Last week, the government made two major announcements on science and innovation. With backing from the Prime Minister and Chancellor, Science Secretary Peter Kyle laid out a detailed plan to ‘turbocharge AI’. The new ‘AI Opportunities Action Plan’ set out how the government will support AI to boost the economy and improve the productivity of the public sector. Given the Labour’s questionable commitment to growth, this was a rare ray of good hope.
On the same day, Research England, a quango that allocates just over £2 billion of taxpayer funding a year, set out the next steps in its controversial plan to shift the emphasis of its funding from scientific excellence to what it calls ‘People, Culture and Environment’ – effectively a euphemism for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).
Research England is piloting new metrics for how it will allocate funding, such as the proportion of research staff who are women or from ethnic minorities, as well as details on mean and median pay gaps. They want ‘documented evidence that leadership of EDI initiatives is appropriately recognised (e.g. in workloads or promotion criteria)’ and that staff are trained on ‘EDI principles’. They want carbon emissions data and evidence of ‘academic citizenship’. They want evidence of participation in initiatives such as the Athena Swan or Race Equality Charter – externally run schemes with a track record of promoting divisive political concepts including radical gender ideology, ‘decolonisation’ and critical race theory. Even where the goal itself is unobjectionable, such as better collaboration, the criteria require it to be supported by reams of documentation and process.
Research England plans to make ‘people, culture and environment’ worth 25 per cent of its assessment criteria for the research it funds – the same as it does real world impact (scientific excellence would also be cut to 50 per cent). In other words, they believe a university’s success at developing the next generation cancer treatments, advancing AI or creating new battery technology should be no more important in determining its funding than its performance on EDI initiatives.
This, by any reasonable definition, is madness. So why is it happening?
This Research England initiative began under the Conservatives, though ministers did not ask for it. It continues under Labour – though there has been no real indication that it is something that the current Science Secretary supports, nor that this will contribute to economic growth, supposedly the government’s top priority.
The issue, as Policy Exchange argued last year in its report Getting a Grip of the System, is that too much power and decision-making has leached away from ministers to unaccountable arms-length bodies – while accountability remains with ministers. Staffed by what Kemi Badenoch has termed ‘a new and growing bureaucratic class’, they are legally entitled to pursue agendas that are orthogonal, or even entirely antipathetic, to the government’s priorities. Of course, it is right that ministers should not be making decisions about which individual research projects get funded. But the overall parameters under which funding is allocated should be firmly under their control.
This is far from the only case of unaccountable quangos thwarting central government’s plans – whichever party is in power. When, the former business secretary asked the Financial Conduct Authority to think again about their plans to impose new EDI requirements on the financial sector – proposals that the FCA’s own impact assessment said would cost businesses £317 million per year – they told her, effectively, to get stuffed. Similarly, Angela Rayner’s plans for house building, Heidi Alexander’s for transport and Ed Miliband’s ambitions of a net zero grid will almost certainly come to grief on the rulings of quangos such as Natural England who, in pursuit of their statutory duties, recently declared that ‘no bat death is acceptable’ when building a railway line.
In a democracy, the party elected has a genuine chance to deliver on its manifesto commitments – and to be judged accordingly at the next election. The transfer of ministerial power to quangos, courts and other unelected bodies is a fundamental threat to our democracy – and explains much of the current disillusionment with UK politics. As Labour are finding out, it is a problem for the left no less than the right. The long-term solution must be for power to brought back to ministers – or devolved to other elected figures, such as mayors.
In the specific case of Research England, however, there is a more immediate solution. One of the few powers the Science Secretary retains is the ability to appoint the executive chair of UK Research and Innovation, the umbrella body that oversees Research England. By good fortune, that appointment process is currently underway. By refusing to select any candidate who does not agree to junk the entire ‘People, Culture and Environment’ initiative, Peter Kyle retains the ability to salvage this mess and save British science. If he does not do so, his commendable plans for growth will be undone by his own quango.
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