Minister sets out five-year vision inspired by NHS in exclusive interview
As a general election inches ever closer, science minister Chris Skidmore has said he wants to implement a five-year R&D programme modelled on the NHS to drive increased private investment in research.
Skidmore sat down with Research Fortnight ahead of this week’s Conservative party conference to reveal how he wants to apply lessons he learnt as health minister to his second stint in the role of science and universities minister.
The conference, in Manchester, comes as prime minister Boris Johnson faces a barrage of questions over conflicts of interest and how he will deal with a looming Brexit deadline.
Labour used their conference at the end of last month in Brighton to outline sweeping reforms to higher education, while the Liberal Democrats are also looking to shake up academia.
Not to be outdone, as the Conservative gathering kicked off in earnest, Johnson announced a £200 million fund to help life sciences companies in scaling up, with the expectation that this will generate a further £400m in private investment in the industry.
Skidmore, who returned to the research brief last month after the resignation of the prime minister’s brother Jo Johnson, told Research Fortnight he wants to see five-year science funding and infrastructure plans inspired by those he has seen in the health sector, such as the hospital infrastructure programme.
Skidmore said he was “keen” to investigate how to create a new science program that would last five years to ensure continuity and security in research funding, and to help reach the government’s target to spend 2.4 per cent of GDP on R&D.
“How can we create that long-term certainty for science and really bake in five-year real terms increase? That’s now my mission,” he said, adding that this was his personal mission as a minister and not an agreed government policy yet.
The money would come via UK Research and Innovation, and the overarching programme would help to plan the funding of infrastructure, he added. “You’ll be able to say this is what we can deliver in the first five years. There may be infrastructure funds that we can’t deliver in the first five years, so what can we maybe look at in phase two, and phase three.”
Part of his overall strategy is to time the release of ongoing reviews, such as UKRI’s infrastructure report and Adrian Smith’s review of international collaboration and funding, so they feed into each other.
Tying in with Boris Johnson’s conference funding announcement, Skidmore stressed that an important factor in reaching the 2.4 per cent R&D target by 2027 and delivering on the UK’s International Research and Innovation Strategy launched in May will be leveraging private funding via public support.
Skidmore envisages bringing in international private investments and designing public funds so that they boost private investment, too. “We know also historically how private leverage is not as impressive as in Germany or India, and certainly not as impressive as it is in Israel.”
Kieron Flanagan, senior lecturer in science and technology policy at the University of Manchester, said the five-year concept would give more certainty to the research community.
“It could possibly be used to join up infrastructure and recurrent funding a bit more, addressing one of the major problems with how research funding works in the UK,” he said.
“But this would need to be thought through carefully. One question is how five-year funding programmes fit into a public sector finance system typified by spending review periods that are not always of consistent length.”
James Wilsdon, professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield, noted that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown attempted to bring in a 10-year framework for science in 2004.
“But of course, they then lost power in 2010, around the half-way point of that plan, which underlines the difficulty of delivering on longer-term frameworks—even when agreed upon—in the face of political turbulence and instability.”
He added, “This last point is particularly acute at the present time—given all the political chaos, how can you develop such a framework with confidence that you can see it through? You can’t wish away the politics—even from an area like research funding, where there’s relative unanimity across the main parties.”
This article also appeared in Research Fortnight and a version appeared in Research Europe