For starters:

1. Your grant reviewing process seems to be crumbling. Comparing notes with numerous colleagues, it appears that many of our grants, despite months’ of our (tax-payer and charity-funded) time investment, receive as few as two reviews, and these are often cursory or ill-informed, clearly written by inappropriate reviewers. It is hard for panel (committee) members to police this, as with the new broader-scope panel structure, their expertise is inevitably thinly-spread.

Solutions?
a) Allow applicants to suggest large numbers of appropriate reviewers (30? 50?), add them all to your database.
b)Pay (50 to 100 pounds per review?) to departmental research accounts of those that do timely and useful reviews (as judged by panel). This money, a small fraction of the grants budget, would not be lost to science, it would fund more research as well as improving the reviewing process.

2. Your conflict of interest rules need to be tightened up because grant success rates are now so low, and so few grants in a particular narrow subject area have any realistic prospect of being funded per panel. The temptation/pressure is too high.

Solutions?
a) Grant applicants should not review rival grants submitted to the same panel meeting.
b) No panel (committee) member submitting a grant should be involved in that panel meeting.

3. You need to put in explicit mechanisms, such as rationing and group size justification, to stop ‘big-shots’ hogging a disproportionate fraction of diminishing resources, or you will extinguish or force abroad a correspondingly large fraction of our up-and-coming post-doc and junior faculty talent base. Training more graduate students is *not* the solution if you are haemorrhaging existing superior expertise. Women scientists are especially vulnerable to the remorseless logic of the covert ‘winner-take-all’ algorithm at the heart of science funding.

What is the future of the BBSRC Institutes? Why has the number of institutes gone back up again from 5? Many of us thought that they were being dispensed with and believe the new governance arrangements, with BBSRC long-term no longer the banker of last resort, will make their employees more vulnerable. What reassurance can you give to staff about their science and their terms and conditions of employment?

I go back a long, long way and well remember the Morris report that suggested combining all the Research Councils into one. Is this merger back on the table again and, if so, is BBSRC’s distinctive science at risk if a merger takes place and, is producing a new BBSRC Strategic Plan a worthwhile exercise if it could get overtaken by events?