Command and cluster
Budget reaction is often an unedifying spectacle of commentators saying “is that it?” – as if it would be a healthy state of affairs were the government to spring a whole raft of surprise science policy announcements from up its sleeves.
Many of the more important mechanisms in the Burnham administration’s toolkit are being managed outwith BIST, devolution in particular, which can leave the research sector feeling like it is navigating unfamiliar waters when wading through the Red Book.
And there was quite a lot of consequential stuff for devolution last week. This column has previously suggested that rewiring the state doesn’t necessarily mean less central government control over the research system. We can see this playing out most clearly at the moment in Scotland and Wales.
The Prime Minister met with respective First Ministers John Swinney and Rhun ap Iorwerth late last week, and his subsequent comments to the press were quite revealing:
“We had a good discussion today on two fronts. One around reindustrialisation and the offer of more devolution of innovation funding to the regional level. It’s about creating those structures at a regional level, and that’s a matter for Scotland and Wales to decide what that looks like in both countries. It’s not for me to impose or try to interfere there.”
Burnham added, for Scotland specifically, that the further devolution of innovation funding could go ahead once there was a suitable “vehicle” – and that said vehicle is not the national government, but rather something necessarily more local.
So what we have here is Westminster telling both devolved governments that this particular new power – which is heading the way of mayors in England, in some form – is contingent on more regional devolution. Some might opine that this would look different were Labour to be in power in Wales or Scotland; we couldn’t possibly comment. It’s certainly a recipe for the whole process to get gummed up quite considerably.
Some comparisons might be instructive. There are almost twice as many people living in London than in Scotland – and yet we’re not expecting that Sadiq Khan will be instructed to devolve innovation funding to Hackney council.
Wales and Greater Manchester have similar populations – but no-one is telling new GM mayor Bev Craig that she has to set up a Stockport-Didsbury growth corridor before getting new powers.
That said, it is worth a dispassionate conversation about what geographies would be most suitable for the devolution of (some aspects of) research to apply to. In Scotland, recent reports from the Our Scottish Future think tank and from former University of Glasgow principal Anton Muscatelli have made persuasive cases for a more regional approach, with combined authorities empowered and clusters better supported. The issue is that the first of these reports was instigated by Gordon Brown (it’s even called Innovation Nation…) and the second commissioned by Scottish Labour, meaning that the chances of a dispassionate conversation recede somewhat.
Wales’ new-ish Plaid Cymru government wants research devolved (according to their manifesto at least; it’s gone a bit quiet since). But not, you intuit, beyond the national level. Four regional authorities are being set up to manage Wales’ new local growth fund in a way that on paper might sound quite promising – but the Welsh government is simultaneously in the process of setting up its own national development agency, whose remit will include innovation.
So there’s plenty of reason to suspect that we haven’t heard the last of this. Devolving innovation spend in some way will create tensions between Westminster and local priorities, but when you chuck in national governments as well, it gets ever more fraught.
Party politics means that the contestations around devolving innovation funding are most visible in Scotland and Wales at the moment, but they will crop up elsewhere as well. The Budget also saw some important announcements on new mayors for English regions, and many of these are in areas quite unlikely to go Labour anytime soon.
Tucked in among last week’s onslaught of policy papers and spreadsheets was the apparent news that mayors will be able to distribute their income tax shares in a way that would be essentially indistinguishable from a tax rebate. They might then end up with less to spend on housing, transport or – yes – innovation, which is perhaps less of a disincentive than Andy Burnham thinks.
This might end up being the real story of devolving innovation funding: that you risk devolving it down to lower amounts, when it runs into politics.
Spotted a politician meddling in the research system? Or a blurry line between academia and government? Email the man himself: haldane [at] researchagenda [dot] news