Technology Centres (Hansard, 6 May 1994)

§ Mr. Aitken

This is a matter delegated to the Defence Research Agency under its framework document. I have therefore asked the chief executive to reply direct to the hon. Member.

Letter from John Chisholm to Mr. Jim Cousins, dated 6 May 1994: In today's written answer the Minister of State for Defence Procurement said I would be replying direct to your question on dual use technology centres. Dual-use Technology Centres (DUTCs) are one of a number of initiatives being taken by the Defence Research Agency to increase the contribution from defence research to wealth creation in the UK, in response to the 1993 White Paper on Science and Technology. The idea behind DUTCs is to enable industry to exploit the facilities, technology, know how and teams which exist for defence research. No funds have been specifically allocated to setting up DUTCs by MOD although the research work in the centres is sponsored by the MOD and, occasionally, the Department of Trade & Industry. This provides the revenue that makes DUTCs possible. But it is left to industry to decide how to participate and how to fund its involvement. The first DUTC covering the area of Structural Materials was established in April 1994. It aims to enable UK industry to gain more benefit from the very large expenditure by MOD on research in advanced structual materials and the combination and processing of such materials in advanced products. The Structural Materials Centre is currently spread around 11 sites but we plan to rationalise primarily into a new laboratory at Farnborough. The construction of this laboratory is funded by MOD as part of the programme of cost cutting and site closures that flowed from Options for Change and 'forms a key part of the DRA's rationalisation programme. A second DUTC, the Software Engineering Centre, will be launched in May. This will aim to exploit MOD expenditure on engineering research software in order to encourage closer working between the UK software companies. This Centre will be managed from DRA Malvern but will involve many projects with multi-company teams located at DRA and industry sites. A third DUTC is planned for the summer in the area of supercomputing. This will be a partnership between a number of UK organisations, both military and civil, aimed at providing world scale computing facilities to the DRA, its partners and other civil users. Other DUTC opportunities are being considered in hydrodynamics and oceanography, using DRA's facilities at Haslar near Portsmouth, and in information systems and technology and electronics and opto-electronics.