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BRITAIN’S computer industry is languishing because the government failed
to encourage firms to exploit the research developed under the Alvey programme,
Britain’s effort in the 1980s to make it more competitive in the field of
information technology. Or so says Brian Oakley, the programme’s former
director.

The original Alvey proposals called for initiatives in education and
training, alongside government support for product development. But the
Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, blocked the idea that Alvey should include
a training initiative, and the government refused to use its influence as
a big buyer of products and services to help technologies out of the research
laboratories and into the marketplace. Such patronage has worked well in
France.

According to Oakley, the government’s refusal to encourage the exploitation
of research it has funded stems from a misunderstanding of what R&D
alone can achieve. During the Second World War, politicians of all parties
saw prototypes, such as radar navigation equipment, come out of a research
laboratory in the morning and go into battle the same evening. They were
convinced that the future of the economy depended on R&D, but were ignorant
of the investment needed to get a technological development into production.
In the computing sector, the costs are huge, and a product can be obsolete
within three years, says Oakley: ‘R&D is not enough.’

At the end of last month, Oakley’s personal reflections on the Alvey
programme were published* together with recollections from other officials,
academics, industrialists and researchers who were involved in the work.
The analysis comes as the government is implicitly acknowledging for the
first time that Britain’s Link programme, designed to stimulate collaboration
between industry and academia, is not working as it should (This Week, 23
June).

Oakley’s Alvey story reads like another missed opportunity for Britain.
Nearly a decade ago, a small army of civil servants in a tower block overlooking
the River Thames began struggling with the task of breathing new life into
Britain’s computer industry. Japan and the US had already realised how important
computing would be to their future economic success – Japan with its fifth
generation programme and the US with its policy of allowing industry access
to the funds of the national defence agency, DARPA.

Britain’s response, in 1983, was the Alvey programme. Nothing like it
had ever been tried in Britain. The Alvey initiative, supported jointly
by government and industry, engaged more than 2000 researchers over five
years on around 200 projects. On a par with both the US and Japan, which
offered $600 million over five years and $500 million over ten respectively,
Britain set aside Pounds sterling 350 million for Alvey – Pounds sterling
200 million from the government and Pounds sterling 150 million from industry.

The idea was to coordinate the efforts of a strong research community.
In the early 1980s, Britain’s research effort was fragmented: Alvey sought
to bring academics and industrialists together and so ensure that industry
exploited the ideas of academia. According to the programme’s proponents,
the collaboration would bring faster chips, more reliable software, and
computers that were easier to use.

Patrick Jenkin, who was industry minister at the time, summed up the
excitement surrounding Alvey’s announcement. He told the House of Commons
that the government was convinced Alvey would ‘ensure for British industry
secure access to the new technology and to the products and processes on
which our future prosperity depends’.

Just five years later the tide had turned. As Alvey ended, the government
refused to fund another programme to exploit the technological developments
begun in the Alvey years. Instead, it chose to support different, scattered
initiatives under what it termed the Link programme – in much the same way
as it had been doing before. So, was the Alvey programme worth all the effort?
Oakley, director of the programme until 1987 and now chairman of Logica
Cambridge, a research company, is equivocal. It is questionable, he says,
whether the awareness and the expertise in new technologies developed under
Alvey can be turned into wealth solely through the marketplace.

Oakley is a physicist turned computer scientist. He was a civil servant
at the Ministry of Defence, the Science and Engineering Research Council
and the Department of Trade and Industry: the only person, he says, who
had ever worked for the three government departments sponsoring the programme,
and survived. He had to steer the difficult course between convincing the
government that money was being well spent, and giving the academics and
industrialists the programme they wanted.

‘In the first years of the programme we had much trouble with the collaboration
agreements between the partners,’ he recalls. Oakley wanted these to be
drawn up at the start of the project to avoid delays or misunderstandings
later, and assumed that industry would have had plenty of experience in
drawing up such agreements. The assumption proved wrong, and some projects
were delayed as a result. But Oakley is unrepentant: ‘If I had my time again
I would require them once again.’

Oakley battled with the government appointed steering group. He argues
that the group should ‘keep the director in line and sack him if he doesn’t
do a good job. But it should not try to second-guess him over what projects
to support.’

The funding rules were also a headache. At the start of the programme,
the government promised to provide industry with 50 per cent of its research
funds; academia was to receive 100 per cent support. In practice, academics
discovered that the government grant did not cover their overheads, which
meant they could not afford to get involved in too many Alvey projects.

To make matters worse, the government wanted to renege on its initial
proposition: it began to negotiate ‘up to 50 per cent’ support for industry.
Oakley fought the change. ‘It would have been impossible for firms to do
any serious planning.’

He also fought off controversial new rules that now govern the funding
of collaborative projects. Under the so-called Link rules, the government
provides no more than half of the costs of a project, which discourages
industry from participating. As a result Link, which was designed to support
research in a broad range of fields, is undersubscribed.

In his published account of the Alvey years, Oakley is discreet in his
comments of Whitehall civil servants or goverment ministers. This is not
entirely surprising because, as he notes in the preface to the book, retired
civil servants writing about their work must submit a draft for approval
by government officials. Oakley did this – and changes were made to the
book as a result.

Other critics complained that Alvey supported too many large firms,
which were keen to take public money for research they would have done anyway.
Major British companies, such as GEC, ICL and Plessey, dominated the programme;
just 37 small firms, those employing less than 200 people, took part. Oakley
is unrepentant: ‘Any belief that small, high-technology firms will make
a significant impact on the economy, or even on unemployment, is moonshine.’

But he remains critical of big companies. He notes how the failure of
British industry to invest in research that does not produce quick returns
has cost it a place in world competition.

The problem is not that the quality of research in Britain is poor –
just the opposite, as American and Japanese firms demonstrate by setting
up research laboratories in Britain to tap local talent.

Oakley concludes that Alvey was hugely successful in bringing industrial
and academic communities together and in stimulating an awareness of information
technology. The trouble, he says, is that Britain failed to build on that
success. Instead, through the Link programme, Britain is back to supporting
fragmented initiatives.

* * *

A SPIRIT OF COLLABORATION . . . WITH TOO LITTLE COORDINATION

THERE is no doubt in Oakley’s mind that Alvey created an immense spirit
of cooperation; in this sense, he says, the programme was ‘absolutely right’.
The success of that collaboration is confirmed by two teams of academics
that Oakley appointed to evaluate the programme. These were drawn from the
Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex and from
the Programme of Policy Research in Engineering, Science, and Technology
(PREST), at the University of Manchester. They expect to publish their final
reports later this year.

According to Ken Guy, who led the team at SPRU, more than half of those
who took part in Alvey said they had benefited from the involvement of their
partners. Only a quarter said they would have been better off working alone.

But the programme could have been coordinated better, says Guy. He is
critical of the way that the Alvey directorate evaluated each project in
isolation without forcing participants to consider the relevance of the
work to their business goals.

There have been tangible results, however. For example, Alvey introduced
industry to formal methods, a mathematical system that enables computer
scientists to develop more reliable software. Nearly every university in
Britain now teaches, or has plans to teach, formal methods as part of their
undergraduate computing courses.

In other areas, such as parallel computing and networking, Alvey researchers
influenced work being done elsewhere in Europe. For example, further work
on the Alvey project that aimed to develop a standard system of communication
between computer networks in different countries, the Pounds sterling 4
million Advanced Networked Systems Architecture project, is now funded under
the European programme, Esprit.

* Alvey: Britain’s strategic computing initiative, by Brian Oakley and
Kenneth Owen. Published by MIT Press. Pounds sterling 24.95, hardback.

Angeli Mehta is a science and technology journalist. She works for the
BBC.