28/12/06 The future of universities
CaSE today urged Parliament to be clearer about the roles it wants universities to fulfil in the future. Submitting evidence to the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee's inquiry into the future sustainability of the universities, CaSE argues that too many different roles have become conflated, and not all of them are adequately funded. While in the longer term, it is essential that UK universities build major endowments to help fund their work, that will take a long time, and in the short term, the state must decide either to provide more funding, or to reduce its expectations of what the universities can achieve.

read CaSE's evidence to the inquiry

18/12/06 Public procurement
CaSE today urged the Government to find practical ways of making the public procurement process support innovation. Writing in Innovation Policy Review, CaSE points out that everyone from the Prime Minister and Chancellor downwards have said they believe that the Government's annual purchasing power of hundreds of billions of pounds could be used more effectively to support research and development into innovative products and processes for the future. The article argues that "athough there is broad consensus on what we want to occur, nodody is quite sure how to go about it." CaSE suggests that the Chancellor should set up a small, highly-focused expert group, with a strict time limit of reporting before the next Budget. He should ask it to come up with three or four specific actions that couls be taken to begin the process of making public procurement better at supporting innovation".

11/12/06 Academic research in medicine
CaSE today calls for Government policy to support academic medicine to promote health benefits. Writing in the British Dental Journal, CaSE says that academic research is under all kinds of pressures, but that in the modern world, it is one of the few ways of making discoveries that can lead to enhancements in the quality and quantity of interventions that clinicians can deliver. "The potential for British academic medicine is enormous, and the Government’s renewed interest is a big opportunity," the article concludes, but only "if each of the different constituencies involved chooses to engage, and lobbies politicians to optimise the final outcome."

06/12/06 Pre-Budget report
CaSE today welcomed the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s emphasis on science in his pre-Budget report, but was disappointed that he ducked some of the key decisions.

read the press release

04/12/06 Science at DEFRA
CaSE today welcomed the publication of the Chief Scientist's review of science at DEFRA. "The idea of reviewing the scientific competence of government departments has to be a good one, particularly given how harsh the House of Commons was recently about ministries' capacity to deal with science," said Dr Peter Cotgreave, Director of CaSE, which is credited in the review with providing evidence. "But Defra has shown how to make significant improvements. In particular, having a Science Advisory Council of outside experts free to speak their minds is a significant advance. It is also worth noting that when CaSE worked with MPs in 2004, to find out how many scientists the different ministries were bringing in on secondments, DEFRA was the only one that could answer the question in a positive way.

read CaSE's summary of civil service secondments from 2004

02/12/06 Science textbook mistakes
CaSE today called for the education system to have more respect for science as a way of revealing truths about the world. Commenting on in the Daily Telegraph about science textbooks that contained basic errors, CaSE said that such mistakes served to give children the impression that accuracy did not matter and that subjective guesses were as valid as objective information. "A child reading this book might think that polar bears really do eat penguins when in fact they live at opposite ends of the world. That in itself is not a disaster, although such a basic mistake it is frankly astonishing. But it is enormously harmful to give children the impression that you do not have to bother observing the world around you and making accurate observations, that somehow careless guesswork is just as valid."

01/12/06 European funding for science
CaSE today called in the European Commission to ensure that its new scheme for funding science and engineering does not fall into the same traps as its predecessors. Writing for the BBC, CaSE points out that the Framework 7 of research funding is supposed to rectify the fact that Framework 6 was out of touch with the reality of a modern competitive economy. CaSE also says the Lisbon target - of investing 3% of national wealth in research and development by 2010 - is unrealistic, and that European Commissioners must cut down on bureaucracy, realise that people are more important than institutions and adequately distinguish between funding excellent science and building capacity in poorer countries.

read the article