UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 140-xiv HOUSE OF COMMONS ORAL EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE SCOTTISH AFFAIRS COMMITTEE THE REFERENDUM ON SEPARATION FOR SCOTLAND WEDNESDAY 29 JANUARY 2014 PROFESSOR HUGH PENNINGTON CBE, ALASTAIR SIM and PROFESSOR DAVID RAFFE Evidence heard in Public Questions 4259 - 4372 USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others. 2. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings. 3. Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant. 4. Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee. 1 Oral Evidence Taken before the Scottish Affairs Committee on Wednesday 29 January 2014 Members present: Mr Alan Reid (Chair) Mike Crockart Graeme Morrice Sir James Paice Lindsay Roy In the absence of the Chairman, Mr Alan Reid was called to the Chair ________________ Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Professor Hugh Pennington CBE, Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology, University of Aberdeen, Alastair Sim, Director, Universities Scotland, and Professor David Raffe, Professor of Sociology and Education and Member of the Centre for Educational Sociology, University of Edinburgh, gave evidence. Q4259 Chair: Thank you all very much for coming along this afternoon to help us with our inquiry. I should explain that I am Alan Reid, the vice-Chair of the Committee. I am in the Chair this afternoon because our Chairman, Ian Davidson, is ill today; he sends his apologies. Perhaps you could start off by introducing yourselves. Professor Raffe: I am David Raffe. I am a professor at the University of Edinburgh. I have been engaged in educational research on a variety of topics, with a particular interest in the impact of devolution on both how policy is developed and how the system has developed within Scotland and, indeed, across the UK. A particular reason for my being here is that I am a member of the team working on one of the projects that is part of the ESRC programme on the future of the UK in Scotland. The title of our project—I have it here but I always have to look it up—is “Higher Education in Scotland, the Devolution Settlement and the Referendum on Independence”. As part of that project, as you might have noticed if you read today’s Scottish press, we are trying to provide a neutral ground in which the debates can be conducted. We have also been interviewing stakeholders and key people around the system to get their views on devolution, not just on independence, and wider issues. We have been looking at cross-border flows of students between the countries. We are working in particular with young people and how to engage them in the debate, so it is a wide-ranging project that is set in the context of some of this. Alastair Sim: I am Alastair Sim, executive head of Universities Scotland, the representative organisation for Scotland’s university and higher education institution principals. We are obviously an interested party, but also a politically neutral party in this debate. Professor Pennington: I am Hugh Pennington. I am not a neutral party. I think my position is fairly well known on the Better Together side. I trained in medicine across the river at St. Thomas’s, then I went to America and then I applied for a job with a medical research council in the tropics. They said that there was not one in the tropics but there was one in Glasgow, so I went to Glasgow and had—I would say—a productive time there during 2 10 years in the Medical Research Council institute at the University of Glasgow. Then I got the chair in Aberdeen, from which I retired in 2003. I am only a Scot by domicile but I have lived more than half my life in Scotland, and I have had lots of dealings with the Medical Research Council and with research bodies in Scotland itself. I have been on a research assessment exercise panel and so on. I think I am fairly familiar with all the background to all the issues pertinent to the debate. Q4260 Chair: Thank you. I would like to start off with a brief overview of how research council funding is allocated at the moment. Whoever wants to answer can just volunteer. Professor Sim, do you want to lead off? Alastair Sim: I can’t claim professorial status, I am afraid. Very briefly, we have a situation at the moment within which Scotland is a successful contributor to an overall UK research eco-system where a great deal of research is done across boundaries by collaborative groups and where we believe that whatever happens—whatever constitutional settlement is ultimately reached after the referendum—maintaining that cross-border flow and eco-system will be in the best interests of the entirety of what is currently the UK. Q4261 Chair: Is funding at the moment purely allocated by open competition and peer review, or is location a factor? Alastair Sim: As far as we see it, it is on the basis of straight quality-based competition. That is one within which Scottish institutions tend to do well on the basis of the quality of the research that they are able to carry out. Q4262 Chair: Professor Pennington, you wanted to come in. Professor Pennington: Yes. If I could expand a little bit on how the money is given out as far as I see it from my personal experience, clearly, there are long-term commitments that the Medical Research Council makes to its research units and so on, such as the one I worked at in Glasgow, which are reviewed on a fairly regular basis. Then there are the individual research grants, which can be long term or shorter term, and are extremely competitive. On the criteria used to award funding, in the first place, there has to be the money available to the grant committee to give out the appropriate number of grants. Twenty-five per cent of the applications will be successful; it is in that kind of order. They take into account the nature of the research, the background of the researcher, whether they are likely to deliver and also the institution in which they work—whether that is going to give them the appropriate support, the right milieu for research and so on. It will depend on the nature of the project how much weight you put on those, but the quality of the research itself is the overriding factor. Professor Raffe: I would like to qualify that in a couple of ways. There have been cases where, for example, devolved Administrations or funding councils have co-funded activities with the research councils. That will be a slight qualification to the principle of being, as it were, geography free, geography blind. Again, one or two of the capacity-building investments that research councils have made have at least taken account of the spread across the UK. Often it is to avoid having a concentration, for example, in the south-east of England. There is a smaller point, but it is worth mentioning. As a policy researcher, if I wanted to ask for funding for a project looking at an issue that made sense in terms of a Scottish policy agenda but might not be of particular interest elsewhere in the UK, there is always the concern of how you get that argument past a panel of referees, most of whom will be drawn from outwith Scotland. There is always that tension. I am most familiar with the ESRC, and to be fair, it has been very good procedurally at handling those issues. It has been very fair 3 and objective, but there is always that tension and concern. Are we actually being given less favourable treatment because we are from this more peripheral part of the policy community? Q4263 Chair: How do those tensions tend to get resolved in practice? Professor Raffe: In two ways. One is by having procedural correctness, as it were, at all stages of the process, trying very hard to make sure that the actual processes do, as far as possible, take account, by looking at the way in which committees are established and the way in which selection panels are established to make sure that you have that geographical representation. I have been on committees where, at least tacitly, part of my role has been to argue the Scottish case, or to make sure that the Scottish case, and indeed the Welsh and Northern Irish case, does not go by default. It is also by awareness among academics. Certainly in my area, there is a desire to be fair, and a desire for it to be recognised that research is inherently a pluralist exercise, and that there are different perspectives and interests even in policy-related research. Q4264 Chair: In your view, how successful have the research councils been at recognising the geographic issues? Professor Raffe: I stress that I am talking very much about research where there is a clear geographical reference.