Volume 2: Science
Part 1: How research was commissioned and funded
Introduction

6.1 The establishment and implementation of an appropriate research programme was one of the key elements of the Government's response to the emergence of BSE. Our assessment of the adequacy of this element is given in Chapter 7.

6.2 This chapter describes how government research was organised and implemented, and how the funders and providers - more usually known as 'customers' and 'contractors', for reasons explained below - worked together.

6.3 Between 1986/87 and 1995/96, the Government spent well over £60 million on research into BSE and other TSEs. ¹ Of this, £37.9 million came from MAFF; £1.6 million from the Department of Health (DH), ² including funding for the CJD surveillance programme, further details of which are given in vol. 8: Variant CJD; and £27.4 million was provided by the Research Councils. In addition, between 1986 and 1998, TSE research funded by a private medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, amounted to just under £6 million. ³

6.4 So although there was a shared objective - to find out more about the newly identified disease, BSE, and other similar diseases - the research was funded from several different sources and the work was done in a number of different places. Figure 6.1 below shows which organisations were involved.

Figure 6.1: Funders and providers of BSE- and CJD-related research

6.5 Part 1 of this chapter outlines the principles that underpinned publicly funded research in 1986, including the system of Research Councils at arm's length from Government Departments, and the machinery for directing and overseeing this system. Part 2 describes the Public Expenditure Survey (PES) system - the means by which Departments obtained funds from Parliament; considers the two key policy considerations that impacted upon animal disease research from the early 1980s; and looks at the main protagonists - the Agricultural and Food Research Council (AFRC), ⁴ the Medical Research Council (MRC), the jointly funded Neuropathogenesis Unit (NPU), MAFF and the Central Veterinary Laboratory (CVL), and DH.

6.6 Part 3 describes the establishment of MAFF's TSE research programme, focusing on the early research undertaken by the CVL, and how this programme developed in the light of advice from the Southwood Working Party, the Tyrrell Consultative Committee on Research (the Tyrrell Committee), and the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC). We conclude with a brief account of the research programmes put in place by other funders.