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Universities: Research Assessment Exercise

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, for promoting what has proved an extremely timely debate. It is a great pleasure to have someone as knowledgeable as the noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow, deliver his maiden speech in this debate. I look forward to his participation in many further debates. I declare an interest: as an academic my own writings were subject to the RAE in 1989, 1992, 1996 and 2001. Indeed, the writings were in the very institution that introduced to this country the dreaded word ““bibliometrics””. The first sort of metrics, which were used in 1989 and were about citation indices, derived from my own institution. The 1989 exercise was very much a pilot to see how far some sort of metrics might work. It was as a result of that exercise that it was decided that you needed to have something that reflected the texture of research a little better, so we moved to the panel system, in which metrics played a part but the panels were also able to judge something of the quality. From 1992 onwards the exercises have got more and more complicated, as the noble Lord, Lord Williams, suggested. Their complication increased almost geometrically. In 2001, there were 68 subject areas, with panels, and something between 10 and 20 members on each panel. As the noble Lord, Lord Desai, mentioned, if each member of the panel, who were largely better known and better qualified researchers, had to read something in the region of 500 pieces, articles and books that had been submitted, it was a huge exercise that occupied a good six months of their year. We have to look at the costs of the exercise. The direct costs of the 2001 exercise were estimated by PricewaterhouseCoopers at £5.6 million, but the indirect costs were in the time occupied by the academics, and not only the panel members but—in every university and every department—the time taken to prepare the submissions. A cost of £45 million has been put on this, but it could be considerably greater than that, partly because it has become such a central piece of the landscape for every department that they are running dummy runs. I know a lot of departments that are currently running those dummy runs. As has been made clear, the up side of the exercise has been to stimulate research in the UK. In numbers of people involved and in terms of publications, about 5 per cent of the research production in the world comes from the United Kingdom, but we have moved up from 1989 from 8 per cent of citations around the world to 12 per cent—and 13 per cent of the highly cited papers. It has already been noted that, in 1996, 36 per cent of research-active staff were in departments rated either five or five-star, and the two top-rated departments by 2001 had moved up to 55 per cent. We seem to get grade inflation here as much as we get it in A-level. The down side is the cost of the administrative burden placed on departments and the distortion of research output. That was a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Rees. It is one that we must beware of. In science, almost by its nature, you investigate and set up experiments because you do not know what the outcome will be—and you will get dud results. But if you get dud results, you cannot write them up, so you go for the safe projects that you know will yield a certain result. That is a great danger. Also, there is a bias against multi-disciplinary research in favour of theoretical and against applied research—against books as distinct from journal articles and, above all, against edited books and collections of essays. We know that academics play the game; they are not unintelligent so, inevitably, if you offer them a reward in certain circumstances, they will go towards that reward. Then there is what I call the league-table phenomenon of the star academics who are bought up. Finally, there has been a distortion in teaching. Some of the best researchers are devoting very little of their time to teaching because their institution puts such pressure on them to devote themselves to research. As we all recall, there have been reviews on this subject; in particular, the Roberts review. HEFCE produced a report after that review, and I found myself quite amused that the first item that came out of it was the overwhelming support from the universities for an assessment process built around expert review conducted by discipline-based panels. There was also support for proposals that the panels should be helped to make better use of quantitative indicators relevant to their discipline. In other words—and I think this comes out in the UUK briefing we had for this debate—there is a great conservatism on the part of universities. They do not necessarily want to move away from the system they know. Better the devil you know than one that you do not. The 2008 RAE is already well under way. The Select Committee report, which came out in 2004, was tougher on this issue and called for a more radical review. From these Benches we have some sympathy for that. We consider the funding bodies to be unjustifiably conservative in their proposals. We do not think HEFCE’s role is to protect the sensitivities of universities. For the first time in my life, therefore, I am saying three cheers for Her Majesty’s Treasury. It seems to have cut through some of the fog that has surrounded this issue, the ifs and the buts, and put forward pretty decisive plans that effectively will get rid of the RAE in its present form and replace it with a simpler allocation system after 2008. So far we have had only an outline of what it is proposing, but it would be to harness the QR allocations, at least for science departments, Research Council income, plus—this is an important plus, and picks up some of the points that have been raised—the full range of research income from charities, industry, other government departments and the EU. My own feeling is that this is a thoroughly welcome initiative. I understand that in the social sciences, the humanities and mathematics, it may not be a satisfactory metric. Quite clearly, there has to be an extensive consultation here. I shall finish by echoing the words of the noble Lord, Lord Giddens: the RAE may be dead, but I think there will be no consensus about what follows.