Throwing out the baby with the bathwater

The irony is that the era of eye­watering salaries and mansions on leafy avenues actually ended some time ago. While there are still plenty of Commission people who live very well ­– courtesy of getting their feet under the table back in the old days – many new staff face short contracts, lower wages and substantially less sexy perks. I am all for the European Commission employing people on a realistic level (i.e. like the rest of us), but I am having problems with additional changes in structure that somebody thought was an ‘efficiency’.

One cut too many?

The EC is a huge funding body, driving innovation and industrial development across Europe. To do that, it needs passionate and motivated staff who are integrated into the heart of the scientific process. Based on what I have seen myself and heard from plenty of others, the increased use of external agencies to administer project funding isn’t serving collaborative research well. Sure, the agencies come cheaper and let the EC talk about reducing costs, but the direct result is that you get people paid to administer – not to add value to – world­class research collaborations.

Another irony is that there is a queue of people 10km long wanting to work for the Commission, and it includes talented scientists and project managers. So why make them just administer project reports? Managing collaborative research is really hard, we all know that, so why not invest a bit more to ensure that it actually works? These guys would work on the same salaries as you pay external staff. In fact, I bet that those external staff would jump at the chance to stretch their brains beyond correctly completed personnel tables.

Investing in results

The fact is that the European Commission will always take the heat for national issues. It is a useful whipping boy on any aspect of money because its budgets are so huge, and it always looks shifty because its answers are necessarily complicated. The Commission is not going to win any debates at national level, regardless of how much it cuts budgets, so it should stand up and say that it is proud to have skilled Project Officers working as partners with the projects that it funds. Then those projects have the maximum chance of delivering the results that they were funded to achieve, while the Directorates delivering the funding can also see the fruits of their labour and assess the effectiveness of their policies.