Stoking the north-south divide
Last week saw business secretary Jonathan Reynolds say four times that decisions around science facilities and STFC spending must be “science-based”. Four times – count them.
You can draw your own conclusion about whether this represents a politician committed to the principle, or whether it shows that department officials are briefing him to answer thus. In the end, these two possibilities may amount to roughly the same thing. The important takeaway is that the government line is holding relatively firm against backbench pressure to intervene over Jodrell Bank/e-Merlin and other unpopular decisions.
Because there has been plenty of this kind of pressure. The STFC cutbacks arriving right at the same moment that a vocally pro-northern England PM came into office was an unfortunate accident. Since Parliament returned in September, various MPs and peers have pushed ministers for a change of heart on where the infrastructure cuts are falling, and the most interesting among these have done it while explicitly referencing a perceived north-south divide:
Alison Hume, Labour MP for Scarborough and Whitby, asked why one particular facility in northeast England (Boulsby underground laboratory) “faces more than double the cuts faced by facilities in the south.”
Labour’s Luke Myer (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) said that if STFC needs to make savings, it should do so “in an equitable way” rather than “cutting from the regions that have already suffered the most.”
Andrew Cooper, Labour MP for Mid Cheshire, told the Commons that it looked to him as if STFC was “circling the wagons around facilities in the south of England at the expense of those in the north.”
Now, it’s been genuinely excellent to see backbenchers, mayors and others standing up for their local research institutions. It is far from the case that this is uniformly about trying to get Andy Burnham to step in and change up where the cuts fell and where they did not – various MPs and peers have simply called for more clarity on how the “prioritisation outcomes” were arrived at. But the north-south angle taps into a deeper challenge.
There’s a relatively rich Labour backbench tradition which is sceptical of Golden Triangle research investment. The Commons science committee is often a good representative of this tendency – a perfect case in point being its suggestion last year that the government should assess whether funding for institutions in the Greater South East should be “contingent on projects having a quantifiable economic impact elsewhere.” The government (sensibly) dismissed this bureaucratic fudge.
So it’s worthwhile to see Reynolds stick to the “science-based” line – but it only works when those the line is deployed on can understand what it means. One of the backbenchers quoted above also asked ministers how they could reconcile cutting funding to a (northern) scientific facility while at the same time being committed to “place-based growth, regional rebalancing and the growth mission.”
And the honest answer is probably that: it can’t, really. The two things don’t have a neat reconciliation.
Burnham’s arrival as PM, and his more recent “innovation nation” speech, make the government pretty committed to supporting regional R&D, in ways that are never going to be purely about following the science. This doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it does make it messy – some further work on making it make sense would be appreciated. For the research councils to be able to do science-based decisions, the government needs to be clear about where, when and how the non-science-based decisions happen.
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