Four open questions for UKRI
Following our UKRI: transformed live event, we’ve published the interview with Economic and Social Research Council executive chair Stian Westlake in full on our news pages, and the subsequent panel discussion is available to watch back or to read on the event page.
The discussion covered a lot of ground, from the challenges of prioritising “bigger, longer grants” – an idea which science minister Chris McDonald recently backed – to how the research sector can ensure that excellent research is valued for social and civic contributions as well as economic returns.
Here are four areas which stood out as important, in that they represent issues which UKRI and the wider research sector will need to navigate in the months and years ahead – and for which we still don’t have clear answers.
University funding, and UKRI’s role
“We have to acknowledge that this is a challenge,” Stian Westlake recognised, when asked about university financial instability and the higher education sector’s growing funding shortfall (which largely stem from issues outside of UKRI’s direct gift such as student recruitment).
Our panellists were more forthright – British Academy chief executive Hetan Shah said that what is happening within the university sector was “one of the biggest threats” to UK research currently, regretting the missed opportunity in the recent machinery of government changes whereby research and innovation policy remained separate from the education brief. UCL’s Sarah Chaytor also pointed out that universities are making large investments in research with their own money, and should not be thought of as “passive recipients” of funding.
On this topic, one noteworthy observation from Stian Westlake was that UKRI’s ability to work closely with the Office for Students had “really improved” in the last year or so – he referenced Edward Peck’s appointment as chair of the English regulator, and the arrival of new chief executives. UKRI cannot fix the university finance issue by itself, he went on to say – but it needs to be “having those conversations.”
It is interesting to see this highlighted; the next question for many will be how this has translated into policy change or otherwise influenced either UKRI or OfS’ thinking. It might be that join-up across different parts of government is improving – there is arguably a need for the sector to understand more tangibly what that means.
UKRI has recently said more about the work it is doing on research financial sustainability, which articulate what the funder believes are the policy levers it has at its disposal. Some in the higher education sector would certainly like to see it take a more vocal role in highlighting the risks to research from deteriorating finances and cuts to capacity. This places UKRI in a difficult position, with the research community on one side and the government on the other. A worsening picture across the HE sector stands to make that pressure even more intense.
Managing demand
One of the policy levers which the above-referenced UKRI position paper refers to was greater clarity over demand management, which it recognised can create additional work within research institutions in working out what moves forward and what does not. That said, its recent strategy and announcement on grant assessment modernisation was clear that such quotas remain an important tool in its arsenal, especially in the context of wanting to bring processing times down.
Research on Research Institute executive director James Wilsdon homed in on this in the panel discussion, saying that the scale of what’s currently happening with application volumes was “pretty clear”, and that if UKRI addresses this using further demand management it might “push the problems out of sight and maybe out of mind” – but would create many further challenges within institutions.
Stian Westlake was asked about rising application levels at a time of constrained finances. The ESRC executive chair was clear that demand management was part of the answer, though he recognised that this means more work for research organisations. “If we can do it in the right way and give advanced notice, then that will make the thing less painful,” he concluded.
Beyond application volume, Westlake said that AI had the potential to raise “really quite profound questions” about how research councils operate. He said that ESRC was “keeping our eyes open because things could change very rapidly.” In the later discussion, James Wilsdon struck a more concerned note:
“Is the system even capable of adapting at the speed required to cope with the sort of juggernaut of AI-powered change that’s kind of going to hit it in the next 12 or 18 months? I have my doubts.”
Buckets are back?
The language around “buckets” was very prominent in UKRI’s thinking as recently as last autumn – with the explicit support of then science minister Patrick Vallance, who was adamant in parliamentary appearances that R&D funding needed to be assigned more clearly, in the quest to give the Treasury and other parts of Whitehall greater transparency about where investment were going.
To simplify somewhat: bucket one represented discover research (including QR); bucket two government and social priorities, in particular the industrial strategy; and bucket three was HEIF and Innovate UK investment in companies.
Since then, talk of buckets has become less prominent, and Vallance has departed as responsible minister. But Stian Westlake was clear that internally the buckets framing is “quite hardwired into how we operate” at UKRI. He also observed that Vallance had resisted attempts to choose a more impressive-sounding nomenclature.
In the subsequent discussion, Hetan Shah highlighted last week’s independent impact evaluation of strategic institutional research funding (SIRF), which detailed the many different ways that QR and other block grants are being spent within higher education institutions. Given that UKRI has assigned all of QR funding to bucket one, he noted that this complicated any discussion of how much is actually being invested directly in discovery research, in a way that the bucket model does not really capture.
Unclear prospects for devolution
Perhaps the key topic of the moment is devolution, given the soon-to-be-published white paper and the ambitious pronouncements we have had so far from the Andy Burnham administration. How UKRI fits in to this picture remains somewhat unclear, given ongoing work to reprofile £1bn of its budget, and the inevitable contrast between a national-level funder’s priorities and those of mayoral areas, especially those short on experience and capacity.
Stephanie Smith of the Russell Group expressed concerns that the government’s plan for devolution may well be “broad and lacking in detail” when it arrives, and may not bring clarity – or could even deliberately obfuscate – regarding what powers are being handed over to regional authorities. But she thought that UKRI would continue to have an important convening role, as would universities.
For James Wilsdon, the devolution agenda was arriving at precisely the moment when UKRI was “finally getting a grip of its original mandate” to provide tighter strategic coordination of the system:
“It is quite a challenge because of course it potentially pushes against that, and unravels the capacity of the centre of UKRI to maintain a degree of coordination – in that, by necessity, devolution involves giving away control and oversight to other actors.”
Stian Westlake had earlier suggested that the benefits of devolution would include local actors having valuable knowledge about what is going on in local economies, and the ability for R&D to be thought of in closer conjunction with other prerequisites for growth, such as transport and skills.
But there’s no doubt that substantial devolution of powers and governance related to innovation – if this is indeed what materialises – complicates UKRI’s oversight and role as a steward of UK research. What happens next, at a time of increasing financial pressure on many parts of the system, will need careful scrutiny.
Research Agenda’s UKRI:transformed webinar can be watched back here. Join us on Tuesday 19 January for our next live event: Where are we with the REF?