V-cs fear mayoral ‘land grab’ of UKRI research funding

Allowing metro mayors to write the innovation chapters of the government’s upcoming devolution White Paper risks a “land grab” of universities’ research funding, sector figures have warned.

Although the details of Andy Burnham’s devolution White Paper are not yet known, vice-chancellors have privately raised concerns over the decision to let the offices of Liverpool’s mayor Steve Rotheram and Teesside’s mayor Ben Houchen draw up key sections of a document that could influence how national research budgets are allocated.

It follows a commitment by the prime minister in his first few days in office when, according to cabinet papers from July, he promised to “support mayors to foster local innovation ecosystems, devolving a substantially increased share of later-stage innovation funding to local leaders”. This would allow them to “back opportunities with the greatest potential for local growth”, he said.

Rotheram and Houchen’s offices have been asked to turn this commitment into policy with the help of officials in the Cabinet Office and the newly formed Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade. However, there are concerns that the proposals, due to be published later this month, will result in more funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) awarded to Burnham’s place-based agenda at the expense of excellence-led research conducted within universities.

“It’s essentially a land grab,” one university leader told Times Higher Education on the likely impact of the devolution White Paper on institutions’ research budgets, predicting that research council funds would be diverted towards translational research or support for spin-outs and scale-ups.

The innovation chapters would boost already announced efforts to devolve research spending to the regions, with a £1 billion pot to be spent over four years to develop “globally significant” clusters of innovation while a UKRI-led £500 million Local Innovation Partnership Fund will be fully devolved to mayoral authorities from 2028.

With Burnham’s closest ally in politics Steve Rotheram – who recently appeared on a celebrity episode of Gogglebox with the prime minister – likely to argue for more funding that could stimulate economic growth in the short term, research-intensive universities could lose significant amounts of funding under new formulas to allocate resources, some fear.

A Rotheram-led push for more devolved research funding would certainly find favour with Burnham, who frequently used research funding to support innovation-led projects in his nine years as Manchester’s mayor, predicted John Womersley, former chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Research Council.

“Burnham was quite active in using the limited amount of research funding he had as mayor to support innovation. The Atom Valley tech cluster that he championed was a good example – it filled a gap in our research ecosystem that needed to be filled but UKRI was reluctant to commit to,” explained Womersley, suggesting that the White Paper might advocate similar projects drawing on UKRI schemes.

“UKRI has always said it supports excellence wherever it exists but it does not say how you create excellence where it does not. Will Burnham just go along with this or will he let others take money away from UKRI to do something different with it?” continued Womersley.

Those leading research-intensive universities will be most worried about any changes because their institutions are the main beneficiaries of UKRI’s £9 billion budget, he added. “UKRI will not be able to object to these changes because it might remain close to government but I imagine big universities will find ways to point out the risks of any changes. For them, it’s not just about conservatism or not wanting to change because they’re the biggest winners; they genuinely believe the current excellence-led way of allocating research funding is the right way to do it,” he said.

Any shift towards devolving research budgets to regions or attempt to distribute funds outside universities would, however, raise questions about whether mayoralties were equipped to choose the right projects, added Womersley. “They will have to explain how they will provide good accountability for this spending and what outputs they’ll be examining,” he said.

“You can criticise how UKRI spends its funding but its structures of expert-led peer review have been established and developed over a long time – there isn’t that same level of infrastructure within metro mayoralties, nor is there any mechanism for accountability,” a university leader told THE.

Another research policy expert, who wished to remain anonymous, put things more bluntly. “It feels like the social contract between government and university research has broken – ministers don’t believe research spending as it’s currently done is working. They want to do things differently."

Richard Jones, emeritus professor of materials physics and innovation policy at the University of Manchester, who has supported greater devolution of research funding, said Burnham was attempting to correct a “market failure” of concentration of research spending in London and the south-east but any push for more place-led allocation of funding had risks.

“Pressures to satisfy too many constituencies, combined with weak governance, could lead to the dividing up of research, development and innovation (RD&I) funding into a large number of subcritical pots,” he explained.

Increasing the amount of “late stage RD&I funding” awarded to regions alone would also “not be sufficient to counteract a geographical imbalance of government R&D spending that has been many decades in the making”, Jones warned.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com