The Russell Group makes recommendations on mayors and innovation funding

The government should make research and innovation investment “work harder for growth across the UK,” the Russell Group has said in its submission to the Treasury ahead of the Autumn Budget.

The mission group makes various observations about the government’s intention to devolve more late-stage innovation funding to mayors and local areas, as set out in the Rewiring the State policy paper. It says that such a move – further details of which will be set out in a white paper later this year – will enable local leaders to “build on the distinctive strengths of their economies and back opportunities with the greatest potential for local growth.”

But it is suggested that the greatest impact will come from matching different types of research and innovation investment with “the geographic scale at which they can be most effectively delivered”:

“Regional decision-making can bring knowledge of economic strengths and opportunities, while national competitive funding and international collaborative programmes such as Horizon Europe provide the scale, specialist expertise and connections needed to back the strongest ideas across the UK.”

The Local Innovation Partnerships Fund (LIPF) is presented as an opportunity to test devolution of funding powers. This £500m fund is allocated to partnerships between local authorities, business and universities, and the government has already announced its intention to devolve the fund further in the next spending review period.

LIPF is currently managed by UKRI, and a recent board meeting heard that its delivery has been “more resource-intensive than initially anticipated,” requiring “significant on-the-ground engagement to build capability, governance structures and partnerships.”

The Russell Group argues that, as the fund develops,

“It would be helpful to combine this local flexibility with national oversight to ensure investment across places collectively supports the Industrial Strategy, responds to regional needs and avoids unnecessary duplication or competition between regions.”

The Budget submission also observes that the mission group’s universities “stand ready” to help local authorities with capacity building, and suggests that secondments could be one way to achieve this.

At a recent event at the Universities UK annual conference, Research England executive chair Jessica Corner noted that UKRI was already starting the process of placing staff in regional government in order to “build up capacity”, saying that this was taking place in six areas to begin with.

Elsewhere in the Russell Group submission, the government is asked to sustain its investment in the “foundations of research and commercialisation,” in particular through QR, HEIF and their devolved equivalents. The mission group says it would welcome a “broader review” of the tertiary system, one which would consider “greater targeting of funding” and the future size and shape of the sector.