FST JOURNAL

The recently retired Chief Executive of UKRI, Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser DBE FRS took to the stage at the Royal Society on Wednesday 8th October, for an ‘in conversation' evening with Rt Hon Lord (David) Willetts FRS, Chair of the Foundation for Science and Technology. The audience were treated to an exploration of topics across UK science and technology, a look back at Dame Ottoline's tenure in UKRI and a view to the future. Below is a summary of that conversation. You can view the full event here.

Lord Willetts: It is wonderful to be here with Dame Ottoline Leyser, the Regis Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge with a very distinguished record as a plant scientist, but also recent Chief Executive of UKRI. I had the pleasure indeed of serving on the board for a long time, overlapping with Ottoline while she was CEO. So, I think this is one of the rare opportunities to hear from Ottoline with her reflections on UKRI, before she moves on to other projects. I understand she has already given evidence to the commons Science and Technology Committee and maybe giving evidence to the Lord's committee. Without further ado, my first question is, how did your experience of UKRI compare with your expectations?

Dame Ottoline: I'd had a lot to do with the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) before that. I was also involved in the Nurse Review that led to the establishment of UKRI, and I thought it was an incredibly important project that actually is, I think, transformative for research and innovation in the UK at a time when having nine separate councils did not make much sense, and there was an opportunity to join up. I think ‘join up’ is critical for getting the benefits out of research and innovation that we need. I suppose I partly applied for the job because, at the time, it was a relatively new organisation. There were still a lot of people who were very ‘nay say’ and quite a lot of those people were ‘folded arms’ complainers, rather than ‘step in and do something about it’ complainers, which I thought was not acceptable. If it is not working for people, you have got to do something about it. I knew that there was a lot of culture change needed, given its nine organisations coming together, only some of which wanted to be part of UKRI at the time. I think in terms of surprises, when I got there, I was less prepared for the immense amount of time it would take to do things like replace the ERP system and those kinds of classic things that you need when you are integrating nine organisations in the public sector. I was less prepared for that part than for creating a team of people who really wanted to work together. That was the part I joined for.

Lord Willetts: You mentioned the Nurse Review and the research councils. What was your experience of bringing the different research councils together? Do you think there is a future for the individual research councils?

Dame Ottoline: I think disciplines exist. My research has been very interdisciplinary for quite a long time, but there are disciplines. Maths is not the same as history, and I think there will always be a place for defined councils whose job it is to look after disciplines. However, the power of all disciplines is massively amplified if they very easily can work together, either for the benefit of their own fields, or because there are things you cannot possibly address through only one discipline. The power of UKRI is that there are strong disciplinary anchors, and there are communities and relationships which make it possible to work well in different permutations and combinations, whether that is through a bottom-up driven collaboration or through a top down driven, challenge-oriented activity. There is still a need for councils, and there needs to be easy ways for councils to collaborate and for activity to happen truly jointly.

Lord Willetts: Having seen you working as Chief Executive, I think that you displayed great skill in promoting interdisciplinarity, and I think people trusted you with that agenda, and that, in turn, enabled you to promote it more effectively than might otherwise have been possible. Looking back, what are the highlights of your time?

Dame Ottoline: I think the organisation grew in a way that allowed it to deliver a lot of those kinds of collaborative benefits, and I do feel very proud of that, and very excited about the potential for that in the future. Particularly that there are specific interdisciplinary schemes. One of the things that continues to be an opportunity is for seamless communication across the organisation, so everybody knows what everybody else is doing, and everybody can tune their work to adapt to somebody else doing something cognate over there. It is a very exciting organisation.

Lord Willetts: Now let us focus on the nine councils of UKRI. We might just pause on councils eight and nine (Innovate UK and Research England). There has always been a debate, does Innovate UK fit into UKRI? Should Innovate UK have a separate, independent role?

Dame Ottoline: I think it is critical that Innovate UK is part of UKRI, because it is essential to join up the business led innovation and research with the other stuff. The way I have always seen it is that there are discipline focused councils, and then there are sector-focused councils. So, Research England is obviously University-focused. Innovate UK is business-focused. I think that kind of horizontal, vertical match is important for getting the full tapestry woven together. It is true that helping that to happen when you've got organisations like Innovate that were very separate and different, it has taken longer to get to the point where we are really benefiting from those interactions, but it's happening, and I think that is also very exciting.

Lord Willetts: What about the practicalities of that? I know it is a difficult judgement to make. For example, sometimes a classic Research Council and Innovate UK, might be doing things differently, and this feature can gradually be eliminated, or it can reflect an underlying difference in the way they should function, things like grant conditions, grant monitoring, timescales, follow up etc. Do you think that those sorts of differences were understandable and benign, or would you look forward to a time when they are more closely aligned?

Dame Ottoline: There is quite a lot of difference between the research councils as well. I think everybody can learn from everybody else in terms of good practice, and that is something else that evolves gradually over time. We did a big review of peer review and are now working very hard to ensure that all of the good things that have been learned in the various parts of the organisation over the years can be spread and deployed, because different grant calls have different purposes, and you absolutely need to run those differently to deliver those different purposes. And then, of course, where there is a big difference with innovators, is that they are in a very different legislative framework, with competition controls and all those kinds of things that need to be taken into account. They will always be different. But I do not think that is a problem.

Lord Willetts: How do universities – where current financial pressures are intense - fit into all this? The second Nurse Review was about how we should fund labs that are not necessarily part of universities, with if anything, a bit of a rebalancing away from universities. There has also not been much increase in research funding for universities via Research England. Some figures suggest that there is a deficit of £5B in research funding. So how much do you worry about the state of research in the universities? And do you think that the new Research Excellence Framework (REF) can help address that in any way?

Dame Ottoline: I think the first thing to say is that UKRI absolutely has a particular responsibility for the research base in universities, and it is important to point out that, it does also include Innovate UK, which is business led. In addition, many of the Councils fully own, or provide core funding to a very large number of institutes. There are 50 different institutes that UKRI support. So, the proportion of the overall UKRI budget that goes into universities is not as large as people think. I do not think it is correct to say that there is a deficit in university research funding. What is happening is universities, which are independent organisations, are choosing to spend the income that they generate in a variety of ways on research. Which is fantastic. It is great that universities have decided that they want to take 5 billion of their own money and spend it on research. The problem is that those sources of income are unstable, and in the context of the real financial challenges that universities are facing, their ability to spend that money on research is undermined, and so there is less money to spend on research. I don't like the deficit notion, because it sort of comes with this tacit implication that, therefore, this 5 billion should be miraculously found from somewhere else. I think universities have made choices, and they have made choices which are good choices for the UK. However, it is not a fairy godmother's responsibility to fix those when the situation is different. The second thing to say is that where I think the system has a much stronger role to play, is the incentives that have led to some of those decisions. There is a complex web of incentives that influence how universities choose to act. These are quite often in conflict with one another, and I think the REF Funding has contributed to that.

One of my main concerns is the volume incentive. So, REF puts money into universities and the money follows the REF assessment according to the number of principal investigators (or similar). That means it makes sense for universities to have more of those kinds of people, and fewer of the people who support them to do fabulous research. That creates all kinds of problems. Not least, because you then have many people in a system which, at an individual level, incentivises them to write grants. Therefore, there will be many people writing grants and bidding into a pot of money that has not grown in proportion. I think doing less better, is important. We have got to find a good way to consolidate and make sensible choices.

I think that the other big incentive change is competition between universities. This needs to flip into collaboration between universities. What are Vice Chancellors doing allowing people to apply for research grants where they will end up, (even if they succeed) with 70% funding and the other 30% coming from a university budget that is heading into deficit.

Lord Willetts: Another feature of the redesign of the REF (led by you, Jessica Corner, and others) was in valuing the team rather than the individual star researcher, and part of the cultural shift was to recognise that a lot of science and research now is a team sport. I can remember just anecdotally, conversations with researchers who would accept that they had done well, but that the software engineer who had helped with all the compute work that was necessary was not recognised in the REF and the university were now proposing to economise by getting rid of the very person who they felt had been part of their research success. How do you see that debate playing out now, and what will the final version of the REF look like with those pressures being reassessed?

Dame Ottoline: Firstly, I should say that the REF is inherently a collaboration between Research England and the devolved funding bodies, so it is, technically not a UKRI responsibility. However, it fits into the wider UKRI system, and that is important. I think valuing the full range of people necessary for the research endeavour is critical for the long-term sustainability of the system. I find it interesting how difficult the notion of valuing the team and the system, the full set of people you need, has been as a concept, and that somehow or other, it plays against the notion of excellence, which we only envisage as the kind of fancy, shiny star person. It just does not make any sense to me that those things are somehow incompatible. We are not in any way denying that there are brilliant individuals coming up with brilliant ideas, but those people cannot do a damn thing without everything else. Meanwhile, there is a brutal competition out there on citations where names and references to names are counted. So the papers have many authors, and the senior author is the person who is being counted in that way, and the other authors are undervalued, in my opinion. But also, everybody knows that those kinds of metrics, whilst they are very useful, are not a straightforward objective measure of how good the research is. They are not a replacement for understanding what you need in the system.

Science is not like a sport (you know, the person who crosses the line at the end in the shortest time has won). There is not a defined winner, because the questions are all different and all over the place. There is not a single activity that you are trying to win. You are trying to find out stuff, but you are also trying to make stuff better. You want to do it for the immediate problems, but also for the problems that we have not even thought of yet. You have got to have a much more sophisticated and eclectic way of thinking about what success is, and what you value and recognise and reward. That is really important, including for those star people, because it is no fun working in a system that recognises and rewards such a limited range of things. ‘Star people’ can have a very hard time in thinking that their worth is only as good as their next fancy publication.

Of course, we are having this conversation in the week where each day we are hearing of a maximum of three individuals winning a Nobel Prize. And in a way, what you're engaging with is a much wider debate, which is live in in the science community - what constitutes great science. It is simply not the case that any of those brilliant discoveries being celebrated can properly be attributed to those three people and not a lot of other people too.

Lord Willetts: At UKRI, you were dealing with politicians, a strange group with their own distinct requirements, and the Haldane principle was, of course, classically formulated to protect rigorous assessment of the merits of research grants from political interference. How did you find dealing with politicians?

Dame Ottoline: A lot of academics would like the Haldane principle to be, ‘give me lots of money and let me get on with it’. However, that is not what the principle says. The principle says that it should not be the politicians who decide who gets the money, because you need expertise to understand where the money should go to deliver a particular outcome. It is legitimate for the elected government to say what the outcomes should be, through an industrial strategy for example with priority areas. I think that having that relationship with ministers is one of the benefits of UKRI. It's a big organisation that brings together all those parts and is the interface with government. There is an opportunity to a build strong relationship that allows that to work better, to provide confidence that the outcomes ministers want are being delivered. through the process of funding allocation that UKRI mediates.  

Lord Willetts: How did you find those types of conversations with departments on priorities?

Dame Ottoline: Almost the whole job at UKRI is about tensioning priorities and articulating the opportunity costs for the solution that you come up with. You are sometimes tensioning ministers against one another, not ministers’ priorities against overall systems health. For example, funding for centres for doctoral training involves tensioning training to support the overall health of disciplines with targeted training addressing particular priorities. But it also involves tensioning those priorities against each other, which requires tensioning the needs of different Ministers against one another.

Lord Willetts: There are of course, other areas of tension and one is place, geographical distribution. Linked to the endless argument about the extent to which certain universities receive more and less funding. What are the lessons you've learned from the geographic pressures and how do you manage those pressures?

Dame Ottoline: Place has been quite a high priority for quite a long time, and it started off as a debate where people were trying to sort of tension place against excellence, which I thought was an insidious, unhelpful and inappropriate way to talk about it. That comes back to this question of diversity and collaboration. I think we have accidentally embedded a system where universities are competing against one another, against a very narrow set of criteria that drives homogenisation between them. They are all trying to run the 100 metres, when really, it is track and field, and different universities should be focusing different areas. There should be more diversity, and that diversity also requires collaboration, so that you are covering the bases. That would inherently make this question of place, and certainly the place/excellence debate a much more sensible and sophisticated conversation, because it's not about everybody trying to do the same thing. The very fact that you have got a small specialist institution in the North should be a great USP for that institution, in a way that should allow it to compete.

Lord Willetts: This might be an area where Scotland is ahead of us. Certainly, because of its size, it seemed to be able to create coherent groupings, thinking about physics as a discipline and capital investment for physics across Scottish universities. I do not know if it was ever tackled, but I believe it is still the case that cannot receive a grant as a group and cheques have to be written to individual universities.

I think all the Devolved Administrations have done a better job of thinking about the ecosystem of higher education institutions that they have and how they should work together. There is an opportunity to do that in England, and that is a conversation going on now in the context of university financial crisis.

How do you incentivise those appropriate behaviours?

Dame Ottoline: I think that groupings would be a good idea. One of the things I really enjoyed doing was visiting cities which had a small number of very different institutions. In lot of them, they were working brilliantly together in a way that really supported the local innovation ecosystem. If you have got a big research-intensive university, but also another that is very vocationally focused and providing highly skilled people to work in local industries, you can really build that in a very powerful way as there is more opportunity and incentive for collaboration between institutions. There is some very interesting economic analysis that show if cities have a two-university model (such as in Sheffield), it is particularly good for the civic economy.

Lord Willetts: One final question. We should touch on AI. What does AI mean for research?

Dame Ottoline: AI is going to change everything and there is a huge opportunity to do research differently because of AI. Using AI as a research tool - that is one whole area which is very exciting. I was in a discussion this morning about genomics and how you could use AI to help bridge the genotype phenotype gap. Then there is using generative AI to write your grant for you. At UKRI, we are following the principle that you should not use AI to referee a grant proposal, for all kinds of reasons. Not least because it is a confidential document that you cannot just put ‘out there’, and also, what we are asking for is people's expert opinion on the proposal. I do not want the AI opinion. I want the opinion of the person whom I have invited to give one.

Using AI to write the grant is a whole different deal at some level, to improve your English and make it easy to understand and so on, that is fine. At what point will AI be able to come up with a sensible set of experimental tests that is better than the one you could think of? Well, that then becomes a very interesting question. Maybe that is also fine. We are interested in is solving the problem, not whether it was Bill Smith who did it. We are interested in people understanding how the world works so that they can make it a better place.

Lord Willetts: That is a very good note to end, because you are fundamentally very principled and very optimistic about the power still of science to tackle the world's problems. I think we should record that that was the spirit in which you approached the role in your in your time as chief executive of UKRI.