Willetts: move universities from DfE ‘treating them like schools’

English universities should be moved away from a Department for Education that treats them “like poorly performing secondary schools” and into the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology if the Westminster government wants to boost its science superpower agenda, according to former minister Lord Willetts.

The Tory peer makes the call in a paper for the Policy Exchange thinktank, in which he urges government and policymakers to move on from “Thatcherite rhetoric” against industrial strategy and have confidence in the state’s role in supporting innovation and key technologies.

The paper revisits a previous report by Lord Willetts 10 years ago as universities minister, Eight Great Technologies, tracing fluctuating Conservative government attitudes to industrial strategy since then amid political upheaval.

In the new report, Lord Willetts calls the division of responsibility for universities in Whitehall – teaching under the DfE and research under the new DSIT – “very dysfunctional as it means nobody has an overall view of the funding and performance of our universities, a key national asset receiving significant public funding”.

Bringing universities into the DSIT would bring “a unified approach to the science superpower agenda”, he says.

“The DfE treats universities like poorly performing secondary schools and intervenes in them heavily via the Office for Students,” he writes. “There is even a risk that they could be reclassified as part of the public sector: that would be a massive change for Britain’s research effort as suddenly our universities would face control over their capital borrowing and the pay of their star researchers.”

Given the fact that UK universities’ research relies on cross-subsidy from overseas student fees, “the DfE is therefore in effect driving a cut in research funding because it won’t properly fund British students”, Lord Willetts continues. “This is only possible because nobody in government has to look at universities as a whole.”

He adds: “[The government] has one foot on the accelerator trying to grow research and another on the brake cutting funding for teaching and trying to limit student numbers. Driving a car like that normally causes it to stall. So why not develop a single coherent agenda by putting overall responsibility for these key national institutions in one place?”

Throughout the paper, Lord Willetts aims to dismantle the Thatcherite consensus among large parts of the Tory party that industrial strategy amounts to a doomed attempt at “picking winners”.

Calling the Treasury “the great sceptic of any role for government”, he argues that the Treasury has actually taken an industrial strategy role in its intensive support for the financial services industry in recent decades, showing that “behind the Thatcherite rhetoric and even at her instigation we have therefore actually been doing industrial strategy after all, usually aimed at promoting innovation”.

“In America it is widely understood that it is one of the roles of government to lower the risks facing innovators,” he also writes.

After Lord Willetts and Sir Vince Cable, the former Liberal Democrat business secretary in the coalition government, exited government, successor Tory business secretary Sajid Javid “tried to dismantle most of what he regarded as ‘industrial strategy’,” he writes. “It was a reversion to the purist strand of thinking that government couldn’t and shouldn’t be doing any of this…The expert technology teams at Innovate UK were disbanded and many left the organisation.”

But driving a shift in thinking towards UK industrial strategy in government now is the need to address climate change, Covid’s spotlighting of the need for UK scientific capacity and turbulent geopolitics bringing new security considerations to the fore, showing that “innovation is often driven by war and national security”, Lord Willetts writes.

Recommending policy changes ranging from new Catapult centres through to support for local research and development clusters in new technologies, he argues that “technology foresight exercises are not hopeless in the face of radical uncertainty”; rather that such an agenda “is key to boosting Britain’s economic performance”.

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com