It’s hard to believe it was only twenty months ago that the Conservative government was going to kick woke out of science.

Starting with falsely accusing an academic of having sympathy for Hamas the then secretary of state Michelle Donelan kicked off a chain of events that led to Research England’s EDI Expert Advisory Group to be suspended, investigated, and then cleared of any kind of wrong doing.

The Expert Advisory Group has now been excused from the culture war and able to get on with the important work of developing Research England’s approach to EDI. Research England’s new EDI action plan does not acknowledge (understandably) the turbulent background from which it emerges but there is a diplomatic recognition that:

the climate in which leading equality, diversity and inclusion work can be challenging to navigate. We therefore welcome Research England’s continued commitment and ambition to actively prioritising equality, diversity and inclusion.

Research England’s approach mirrors that of UKRI’s in looking at how EDI considerations can be embedded in policies, funding, programmes, and approaches to research

The action plan makes the case that it’s not just that EDI is a good thing on its own terms but a more diverse workforce will encourage more diverse ideas in turn create a richer environment for research and knowledge exchange.

Measures include gathering insight into the use of Strategic Institutional Research Funding, looking at how the the Research England Development fund (a strategic development fund) may be used to promote EDI outcomes, building the evidence base on future research funds and their research culture components, looking at whether any EDI information can be collected as part of HEIF, working with partners to improve the diversity of PGR study, and providing further guidance and advice to Research England staff as well as the wider sector.

These ambitions on their own terms fit neatly within the wider ambit of UKRI’s work. They do not feel controversial in isolation and in many cases clarifying, codifying, and otherwise explaining existing practice, will help turn what is often a lot of good will into concrete actions.

As ever with these kinds of action plans the challenges come when trying to implement measures like this across Research England’s portfolio. At a macro level the idea of improving culture, the diversity of researchers, and making progress on a range of EDI issues is well accepted. At a micro level the trade offs implied in making some of these ideas possible is hotly contested.

This is true of the extent to which REF should be measuring People, Culture, and Environment, and it will be equally true of any places where funding is ringfenced or allocated in such a way as to reward the things which are important to research, like research culture, but hard to measure, like a good research culture.

However, just because it is hard to make these measures work does not mean Research England should not seek to do so. Research England consulted widely in constructing the action plan the next phase is building a consensus around the trade-offs it involves. Inevitably, there will be places Research England leads the sector, places where it will be led by the sector, and places where it cannot bring the sector with it due to reasons of costs, time, complexity, or worry about intended consequence.

The benefit of launching the action plan now is that the environment in which to have this debate is less febrile than it was two years ago. Ironically, the thing which may secure a better dialogue on the future of Research England’s EDI work is a government that has toned down the freedom of speech debate.