Examination of Witnesses (Questions 45-59)
Dr Pamela Kempton, Professor Georgina Mace, Dr Colin
Miles, Dr Alf Game, Professor Philip Esler and Professor Brian
Cathcart
11 MARCH 2008
Q45 Chairman: May I welcome you very
warmly and thank you also for the evidence that you have already
submitted. That has been available to the Committee so you do
not need to go through that again but we have a series of questions
partly arising out of the evidence you have submitted that we
would like to put to you. My name is Lord Sutherland. I chair
the Committee. You will see we are all labelled, as you are, but
I will ask you in a moment to introduce yourselves for the sake
of the recording. I take the opportunity to remind you that this
is recorded and will be on the public record. I wonder if you
would like to introduce yourselves and that will be noted.
Dr Game: My name is Alfred Game. I am the Deputy
Director of Science and Technology at BBSRC.
Dr Miles: My name is Colin Miles. I am Head
of Molecular Cell Biology at BBSRC.
Dr Kempton: I am Pamela Kempton. I am the Science
and Innovation Manager at the Natural Environment Research Council.
Professor Mace: I am Georgina Mace. I am the
Director of the Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College,
London, which is an NERC Collaborative Centre.
Professor Esler: I am Philip Esler, the Chief
Executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Professor Cathcart: I am Brian Cathcart. I am
Professor of Journalism at Kingston University and I am here because
I am principal investigator on the New Perspectives project.
Q46 Chairman: Thank you. We have
quite a number of questions we would like to put to you in the
hour or so that is available but I fear I have to warn you that
there may well be a division bell. It is something that is perhaps
close to your heart, it is on the Climate Change Bill and at that
point we will have to suspend proceedings while Members go to
vote. We will be back as quickly as we can but there are no alternatives
to that procedure so I hope you will bear with us should that
happen. That being said, can I perhaps begin with an opening question?
It has to do with the submission from DIUS that the research councils
are providing expert input on behalf of DIUS in support of Defra's
lead on policy issues relating to systematics and taxonomy. Can
I ask who in your experience represents DIUS in discussions on
cross-government strategy, because clearly there are cross-government
issues at stake here, and I will pick up some additional concerns,
but would anyone like to start?
Professor Esler: I think it is probably my job
to answer that question. I think the answer depends upon the level
and the nature of the issue to be discussed at the meeting. In
the event that the matter is fairly scientific in nature, we would
expect DIUS to ask a representative from one or more of the councils
to attend. In the event that it is a more strategic or policy-driven
meeting, we would expect DIUS itself to attend and in the event
that it were a Defra-only meeting, which seems to be contemplated
in the question, we would expect that DIUS would not attend such
a meeting or a Defra strategy meeting.
Q47 Chairman: You have been content
at the level of the people who have turned up for these meetings?
They are pitched appropriately?
Professor Esler: We are not aware of any unhappiness
at the level of representation.
Q48 Chairman: One of the central
questions that I would like to put you because of evidence we
have received relates to the concerns that many have about the
infrastructure in terms of personnel in the areas of taxonomy
particularly. How many people are in the system? Is there a drop
in the number of people available who are trained and equipped?
How much attention does DIUS pay to that?
Professor Esler: Certainly the research councils
each year provide an annual return on health of disciplines. The
figures that relate to this particular area have been provided
in some detail in the written submission, I believe. As far as
further details on the population, I think I will turn to my learned
friends here who represent research councils on the science side.
Q49 Chairman: Can I perhaps underline
one of the concerns here is that the volume and level of skills
available in this area on some of the evidence we have had is
declining. Is that a reality and, if so, what can or is being
done about it?
Dr Game: I think most people would accept that
it is the reality; over a number of years, particularly in universities,
the amount of activity in taxonomy and in support of collections
has probably declined. You have to set that in the context of
the fact that this is something which happens all the time, that
disciplines and areas change in terms of their priority and so
forth, and whether one does anything about it depends on whether
people affected by the situation are asking you to do anything
about it. I could draw examples from other areas: informatics,
for example, in biology, where representation from the pharmaceutical
industry has caused quite a lot of activity to be done by research
councils. I am not sure that the change in the state of taxonomy
in universities has necessarily been reflected by very much evidence
from what might be described as the wider science base or the
user community of concern about it. One specific exception might
be a report that the Biosciences Federation produced a couple
of years ago, which we did respond to.
Q50 Chairman: Do you know if any
representation was made to DIUS about the decline in skills in
relation to the last Comprehensive Spending Review?
Dr Game: Personally, I do not.
Chairman: Does anyone know if this was raised? As
I say, the evidence we are getting is that there is a decline
in skills, we have seen it elsewhere, and at some point somebody
has to point this out to those who supply the funds.
Q51 Baroness Walmsley: The users
may not be indicating yet that there is a problem but in some
evidence that we have, the systematics community seems to think
that there is going to be very soon. NERC and Defra, I gather,
are telling us that they are users of systematic information but
not involved primarily with research. You may recall that one
of the recommendations of our previous report was that the systematic
community should focus its outputs on making it useful material
for users and the evidence that we have taken recently indicates
that that has been done to a very great extent, and the community
are now telling us that they have focused as far as they have
been able to do and cannot really go any further, and now they
are living off capital. The question really is, as self-declared
users as well as key funders, what is your response to that claim
from the systematic community?
Professor Mace: I cannot answer that question
in its full extent except to say that NERC does fund a lot of
taxonomy as part of scientifically-led research grants, and if
those research questions require taxonomic knowledge, if that
is available, it will be used; if it is not available, NERC will
pay for the taxonomy to be done to support that science. In fact,
over the last six or seven years NERC has funded a couple of hundred
grants that include taxonomic research within them. The key point
is that those grants are awarded on the basis of the scientific
question, not on the basis of the taxonomy that is in them.
Q52 Baroness Walmsley: Is that not
scientific?
Professor Mace: The descriptive taxonomy on
its own would probably not qualify for a NERC grant because NERC
grants tend to be based around hypothesis-driven science. There
is an open question, which is one that we have talked about recently,
for new areas of science that NERC has prioritised in its strategy
that is being launched this year. It is about how we would ensure
that the taxonomic knowledge that is required to deliver some
of that science would be funded and gathered. That is a question
that NERC is considering at the moment.
Q53 Baroness Walmsley: Am I right
in understanding that the taxonomy that is funded is directly
related to another research project and only that?
Professor Mace: Yes, I think that is true.
Dr Kempton: Yes, I think that is true.
Q54 Lord Krebs: Could I come in behind
that and ask really two related questions. First of all, I am
a bit surprised that NERC says it has no responsibility or little
responsibility for taxonomy per se given that back in the
1990s, when I was chief executive of NERC, we had a taxonomy training
initiative which was specifically to increase capacity in the
British system. I wonder if NERC has taken a strategic decision
to move out of taxonomic capacity, and if so, why? Secondly, I
wonder if you can give us an indication of the total amount of
money that NERC on the one hand and BBSRC at the moment spend
on taxonomic research in the way you have described, what proportion
of the budget that is and how that has changed over time.
Professor Mace: Perhaps I can answer the first
one, the capacity issue. My answer related to research funding.
NERC certainly takes responsibility for training and for maintaining
the expertise base in taxonomy. One of the reasons that we have
been able to fund a lot of grants in that area is that many of
those taxonomists trained as a result of the taxonomy initiative
in the 1990s are now embedded within research groups and, arguably,
that is the right place for many of these people to be. To me,
one of the measures of success of that training activity is that
we have the capacity for the skilled people in taxonomy to answer
the research questions that NERC is funding.
Dr Kempton: It is partly because of that embedding
of the research into the projects that it is a bit difficult to
say exactly how much we spend on taxonomy. I did some checks through
our grants on the web facility just before coming, and since 2000
we have funded over 200 grants with a total cost of nearly £29
million that have taxonomy as a component. The amount that is
allocated to taxonomy, because in each application they have to
estimate approximately how much they fit into different categories,
and the amount estimated was that a little over £7 million
of that work was on taxonomy. That is just for the responsive
mode grants and it does not include the amount that we spend on
training of PhD students and Masters students or the taxonomy
that we would fund through our research for centres. That is a
minimum that we are spending on taxonomy.
Q55 Lord Krebs: £7 million out
of how much over those five years? What is the total budget of
NERC over five years?
Dr Kempton: I do not know what responsive mode
funding is. I am sorry. I do not know that figure.
Professor Mace: We can get that figure.
Chairman: If you could, that would be very helpful.
Q56 Lord Haskel: I wonder if we could
look at the marine sector, because we have been told that there
are difficulties in this sector. In the Research Councils UK evidence
the NERC marine centres and the British Antarctic Survey all comment
that taxonomy underpins marine ecological research and they give
an example. The National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton states
that taxonomy is "vital to all areas of deep sea biology"
but they also state that "financial support for taxonomy
within NOCS is effectively non-existent." The position is
similar for the British Antarctic Survey and the Plymouth Marine
Laboratory. How are these NERC institutes planning to meet their
taxonomic needs in the future?
Dr Kempton: The reason we fund our research
centres is at least in part to provide long-term datasets, monitoring
and survey activities, things that we are now calling national
capability. Within that would be some element of taxonomy as needed
to deliver the strategies of these various research centres. We
would basically leave it to those research centres to do the planning
for how they would provide the tools that they need to deliver
their strategy.
Q57 Lord Haskel: Are you saying that
it is up to these centres to allocate funds and carry out their
own training?
Dr Kempton: NERC provides training of PhD students
and Masters students and so on, but in terms of providing taxonomic
experts within the staff of the research centres, that would be
up to the directors of those centres to decide how to allocate
their resources to take that into account.
Q58 Lord Haskel: But they tell us
that they have not got enough resources to do this.
Dr Kempton: It is a matter of prioritisation,
I guess, then.
Q59 Lord Methuen: With the decline
in teaching of taxonomy and systematics at UK universities, the
natural history collections in university museums are under increased
threat. How will important teaching collections be supported now
that the current HEFCE-funded scheme is coming to an end?
Professor Esler: My Lord Chairman, I have undertaken
to answer this. One of the issues is that we are not exactly sure
what the evidence is that your Lordships have seen in relation
to this issue. We feel that, certainly our position is that, HEFCE
should provide an answer to this and I cannot speak for HEFCE,
nor can any of my colleagues on this particular issue. We would
suggest, if your Lordships were so minded, they could approach
HEFCE to get some more specific details on this issue.
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