir Adrian, can I press you a little on this? One of the pillars of Pioneer is to do with talent. The Royal Society has been quite vocal about international talent and visa fees. Do you think we are in the right place to attract international talent given the work that the Royal Society has done in exposing that?

Sir Adrian Smith: There have consistently been inconsistent signals. The general tone of discussion about immigration and numbers and occasional wild statements about restricting students and so on run entirely counter to trying to create the environment and tone that make the UK a magnet for global talent—in addition to the stupidities of visa costs. It costs six times as much to bring a family to the UK as it would to go to the Netherlands, but in the wider scheme of things the finances are almost irrelevant. It is the tone. There is still a lot to be done to line up consistent Government messaging about us being open to talent.

Q70            Carol Monaghan: Can I put my original question to the other two panellists? Are we ready to implement Pioneer?

Professor Leyser: Although we are not by any means the only delivery partner with the academies and so on playing a critical role, UKRI would be the main delivery body for Pioneer. It will be challenging. It will not be easy to stand up that breadth and complexity of programme instantly. We have obviously been working very hard to make sure that we are in the best possible position to do that.

Getting back to the rather technical point to do with the way budgets work annually, to deliver against the spend profile gets more difficult every day we move into a financial year. There is quite a technical context against which delivery is bounded by the annualisation of Government budgets.

Beyond that, it is really important to say that there are a number of mechanisms embedded in the Pioneer prospectus that are about smoothing the transition and ensuring that funding continues to flow into our research and innovation community in the most effective way while the big, substantive new programmes like those moonshot programmes are standing up, and those are mechanisms that we use and therefore are available now to mitigate some of that transitional pressure.

Q71            Carol Monaghan: If we were to find out today that we had not got association, how long would it be before we saw Pioneer up and running?

Professor Leyser: Critical elements of Pioneer like the transition measures I mentioned are almost instantly ready to go. That is the first thing to say.

A number of the schemes that are a core part of Pioneer are evolutions of existing schemes, so we have the opportunity to set them up quite quickly. The issue concerns some of the bigger, more flagship elements like the moonshot programmes. It undoubtedly will take a little more time to build ideas about what the critical moonshots would be and how to deliver them, but that is why the consultation now on the current prospectus is so important.

Q72            Carol Monaghan: You are not going to commit to a time on that in terms of setting up—

Professor Leyser: On the moonshot?

Carol Monaghan: On the moonshot.

Professor Leyser: No, I am not going to. I do not think we can because that will be critically dependent on the consultation.

Q73            Carol Monaghan: Finally, Professor Tracey, do you have anything to add?

Professor Tracey: As scientists in the university sector, we are pretty adaptable. We will adapt. The delivery element will fall largely on Ottoline’s remit. My concern would be a brain-drain problem. You heard from Paul Nurse about the desirability to attract talent outside Europe to come because of the access to Europe. That would be my immediate concern. While we are having that phase, we would do further damage to the damage that we can already witness statistically in terms of the drop of applicants coming to us from Europe and the drop in grant income.

I am really glad that Ottoline mentioned the technical issue. I was not going to mention it. The fear that was struck when people heard about the £1.6 billion returned to the Treasury from the funding pot really reflects the lack of understanding of the fact that science is done over a temporal scale, and that you cannot just map on to the way you would run your budgets as a business in a one-year cycle. It is more complex and nuanced than that.

The surety of the funding, the safety of that and the ability to be able to plan the type of science that you need to plan to do your groundbreaking discovery work has to be there for the community. The fact that that happened really did not instil any confidence that going forward outside of that there would not be more of that happening. I note the Pioneer document says at the start that the infrastructure is “subject to spending review”, so things are not as sure as we would need and want.

Professor Leyser: On the plus side, in Pioneer it explicitly mentions the £14-odd million over the full length of the programme, which I think is very heartening to see—that clear commitment to support science to the value of the Horizon investment should we wind up unfortunately not being able to associate.

Q74            Katherine Fletcher: Thank you, esteemed panel. I have been listening quite hard to what you are saying. There is a thread running through your comments, and I just want to check whether I hear you correctly.

There is an appetite for a significant simplification and clarification of the non-ARIA, non-moonshot funding process. Is there anything that any one of you want to say to this Committee, which is, “Can Government do this because it will be better?” I want to give you the opportunity to fill in the “this” box. Sir Adrian, could I perhaps start with you?

Sir Adrian Smith: Look at it the other way round. There is a great welcome for increased investment, although, as Paul Nurse said earlier, maybe we still do not have the scale of that right. Given the investment and the landscape in which it takes place and the Treasury rules against which the cheques go out, there are a couple of things that we have referred to. Ottoline eloquently referred to the nonsense of year-on-year budgeting in a system where you are trying to do long-term—

Katherine Fletcher: The next three years.

Sir Adrian Smith: The second thing that was mentioned by Paul earlier in his review is rules on salaries. I chair the board of the Diamond Light Source synchrotron at Harwell, and we are currently in the process of recruiting a chief executive. There are not thousands of people around the world to run synchrotrons; you are fishing in a very small pool. We do not have the ability, except after we have made an appointment, to go and say, “But I need to pay him or her more than the Prime Minister.” This is a nonsense constraint. It buys you nothing.

Q75            Chair: That is the rule, is it not? If you want to pay someone more than the Prime Minister, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury has to approve it.

Sir Adrian Smith: Yes, three months later, by which time the person has given up.

These are things that cost virtually nothing. By all means, put a total budget constraint on an institute or a facility, but then trust the board that runs it to stay within its budget. To have to ask permission to give somebody £10,000 more is a nonsense. There is a whole raft of stuff like that.

Q76            Katherine Fletcher: I would be fascinated to see the raft. I do not think we have time for it now, but would it be possible to write to the Committee? I just want to give you the opportunity. What is the “please do this” box for non-moonshot funding?

Professor Leyser: There are a number of elements. I push back a little bit on the framing of “please do this” box for non-moonshot funding because that implies that the moonshot funding is somehow wonderful and unbureaucratic.

Q77            Katherine Fletcher: I want to give you the chance to get both on the record. Go for it.

Professor Leyser: We need to think about the full diversity of funding mechanisms that the system needs and the full diversity of activities that the system needs. There is no one size fits all. It is absolutely essential that the next generation of researchers have the opportunity to apply entirely flexibly all of that stuff all the way through. We need multiple different sorts of funding mechanisms, and those take different amounts of time to deliver. The community is actually keen on the fact that there is high-quality peer review and they get the opportunity to respond to it and so on.

Adam Tickell has done an excellent job in his report of setting out the opportunities for reducing the unnecessary layers of bureaucracy in the system. They come from multiple places, some of which are the very broad application of Cabinet Office rules in contexts where they do not make so much sense, and some of them are cultural right across the research and innovation community—a conservativism in how we then think about and apply those rules collecting information in case you need it rather than only when you need it, as he highlights. From the point of view of the Committee, the list is quite well articulated in Adam’s report.

Q78            Katherine Fletcher: That is helpful. Professor Tracey, would you add anything?

Professor Tracey: Some of the interesting ways that we can go forward are a little bit like moonshot, so it is a bit parallel. It is slightly more bottom-up. We spoke about large collaborations beyond Europe with some of our major research counterparts and taking on some of the big challenges that are out there, like climate, mental health, AMR, etc., and in a slightly more co-ordinated, bottom-up approach saying, “We’ve got this, and this is what we want to solve.” That could encompass that breadth of variety that we have in our research portfolio in Britain rather than the constant response mode of funding where you go into the cycle and say, “We must not touch the Haldane principle and peer review, etc.”

I think there is space at this next evolution via science for us to be a little bit more proactive as the scientific community to identify what the big questions are and to co-ordinate among ourselves, and then just ask for the money, frankly. Then it can still go through a peer review process. It is just slightly a bit moonshotty but a bit different from that.

Q79            Katherine Fletcher: The challenge we have is that you guys are turbo-clever, so you describe it in this very way: “There are all the cogs in the old-fashioned clock, and it is going to get us across the Atlantic without losing more than a second.” How to simplify that so that it is actionable by civil servants in multiple streams is what I am driving at. That is why I was trying to interrupt you. You want to come back in.

Chair: Very briefly, if you would not mind, because we have other stuff to get on to.

Professor Leyser: Among the huge things we won in the last spending review, apart from a three-year settlement for the first time in the existence of UKRI, was more flexibility to move money between the different pots that we have, and that has allowed us to do exactly what Irene described: to understand what we are funding through that dynamic response mode, which is really the lifeblood of the research and innovation system, and then collectively put together some central funding that all the councils bought into to identify the missing pieces, and then add some of that top-down to really capture the benefit of all of that bottom-up. Some of exactly those programmes that Irene describes are absolutely about to launch.

The creation of UKRI really provides that opportunity to work in that more coherent and co-ordinated way, delivering the full range of things that we need to do with every pound and able to do multiple things. One of the most frustrating things about some of the frameworks through which we work is that they drive towards labelled pots of money with a flag on top saying, “Do this with it,” which is actually incredibly poor value for money, because they do not allow you to make the most of the collective portfolio that you can build.

Q80            Chair: I want to get the panel’s views on some of the reports. Obviously, the Grant report is particular to UKRI. Can I just pick up on something that Professor Tracey said? You are relatively new as vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford. I think you said that there should be a review of how universities generally are funded. There was a proposal to that effect from your equivalent at the London School of Economics, Dame Minouche Shafik, to say that there should be a comprehensive review. You are associating yourself with that.

Professor Tracey: Absolutely. There has been much conversation among the VC community both in the Russell group and in UUK about the situation. I was quite public about this in some recent media coverage. That is the one major thing I have learnt coming into the role. Obviously, I have been an academic in Oxford and had other leadership roles, but in coming into this role and for the first time understanding the broader ecosystem I have been shocked at just how perilous it and the funding are. So I completely support the comments from the head of SOAS about the overdependency on particular groups of international students and that if that was pulled to avoid the brain drain from particular countries you would be driving universities into a very perilous state. I am completely with Minouche on that point, as are many other VCs.

Q81            Chair: One of the aspects of that was a look again at student fees and loans and that whole system.

Professor Tracey: It is the whole lot. You can even link it to aspects about QR and the full economic costing, and the fact that research is expensive. Regulated fees are a problem—there is no doubt about that—but it is a bigger issue than that. It is a size and shape question and it is about a fundamental philosophical discussion about what the country wants from its universities. I am an educator, so I am a passionate believer in their role in teaching and in our research capabilities, but we have a model that is just not sustainable, and we need to look at it now in earnest.

Q82            Chair: The critics of Dame Minouche’s initiative have said that in recent years we have had the Dearing review, the Browne review and more recently the Augar review; you do not need another review that is going to take many years. The answers are all there. You just need to decide. What is your brief response to that before we go on to some of the other questions?

Professor Tracey: You are right; action is always better, is it not, than more discussion and more reports? There is a laser focus, particularly now as we have come out of the pandemic and the university sector has gone through some interesting transformational changes, on how it thinks about its teaching and its teaching delivery. We are fully embracing what Brexit means and the impact that has had on the university sector. This is a good time, going forward, to think about what it is we want out of our university sector and how we are going to best fund it.

Q83            Chair: Our remaining questions will be about the Grant review. We were not able to hear directly from Sir David, but we have read his report. Given that we discussed two other reviews, the Nurse review and the Tickell review, both of which have been mentioned, may I briefly ask the panel whether they have anything to say about those reviews from the standpoints of their organisations before I turn to Stephen Metcalfe to ask about the Grant review?

Sir Adrian Smith: Coming back to the landscape, there is a lot in Paul Nurse’s review that draws attention to the very different frameworks that apply to different public sector research establishments and different institutes, and the fact that some get the strategic free funding that you get through QR, which gives you flexibility. There are a lot of places that do not get those equivalent things, so it all becomes very transactional. There is something to be done.

If I speak for a moment with my hat on as director of the Alan Turing Institute, the way in which that was set up links it to a particular research council, and that particular research council is within UKRI. Then there are wider issues that in the past would be indicated by BEIS but now by the new Department. There are complicated structures for which, implicitly in Paul’s review, there is a call to see whether they are the right structures and the right roots for the individual thing.

Artificial intelligence is a big national strategic priority. Do we have the set-up right that does the funding and the governance of the institute? That applies to a lot of other institutes. He did use the phrase, “We need to rescue some of these institutes from the governance and funding frameworks that they are in.” I would just echo that with my Turing hat on. If the panel would like chapter and verse, I can give it to you in writing.

Q84            Chair: Thank you. We will take you up on that in writing. Very briefly, Dame Ottoline, on the two other reviews.

Professor Leyser: A huge benefit of both of those reviews maps back a little bit to the conversation we have just been having. They are systems-level reviews. They look across the whole system and ask whether we have all the right bits and whether they articulate in the right way. Of course, on the one hand you can always argue that we need more money. Actually, at least as important is having the right incentive structures embedded across those systems so that the different parts support one another collectively.

My view is that if we poured extra money into the system at the moment it would simply re-equilibrate with the same tensions, because the incentives are not there to make the money go into the right places and do the right things. There, we have to think about it in that more holistic way. We cannot say, “Teaching—we have done that. Research—we have done that.”

We need to think about it in an integrated way, and there I would flag the huge opportunity from the science and technology framework that has just been published, which absolutely sets out all the different elements right across Government that you have to get into place to make this work. It includes technical skills and the wider range of skills that we need for the system and the public procurement system and all those things. That is the chance with the creation of DSIT and, hopefully, the embedding of that framework right across Government to create the incentives and then the funding that goes with that to drive the system into a much healthier place.

Professor Tracey: They are two excellent reports. I know there has been an independent committee to look with the Office for Students at the regulatory burden. That is a real problem that we definitely have to address. That broadens out to clinical trials and other aspects of how we put increasing barriers to be nimble and to be able to deliver on things. The regulatory piece is a big one and it is definitely a problem for the universities, and it is draining resources in an economic climate, which I have emphasised, as before. I am a big fan of the systems and the cluster approach.

Paul mentioned clusters and collaborations, and those naturally happen organically. That is when they are best. There are opportunities to think about how we address some of these big questions that we want to address in science, which definitely need to be approached with a more interdisciplinary approach. Thinking in ways that we can support a more cluster-based approach across our institutions would be interesting and very welcome.

Those are a few things that I would highlight.

We have focused a lot on the academics and the researchers, but there is the glue that makes it all happen—the technical support staff. We need proper funding for them and proper surety, security and career structures. We all know in our sectors how important that group of skilled workforce is, and that is another area that we need to think about in the round. It is not just their role within the research institutes we have; it is about having a skilled workforce in Britain in parallel. This speaks a little bit to question marks around what we want in our broader educational system, because if we are really going to do the spin-outs and innovation scale-up we need a skilled workforce to land those companies in Britain, otherwise those companies go abroad.

Chair: Thank you very much indeed. We are now going to look at Sir David Grant’s report into UKRI. Stephen Metcalfe and then Tracey Crouch are going to ask some questions.

Q85            Stephen Metcalfe: Before I do that, Sir Adrian, you mentioned AI and whether the funding and set-up is right in the UK. Would you like to answer your own question? I am sure you will be aware that the Committee is doing an inquiry into AI. Is there anything you would like to put on the record?

Sir Adrian Smith: It is the paradox of it being so important and of interest to everybody that everybody’s finger gets in the pie. Over here, we have an AI council. In another Government Department we have offices for AI. UKRI has its AI strategy. EPSRC is the direct funder and has its own constraints, and so on and so forth.

With these big national strategic things you need to stand back somehow and ask: what is the sovereign capability that we need to build? It is difficult if umpteen Government Departments and umpteen different research councils are somehow in the pot. It may be something for the new DSIT where you have these high-level national strategic things to think about whether you try to slot it down the current structures or whether you need to think a bit more with a blank sheet of paper about what kind of best structure, institute, or whatever would drive that national strategic priority.

Q86            Stephen Metcalfe: That is food for thought, so thank you for that.

Sir Adrian Smith: We have the current structure, so UKRI does what it does and the EPSRC does what it does. The question is: is that the right way to trickle down to a national priority?

Q87            Stephen Metcalfe: Because that ecosystem has grown up quite rapidly and not necessarily with strategic thinking.

Sir Adrian Smith: Yes.

Q88            Stephen Metcalfe: Okay, thank you for that. The Grant review makes some recommendations around the board activity of UKRI. I will quote page 20 of the summary: “The board should actively engage more in the operational risks and challenges discussed in this review. Matters of UKRI’s performance should be discussed at full board level and not only delegated to the ARAP committee.” Then it goes on and talks about the speed of decision making and how that might be improved. Do you think it would be a good use of executive time to be more involved in the day-to-day operations?

Professor Leyser: The executive is obviously deeply involved in day-to-day operations.

Stephen Metcalfe: The board, sorry.

Professor Leyser: It is good practice on a high-level board to have, essentially, a segregated agenda where there are absolutely elements that are about providing challenge and scrutiny for the actions of the executive in delivering operationally. That is an important function. It is a question of also creating space on the agenda for the longer-term strategic discussions. It is a balance between the two. Sir David was of the view that that balance had been a little bit too far in one direction and that it was time to bring it a little bit back. Sir Andrew Mackenzie, the chair of our board, has actioned that very effectively. There is now a much deeper engagement at board level with all those operational aspects, and the relationship with the risk register and so on has been significantly deepened.

Q89            Stephen Metcalfe: So the recommendation was accepted and acted on.

Professor Leyser: Absolutely.

Q90            Stephen Metcalfe: Great, thank you. Is the comment about the speed at which decisions are taken something you recognise, and is that also being addressed through this process?

Professor Leyser: Absolutely. We make an awful lot of decisions. It is a question of which decisions we are talking about. We are a relatively new organisation. We just had our fifth birthday. We exist through the bringing together of nine pre-existing organisations. We have had two challenges in making the most of that opportunity from bringing the nine together, which I think is huge and absolutely essential for the UK to deliver on its research and innovation ambitions.

Those two things are partly to do with our data infrastructures, which David very rightly highlights are a key priority for upgrading those systems, and those programmes are ongoing at pace. Without them, a lot of our opportunity to maximise the benefit of the nine being one is difficult, because getting the data together, in parts of our business, is still about collecting up nine numbers and combining them, which is ridiculous. That data infrastructure is key.

Building ways of working across the organisation that really benefit from the deep expertise of a specialist level across those nine parts in a way that then gives you the more-than-sum-of-parts collective activity is critical.

We need to move to a model that is more about everybody in the organisation thinking of themselves as having two roles. One is their local role, whatever that might be, and the other is a global UKRI role: “How am I contributing to that wider collective endeavour?” That is critically true particularly for the executive chairs of each of the councils.

We have evolved from a situation where those chairs felt they were representing their council on the executive committee to a situation where they are bringing the expertise of their council into a collective decision-making body. We now need to embed that right down into the organisation, and we are re-engineering the whole way we work, our operating model, to make the most of that way of working. That will significantly improve the clarity of the governance and therefore speed up our decision making, and give people the power, wherever they sit in the organisation, to make the decisions they need to make without endless up and down change that tends to happen if we are not careful.

Q91            Tracey Crouch: Dame Ottoline, do you think there could be any unintended consequences to reducing the number of UKRI objectives?

Professor Leyser: It is an interesting question. David, I think, is concerned with the number of different things that we wind up being asked to do. A number of the issues that David raises about our relationship with Government have moved on significantly with the creation of DSIT, where we need to build that really strong and close relationship—a trusted relationship that maximises the benefit of the extraordinary expertise we have to deliver in a way that we talked about previously.

Critically, DSIT has a cross-government remit. I think that could be transformative in supporting a simplification of the priorities landscape by co-ordinating those S&T priorities in one place and making it much easier for us to deliver on them, particularly if we can build that really high-quality trusted relationship that allows us to deliver on them flexibly with our £1 doing many things, rather than being given 20 pots of money to do 20 specific things, when you could deliver those 20 things much more cleanly with one pot of money and do more for that money.

Q92            Tracey Crouch: Sir Adrian and Professor Tracey, do you have a view on any of the current objectives of UKRI that you think should be prioritised and/or retained?

Sir Adrian Smith: To take the example of trying to run an institute in and around data science and AI, it can be quite difficult to locate where the thought leadership is coming from. If you are in the Medical Research Council you will have expertise in thinking what AI can do for medicine and healthcare, and then in the environment with the British Antarctic Survey, etc. When you are trying to get a coherent national strategic something or other, the scattering across the research councils of the expertise makes it very difficult to know who to talk to and how, and you end up having many different conversations that could perhaps be better joined up. The direction of travel is there, but I do not think we are there yet.

Professor Leyser: Absolutely. We definitely have more work to do. Particularly in the context of the data, exactly for the points that you say, we will wind up with a step change once we have managed to re-engineer our operating model and have those new data systems in place. Exactly as I described where everybody has to think of themselves as doing two things, you need that local expertise and you need AI to be delivering for the Antarctic and a hospital, but you also need to understand the full breadth of the landscape, and only through UKRI do we have that opportunity. I am glad you think we are getting there. I also think we are getting there, but I also agree that we have a way to go.

Professor Tracey: I still sit on the council for the MRC component of it, and I sat on that before UKRI was formed, during the transition, so I can speak from watching the evolution of being on a research council. It is phenomenal what it has achieved in a very brief time, and all kudos and credit to Ottoline and the huge effort that has gone into it.

I would say that, in the past year and a half, we as the research councils have our heads in the space now of how to operate within that model, which actually is quite quick, I think, to shift what are the quite long-standing institutions that have worked and operated in a particular way into what is the philosophy behind the creation of UKRI, which is thinking in an interdisciplinary way.

One of the things that we have done that has worked really well—and we are going to do it again—is a one-and-a-half-day workshop with NERC. We identified a key set of things that would give that mutual synergy and benefit. It is learning what works in order to drive that interdisciplinarity that is ongoing at the minute. We are starting to find the success recipe for how to do that. Going forward, it will be quite exciting to see what we generate in terms of UK science from this model.

Q93            Aaron Bell: Dame Ottoline, I want to talk a little bit about the section of the report about your internal bureaucracy, not the Tickell review stuff, and the way it interacts with Government. You were asked to do a lot by Government. I think it was noted that there were 40 separate reports—annual, quarterly and monthly ones as well as ad hoc ones. What changes would you like to see the Government make in information requests to you, and have you started to see some of that already with the creation of DSIT?

Professor Leyser: It is too early in the creation of DSIT, but I think that is a huge opportunity in building ways of working that reduce the level of conservativism in how processes operate. It is really important that we are able to demonstrate that we are really responsibly using public money. I am an accounting officer. I spend a huge amount of taxpayers’ money every year. It is really essential that we can demonstrate that we are doing the best job we possibly can with that. I would like the systems through which we work and the reporting structures that we use to support my endeavour to expend that money in the highest-value way possible.

Sometimes it feels like the opposite is true: the constraints that are provided on how you spend the money actually wind up with lower value coming out of that money because you have chopped it into tiny amounts. The big picture is key to me: having the flexibility to spend the money well. I am very happy to be standing in front of the Public Accounts Committee accounting for how I do that whenever they want to see me. I would feel more comfortable being able to do that with more flexibility and less bureaucracy.

Q94            Aaron Bell: There are things in your direct control. Your internal IT was identified as a problem when the report was published nine months ago. What progress have you made with your internal IT challenges?

Professor Leyser: We have huge internal IT challenges that we are addressing. We are making very good progress, but, obviously, with the replacement of major IT systems everybody knows it is quite a scary business, and you have to proceed slowly and with caution, and with adequate testing up front before you make big switches. There are three different elements to it, one of which is our central data bank single source of truth for all the data held across the organisation. That is moving along well.

Then we are completely replacing our ERP system for all the HR, finance and so on. It has taken a long time to get the procurement process all the way through the Government processes and out the other end. That is now very actively in the delivery phase with an aim to finish that by the end of this year.

The thing that the research and innovation community will see most is the replacement of the Je-S grants system. This is actually a major cause of the frustration of the community with us. The interface through which most people engage with UKRI is an incredibly clunky, incredibly inflexible, incredibly out-of-date system, and we are replacing that wholesale with a system that we have built in bits, and we have been able to test all the bits and build in the feedback. It is way more flexible.

I will give you one specific example that astonished me coming into this role. We are working hard to be able to work both through the councils and collectively across the councils to make the most of the opportunities we have to marry that bottom-up with the top-down in a way that you are endlessly having to juggle in research and innovation. In the old system, it was impossible to run a UKRI-wide call. It had to go through one of the councils. When you are running some big interdisciplinary programme, the form that people fill out is branded with one of the councils. Little things like that, when you add them all together, are deeply frustrating.

That programme is also massively ramping up this year. We now have end-to-end capability in grant delivery. We are adding extra functionality to support research offices in universities to get the most out of that system. We are expecting to be able to turn off the old system by the end of this year.

Q95            Aaron Bell: Finally, this is slightly off-topic but not really off-topic given everything we are discussing. You have seen us before. You have welcomed the creation of ARIA. Since we last saw you, we now have a chair, a chief exec, a board and some advisers. What interactions have you had with the new people at ARIA since they have been appointed, and how do you see ARIA fitting into the landscape?

Professor Leyser: Absolutely. I have regular meetings with Ilan and board members like Matt. They are very positive relationships. I am very excited about working closely with them. Our role is to support the entire UK research and innovation system as a system to work really well, to have the skills, the people, the infrastructure, the institutions, the innovation architecture and the focus to make it work. They get to build on all of that with really out there, high, transformative potential funding that takes advantage of the high-quality system that we have in place doing the work of all the institutions across the UK, and then collects up that expertise to deliver really big transformative projects. They are very complementary roles. Since we are planning and are working closely together, we had better make the most of that. I am really quite excited and optimistic about the possible outcomes.

Q96            Graham Stringer: I have just one question. The problems you have outlined of annual funding and pot funding would be familiar to local government and the health service over a long period of time. What sometimes makes those problems easier are the empathy and understanding of officials of your issues. What level of officials do you meet, and how often?

Professor Leyser: Lots of meetings with lots of officials at lots of levels. That can be part of the issue. If you have high-level officials meeting high-level officials, everybody agrees something or other, and then with—

Graham Stringer: You decide to have another meeting.

Professor Leyser: —lower-level officials meeting lower-level officials, the transmission of what that really means does not necessarily happen. We have very good contacts right across Government. We work with all the Government Departments as well as with our sponsor Department, DSIT. I would flag the opportunity for DSIT to get those relationships right and to get much greater clarity right across the whole of Government about what we can do, what we should do and how we should do it. It is a critical time.

Sir Adrian Smith: I am optimistic with the creation of the new Department that you have one place that ought to be focusing on relationships with important bodies like UKRI. Let us see how it works out. The initial response from Ottoline was about layers and layers of conversation. I think there are issues with the internal organisation of the civil service.

Professor Tracey: I have been impressed by the level of opportunity for engagements for the university sector, whether that is through the conduit of the Russell group or UUK. It seems that there are good relationships and good opportunities to communicate. Certainly, for my institution, those avenues are open, so I feel that is quite good.

There are separate questions around OFS and the nature of that engagement and the style of it, which I know has been discussed in recent Select Committees. That goes into issues of over-regulation and the challenges that presents for us in real terms. Those are just a few comments from my first full month in post.

Q97            Chair: I have a final question for Dame Ottoline. Obviously, the organisation exists to put money in the hands of researchers and to get excellent research done. In his report, Sir David pointed out that in the three years to 2020-21 there had been a 21% increase in full-time equivalents employed across UKRI. In particular, in what is described as the corporate hub, which is to say finance, HR, communications, strategy and performance, there had been a 55% growth in the full-time equivalents employed during those three years. What is your response? That is something you partly inherited. Are you looking to turn that around, or is that a required response to the complexity that you face perhaps in other organisations?

Professor Leyser: First, the way people have thought about UKRI, which is nine things and then a 10th thing, which is the corporate hub, is not the way that we need to operate. We are the nine things, and the things we do collectively we do collectively because the nine parts know and want those things to be done collectively. The current framing, which is, “This bit is big,” does not help us to deliver an operating model that works for all the parts, and that gets back to my point that everybody needs to think of themselves as doing two jobs.

If the MRC wants to know how much it is spending on AI, it can do that, but it should be easy for it to do that once, and for the entire organisation, rather than that happening in nine places. There is no reason why that should not happen as an analysis in MRC that is shared rather than somebody in MRC asking somebody centrally, if you see what I mean. We need to be very agile in how we work across the organisation so that we are not duplicating activity in different parts of it. That is a key component of our re-engineering of the organisation.

Some of that growth came from more of a 10th thing conceptualisation of UKRI, which we are moving rapidly away from, and we are reducing staff numbers gradually across the board as we are able to work in that more effective way and as we bring in the new data infrastructures and re-engineer the way we work.

The other thing I would say is that you were there at the time, and you would have noticed that at the same time we significantly increased our budget across that period and added some quite demanding and interesting new programmes that, of course, required additional operational expenditure to deliver. If you look at our operational expenditure per £1 we spend, it has reduced somewhat over that time. We can take it down further, but it compares very favourably internationally. To me, this is much more about how we work and making sure that we make the most of all of that expertise, rather than worrying too much about how many people there are in particular parts of the organisation.

Chair: That is very clear. Thank you very much indeed. I thank all of our witnesses, including Adrian Smith, Dame Ottoline Leyser and Professor Tracey, for joining us this morning. We have covered a lot of ground in terms of three very substantial reports and in some depth on Horizon and its potential alternative.