Ensuring decisions are well-founded in evidence
Building and managing relationships with policymakers, and influencing them, is an important pillar of our efforts, says Robert Parker.
Readers of these pages over the last few months will have seen pieces highlighting our policy and public affairs work. Building and managing relationships with policymakers, and influencing them, is an important pillar of our efforts, and indeed forms part of the mission laid out in our Royal Charter: "to serve the public interest by acting in an advisory, consultative or representative capacity in matters relating to the science and practice of chemistry".
Working with our members and governance committees, we develop policy positions that take account of opinions from across our community. That allows us to speak with the voice of our well over 50,000 strong membership and wield far larger influence than would be possible on an individual scale.
We aim to ensure that decisions made in government are well-founded in evidence and of benefit to both the research community and society more widely. Our consultation responses and political work are heavily interlinked and we’ve contributed to or commented on all of the recent high profile announcements - on the Nurse review, the Spending Review and the HE Green Paper.
I write this piece only a few days after the Chancellor stood up in Parliament to outline this government’s spending priorities over the next five years. In the lead up to that announcement we have been fighting hard to make the case for investment in science, together with those in our sister societies, and with your support we’ve helped to turn the tide. On a tangible level we’ve worked personally with countless MPs and civil servants, placed comments in the national press, and submitted policy reports and recommendations in support for science in the UK.
Spending Review
The Spending Review itself marks the culmination of activity that began with the publication of the Research Excellence Framework results, and includes recent work on Sir Paul Nurse’s review of the research councils, as well as a Higher Education Green Paper. Big decisions are still to be made and more detail is
needed on the implications of those ventures. Our policy colleagues will be unpacking some of the details in the February edition of RSC News, but this is where I think we stand now: The Spending Review itself was critical, with broad implications for all areas of public policy for the remainder of this parliament.
Since 2010, the science budget has been held at ‘flat cash’, meaning the amount of money for science in the budget pot was protected but didn’t rise in line with inflation. With cuts anticipated across government departments, this was broadly seen as the best the sector could hope for in November’s announcement.
Beating expectations, George Osborne met our campaign ask of real-terms protection for science spending (which means it rises with inflation), and reaffirmed his commitment to science capital spend too. And it’s not just research that did well, both schools funding and investment in STEM subjects in further and higher education were protected in real terms, and significant commitments were made to both energy innovation and health R&D.
Nurse Review
Looking further into the detail, one of George Osborne’s commitments to science was to implement Sir Paul Nurse’s review of the research councils. Published only days before the Spending Review announcement, this report outlines a number of principles for research funding and adjustments to the structure of funding bodies. Perhaps the largest proposed change is the creation of Research UK, a new overarching body for the existing research councils (and possibly Innovate UK), which will have a budget of its own to support interdisciplinary research.
Research UK will be led by a chief executive, appointed by ministers, who will be the single accounting officer to the government for all research councils. To put that in context, this new structure has been likened to a university structure, with a single head but multiple departments focusing on different subjects. We’ll be talking to government and the research councils as this new arrangement is implemented, so if you have any comments we’d be pleased to hear them.
HE Green Paper
The other big announcement recently was the publication of the HE Green Paper. This draft bill lays out a potential widespread shake-up of higher education in the UK, including the abolishment of HEFCE, the introduction of a Teaching Excellence Framework, a reduction in the costs of the Research Excellence Framework, and proposals towards widening access and encouraging diversity.
There have been mixed responses to the announcement, with concerns voiced by student bodies among the points we will be tracking. We will be responding to the green paper jointly with Heads of Chemistry UK.
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