FST JOURNAL

Summary

• There are around 50 public sector research establishments all over the UK which are as diverse as they are geographically dispersed
• Due to the diversity of the UK’s National Laboratories, it's quite difficult for people to move between them. However, they create an infrastructure and a capacity which is important for science over all
• Progress has been made towards better utilisation of government owned public laboratories and expanding eligibility for funding streams, however the funding is often provided in a way that's very difficult for public laboratories to take because it's not a full economic cost for them
• Every department should have a senior, accountable individual who actually cares about each PSRE
• We need to define what each PSRE is for and what we want them to do as well as a system for quality assessment.

I don't think anyone can really define what a public sector research establishment is and there is no accurate definition or whether they are the same as national laboratories, but when I look around, there are something like 50 public sector research establishments all over the UK. They report not into a single department in government, but into eight different departments. The public sector research establishments are less well known than they should be. I must admit that before I joined government, I did not know much about them. There is a report by Paul Nurse which illustrates how many people don't know about them. They're geographically dispersed and highly diverse. They do research, monitoring, policy, and they have links to business. They also have vastly different funding models. Some are private public partnerships, some are privately run, but on behalf of the state, some of them are totally public. I’ll begin by giving some examples. 

Firstly, The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is based in Teddington and it has a site in the northeast, another in the south and a site in Scotland. It was set up to look at the science of metrology in 1900 and did a lot of important work in the early days of computing.  It was the place that made the first atomic clock in 1955. When I was at GlaxoSmithKline, we had a collaboration with the NPL on imaging mass spectrometry, which is a very difficult technology to quantify but it was crucial for industry to try and get some images of where drugs were going into cells. 

In York, we have the Food and Environment Research Agency which was transferred to become a public and private joint venture in 2015. It used to house the Plant Health Inspectorate and the National Bee Unit which are now at the Animal Plant Health

laboratories and despite the fact that it is now an independent private organisation, it remains a natural, national reference laboratory. It is also part of the National Laboratory Alliance. Just after the Novichok poisonings, there was a question about cleanup of the environment and it turned out that the ability to access mass spectrometry to understand what was needed to make measurements in the environment, was difficult. This lab became a really important resource during that national emergency.

Another example is the Met Office in Exeter. Of course, the Met Office deals with weather but actually during Mrs. Thatcher's government, the Hadley Centre was set up which meant that the Met Office is also conducting world class climate science activity, which has been hugely influential in UK and global climate science. They also have a joint unit with the Environment Agency on flooding, Another significant thing is that they have a supercomputer. One of the things that the UK doesn't have is a very strong and effective compute infrastructure. But this supercomputer and the following one that they will be obtaining are an important part of this. The Met Office are also an important source of information on potential impacts in space weather and are working with the Alan Turing Institute to look at what AI (Artificial Intelligence) might do to improve the ability to get greater granularity on weather forecasting. This will become really important as we think about adaptation to climate change. 

Then we have the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture, in Weymouth, among other sites. This laboratory does surveillance of fish stocks and marine quality around the coast of the UK. It also does research and policy work. The Natural History Museum (of which I am now chair of trustees) has 350 scientists, and those scientists work on a range of areas, including things directly relevant to government policy, such as climate and biodiversity research. Using collections going back a very long period, they have put together a biodiversity intactness index, which allow you to look around the world and say how much of the biodiversity that was present pre-Industrial Revolution, even pre-appearance of mankind, is still present today. In the UK, we're down about 50% of the biodiversity that we had. This biodiversity intactness index is now on Bloomberg terminals, so investors can start to look at it and say, ‘what are companies doing’? So there are unexpected links through to company and finance. 

Supporting the UK’s National labs

Due to the diversity of the UK’s National Laboratories, it's quite difficult for people to move between them. However they create an infrastructure and a capacity which is important for science over all. In 2019, together with Treasury, government officers of science wrote a report for the science capability review asking the question, what was the capability of science across government and what needed to happen. One of the areas that we touched on was PSREs. There's lots of good things going on, but it is all a bit ad hoc and uncoordinated. We also touched on an important area, which is how they might be involved in business and link through into the economy. Through this report, we shared a number of things that should happen to ensure that important R&D infrastructure departments have adequate long term funding. Due to a bizarre situation where certain PSREs could apply for a UKRI grant and others could not, we suggested that research funders needed to open up funding schemes. As part of what was then the aim to get to 2.4% of GDP R&D, we also said that this should be part of looking at what the public laboratories could do to be held.

But what has happened since then? Well, there was an update this year of the science capability review and one of the four things it looked at was the public laboratories. It still said that we should ensure sufficient capacity, capability and quality within the public laboratories. The Government response to the review said that the wide range of PSRE's in the UK present a significant resource for government and will have a higher priority in government thinking. However it is important to try and pin down what that means in practice. Progress has been made towards better utilisation of government owned public laboratories and expanding eligibility for funding streams. Happily, they are now able to apply for UKRI funding but the funding is often provided in a way that's very difficult for public laboratories to take because it's not a full economic cost for them. So there are still challenges and in many cases, the science missions of the public laboratories need to be better defined. 

What could make a difference?

Some of the key features which would make a difference and relate to the current and any future system is that firstly, every department should have a senior, accountable individual who actually cares about the PSRE. Every department does currently have somebody, but it's often part of somebody's wider job. It’s also not necessarily a very senior person who's got that accountability. So the PSRE needs somebody senior in the department who really cares about it, and there also needs to be a minister who really cares about the PSRE as part of their job.

Secondly, the department needs to define what the PSRE is for and what it is that they want them to do. What is it that is important for the department that these PSREs can deliver?

Thirdly, they need to have a system for quality assessment. How do they know that what is going on at the PSRE is high quality science and relevant to the mission. I also think that this is an area that a Chief Scientific Advisor can play a role. 

They also need to worry about career structures. If individuals can only think of their career development in terms of the PSRE they are based, then that is a mistake. The National Laboratory Alliance got together for a review recently and said that we can work better together, do things of common interest, share equipment, and look at staff promotion and development activities.

Finally, there is a Department of Science, Innovation and Technology and this department could take a cross government accountability to ensure that we have the appropriate quality and we look across all National Laboratories for opportunities.