Two ways of understanding the government’s role in research
Physicist Brian Cox is back in the news with further criticism of UKRI’s spending decisions, telling a Labour party conference fringe event that he has “serious problems” with how money is being used. In particular, he asked whether the UK should be attempting to “try to engineer higher growth rates by fiddling around with the targeting of the science budget?”
His comments are ably written up by Politics Home, in an article which is (understandably) more interested in his thoughts on Andy Burnham and the political uses and abuses of D:Ream anthem Things Can Only Get Better.
The latest critique will come as little surprise if you’ve followed Cox’s comments on social media in recent months – back in July he was particularly excoriating about UKRI’s “short-sighted vision” for UK science:
“The problems appears to have been caused by senior management at UKRI focusing on short term economic ‘impact’ (whatever that means) rather than doing their job as custodians of the foundations of science.”
On this occasion, his post received a reply from ESRC executive chair Stian Westlake, in what is probably the most substantive defence of UKRI’s overall approach that has made it into the public domain thus far. He replies that UKRI’s new strategy is about investing in curiosity-driven research, while also “doing a better job of backing translational R&D to improve people’s lives and drive economic growth.”
He contends that even those only interested in curiosity-driven research (apologies if that is not a term you are on board with; it’s the one being used) should be pragmatically in favour of this approach:
“At fiscal events like the 2025 Spending Review that determine UKRI’s current budget, organisations like UKRI aren’t given a pot of money and told to spend it how they like. The spending negotiation is about “how” as well as “how much”. My reading of last summer’s negotiations is that the financial settlement for R&D [...] would have been significantly less generous if UKRI and DSIT had proposed to focus spending purely on curiosity-driven research, and that had we done that, curiosity-driven research would now be in a worse position, not a better one.”
There are two theories of UKRI’s role here – but it may strike you that there are also two theories of how the government intervenes in the system.
Cox’s call is for the Burnham government and its new ministers to “review the upcoming catastrophe, and instruct UKRI to do their job and focus on making Britain the best place in the world to do science, now and in the future” – that is, a kind of backstop against bad choices. Westlake’s is that the government sets wider national strategy and funding envelopes, and UKRI positions itself within them and in response to them.
This column has previously gone over the (we would argue) dangerous tendency for moments of maximum stress in the system to be accompanied by more vociferous calls for the government to overrule. But equally, we need to find better ways to talk about and critique the government’s strategic steer to UKRI, as that’s what the object of study should be rather than individual moments.
The problem is that it is often diffuse, time-lagged, or delivered behind closed doors, and hard to get excited about when it is formalised. See, for example, Patrick Vallance’s updated framework document for the relationship between the funder and his department. This placed a decent emphasis on promoting economic growth, in a way which presumably Brian Cox would not be happy with. It’s not the kind of document which launches a thousand op-eds, however – maybe we will all need to try harder to have Big Thoughts about future iterations.
So there are different ways to understand UKRI’s job, and the government’s role. This is not to say that the merits of STFC’s funding choices are simply a question of interpretation. There’s still plenty more to be argued about – for one thing it remains an extremely open question how exactly Jodrell Bank is to be “saved”. Plus it probably is a problem if the most cogent defence of UKRI’s approach that we’ve had to date came on a social media platform that much of the research community has abandoned.
Transparency is the other thing: STFC’s by now infamous prioritisation outcomes document has a whole section on “how these decisions were made” which clearly sets out the process by which the decisions were indeed made – and leaves one none the wiser about the actual reasons. The research community needs to be careful about asking the government to step in when it is unhappy with investment and policy choices (in part because ministers would probably love to). But the flipside of this is that it needs to properly understand why what was chosen was chosen.
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