A few weeks before the general election, the Telegraph ran with a curious story. A “secret document” was said to have been prepared for then shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves and shadow defence secretary John Healey. The policy paper in question set out how a Labour government could respond to concerns that China was “out-innovating” the West – and universities were at the heart of its plans.
The proposal, the paper reported, was for the Ministry of Defence under Labour to set up an alliance of defence-focused universities to “coordinate academic research aims” and “match the rate of innovation by our systemic competitors.” Perhaps the most interesting angle – certainly the one that caught the Telegraph’s attention – was the parallel with China’s own university-military nexus, the Seven Sons of National Defence, those seven Chinese universities seen to have closest links to the People’s Liberation Army. This grouping has been a regular bête noire of the media and security think tanks, in particular when examples of UK university research collaboration with one of its members are held up for scrutiny.
Nothing was heard of the (rumoured) plans for a while, until last September’s Defence Industrial Strategy confirmed that a Defence Universities Alliance for the UK was indeed to be established. This would enable a “more strategic relationship between defence and the higher education sector” – very much in keeping with that document’s framing of the UK’s defence sector as both a means to drive scientific and technology change (as Anthony Finkelstein has recently explored) and a means of boosting economic growth.
There was further news earlier this year when the Office for Students opened a funding competition, in which expressing a willingness to participate in the alliance would garner a provider extra points. But the alliance hadn’t actually got off the ground at this point, so it was largely a matter of having sent a letter of intent.
Now the ministry has opened up the application process for becoming a founding member of the DUA – up to 20 UK universities will make the cut in this initial round. These will be the ones who will get to design the alliance, in conjunction with the MoD, including its governance structures and forward work agenda. Plenty of institutions, from what we understand, are keen to get in on the ground floor.
Both the application process and the group’s charter are worth a closer look – especially when seen as part of the wider defence innovation landscape that has slowly been coming together following last year’s Strategic Defence Review (even if the plans to pay for it are still not out, as the government has been repeatedly criticised for in recent months).
Ramping up
Last summer’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) – one of the various targeted reviews that Labour launched upon taking office – made a number of recommendations around both universities and defence-related innovation. It suggested that the MoD should
forge ‘anchor partnerships’ with a small set of trusted universities to leverage Government-funded, world-class S&T more effectively, and to make it worthwhile for universities to invest in long-term capability-building.
The spending review, a couple of weeks later, endorsed plenty of the SDR’s conclusions, such as the establishment of UK Defence Innovation to “fast-track innovative technology to the frontline while supporting the UK tech sector,” with an initial annual budget of £400m a year. Overall defence spending would, we were told, “prioritise R&D and innovation” – the defence R&D budget would top £2bn in 2026–27 and continue to rise, with ten per cent of procurement budgets ringfenced for innovative technologies.
And September’s Defence Industrial Strategy, referenced above, sought to frame defence as an “all-of-society challenge”, with the UK’s defence industrial base redefined to include academic institutions. Alongside innovation, the strategy also took an interest in the skills pipeline, with commitments ranging from a grab-bag of awareness-raising initiatives about defence careers to promises to stump up actual investment in teaching and university facilities, as well as in other areas such as defence-focused FE colleges.
All this comes through in the newly published Defence Universities Alliance Charter. The alliance’s aims will span defence-related research, skills, promotion of defence careers, and the fostering of industry partnerships (whether these distinct objectives will necessarily cohere remains to be seen).
By signing the charter, universities will be committing to “actively growing research and development activity and capacity in defence and national security relevant fields and technologies to support defence aims and objectives.” Members will “ensure that careers in the defence sector are promoted” (though “as part of a balanced portfolio of impartial careers guidance) – this even includes a nod to the long-standing campus challenge of supporting the attendance of defence sector firms and the armed forces at careers events. Members will also get involved with CPD for the defence sector workforce, champion research security, and take “robust steps” to detect and resist foreign interference.
The benefits of membership are less concrete at this stage, but plenty of institutions will be intuiting opportunities to come. As the guidance puts it (my bolding):
Currently there is no funding attached to the DUA, and it is not intended at this stage to be a primary mechanism through which funding for research or skills is allocated. There is however the possibility that the future development of the DUA may involve the development of dedicated exclusive, or advantaged, funding opportunities and or mechanisms for members.
The ministry stresses that the alliance “will not be the only way” in which it engages with the higher education sector across R&D, and that the DUA is not intended “at this stage” to be a mechanism for contracting with the sector.
In terms of governance, a steering committee will be established with senior representatives of the alliance members, plus Universities UK to “represent the views of non-alliance institutions.” Wider questions of governance will be co-developed with those founding universities – given previous concerns about the extent to which the alliance will be something done with, rather than done to, the sector, it will be important to see how this develops.
The call
For those universities motivated to apply – and for the reasons above, and what we hear across the sector, this will be more than a few – the DUA application process is an interesting one, in part due to how it comes across as the MoD feeling its way through a somewhat unfamiliar new set of relationships (case in point: the request for REF and TEF scores, “to ensure the alliance is composed of high-quality institutions”).
The call is only open to those with university title – the FAQs note that this may be reconsidered once the alliance has reached a more advanced level of maturity – and will have its membership spread around the four UK nations by design.
The key criteria to fulfil include meeting a research security baseline as defined by the National Protective Security Agency’s trusted research work (or intending to get there quickly), and being a signatory of the Armed Forces Covenant, the pledge to support current or former forces members and their families. This latter is unlikely to be a hurdle, given the voluminous list of universities that are already public signatories.
And, above all, applicants will need to show a track record in at least one area of defence R&D, skills and careers, or the teaching and training of defence sector personnel (the MoD here acts as if it has no sense of which institutions are currently engaged in what kinds of defence-related research, or most deeply involved in armed forces training – this may indeed be the case, and if so it feels somewhat of a glaring oversight that is long overdue correcting).
This will need to be evidenced through a spreadsheet, which for careers and training is – relatively – straightforward. For R&D, however, institutions will be expected to produce an extremely detailed record of extant research projects with both government and industry, with a notable emphasis on setting out how much funding was received, from what countries or organisations, and how any research security risks were mitigated (we might observe that it’s not a million miles away from the reporting of overseas funding that the original free speech act demanded, and which Labour has held off from implementing).
Universities wanting to apply for membership, then, will need to demonstrate their prowess in big-ticket defence R&D, while at the same time avoiding setting off any government alarm bells from existing international collaborations. This is made crystal clear elsewhere in the guidance:
MOD will perform due diligence screening on prospective alliance members to ensure that members’ research security risk is being managed sufficiently and that their research and collaborations are not contributing to the defence or security capabilities of adversaries, introducing vulnerabilities into critical national infrastructure, or undermining assured capabilities. MOD will take any significant concerns into consideration when deciding on an institution’s membership application.
Where MOD or wider government holds or develops research security or national security concerns, based on the knowledge of an institution’s research collaborations, funding avenues or other relationships, the MOD may choose to reject, suspend or rescind an institution’s eligibility to be a member of the alliance where deemed appropriate.
It’s uncontroversial as a condition of entry to a group focused on national security – but the fact the processes are being newly designed speaks somewhat to a lack of existing connection between academia and the MoD.
Whole of society
In making final decisions on membership, the MoD says it will consider “geographic spread”. On that note, it’s worth flagging that the defence industrial strategy has already arrived at certain conclusions about which industries in which locations have – in its view – high growth potential (see the map on page 36). You would be forgiven for anticipating that the founding DUA membership might cleave to a similar distribution, at least in part.
On a similar note, while in England the MoD has already announced funding for the skills side of DUA-adjacent work, via the Office for Students competition, it remains to be seen whether governments elsewhere in the UK will pick this up or simply pocket the Barnett consequentials. It could be that membership for universities outside of England will end up necessarily focused more on the non-devolved areas of the alliance’s work.
To return to where we began: in a move that has parallels with other elements of the “specialisation” agenda in current HE policy, the MoD has concluded that partnership with a tight-knit group of universities – at least to begin with – is its preferred way of operationalising some of the big objectives, and investments, that are being made in defence spending and policy.
Even if it’s not said publicly, there’s a clear element of international competition here – and in the context of constant ongoing scepticism about UK universities’ research collaborations with state-linked overseas partners, it’s worth considering what the effects will be of public membership for those institutions that do suitably wow the MoD with their TEF and REF scores (and the other strands of their applications). It’s not impossible to imagine that longer-term there might be reluctance on the part of other countries – in particular, China – to collaborate as frequently or openly with universities that are publicly part of the UK’s defence establishment. Or a greater need for caution on the UK side in those partnerships that do come about.
That is unlikely to be an immediate disincentive to would-be members, given the value of being in the initial wave of founders alongside the intimations of future advantages in funding opportunities that participation may bring. If anything, membership will be a significant public relations boost.
A more pressing issue is the effect on those universities left out from setting the weather. But in this space – as with much of contemporary research policy and the wider industrial strategy rollout – the direction of travel appears to be towards closer-knit groups and a division between who is in and who is out, rather than an assumption that all kinds of opportunity will be permanently on the table for all kinds of institution.
