Sir Mark Walport: my ambition as first chief of UKRI

How is British science and technology supposed to attract young, technically-literate people into its fold when the real world they go into will require them to act in an unprofessional manner, later on in their career? In a report released last year, the Defence Select Committee of the House of Commons accused the Ministry of Defence of using creative accounting practices to meet its NATO commitment to spend 2% of GDP. What is less well known about MoD’s use of such under-hand tactics is that, it was the first to pioneer application of the wet-finger-in-the-air technique in the designing of military kit – more specifically, the most important aspect of defence equipment – its inherent reliability – which is an indicator of how frequently it will break-down when in service with the User, and therefore its cost of upkeep subsequently, through-life. The main reason why MoD Abbey Wood has failed to build-in desired levels of reliability into diligently engineered products is because Defence Contractors have been using the thoroughly unprofessional, wet-finger-in-the-air technique of ‘divvying up’ the given MTBF (mean time between failures) figure among lower-level Maintenance Significant Items – instead of employing the best practice method of determining overall system reliability ‘bottom up’ using measured failure rate figures (not predicted or estimated) derived from an up-to-date, Microsoft Access based 4th Line data repository. And from whom did Contractors’ people learn this method of quantifying equipment reliability? Why, none other than from the MoD! To be precise, the famous here-today-gone-tomorrow procurement officials who have been freely applying this wet-finger-in-the-air technique during their short stay at MoD Abbey Wood before migrating to the Defence Industry, in overwhelming numbers, and infecting it by continuing to spread this lazy practice – which has, over the years, become regularised and embedded in commercial & engineering processes to the extent that objective, evidence-based scientific analysis and thinking which has exercised technically-literate people since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, has been suppressed. This disastrous situation has come about because 99% of people who end-up working in the Defence Industry were previously in the pay of the State – with no prior Private Sector experience. It should come as no surprise to MoD that all competing bids appear to be fully compliant with the reliability requirement claiming the same level of achievement, a figure slightly higher than that stated in the technical specification – thereby denying Abbey Wood Team Leader the opportunity to discriminate between Technical Solutions on the basis of inherent reliability. So, instead of acting as a responsible great Department of State and instilling professional values in its loyal employees, the Ministry of Defence has ended up doing the exact opposite! It has made a mockery and laughing stock of the engineering profession – as practiced in the UK – especially in the eyes of European competitor nations, the United States and potential export governments in the Arabian Gulf region, the wider Middle East, North Africa, Latin America and emerging nations in the Asia-Pacific region – where the engineering profession is still regarded in high esteem, and remains an automatic career choice for many young people. @JagPatel3 on twitter