Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-101)

ALAN JOHNSON, MP

3 DECEMBER 2003

  Q100 Chairman: You have given us a lot of time, Minister, but we would be really remiss if we did not ask you one last question, and that is about research funding. One of the strongest resonances we picked up during our inquiry into the Higher Education White Paper was people were much more interested and much more concerned about research funding than they were about anything to do with flexible fees and the real feeling of injustice in the higher education community of this Government's fashion for believing that further increase on the focus and concentration of research funding in fewer institutions was going to benefit universities and our research capacity as a nation. So much of the evidence came back time and time again that that was not the case. A recent survey conducted for the Universities UK seemed to back this up. Sometimes we would like to see some response to Select Committee inquiry reports and we are really disappointed that you do not seem to have moved at all in this area.

  Alan Johnson: We debated this, as you remember, in July. We have not put the 21 million back from the five's to the four's, which I think you specifically asked for, we thought that was unrealistic. It was only 2% of the research budget. What we tried to do was separate myth from reality, the myth that we only wanted to focus on four universities round the South East. There were over 40 different higher education institutions that got more than £5 million in the latest round and there was one in every region. We want to concentrate on excellent research wherever it is. We do not intend to concentrate all research funding into a tiny group, 75% has always been allocated to 25 institutions, that is just the nature of how research operates. We want to reward emerging research and innovative research, the Higher Education Innovation Fund, which is £90 million against the £20 odd million we moved round—2% of the budget that causes a great deal of consternation—is a third arm of funding. Since you have written your report you would have seen that HEFCE said they will retain four rated departments at their current rate of funding, round £138 million for the entire RAE period, so over the next three years. That has settled down lots of concerns. Having said the movement of that 21 million was a shock, it was meant to be a shock to the system, it ended up as just a shock in terms of people misconstruing that. There was also legitimate criticism from you and others that if you read the OSTs consultation document on Research Council funding alongside Gareth Roberts' report on the RAE you could have thought they came from different governments—I am going to say something controversial here—they did not seem entirely joined-up, and that has been recognised by myself, David Sainsbury and Charles Clarke, et cetera. There was a real concern, the third bit of self-criticism of Government, because it was a shock to the system and universities were not expecting it, we had not consulted them enough on where we wanted to go with research. Our view was with Government putting an extra £1.25 billion into research we wanted to be absolutely sure it was not just going to be business as usual, because it is not business as usual in India, China or America and elsewhere, we have to keep up to scratch. Mea culpa in terms of some of those messages. What we have done since is to set up the Research Forum, which has a wide cross-section, the unions are represented, including the NUS, UUK are represented, modern universities, ancient universities, Scotland, they all have a place there and that will look at some of these thorny questions like, is there an integral link between research and teaching? It will also help us, it will act as a sounding board for how we go forward with those three pieces of consultation on research which will be taken through a Committee with me and David Sainsbury so we are linked up with the OST and we will use this group as a sounding board. I hope we can get some shared analysis. I have not heard anybody say it should be business as usual, they all accept the challenges we face. A bit more dialogue about how we address those challenges should lead to a far more productive atmosphere over this whole question of research.

  Q101 Chairman: Minister, you have given us a lot of time, thank very much for the session. We look forward to seeing you again.

  Alan Johnson: Thank you very much.





 
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