What might the Comprehensive Spending Review hold for Higher Education?
Well worth a read is the British Universities Finance Directors Group’s (BUFDG) submission to the UK Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review (expected in June). Amongst other things, BUFDG call for:
- a commitment to increasing tuition fees in line with inflation every year
- removing international students from immigration statistics
- making charitable and non-profit-making higher education zero-rated rather than exempt from VAT—enabling the VAT that would be recoverable on costs to be spent on educating students
- government to “explore a different, more effective funding method”
- the restoration of QR funding to 2011 real-terms levels
The submission underlines how precarious the finances of the HE world currently are – but anyone hoping for the calls to be adopted by UK Government might be waiting a long time. As Research Professional observed, the BUFDG proposals represent “a sensible, considered set of recommendations that could genuinely help to alleviate the financial pressures currently faced by universities. Unfortunately, according to the noises coming out of Whitehall, it seems unlikely that any of it – except perhaps the annual tuition fee rise – will come to pass.”
Other news in brief
- New UKRI CEO: In late February, Professor Sir Ian Chapman was appointed as the new CEO of UK Research and Innovation. Previously chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the appointment was trumpeted as bringing UKRI “a renewed focus on economic growth, making Britain a clean energy superpower and building an NHS fit for the future”, three of the missions outlined in the UK Government’s Plan for Change. The statement also emphasises the funder’s role in future research related to artificial intelligence, and the need not only to support “pioneering research” but also to “provide a clear return on investment for hardworking taxpayers”. Prof. Chapman already sits on UKRI’s board and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Physics. He was knighted in the King’s New Year Honours in 2023. Educated at Durham University, where he is now a visiting professor, he studied for his PhD in plasma physics at Imperial College London, joining the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham laboratory. In the days after the announcement, Stian Westlake (Executive Chair of the ESRC) called for UKRI to have “another crack” at being the nation’s “strategic brain” for research and development.
- New OfSE Chair announces: Professor Edward Peck CBE, the outgoing vice-chancellor of Nottingham Trent University, was named as the UK Government’s preferred candidate to be the new Chair of the Office for Students in England, with the formality of approving his nomination expected to happen very soon. Peck announced last month that he is to step down as vice-chancellor of the Nottingham institution this summer after 11 years in the role.
- Medr stratregic plan: Wales’ new tertiary education and research regulator, Medr, published its 2025-2030 strategic plan. Whilst there is much in the document to welcome, we were disappointed to see they had not adopted our consultation recommendation to explicitly include learned societies as one of the bodies with whom they would collaborate in the years ahead.
- SIRF, QR and transparency: Research England has provided an update on its ‘transparency programme’ for how its research funding is used, as part of its broader evidence base for its Strategic Institutional Research Funding programme. It comes on the back of the Nurse Review saying that QR was essential, but universities were opaque with its usage and likely re-allocating to non-research activity.