Concentration of research funding: a cautionary tale

19 August 2010

By Andy Humphrey

Some years ago, a research centre with which I had a close association went through a near catastrophic shake-up. The centre, a small but specialised unit in the north of England which attracted national business and was a stakeholder in a number of patents, relied heavily on external funding from one of the UK’s largest research charities. It punched well above its weight in terms of publications and intellectual property, and was seen as a flagship in its field.

That was until the charity that funded the centre took a political decision to concentrate its research funding in a much smaller number of big institutions, almost all of them in the south-east of England and close to the charity’s London operating base.

In one fell swoop the entire funding programme for the centre (and several others around the UK) was axed. The decision could well have led to the closure of that centre, 40-50 redundancies and the end of a research programme going back 40 years.

It’s a tribute to the academic staff at that centre that the closure did not happen. The centre survived. New business plans were put together, funding streams were diversified, and income was generated from consultancies and spin-out technology. All of this has given the centre a degree of security that should see it survive the recession and the further funding cuts that are impending across academia. But nothing is ever guaranteed. The centre’s research programme has already sustained a heavy knock; recruitment has frozen and research contracts are no longer being renewed. Instead of having the critical mass necessary for a forward-moving research outfit, the centre now operates on a skeleton staff, all of whom are overstretched and just don’t have the time and space needed to do the creative thinking that has to underpin a cutting-edge research programme. There’s still a risk that should another of the centre’s funding sources fail, research projects will have to be axed altogether, and a great deal of knowledge and expertise will be lost to the world.

Taken on its own, this may seem to be just a single sorry tale – unfortunate, but nothing to write home about. What really bothers me, though, is that what happened to this research centre isn’t an isolated incident. In fact, it’s the result of a business model which was heavily supported by the Labour government and which doesn’t look likely to change any time soon. As successive Research Assessment Exercises have come and gone, those who hold the purse-strings for research funding have increasingly advocated the concentration of funding into smaller numbers of large, highly rated centres. Funding decisions from Research Councils, charities and industry increasingly reflect this model. There’s no question that it has benefited Oxford, Cambridge and some of the bigger Russell Group universities (whose Vice-Chancellors have been effusive in their support of this model). These institutions have increasingly found funding decisions going in their favour. But this has been at the expense of smaller universities, the post-92 sector, and regional centres of excellence such as the one that features in this article.

Is concentration of research funding such a good thing? I’ve always suspected that it isn’t, because of the difficulties it presents for research staff trying to build careers and reputations. In my field of science, there is now a “biotech triangle” with vertices at Oxford, Cambridge and London, which encompasses over 90% of the research opportunities available. It’s almost as if researchers are being subjected to a high-tech version of Norman Tebbit’s infamous “get on your bike” speech. Those of us who don’t have the freedom to move to where the jobs are – women researchers with young families, or researchers with mobility difficulties – are more and more disadvantaged. It’s a slap in the face for equality of opportunity. At this year’s UCU Congress, the trade union condemned it as an attack on academic freedom as well.

There is no evidence that the centralised model produces better quality research. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case, as shown from a detailed dissection of the 2008 RAE and its French counterpart. The study, recently reported on ResearchProfessional.com, suggested that the best model for quality research is one based on small to medium-sized research teams, not the mega-centres that have been envisaged by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about an alternative model for sustainable research. The model is the exact opposite of the centralised one, with regional networks where researchers can communicate and collaborate, sharing resources and knowledge to maximise research potential whilst also bringing their individual expertise to benefit their local institution. It is underpinned by a sharing of resources, both in terms of personnel (with flexible redeployment of staff across the network), equipment, and finances (with collaborative funding applications being the norm). The model requires much better communication than exists at present, and also requires a move away from the culture where institutions are competing against one another for research funding as well as for results and publications. But it seems to me to be a model which reflects the concept of the Academy much more truly than the centralising, big business-like model which now prevails.

My fear is that unless institutions reject the centralising model, academic research will become indistinguishable from what happens in the private sector. I suspect that the real beneficiaries will be the few established professors who can command mega-budgets for their research, and the Vice-Chancellors who line their pockets from the proceeds. Many small centres of expertise, by contrast, will probably be forced to close. The brain-drain to the south-east will become unstoppable, and knowledge creation in the less favoured centres (many of which are deprived northern inner cities) will be crippled. The damage to the UK’s economy and to its academic reputation could be irreparable.