Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, my remarks will focus on some concerns about UKRI. I declare an interest as a member of Cambridge University and as having been both a member and a grantee of research councils.

The Minister’s positive rhetoric about research and innovation is of course welcome, and a “strong voice” in Whitehall for these sectors must indeed be restored. Ministers need external advice on how to apportion funding between different councils, on the balance between responsive mode grants and strategic and regional initiatives, and of course on how to cope with Brexit.

It would have been widely welcomed if the old Advisory Board for the Research Councils had been revived in some form—again headed by a respected and experienced figure but perhaps this time with a stronger and broader membership than that body had. In a sense, the Government have done that. The “top layer” of the proposed UKRI—its chairman, CEO, and board—has essentially those features. Many of us wish that the Government had stopped there, leaving the research councils and Innovate UK with their present status. However, the Bill proposes to merge them—even the century-old MRC with its distinguished history and culture—into a new conglomerate. In so doing it would downgrade the existing research councils—their heads, and their councils—with their diverse networks and expertise, by imposing an extra layer of authority above them, and would concentrate power in a single chief executive.

Among the motivations for UKRI have been two things. First, a McKinsey report suggested that there were too many independent cost centres under BIS. Secondly, undertaken at George Osborne’s request, Sir Paul Nurse’s report—which, incidentally, he wrote as an individual, not representing the Royal Society—advocates a merger of research councils. It is an old idea, but it seems to have become a sacred text—in respect of which I am proud to be a heretic, alongside the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave.

To combine them all into one looks administratively neat but has little more justification than, for instance, DCMS putting all of London’s museums under a single executive super-director. UKRI’s yet-to-be-appointed chief executive would not only advise on science policy, apportionment of funds between councils, strategic initiatives, and so on—a job that I have already emphasised is needed—but he or she would also be the line manager and accounting officer for nine complex and disparate organisations. To take an analogy from the United States, it seems like putting the NSF, NIH, DARPA, and the National Endowment for the Humanities under a single “supremo”. UKRI would oversee as large a fraction of this country’s publicly funded research as those four bodies, added together, do in the US. It is not just a UK analogue of the NSF, as has sometimes been claimed.

If UKRI is set up as proposed, the UK’s efforts in humanities, big and small sciences, medicine, engineering and innovation will all depend on the leadership within this one conglomerate. Such a concentration of authority surely introduces too great a risk of single-point failure. The message from many speakers suggests that in this context, as in others, subsidiarity and diversity will be more prudent than the proposed reforms.

Moreover, even those who think that UKRI’s structure could offer net long-term benefits might deem this a bad time to set it up. It has already been stated that this reorganisation will not come into full effect until April 2018, and its fall-out could drag on longer. This upheaval is surely the last thing we need at a time when universities and the high-tech community have to contend with so many issues that need top-priority attention—not least, the ones threatened in the other parts of the Bill.