Understand the REF changes through the lens of money and bureaucracy

There’s a narrative about the REF changes which – without too much exaggeration – sees a shadowy cabal within the UK research funding bodies pushing EDI too hard and getting their fingers burned once the government belatedly twigged what they were up to.

But lots of the pushback over the culture aspects (as was) of the REF from within the sector, to my eyes at least, was more over a sense that these elements were threatening to be a bit woolly, and that the shape of what they would entail wasn’t in place anywhere soon enough in the cycle.

Patrick Vallance’s comments at the Universities UK research and innovation conference this week trod a line between commitment to diverse and inclusive environments – “you don’t solve difficult problems by having a monolithic culture,” “diversity and inclusion is not some nice to have, it’s fundamental to how we get better outcomes” – and signalling that he was “very pleased” to see the percentage of the assessment attached to outputs tick back up.

That latter intervention probably reflects the minister’s overall steer on REF design, such as there was one. While the arguments over culture versus output excellence generate plenty of heat, one of the issues that gets overlooked is the likely Whitehall consensus on cost and bureaucracy.

The government’s response to the Tickell review of research bureaucracy was pretty clear (and notable, given that the review itself hadn’t spoken about the REF):

We are mindful that a prominent source of research bureaucracy is the Research Excellence Framework (REF), and this requires special attention in our response. The cost of the REF to universities has increased significantly over time – from £246m in 2014 to £471m in 2021.

Government is committed to reversing the trend of increasing costs and expects the next REF exercise to be significantly and measurably less bureaucratic than REF2021.

While this appeared in the dying days of the last government, there’s little reason to think that the position of the science department and Westminster more broadly had changed much. Yet it’s hard to think of any example where public efforts had been made to make REF lighter touch or to reduce the workload associated with it – the staff time involved is by far and away the biggest driver of that £471m price tag Technopolis calculated a couple of years ago – in the course of developing the new version for 2029.

If such thinking was going on, it wasn’t communicated clearly enough by the funding bodies. It’s likely in this context that a shift back towards an exercise more similar to 2021 should be understood. The argument can be made that REF represents a good use of public money, and indeed the Tickell response contrasts its overheads with that of grant funding through peer review calls. But the government had set out its expectations on what is essentially a measure of the overall sector-wide work involved in the next REF, and it’s reasonable to conclude that the failure to meet these expectations – or the failure to convincingly tell a different story – has at the very least contributed to some of the changes that have had to be made.