---

Universities: Research Funding

My Lords, it was right in 1992 to abolish the binary line which had so arbitrarily and invidiously divided polytechnics and universities. What we made clear, however, at that time—I was Higher Education Minister—was that this policy was not a green light for institutions to drift from their previous missions. We expected the post-1992 universities to be funded to continue to concentrate on what they were best at: vocational higher education and applied research. I asked every polytechnic, before the legislation reached the statute book, to write a mission statement as an anchor. We made it crystal clear that while post-1992 universities should be free to make their individual cases for research funding, they should not expect public funding to be available to convert every institution in the system into a research university. Basic research would continue to be relatively concentrated, though we were enthusiastic that ties between business and all universities should be strengthened to generate more applied research. The RAE had already achieved important benefits in identifying research quality and promoting more businesslike management of research, and that drive would continue. With the imperative to expand undergraduate numbers and their teaching, the resources would not be available from the public purse to provide substantial QR funding across the enlarged and enlarging sector. The harsh reality is that there has not been enough money available through public expenditure at any time since 1992, notwithstanding the very large increases that this Government have provided for research, to pay for the QR funding that post-1992 institutions so eloquently demand. Research gets more expensive, while the leading research universities across the world—the league in which a small number of ours must remain—develop more resources, new endeavours and new achievements. The Government and HEFCE have had no option but increasingly to concentrate resources for research. This process has been compounded—and it had to happen—by full economic costing, which means more money for no more volume. The result has of course been that not only has there been precious little left for the modern universities, but the squeezed middle—a number of universities that once seemed secure as research universities—is sliding down the research funding slope. These are painful and difficult circumstances. The RAE methodology in prospect after 2008, metrics, will not offer a reprieve. I shall make two observations which, though not quite upbeat, are positive. First, it is valid and honourable for a university to be a teaching university. Resources of money and time in universities publicly funded for teaching but not research should permit scholarship, keeping abreast of significant developments in an academic field. In that way, the teaching of students will be informed directly by research. In America, this has been accepted for a long time. Secondly, there can be scope in every modern university to develop at least one or two centres in which there is research excellence, funded perhaps by concentration of a continuing small ration of QR and by private resources. In these areas, students can experience teaching informed and inspired at first hand by new research. Ministers should be candid in the run-up to the 2008 RAE, as perhaps they were not sufficiently before the 2001 RAE, that while they will do all they can in the face of valid competing demands for education funding to preserve funding for university research, there will be no cornucopia from which to reward all those whose research peer review has recognised as good but not the very best. I am sorry to speak so starkly, but I cannot criticise the judgment of Ministers that research funding should be concentrated and that universities should embrace very different roles.