Explainer: The spreading the jam debate
Andy Burnham’s arrival as Prime Minister has reignited arguments about how research funding should be distributed across the UK’s different regions and nations.
This debate is sometimes referred to as “spreading the jam”: to what extent the government and research funders should seek an equitable distribution of investment across the country, in the same way that one applies an even layer of marmalade (or other condiment) to a buttered piece of toast.
Jim O’Neill, former Treasury secretary and now Northern Gritstone chair and informal prime ministerial advisor, recently took up the question in an article for UKRI’s Substack. He argued that the UK’s research system is “idiotically lopsided and over-dependent on London and the South East” – but that he was strongly against “jam spreading”:
“The answer is not to spread money everywhere because it superficially feels fair. If you try to please every place and every institution, you dilute impact everywhere. You have to back the places and institutions with a genuine edge – and the capability to use it – and accept that some won’t make the cut.”
It is certainly the case that the lion’s share of UKRI’s funding flows to institutions within what’s sometimes termed the Greater South East – London, southeast England, and the east of England. This formulation can at times be used interchangeably with the “golden triangle”, the slice of England arranged around London, Cambridge and Oxford as its three corners.
UKRI publishes an annual release on how its investment is distributed regionally – what is spent, rather than allocated; the chart below shows the latest data for 2023–24, not including Research England spending:
The raw totals don’t tell the full story, as the UK is not divided up neatly by population area. But toggling across to a per head of population view shows that disparities still persist. Wales and Northern Ireland receive the lowest share of funding relative to population, an issue which has been politically contentious for many years and which sometimes occasions calls for research funding to be devolved (for more on this topic with respect to Wales, see this Wonkhe article from earlier in the year).
The above chart shows investment by what’s known as ITL1 area: the devolved nations, plus macro-level English regions. The data is also available broken down by the more refined ITL2 area, which are difficult to fit on one graph; the one below allows you to see which area received most and least UKRI funding in 2023–24, again excluding Research England so that the figures are comparable across the UK:
For England, these areas begin to approximate – in some cases – existing or planned mayoral authorities. But again they vary by population and economy size. UKRI helpfully provides a separate data table showing how the investment it makes compares to the total economic output of each region. Here outer London performs worse, along with more rural areas:
Should the jam be spread?
Jim O’Neill argues that the government and funders need to prioritise and accept that there will be winners and losers in who gets funding; similar arguments have been made by many policymakers in recent years.
On the other hand, recent parliamentary committee reports such as last month’s Public Accounts Committee one have pushed for more equitable spreading, or at least better data collection and a clearer government strategy for change over time. Backbench MPs and mayors are often strong advocates for sharing research investment in a more balanced way – perhaps unsurprisingly when they represent areas which are getting less than others.
A new report from the Innovation and Research Caucus research group digs a bit deeper into the debates around “jam-spreading”, suggesting that UK science policy in recent years has tried to have its cake and eat it – setting up specific programmes targeted at applied research and commercialisation capacity building beyond the Golden Triangle, while also pushing for stronger returns in the Greater South East, for example through the OxCam corridor project.
Andy Burnham has said that he wants to see a world-leading research cluster in every part of the UK, which on the face of it would appear to be a vote in favour of some degree of jam-spreading. But the emphasis on clusters – specific areas of strength, in specific geographies – is not a straightforward endorsement of the idea of every region getting its fair share.
With £1bn of UKRI funding now earmarked for these clusters, the outcome of how this ends up being distributed around the UK is likely to provoke further debates about equitable distribution of research funding.