Welsh Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: University Research Funding, HC 1261
Wednesday 24 May 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 24 May 2023.
Members present: Stephen Crabb (Chair); Virginia Crosbie; Ruth Jones; Ben Lake; Mr Rob Roberts.
Questions 1 - 52
Witnesses
I: Professor Paul Boyle, Vice-Chancellor, Swansea University; Professor Edmund Burke, Vice-Chancellor, Bangor University; Professor Colin McInnes, Pro Vice-Chancellor of Research, Knowledge Exchange and Innovation, Aberystwyth University; and Professor Colin Riordan, President and Vice-Chancellor, Cardiff University.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Professor Paul Boyle, Professor Edmund Burke, Professor Colin McInnes and Professor Colin Riordan.
Q1 Chair: Good morning and welcome to this session of the Welsh Affairs Committee, where we are looking at university research funding in Wales. I am delighted that we are joined virtually today by Professor Paul Boyle, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Swansea; Professor Edmund Burke, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bangor; Professor Colin McInnes, Pro Vice-Chancellor of Research, Knowledge Exchange and Innovation, University of Aberystwyth; and Professor Colin Riordan President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cardiff. Bore da, good morning to you all. Welcome.
I will start the discussion by asking one of you to outline for the Committee the current situation with the loss of European funding from Welsh university research programmes and what you consider to be the potential impact on the Welsh economy. I will ask Professor Riordan to go first.
Professor Riordan: There are two issues here. One is Horizon Europe. We know that the UK Government are in intensive negotiations with the Commission about whether we are going to associate to Horizon Europe. If we do not, there will be a major impact from that, if we switch to our domestic system. We can go into the details of that, if wished.
The other major issue for us—and it is probably a bigger issue in Wales than anywhere else in the UK—is the loss of structural funds; essentially, regional development funding from the Commission when we were members. This came through the Welsh European Funding Office and it was a major source of funding for Welsh universities in the area of innovation, funding for our work, collaboration with business and new technologies. I know that my colleagues around the virtual table will be able to give examples from their universities, but a specific example I will give in our case is the Institute for Compound Semiconductors.
We had the interim Secretary of State in DSIT come to Cardiff on Friday for the launch of the UK Government’s semiconductor strategy. As part of that, she came to our Translational Research Hub, which has been part funded with significant funding from European structural funds. We think that is having a significant effect. It means that a range of projects are now coming to an end. The funding for a range of projects in the innovation area, including co-operation with other European countries, is now running out. We think that the impact of that on the Welsh economy will be significant over time.
Q2 Chair: Thank you very much. Some of the headline figures that we have received in written evidence from the higher education sector in Wales suggest that around 1,000 jobs are at risk. Is that a figure that you recognise?
Professor Riordan: That would be the case over time.
Q3 Chair: Are those direct jobs—people employed directly by universities in Wales?
Professor Riordan: On research and innovation-type projects, yes.
Q4 Chair: Okay. Is it around 7,000 total employees in HE across the universities in Wales? Are we really saying that one in seven jobs is currently at risk at Welsh universities because of the loss of European funding?
Professor Riordan: There will be far more people than that employed across the universities. But in the research field, it is a significant proportion.
Q5 Chair: Thank you. Can I ask one of you to outline the immediate ask, for the benefit of the Committee? You very effectively set out the nature of the challenge facing you. What is the current ask that you are putting to Welsh and UK Governments? Professor Boyle, perhaps you can take that question.
Professor Boyle: Everything Colin Riordan said is correct. The calculation at the moment is that about 1,000 jobs and something like 60 projects will come to an end in Wales. To give you an idea of the scale of that, I will give you a sense of the level of funding that has come into my own university. Since 2000, we have had about £300 million-worth of investment from the structural funds on a range of projects. Quite significant sums of money have come into just my university, and that will be replicated across a number of other universities.
The ask is pretty clear. If we go back to the point that Colin Riordan was making, there are effectively two big pots of money that come for research: Horizon Europe, for which there is a plan B if we are not able to associate, and structural funds, of which a proportion is used for research and innovation. To be honest, we have no real plans for any fallback once those funds come to an end. Our view is that that is not a very strategic approach to how you manage research and innovation. Let’s be frank; in parts of the country that the European Commission has put the money into because of the very needs that existed in those areas, they have recognised the need for development money to help grow the economy. Part of that money, quite rightly, is put into research and innovation projects to achieve that.
Our view matches a paper that was written prior to all of this happening, by Adrian Smith and Graeme Reid. They recommended that when the UK shared prosperity fund was set up, a proportion of those funds should sit in what is now DSIT, the Department that has responsibility for innovation, to make sure that there was a strategic approach to what to do with these projects. That never happened. All of the money for UKSPF now sits in DLUHC, and we do not have a body responsible. Our view is that it would have made a lot of sense to have some bridging funding to allow those projects to continue—not for ever, but for just long enough to think carefully about whether these projects were coming to a natural end. Perhaps some of them were, and perhaps some of them were not as successful as we had hoped they would be, but the vast majority were powerful, strong projects. It does not seem to be logical to allow them to wither on the vine at a time when I think UK Government policy, and certainly Welsh Government policy, is that we want to grow research and innovation to help develop local areas and generate local economic growth.
That bridge funding would have taken up about 6% of the total shared prosperity fund if it had been done for all of the projects across the UK. In Wales, the amount of bridge funding we would need is around £70 million, which would have taken us to the end of the spending review period and given us time to come up with a sensible approach as to what we should continue and what we should stop, perhaps for good reasons.
Our view is that having a cliff edge, as we have described it in the literature, just does not seem to make any logical sense because these are hugely ambitious projects. Nearly all of these projects rely on years of development work and years of building to a situation where the research is going well, and now we are in a situation where many of them will just drop off the edge of the cliff.
Q6 Chair: Thank you. That is very clear. You talk about a cliff edge. The way European funding cycles work, there is always an end, isn’t there? Then another cycle begins. Are you saying that the projects you are talking about are predicated on an assumption that Wales would always qualify for European structural funding and that you created permanent programmes with temporary pots of money?
Professor Boyle: You are absolutely right. Let me give you an example of what happened before Brexit. We had three waves of what was called ESIFs funding—European structural funds funding—in 2006, 2007 to 2013, and 2014 to 2020. Each wave that came along allowed the opportunity for projects to be funded in the next wave. That will not always have happened. Some projects might reach their natural end, some projects might need to run for many, many years, and there would be a competitive process to decide whether the projects were valuable enough to continue. That is the sort of process in which you need to sensibly have the conversation about whether, through a competitive process, this project be extended because the work it is doing is so valuable. That is what is missing at the current time.
We came to the end of the funding because of the Brexit process, and then there was no opportunity to sit back and say, “Let’s think carefully about which of these projects should be extended and which, perhaps very understandably, would have come to the end of their work and the researchers may have moved on to other and different projects”. Those rounds of funding from European money were pretty reliable. You could not guarantee you would get the money—nobody was reliant on it—but you could compete, and we competed very effectively because the projects were so strong. That is the cliff edge we are talking about.
Chair: Thank you very much. That is very clear. I am now going to bring in my colleague, Virginia Crosbie.
Q7 Virginia Crosbie: Bore da, gentlemen. We have spoken quite a lot about the ESIF funding and Horizon Europe. There was a review by Professor Graeme Reid in 2018 in which he warned that there was a historic dependence on European moneys by Welsh universities. How come Welsh universities are so dependent, compared with their peers across the rest of the UK? What has led to that, and what are the other UK universities doing differently?
Professor Riordan: One of the reasons is that Wales does have some of the most deprived regions in Europe. The way that the structural funding was calculated was pretty straightforward. There is a European average, and it depends on how far you fall below the average. Unfortunately, west Wales in particular was quite a long way below the average and, therefore, there was quite a lot of funding available.
I think it also has something to do with how it was organised in Wales by the Welsh European Funding Office. We have had very good access to that. It was a source of funding that was very useful to universities and fulfilled a very useful purpose, and therefore we accessed it. I mean, you do; if you have a set of academics and a pot of money, they will go for it. That is the way these things work. We had a pot of money, so we would go for it.
Q8 Virginia Crosbie: This is a question for Professor Burke. What could the Welsh Government do to support universities more? Is it dependent on an upward revision of the block grant? I think we have talked about the £9,000 versus the £9,250 fee per student in England. How much of it is related to that?
Professor Burke: Before I answer that question, Virginia, I want to stress the importance of those structural funds. I can give you a couple of examples of very important projects that were funded at Bangor University. Our Nuclear Futures Institute was a major initiative. It is now the second-largest nuclear research group in the UK, and it is key to net zero. It is a really high-impact area. The SEACAMS project is a major project, with a value of £23.6 million, and it has an important impact on ecology and carbon reduction. I want to stress how important some of these projects are.
Coming on to the issue of fees, I think it is UK-wide. We have inflation running at around 10%, and across the UK we have fixed fees. This is unsustainable into the future. It simply cannot continue without something giving at some point. It is a UK-wide issue. There is, of course, the differential of £250 in Wales, but the issue is much broader than that; it is a UK issue and it is unsustainable. We are currently in dispute—
Q9 Virginia Crosbie: Could you explain why there is that £250 difference? Why is it different for Welsh students compared with the rest of the UK?
Professor Burke: It was a decision of the Welsh Government, but it is a broader UK issue. If the £9,000 or the £9,250 is fixed going into the future, it is unsustainable, and we need to address the issue with inflation running at around 10%.
Q10 Virginia Crosbie: Would anyone else like to comment on that support from the Welsh Government, please?
Professor Riordan: As Edmund Burke said, it is a matter for Welsh Government. We can have no influence over that. They make these decisions. You are asking the wrong people about it.
Professor McInnes: If I may come in, I totally support that. It is a sector-wide issue. The fees we are charging students now have gone up in England once; they have not gone up in Wales for, I think, seven or eight years. One of the calculations that has been doing the rounds is that that means that with the deflator, we are talking about something like £6,000 to £7,000 in current money compared with when it was introduced. This is a significant cut for one of the major sources of income, and that is why a number of universities across the UK are so heavily dependent upon international student recruitment to cover the gap.
Q11 Virginia Crosbie: Why is there this difference? Why is it £9,250 for students in England and £9,000 in Wales? I still haven’t got any feeling from you as to why that is the case and what it means to you.
Professor Riordan: I can try to explain the reasoning behind it. The Welsh Government announced that our fees would follow the English rise. Originally, the idea was to raise fees in line with inflation, so now they ought to be well over £10,000, depending on how you calculate inflation. However, the Government then decided to un-announce that. This is all on the record, back in whenever it was—I can’t remember now, a few years ago—and English fees have not risen with inflation either. That is clearly for political reasons. It is deemed politically unacceptable to raise fees in either England or Wales.
Q12 Virginia Crosbie: Do you feel short-changed compared with your counterparts in England? I also want to ask a question about the shared prosperity fund, Professor Boyle, which you mentioned, and getting access to things like the multiplier and working with councils. How does that work in practice?
Professor Boyle: I am pleased you asked about the shared prosperity fund because, of course, that is the fund that was established to take the money that the UK would have put into the European Community for structural funding and that is now being allocated through DLUHC. The first point about the structural funds is about how they were allocated. As Colin Riordan described, distribution was based on deprivation levels across the EU, putting money into places that required that uplift in particular. The shared prosperity funds are being allocated in a very different way. They are more thinly spread across the UK and of course are devolved to local authorities to manage.
We are very supportive of the work that local authorities are doing, and we will work with them and partner with them, I am sure, on many local projects. However, those projects are very small compared to the sorts of projects that were funded under the structural funds. I mentioned that we have had something like £300 million-worth of funding since the year 2000, just in my own university, to manage some very large-scale innovation projects. That is £300 million. At the moment, through the shared prosperity fund, we have put some bids in through our local authorities to work on projects. Those bids amount to about £5 million, and we expect possibly to receive about a third of that if we are lucky and they are successful; we are not sure about that.
The scale of projects that you can fund is nothing like the sorts of projects that we have been funding through structural funds money that have led to very big, ambitious programmes of work. That is a strategic decision that was taken by the UK Government. They felt that they wanted a fund to be done in a different way. I think many people would have views that that means that you cannot fund all sorts of ambitious projects that we would otherwise have funded. It also means that we do not have any other avenue to go to to find money to fund the structural fund projects. Shared prosperity could well lead to lots of very good local projects—we are not suggesting that it will not—but it has made a huge difference.
The Welsh Government put forward what we think was an extremely compelling plan about how they would have allocated the shared prosperity funds had the money been devolved to the Welsh Government to distribute. Instead, it has been given to local authorities in a rather more spread out way. I think the Welsh Government plans would have been far more ambitious, and we were very supportive of the approach they were suggesting, but it means that we are now in a system that is completely different from the one that we were used to.
Q13 Mr Rob Roberts: I want to follow up on Professor Burke’s comment that current fees are unsustainable. I have family in the United States whose children are leaving university with student debts of $100,000 to $150,000. If our fees are unsustainable now, what should the fees be and who should be paying them?
Professor Burke: That is a matter for the Government.
Q14 Mr Rob Roberts: Sorry, no. You said that they are unsustainable. What would be sustainable, in your opinion?
Professor Burke: At least rising with inflation would have an element of sustainability to it. However, you do not need to be an expert in economics to understand that if your prices are fixed and inflation is running at 10%, you will have a problem. That is unsustainable. There is no question about that.
How universities are funded is a question for the Government. The Government will have to make decisions about how to fund universities, but it is unsustainable, and you cannot argue otherwise. How could it be sustainable to have 10% inflation and fixed prices year on year on year?
Q15 Mr Rob Roberts: So your position is that the £9,000 is okay provided it increases in line with inflation?
Professor Burke: It would be a start. In my view, there should be an inflationary uplift. We can look at when you would start the £9,000—it goes back many years—and what it would be if we raised it in line with inflation. It is unsustainable not to have an inflationary uplift every year. Where you start that is a matter for debate, but how to fund universities is a matter for the Government. I think it needs to be addressed quite urgently because it is unsustainable.
Q16 Chair: Thank you very much. Before I bring in Ben Lake, can I come back to the discussion about research funding? Professor Riordan from Cardiff University, in your written correspondence with this Committee recently, you said, “ESIF has reduced the need for Welsh Government to invest its core budget in R&D and innovation support so the cessation of ESIF in Wales has left exposed the low levels of investment in these areas which are critical for economic growth and prosperity”. What I am reading from that is that the Welsh Government have almost felt able to step back from the need to do research funding because they have had this ready pot of money from ESIF. In your discussions with the Welsh Government, do you get any sense that they are looking to increase their level of funding for research and development and innovation from their core funding?
Professor Riordan: Just the other day they announced £10 million, but I think what you say is right. In Wales, the structural fund was being used for that purpose. Without it, there is no obvious and ready alternative.
Earlier on somebody—perhaps it was you, Chair—referred to the report by Graeme Reid a few years ago. He recommended a higher level of spending in this area, which was initially accepted by the Welsh Government but not followed through on, so we are still in that position. It is fundamentally the same problem as with the fees. There is just not enough petrol coming into the tank. I probably should not use that metaphor these days, but you know what I mean. We just need more money for universities, to be very blunt about it. If we cannot increase the fees, we need more support for teaching via the funding mechanism and similarly for research.
The only point we must make, of course, is that research and innovation are not devolved competencies. It is a UK Government area, so there is an issue around all of that as well. The Welsh Government do involve themselves, but, unlike education, it is not a devolved competence so we need to report that.
Chair: Thank you. That is helpful.
Q17 Ben Lake: Thank you very much for joining us this morning, gentlemen. You have been very clear about the immediate pressures and consequences should bridging funding not be forthcoming. Could you explain to us how significant the absence of structural funds or a direct replacement would be for your research base going forward? I have in mind here the longer-term impact on your research base. Who would like to go first on that?
Professor Boyle: Perhaps I will take that. I will not list to you the detail of all 51 projects that Swansea has been involved in over the last 15 or 16 years, some of which have already come to an end. In my institution, I have to chair a panel every month where we talk about staff leaving the institution, and we have seen very significant rises over the last few months in the numbers of staff who are having to leave.
It is true that not every member of staff on all of those projects will effectively be made redundant come the end of a project. There may be new projects that come into the university, and some people work on more than one project and might split their time. However, it is certainly the case that we will lose a lot of the best talent. If I was asked about our most successful work, some of the projects that I could describe in my institution are those projects. We are not talking about run-of-the-mill projects; we are talking about a number of projects that are at the leading edge. The staff working on those projects are not staff we want to lose in Wales. This is at a time when I think there is general agreement—and I certainly support it—that research and innovation drive economic growth. The argument that you want to cut those projects off now at a time in the UK when we are really struggling to lift the economy and get things working again feels rather back to front.
Following up on Colin Riordan’s earlier point, it is certainly the case, of course, that there are research funds available across the UK for us to compete for, and we all hope that the Horizon Europe fund is coming down the track as well, but these funds were quite different. They were for very applied innovation projects, in the main, because of the determination to try to link them to economic deliverables, so it is a different style of project from some of the projects you might fund in other ways. The balance of the type of work you are doing will also be affected by this change.
Professor McInnes: Professor Boyle has stolen my thunder a little. The key point that I want to make is that the structural funding was so closely linked to innovation at a regional level that many of these projects were directly related to the needs of the region in which they were being invested. You can see that from projects like Beacon here in Aberystwyth, which was about using waste biomass, and the AberInnovation project, which was very much geared to agricultural and food production. These sorts of things were geared towards local innovation and local economic growth. They were dealing not just with very global challenges, but with the local ramifications of those global challenges and developing local economies and society. That was one of the advantages of structural funding, particularly for an area like west Wales.
The other long-term impact that I think we might see—and that I fear for—is the attractiveness of Wales for top researchers. European funding is a gold standard; it really is a gold standard. Top researchers are attracted by how universities can draw down European funding, whether structural funds or other funding. In Aberystwyth, we are beginning to see that we are just not as attractive to not only international researchers but even UK researchers because of the way in which European funds are beginning to dry up, because we do not have the structural funds that sometimes buy really big capital investments. If you are in the science group, you want that level of investment.
If you are thinking about what the long-term ramifications might be, it is not just the immediate loss of talent but our ability to attract talent in the future and particularly for these large capital projects that build the facilities that world-leading researchers want to work in.
Q18 Ben Lake: I take it from your comments, Professor McInnes, that you are concerned as well about the international profile of Welsh universities if a replacement for some of these funds is not found.
Professor McInnes: Absolutely. As you may be aware, we have just opened the first category 3 laboratory for dealing with animal pathogens. That was funded partly by European funds, and we are attracting major international interest because of the quality of the facility we can offer.
One of the leading researchers in that lab has worked at MIT and Cambridge and is quite explicit that this is a world-leading facility the like of which he has not worked in anywhere else in his career. The ability to invest quite significant chunks of money into developing these kinds of facilities is being lost, and we will not be able to attract the same quality of researcher to Wales as was perhaps the case before. That is my fear.
Q19 Ben Lake: Thank you. That is very useful. You have mentioned the numbers of researchers who will have to move on if this bridging funding is not found. First, could you address where you expect them to go? I open this question to everybody. Will they go to other institutions in England or further afield or will they simply leave higher education and research entirely?
Finally, if there is no replacement for structural funding—longer-term now—is there a risk, in your opinion, that we will find—there is a wonderful expression in Welsh and I don’t think it quite translates, “I’r pant y rhed y dŵr”—water always runs downhill. Is there a risk that we might find further concentration of research and innovation funding investment in existing universities in the so-called golden triangle? Mentioning that, I remember that my alma mater college at the University of Oxford has, I believe I am right in saying, fewer than 400 students and has an endowment that far surpasses the entire endowment of every single university in Wales.
Are you worried that if there isn’t a continuation of structural funding and a specific policy by the UK Government to ensure that universities beyond the golden triangle receive research funding, we might just find ourselves further concentrating a lot of the expertise in the south-east of England?
Professor McInnes: I will deal with the vulnerability of researchers question first and perhaps one of my colleagues would like to deal with the second part of the question.
Research is a highly mobile profession, particularly if you are at the top of your game. We are dealing with an international community of researchers who work with teams across the world. If you are a top researcher and you leave Wales, you will probably manage to get a job somewhere else. That obviously depends on all sorts of other facts, but it is a highly mobile community.
On the flipside of that, of course, is the fact that Wales is losing its talent to elsewhere. If the talent is being focused on innovation with local impacts, that further increases the economic disparity between parts of Wales and parts of the UK and globally. If we lose this talent, the majority of them, I suspect, will be able at some point to find a job elsewhere. Unfortunately, some may not. However, the question is what this will do to the regions of Wales, and that is what drives my concerns. That is how I see the picture developing for the mobility of researchers.
Professor Burke: I want to stress the point that has been made about high-impact innovation-based research. I have already given you the example of support for the low-carbon energy sector—nuclear, wind, tidal—but work that came out of these funds at Bangor supported the Covid waste-water analysis, which had such a high impact.
The impact on our research base would be a loss of circa £10 million a year. That is what we have to replace. We have had about 190 FTE staff supported on this and now we have about 95 researchers who would be going off, as you say, to different areas of the world. It would have a very significant impact on the university, the research base, the region and the high-impact, innovation-based research that we have been undertaking.
Professor Riordan: Straightforwardly, it would surely mean that our researchers will be going to where the jobs are and that probably is more likely to be in the golden triangle than south, west or north Wales. I think that is a reasonable assumption.
Professor Boyle: I agree with everything that has been said, and I will follow up on the second part of the question. You talked about the focus on the south-east. Of course, funding, which is the big national pot of funding for research and innovation in the UK, is talking about how it might use some of its funds in a kind of levelling-up way and trying to think about how it might push some of its funds into areas that perhaps have not received them as much in the past. There is no question, however, that the vast bulk of UKRI’s funding has followed where funding has gone previously. The implication of what you are suggesting is correct, that the bulk of that funding has, in the past, gone to the south-east. I don’t think we can expect a radical change in the UKRI fund that would suddenly offset the problem we are facing now.
Don’t forget, as we kept reiterating, that the European funding system was in a sense a bit of levelling-up fund. It was designed to drive research and innovation in places that perhaps had not had so much research and innovation because of the very strong correlation between investment in research, innovation, work and GDP in those regions. There was a recognition that investment was valuable.
The final thing that I will add is that we are not complacent. We absolutely know that our job in universities is to compete as much as we can. We will compete for wherever the funds come from. We will do as much as we can to improve the situation for our universities and, more importantly, for Wales. As a result of that, we have established a new network that brings all the universities in Wales together. It is called the Welsh Innovation Network and is designed specifically to help us work together better but also to help us compete for larger-scale funds, given that the size of our individual institutions is very small compared with many of the much larger institutions we are competing against in the UK. We are taking proactive steps to work together as a collective to try to help solve some of these problems.
The challenge—I hate to keep using the term—is that it is very hard to be strategic in a situation where you face a sudden cliff edge. It is very hard to respond immediately, hence the reason why Colin Riordan and others have talked about the loss of very talented staff. Quite understandably, they will look for the best opportunity that comes along for them, and that is the position that we are currently in.
Q20 Ben Lake: Finally, the Welsh Government expressed quite strong disappointment with the amount of funding provided to Wales through the shared prosperity fund. However, the Secretary of State told us back in November that the shared prosperity fund should not be considered a direct replacement for EU funds for university research funding. Did you share the expectation of the Welsh Government that the shared prosperity fund would directly replace EU funds? I see a few nodding heads.
Professor Riordan: We were told that. We were told they would.
Q21 Ben Lake: You were told by whom? Sorry, I missed that.
Professor Riordan: It is a long time ago now, and it took a long time before the details emerged of how the UKSPF would work, but when it was originally announced, we were assured that this would be the replacement for the structural funds. That is what we have been expecting and we now discover that, to our horror, they are not.
Q22 Chair: On the shared prosperity fund, Professor Burke, you said something interesting a few moments ago about the correlation, the link, between good research and GDP outcomes. Sorry; it was Professor Boyle, I think, from Swansea, who made that point a few moments ago. I can see you all nodding, so you all share that viewpoint.
When I looked at the regional investment plan that has been written for Swansea and the west Wales region—this is supposed to drive the priorities for spending the SPF money—there is hardly any reference at all to the universities. There is one passing reference, or a couple of passing references, and only one substantive reference. I will read it out for your benefit. It says, “‘Transformational’ growth opportunities need to be balanced with the conditions for incremental improvements in resilience, capacity and capability across the whole of economy”. I am not sure I understand that sentence. The second sentence says, “There are distinctive opportunities at the ‘leading edge’ linked to the expertise within Swansea University and University of Wales Trinity Saint David”.
That is the only substantive reference to the two universities in the entire region in the economic plan that is supposed to be the overarching framework for spending this replacement money in the west Wales region. I am concerned that the money will be used on projects that really are not strategic and do not move the dial, but what really concerns me from that—I am going to ask Professor Boyle to respond to this—is that the local authorities that have drafted that plan clearly do not seem to recognise or see any role whatsoever for the universities in helping to close the GDP gap.
Professor Boyle: I think that is a really interesting point. The first thing is that although you are right, in the original documents that were pulled together, universities were not mentioned that often. The Welsh Government came back to local authorities to remind them that there was a variety of partners, not just universities, and that there ought to be a partnership approach to this.
The relationship that we have with our local authorities—I have two because we have two campuses, one in Neath Port Talbot and one here in Swansea—is exceptionally good. We meet monthly. Our senior teams get together and we talk about the strategies that we are going to try to deliver collectively, and not just the two of us but with other partners as well. In fact, the conversations that we have had around the shared prosperity fund have been quite productive except for the shared realisation, when the funds were eventually announced—remember, there was a huge delay in the announcement of what these funds were going to be allocated for and how they were going to be spent. There was a lot of delay and misunderstanding at the beginning about the nature of the funds, so it took a while for the local authorities to understand quite how these funds were going to work. We have had many conversations with the local authority, but we are both, together, frustrated that the scale of the funding that is available to Swansea does not allow for them to invest in very large-scale innovation projects of the type that I was describing that can be demonstrated to drive local GDP. The problem you have is that the funds are really too small, they are over relatively short periods and the agreement to fund them is very rapid, so the whole process is challenging and does not lend itself to those sorts of projects.
I mentioned earlier that the Welsh Government put together a prospectus that we thought was a very collaborative approach that talked to many stakeholders about the variety of ways that a replacement for structural funds could be spent. That led to a much more strategic discussion about the fact that, yes, you might use some of that money in small-scale local projects, perhaps led by local authorities. You might also want to use some of those funds in rather more ambitious, larger-scale projects. That is the frustration, I think. It is nothing to do with the local authorities not being willing to work with the universities. Frankly, I think it is just a realisation that, yes, we might be involved in a lot of much smaller-scale projects, but we cannot deliver on the large-scale projects that I think we all feel would have been hugely valuable to the economy of Wales.
Q23 Chair: Thank you for that. It also might speak to the fact that maybe local authorities—of which we have 22 in Wales, all of them relatively small—do not have the capacity and the expertise to do real big-ticket regeneration and investment in things that move the dial for our regions.
Professor Boyle: Yes. If I could just come back on that specific point, you are right. There is a structure that we are working within, a local authority structure that exists in Wales and that is as it is. Of course, you can go back in time, not just in Wales but in the UK, when there were lots of different approaches to how to think about regional economic development and whether you need RDAs or smaller entities. There is a lot of discussion about that.
Let me use a different example of the city deal projects that we happen to have had in my region. Here we have a couple of major projects that are going to be funded very much in collaboration with the city and are very substantive projects. They involve partners from business and from the local authorities. One is called SWITCH. It is in Neath Port Talbot, and it is a building that will be put up with huge support from Tata Steel to try to help decarbonise the steel industry. Another is with Swansea City Council and our other campus here in Swansea, and this one is looking at med tech, biotech and sports tech and thinking about how we bring industry together with our expertise in sports and medicine.
They are very prepared to be involved in and help work alongside us in these sorts of major innovation projects if the funding envelope allows for it. The city deal funding has allowed for some of those more ambitious programmes in a way that I am afraid I do not think the UKSPF has been able to do.
Q24 Chair: Thank you; that is very clear.
Professor Riordan: On that particular point, local authorities are not set up to fund research and development. That is not what they do. They do what they do. They are not R&D-type organisations and we cannot expect them to be. Not only that, but the criteria for the SPF do not permit them to spend the money in that way. There is a series of issues there that will not allow SPF to be used for this purpose. Definitely the best way is to channel at least some of that money through things such as the Cardiff capital region or the Swansea Bay city region, the equivalent of others that we have in north and west Wales, because they are doing that right now, as Professor Boyle says.
As part of the ask, yes, it is splitting funding, but it is also a change to the way that the SPF operates to allow this type of funding to happen, and surely the city deals are the best way of doing that.
Chair: Thank you very much.
Q25 Mr Rob Roberts: Hopefully, gentlemen, we can have a quick couple of questions just to round off on the shared prosperity fund before we move on to something else.
The Minister in charge of this, the Minister for Levelling Up, told us that the SPF had been specifically adapted for Wales and, I quote, “acknowledges priorities for research and innovation and incorporates opportunities to invest in R&D” and also that decision makers have been, I quote, “strongly encouraged to engage with higher education institutions”. It sounds really good to me. Does the Minister’s vision reflect your experience of what has actually happened? Let’s start with Professor McInnes.
Professor McInnes: Thank you for that. I will preface my comments by saying that over the last few years we have developed a very strong working relationship with both Ceredigion and Powys. I mention that because of the Growing Mid Wales partnership; it is on the back of that that shared prosperity came along. Shared prosperity came at a moment when we were already in very successful talks with both councils on major investments in R&D and innovation. We are talking about tens of millions.
When shared prosperity came up, we were in a position where we already had close working relationships with the local authorities and they were looking to us as—to all intents and purposes, for parts of mid-Wales—the anchor company for mid-Wales, to start to work on that. In that sense, we were already working with local authorities, they were given shared prosperity funds to manage and so we were a natural customer or partner to work with on that.
In that sense, the authorities were looking to us anyway. We were on fertile ground. The problem they face is that shared prosperity can cover so many areas of their competence, of which research and innovation is just one, so they have to address a range of issues. We have, I think, just seven projects going in. I hope they all get funded, but the chances are that they will not all get funded. The totality of the shared prosperity funding for mid-Wales is in the region of, I think I am right in saying, £45 million, which is about £20 million less than we got from structural funding.
In that sense, although we are managing to get some money, I hope, from this fund in innovation, and particularly in training and partnerships, the reality is that the level of funding is just nowhere near the level we were used to. For major capital projects, we are looking elsewhere. It is not what shared prosperity does at all, and particularly in the major STEM areas you need those major capital investments to make the difference. Yes, we have a very good working relationship, and we are looking for some money out of that for research and innovation funding—mainly innovation and training, to be honest—but it pales in comparison with what we have had before, and for the local authorities it is just one of a range of things that they have to use this funding for.
Q26 Mr Rob Roberts: Thank you very much. I noticed, Professor Boyle, that you had a wry smile on your face when I was reading the quotes from the Minister, as if they were some figment of everyone’s imagination. What is your experience with that? Does this vision for how SPF should work accord with your experience?
Professor Boyle: Yes. As I said earlier, our view was fairly clear. We were aware that the structural funds were coming to an end. We were aware that a proportion of those funds—remember that structural funds were also used for lots of big infrastructure projects—were previously used for research and innovation. We also became increasingly aware, as time went on, that because the new fund sat within DLUHC, a Department of the UK Government that does not have responsibility for research and innovation, there were considerable growing concerns that the Department’s expertise in that area, its understanding of the value of some of that work, would be lacking to some degree.
I personally felt, as I said earlier, that as with the Reid and Smith recommendation, just a smallish proportion of those funds could have been managed in a better part of the UK Government. I think it would have made a lot of sense. I am not critical, necessarily, of what the shared prosperity funds are going to be used for. We will try to partner on lots of smaller projects with our local authority to help to deliver some change. I am more critical of the fact that I do not believe that any strategic discussion was held around the value of the research and innovation projects that came from the structural funds and how they might be supported in the future.
I do not think the shared prosperity fund was set up in such a way that there was any chance of those projects continuing into the future. That is the thing that I think has frustrated the sector and, indeed, to a great extent probably frustrated some of our local authority colleagues, who have enjoyed working with us on some of these big projects in the past.
Q27 Mr Rob Roberts: Perfect. Thank you very much. Professor Riordan, have you detected any willingness on the part of the UK Government to engage in ways that will make the SPF operate in a way that is more suited to the needs of research bodies in the long term?
Professor Riordan: Not really, no.
Q28 Mr Rob Roberts: Have any of you experienced any kind of willingness on the part of the UK Government to engage on these sorts of things? Just a shake or a nod will do. Shaking heads all around—that is not very good.
To finalise this part, I will come to each of you in turn for two very specific numbers. The first one is how much you estimate you may receive from the SPF this year, and how much you would ordinarily have received from structural funds in comparison.
Professor McInnes: We have just put in seven applications, the total value of which is under £2 million. If we get £1 million, I will be very happy. In comparison, we got something in the region of close to £70 million over six years with structural funds. If we are lucky and we get £1 million, that would be one-seventh, if that, of what we would have ordinarily expected, and that is a very optimistic assessment on my part.
Professor Burke: We have submitted 10 projects, three through to the next round. They incorporate community activities around skills. We are bidding in for somewhere between £300,000 and £2 million, so at a lower level, maybe £300,000, but we have put £13 million in.
Q29 Mr Rob Roberts: What would you normally have expected to receive from European structural funds?
Professor Burke: About £10 million.
Mr Rob Roberts: Thank you. Professor Riordan.
Professor Riordan: Yes, very similar. It is a bit speculative, of course, but we would expect, or hope, to get somewhere maybe in the low hundreds of thousands from UKSPF versus what would be tens of millions in a typical year. We would sometimes have £25 million in previous years. Very much like my colleagues, I suspect that it will be perhaps 10% of what we would previously have had, if we are lucky.
Professor Boyle: Yes, very much matching. I think I gave the figure earlier. In 2014 to 2020, we got about £150 million of the structural funds. We have put in bids to the UKSPF of about £5 million, and we guess we might be lucky to get about one third of that. Remember that the point about the structural funds is that they were year-on-year funding, while the SPF is reasonably small pots and we do not quite know what the long-term trajectory is, and so on. There are all sorts of other challenges around it as well.
Q30 Mr Rob Roberts: Thank you. Broadly speaking, the picture is 10% at best. That is the overall thinking. All right.
Moving on slightly, the Secretary of State for Wales told us that Welsh universities would need to adapt to secure additional funding from UK Research and Innovation. The Reid review in 2018 had a similar message. What kinds of things need to be put in place to assist you guys in securing a greater proportion of UKRI funding? We will start with Professor McInnes.
Professor McInnes: I think we have already started doing quite a lot here, and the key vehicle for this has already been mentioned—the Wales Innovation Network. The Reid report, which you mentioned, identified the need for Welsh universities to collaborate much more closely than they had previously done simply to develop the sort of capacity or critical mass to compete for large pots of money, which ARIA and UKRI were looking for, for game-changing things rather than more incremental advances, perhaps. We have been working on that for two years and I think it is becoming very successful. It has received a bit of funding from the Welsh Government, which has led to a number of starter projects—seedcorn funding, if you like.
I have been in this job now for four years. If you view Welsh research and collaboration as a spectrum from competition through to collaboration, when I started we were definitely slightly beyond the mid-point, towards competition. We viewed each other as friendly competitors. Now we are very much towards the other end of the spectrum in collaboration, and there is widespread recognition across Wales and Welsh universities that we need to collaborate much more closely, where it is feasible, to develop the critical mass of expertise to compete for really large pots of money.
That is the absolutely key thing that is happening at the moment, and we have already funded—I forget the precise number—in excess, I suspect, of two dozen small, seedcorn-funded projects to try to develop that momentum of collaboration between the universities across Wales, in which, although it is geographically quite a small country, nevertheless communication links are sometimes not ideal. However, as we are seeing today, online technologies allow us to collaborate in new and interesting ways. That is the key vehicle, which we are looking at, to develop greater competitiveness across Wales.
Q31 Mr Rob Roberts: Thank you. Professor Boyle, this is your bag. You are chair of the research and innovation policy networks and you are a board member of Universities UK. How do Welsh universities get more money from UKRI funding?
Professor Boyle: You are right; I have been involved in research and used to run one of the research councils in a previous role, so I have been quite close to the research and innovation space. I think Colin McInnes is absolutely right. We have established a Welsh innovation network precisely—at least, it is one of its key aims—to grow the income that we are receiving.
If I look to my institution, we have not been complacent. I talk a lot about the cliff edge because it genuinely is a cliff edge with structural funds, but we at least have known that we were coming out of Europe and so on, so our institution has turned its head towards UKRI funding. We have improved our funding from UKRI year on year in the last few years, so I am pleased with the progress we are making. However, we are also anticipating associating with Horizon Europe, and that is another part of the European funding system that we have an opportunity to engage in, unlike the structural funds that we can no longer participate in.
Thinking really hard about how we might collaborate in Europe is another thing that we have been doing. I and some of my colleagues here have been over to Europe a number of times to talk to other European universities about the sorts of networks we might be able to establish. We are conducting lots of work to try to make ourselves as resilient and as robust as possible and I believe that there is a chance there.
The one area that I think UKRI is struggling with a little bit at the moment—and I think it would admit to it—is that it has within its strategy a very clear agenda to try to think about how to devolve some of its funding into areas that have not received so much funding in the past. Coming up with mechanisms that allow it to do that in a robust, competitive way is challenging, but I think we are starting to see some signs of that coming through now with some of its impact accelerator accounts and so on. We are working closely with colleagues in UKRI. I meet with them regularly to talk about the sorts of activity that might help stimulate growth in Wales but also in some of the other parts of the UK that have not done as well out of research and innovation funding in the past.
Of course there are things that we will work on. We are dynamic, agile and we will do our best to respond. I keep making the key point, though, that it is rare to be in the situation that we are in at the moment where we face such a sudden, quite traumatic change in the funding environment.
Q32 Mr Rob Roberts: Before the Chair throttles me for going over time, my final question is this: do you feel that you are getting better engagement from UKRI than from the UK Government on the SPF?
Professor Boyle: We have always had a good partnership with UKRI. Interestingly, they came to visit us in Bangor, hosted by Edmund, not that long ago. Dame Ottoline Leyser, the head of UKRI, came to visit. Colin and I have had dinner with her in the recent past, and I meet her fairly regularly. I am bringing her to a dinner very soon. They are absolutely open to these conversations, notwithstanding the challenge that UKRI has, which is quite understandable, that it has to fund the best and most excellent research and innovation that it can find in the UK. It has a clear commitment to that, but it increasingly sees the need to engage in local agendas, which overall will drive research and innovation in the UK into the longer term. There are real challenges there, but I think UKRI is listening.
Mr Rob Roberts: Thank you. Professor Burke, super quickly.
Professor Burke: I absolutely agree that collaboration is the way forward. The Wales Innovation Network is doing some fantastic work thanks to Paul Boyle. I was going to mention the UKRI visit to Bangor. We had some very constructive discussions. It is important to make a note around bridging funding to keep our highly qualified experts in our universities as we transition to a post-structural fund world.
Mr Rob Roberts: Thank you.
Q33 Virginia Crosbie: Professor Boyle, you keep mentioning this cliff edge of SPF funding. Presumably this has impacted your peers across the rest of the UK. How have other universities dealt with this?
Professor Boyle: You are absolutely right; it does have an effect across the whole of the UK. We have already pointed out that Wales benefited more from structural funds than other regions in the UK, but there were many other regions in northern England and elsewhere and down into the south-west that also benefited from structural funds. The extent of the problem—if I talk about the bridging funding we have just described, we think we need about £70 million in Wales to bridge our current projects. For the whole of the UK, it is about £170 million. You can speak to many vice-chancellors and others across the UK who will give the same answer. At every meeting I go to to talk about structural funds, the same view is held: that the replacement, the shared prosperity fund, is not solving the problems.
Many other projects are coming to an end. Looking at my own institution, as I said earlier, we had 51 projects, and about 32 of those have now come to an end. That means considerable numbers of staff will have left or have had to move on to other things.
Q34 Virginia Crosbie: I was pleased to hear about the Wales Innovation Network and working together. What are you doing to seek funding from commercial enterprises and how are you innovating to encourage entrepreneurs? From the evidence that I have seen in Wales, it is something that we certainly need to improve upon. How are you driving that goal of getting more entrepreneurs and working more with communities and industry?
Professor Boyle: You are absolutely right that that is a key part of what we are doing. I am bound to say it, aren’t I, but many of our structural fund projects included business and industry as partners in those projects. All of our institutions work with business—not just business but third sector organisations and public sector organisations—in a lot of the research that we do. In my own university, in our collaborative grants, a huge proportion of any grant we get from any source will involve those types of partners.
We are very much in agreement with you. We think that is definitely the way forward. Obviously, there are certain businesses and industries in Wales. My institution has a very strong partnership with Tata Steel, which is just down the road, and many of the people who work in Tata Steel were educated in Welsh universities, particularly in Swansea, Cardiff and elsewhere.
We have deep partnerships with certain types of industry. Do not forget that Wales is a little different from some other parts of the UK. We have much more emphasis on small and medium-sized businesses than many other parts of the UK. In Cambridge there are large-scale pharmaceutical companies and so on, and we have far fewer of those organisations in Wales.
Working with those small businesses is quite tough. They do not always have the bandwidth to invest in research and innovation, but even to have the time to invest. Interestingly, some of the projects from the structural funds were designed to bring together small and medium-sized enterprises to help them learn about how they can innovate and how we can work with them to innovate.
Some of the funding we have is not just about bright shiny research ideas. Some of it is about: how do you work better as a system? How do you bring people together to work more, and how do you help them understand the value and the need for that work? We have some good partnerships, but because we rely on small and medium-sized businesses it leads to a different set of partnerships than you might see in other parts of England, for example.
Q35 Virginia Crosbie: My last question is for Professor McInnes. Without the constraints of the EU state aid rules, is there scope for universities to construct their own research programme so that they can be revenue-raising and self-funding in the future?
Professor McInnes: Up to a point, yes. You need that initial funding to start it up, and not all universities have the capacity to do that. We are working very closely with industry. We are launching the national radio spectrum centre to exploit the geography of Aberystwyth. We have a very small urban environment, but we also have a coastal environment and hills, which for spectrum engineering is ideal to test new technologies, whether it is 6G, 7G, and so on. We can exploit the area, and we are working with a number of major companies.
As Paul says, particularly in mid-Wales it is SMEs. Well over 99% of the companies in west Wales are SMEs and we can support them, we work with them. With the amount of capital they have, to start a major research project that they do not know quite where it is going to lead—there is an understandable caution sometimes about that.
Getting some of the big companies in to try to invest quite heavily in the mid-Wales area is something that we can do, which perhaps other smaller companies cannot necessarily manage as a partnership agreement. The National Spectrum Centre is a very good example of that. We are looking for a number of companies with big food production for our work on future foods and those sorts of things. We can use our expertise, our capacity and our scientific status to try to bring in companies to the region as well as supporting companies already in the region.
Q36 Ruth Jones: Thank you for your time this morning. I want to look at Horizon Europe funding now. We have talked a lot about the current situation within the UK, but looking at the European funding, the issues and the length of time it has taken the UK to negotiate with Europe about what will happen next are clearly documented. You have already alluded to the fact that Pioneer could be a potential second option or plan B.
Amanda Wilkinson spoke to the Senedd committee in March and said that Horizon funding is crucial, but the actual funding that universities in Wales get is only about—Bangor is the highest as 53rd among the UK universities. How crucial is this funding to you in where you go with it in the future? How much do you need Pioneer or whatever comes in its place?
Professor McInnes: It is not just the cash; it is the networks. Horizon gives you access to some of the leading scientists across Europe and potentially beyond. When you look at science, particularly some of the major challenges that we are looking to address, it is those huge networks that we are excited about working with.
Horizon is not simply about the money. My own university got a bit of money out of the previous funding pot. It is not just about that. It is about the way in which you are able to collaborate with some of the leading researchers across the continent of Europe to address some of the big challenges. Horizon is very much structured along strategic challenges. This is the excitement of the Horizon project. It is not simply the cash, although the money is very welcome and very necessary for some projects. I think that we value the networks the most.
Q37 Ruth Jones: That is very clear. Professor Boyle, did you have anything you want to add?
Professor Boyle: To add to that—and I agree with Colin entirely—the Horizon funding is particularly prestigious across Europe and indeed across the world. It is the largest collective network of research and innovation funding that exists in the world. It is very powerful from that point of view. It allows you to be part of what effectively are three big systems. We have the United States and China, and the only way we can compete in that is to be part of a European system that gives us the scale and the opportunity.
The other thing about the Horizon funds is that they are very long term. They set seven-year windows of funding, which give you plenty of time to build relationships, to build the networks that Colin was talking about and to develop your bids, whereas in the UK funding system—I guess this is the way the Government work—we go from spending review to spending review. You can never guarantee what the funding will be like at the end of a much shorter window.
The Horizon funding is much deeper. It gives you time to develop your bids, and of course it is also steered very much by all of the countries coming together to identify what the priorities are, many of which are similar across European countries and some of which will be slightly different.
I think it is an ambitious programme, and that is the reason why universities in the UK have been determinedly supportive of our aim to associate. We have been very pleased with the work that has gone on with Pioneer. I and many others have been involved in discussions with DSIT about that, and I think they have been collaborative. We have had good conversations about what Pioneer might look like, but I do not think that anyone believes it would be anywhere close to the opportunities we get from Horizon. It is obviously something that we can put in place and champion if we have to, but clearly we are strongly supportive of associating.
Q38 Ruth Jones: Professor Burke, did you want to add anything?
Professor Burke: Between 2018 and 2022, we won about £4 million from Horizon. I reiterate what my colleagues are saying about the networks and being part of the European research ecosystem. It is so important; it is critical to us.
Q39 Ruth Jones: Professor Riordan, do you have anything else to add? All three of you have been very clear and very explicit about what you expect from Horizon, or would like to get from Horizon.
Professor Riordan: I agree with everything that my colleagues have said. There are real effects of not being in Horizon, particularly the loss of talent, because we have had people who have decided to move to other universities in Europe where they can access that funding. I think once it is absolutely clear that we are not part of it and you cannot apply via the guarantee to be part of it, I think that will discontinue. It would be a big mistake if the UK Government decided not to go down this route. It will have a big effect on all universities in the negative.
Q40 Ruth Jones: That makes sense, and it is perfectly clear. Thank you very much. I am going to move on now. Obviously, Covid had a major impact on the ability to provide the education that you do. The BBC reported that last year, over a quarter of university courses in the UK still had some measure of online learning. In your universities, have you entirely returned to face-to-face teaching now?
Professor Riordan: Yes, there is very little happening now in online teaching. There were some areas where people felt that some of the very large groups could be done better online. There are advantages to online teaching. I know it became heavily politicised, but we should not dismiss it on those grounds. We noticed, for instance, that attendance was much higher and engagement was much higher. We do not know whether that is because they were stuck in their rooms and did not have anything else to do. It is not particularly clear that that would continue.
One thing it certainly can do is to allow students to chip in and ask questions in the chat, and work together in groups and ways that allow the shyer ones to come to the fore. All of us know, as academics, that if you are in a lecture room with 500 students and you say, “Any questions?” there will only be very few who will ever put their hands up in a room like that. In answer to your question, we have gone back to teaching face to face throughout.
Q41 Ruth Jones: Professor Burke, in Bangor are you back to face-to-face teaching?
Professor Burke: Yes, we are. It is important to make the point that Colin made about technology-enhanced modules and things that we have learned through Covid. By and large, we are back to face-to-face teaching and on campus activity.
Q42 Ruth Jones: Professor Boyle, in Swansea?
Professor Boyle: Yes, same story. We have recognised a small number of areas where we can provide better training and engage with students in different ways, but the vast majority is back to face to face, and that is certainly the message we have given across our institution.
Professor McInnes: Much the same story, but I will add to that. The undergraduate and postgraduate taught provision is campus. Our offer is a distinctive campus environment, but we see opportunities for CDP, microprudentials, reaching out into the community, lifelong learning and those sorts of things. Given where Aberystwyth is located, it is not always easy on a wet November evening for somebody to drive 20 miles to a course in Aberystwyth, whereas by delivering it online, lifelong learning activities and those sorts of things have been revolutionised. The undergraduate and postgraduate taught provision and most of the postgraduate research is very much back to normal campus-based, but we are looking at these opportunities and exploiting them wherever they make sense.
Q43 Ruth Jones: I am sure my honourable friend from Ceredigion would not agree with the November analogy, but some of us do recognise it.
My final question is about students. A lot of students choose to study away from Wales; nearly 40% study outside of their home country. Those who stay in universities to study tend to move away for jobs afterwards. My question to all of you is: how can you counteract this brain drain? My own son studied in Manchester, and he never came home. Sorry; he did come home at times, but that is not helpful, is it? I wonder about the brain drain because obviously it is an issue for us in Wales. We want to keep our educated young people. How do you see doing that within your own spheres?
Professor Boyle: I think it is an interesting question, because you are right; we are obviously very keen to recruit locally and from Wales. We put a lot of effort in trying to do that. I am also cautious that we want to make sure that students have choice and they have the opportunity, as much as your son did, to choose a course that suits them or a place that they feel they would be comfortable in.
I think we have to be a little bit cautious about putting in place things that constrain our students too much, in the knowledge that many of these students, while they may not come back immediately, retain their links with Wales and will want to be part of Wales in the future. We see many examples of people coming back.
If I take my example, my first ever job was in Swansea. I then went and worked in many other parts of the UK and overseas. Now I have come back as a vice-chancellor later. Part of the reason for that was that obviously I enjoyed my time here and thought it was a fantastic institution. I think we have to be a little cautious about trying to discourage Welsh students from looking at the opportunities that are available to them in the breadth, but we will continue to do our best to encourage them to realise that there are fantastic programmes here in Wales. You do not have to go to the UK for the vast majority of courses; you can find brilliant things here, too.
Q44 Ruth Jones: You are a shining example of how people do return. Professor Burke, I see on the tube that we have adverts for Bangor University. Do you have anything else to add?
Professor Burke: Yes, I do. What we have to stress here—certainly at Bangor University—is the heritage and the bilingual nature of the institution. We offer teaching in Welsh across our subject offering. That is an important part of the mix. We are putting a lot of effort into making our courses, our university and our bilingual community attractive across the world but particularly to students in Wales and in our region. I think the bilingual offering is a key aspect here.
Ruth Jones: Absolutely, and to be completely even-handed, my daughter spent some time in Bangor University and as a result learned to speak Welsh.
Professor McInnes: It is a very similar story. We have put a lot of effort into trying to improve our recruitment from within Wales, particularly Welsh-speaking students. This includes the major refurbishment of a key Welsh-speaking hall—Pantycelyn Hall—which has massive resonance among the Welsh-speaking community in Wales. That has been very successful. It is a very nice hall of residence now for students to live in.
The data are very soft on this, but we estimate that something like two-thirds of our Welsh-domiciled students stay in Wales. Given the mobility of graduates and of younger people, that is not bad. There are certain things that we are constrained by in the local environment. We constantly see that the student who is attracted to Aberystwyth in the first place tends to want to stay here because of the environment and the nature of the place. A lot of them are disappointed that they have to leave simply because there aren’t job opportunities. On the other hand, we are finding that job opportunities are increasing. It is sometimes more difficult to fill posts than it has been in the past. This figure of two-thirds may go up and we may retain more of our students. At the moment we are putting a lot of effort into recruiting Welsh-domiciled students, including of course students who are Welsh speaking.
Q45 Ruth Jones: Finally, Professor Riordan. Obviously it must be easy to keep students in Cardiff.
Professor Riordan: It is relatively easy, and the reason for that is the economy. I think the most important thing that we can do as universities—in the 10 years of my transfer here I have put a huge emphasis on this—is helping to generate economic benefits for our regions and for Wales. Together with Swansea University and local industry, we are creating the world’s first compound semiconductor cluster. There are semiconductor clusters based in Europe, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, but there is not a compound semiconductor cluster, so we have a niche there that we can fill. That will create hundreds of graduate level jobs just through that initiative. We are anticipating that over the next five years, 660 jobs at that level will be created through this work.
To me, that is what will get people to come here and stay. About a third of our students come from England anyway, so we are attractive in that respect, but we need that stickability. We need Welsh students to be able to study in Wales, work in Wales and make their lives in Wales. We can only do that by creating the economy that that can happen in.
Ruth Jones: I hear what you say about the semiconductor R&D, and I am sorry that we will not have the manufacturing capacity to go with it.
Q46 Chair: Can I ask about the industrial action that has been happening? Are students in your universities going to have exams and assessments marked this year?
Professor Riordan: Possibly not, frankly. If this action continues and staff refuse to do marking, it is certainly possible that we could reach that stage. We very much hope that does not happen, and we are putting mitigation in place. We are confident that our students will graduate but there may be some mopping up to do over the succeeding months. It is a difficult situation we are in, to be honest.
Q47 Chair: I do not want to labour the point too much, but it has obviously been in the public domain and in the news. Help me understand—how will students be able to graduate if final examinations have not been marked?
Professor Riordan: It depends on the extent of that. During Covid we had to introduce a range of mitigation to allow students to progress and graduate. We are adapting, and obviously my colleagues can speak for themselves, but I imagine that other universities are doing similar things where those mitigations allow that to happen. You can use pre-existing marks and other assessments that have been done to feed into the calculation.
Q48 Chair: It is a real blow for those students who have worked hard for the last three years, and particularly as they would have experienced some of the Covid lockdown. It is a bit of a comedown to end their university experience like that, isn’t it?
Professor Riordan: I agree. I very much hope that the marking and assessment boycott is suspended. That is what should happen.
Q49 Chair: To be clear, it is a university-wide issue, isn’t it; it is not just Cardiff?
Professor Riordan: There are 144 universities in collective bargaining, and because of the rules and legal framework of collective bargaining, we all have to hang together on that. We cannot freelance.
Chair: Thank you for answering that.
Q50 Virginia Crosbie: Since 2017, 2018 the number of international students joining Welsh postgraduate courses has roughly doubled. Are you too dependent on international students as a source of funding, and does this concern you? What does it mean for reduced places for Welsh students? With that context, there has been quite a lot of discussion in the press about postgraduate students and immigration, so I am very interested in your thoughts on that.
Professor Boyle: You have drawn attention to one of the things we raised right at the very beginning when we talked about the funding of higher education in general and how the system works. Let us not forget that the UK Government set universities a target to increase our international recruitment of students, which we met. They set a target of 600,000 students and we met that target. One of the challenges we have is that we are very aware that within some parts of government, there is perhaps concern about migration into the UK. Of course, if we speak to the public, they do not think of students as migrants. In some countries they would not be classified as migrants. They would be classified separately.
As I say, we were set a target by UK Government. We worked hard to achieve that; and, in my institution and most other institutions, we could not exist without the income that comes from international students at the current time, because it so heavily cross-subsidises the research and innovation work we do but also now it is something to cross-subsidise the shortfall in home tuition fees. That income is important.
It is not just about income, though. I think for the students who come and study in our universities, it is a wonderful environment for them to learn about the world and to get engaged with people from all different parts of the world. Our city benefits from that as well, as our university. We are very passionate about being a global institution in a local context. We think it has been a huge benefit to the students who come here, whether they come from Wales, the UK or overseas, to be part of that mix.
It is important to remember the value that comes from all of that alongside the financial implications, but we have to recognise in the current system that there is no way that we can do everything we do without the support we get from the tuition fees that come in from international students.
Professor Burke: We had the discussion at the beginning of this meeting about sustainability, and what is making it work financially for this institution is international fees at the moment. I want to reiterate Paul’s point around the important contribution that international students make, the diversity and the benefit of having that cultural richness in a university community. I think that we are lucky to have international students as part of our student cohort. It is an important part of what we do as an institution. Financially, it is also absolutely critical to us.
Q51 Chair: I will add my own thought on that. It is a point of strength for British and Welsh universities that we remain attractive. I completely agree with those comments about the richness and diversity a cohort of international students within the university body brings to the student experience.
Professor Burke, on that, you talked about sustainability and emphasising how important international student fees are. Between that discussion about international student fees and the discussion about historic dependence on time-limited European structural funds, is this not just revealing just how precarious the business model of Welsh universities is?
Professor Burke: It is not just about Welsh universities. I think it is about the UK higher education sector. We need to have a debate around how it is funded. We had the discussion earlier about inflation. The money that universities receive for students, whether it comes from fees or wherever it comes from, is a Government decision but, as I reiterated earlier, I think that it needs to rise with inflation. I do not think it is sustainable to have it flat for the foreseeable future while inflation is running at 10%. I do not think it is just a Welsh issue; it is a UK higher education issue. There is an important debate around how we fund higher education in the UK into the future.
Chair: Does anybody else on the panel want to respond on that point? You feel it has been covered. Okay, thank you.
Q52 Mr Rob Roberts: I am currently engaged in doing an MBA through Glyndwr University in north Wales, not too far from me. It is all being delivered online and virtually and through that kind of medium. Is that something that your universities are also engaged in? On my course there are people who are in Australia, north Africa and all over the place. Is that something that you are engaged in, in broadening out the marketplace of where you can attract students from?
Professor McInnes: Absolutely, but I think the MBA is not the only route—the traditional master’s. The real interests now are in very small bespoke courses or DProf. For small bespoke courses—microcredentials—it could be, for example, offering a marketing module to a small company in mid-Wales. It could be about all sorts of legislative changes.
Certainly during Covid, with all the changes in regulations for government support for industry, we did a lot of microcredentials delivered online to SMEs about what was changing, what funding was available and that sort of thing. That started us thinking that there is a real demand for very small bespoke courses that do not require that much commitment for somebody working in an industry, particularly a small company where they may be slightly reluctant to see somebody spending a significant proportion of their time doing training.
The other end of the spectrum are the professional doctorates. We have a very successful scheme with UAE where we have very senior civil servants doing professional doctorates with us. Part of the arrangement is that they are doing a major project where they get training on research methods, largely done online, and most of the supervision is done online. They visit Aberystwyth for a couple of weeks each year but most of it is online. It would be inconceivable to deliver that if it was a traditional PhD. They are doing these major projects, which are useful for their employers but also that get them a doctorate and they meet all the traditional requirements for a PhD.
There is a range of opportunities there and we are moving into that market as aggressively as we can because of the opportunities, not only for us but for communities we serve.
Mr Rob Roberts: Perfect. We talked a lot about research and innovation. It would be good to see you turning those innovative minds into thinking about ways of expanding your markets and doing those things.
Chair: Thank you very much. We have just hit 11 o’clock so we have probably had a good run through the issues. I want to say thank you, on behalf of my colleagues on the Committee, to you all for giving up your time with us. I will finish with a couple of thoughts.
We enjoy hearing from you as Welsh universities. I do not have a university in my constituency, but I have a lot of constituents whose sons and daughters go to university in Aberystwyth, Swansea, Cardiff and elsewhere. From a constituency perspective, I feel as though sometimes we do not have enough engagement at the Westminster end with the Welsh universities. It is a shame we could not entice you up to Westminster this morning, but we would welcome that in future.
I think I speak for all of my colleagues in saying that we want the Welsh university sector to be something of real excellence. We feel proud about it, and we want to support you in the discussions that you are having with Welsh Government and the UK Government about the sustainability of these important projects and programmes that we have been talking about.
For my part, it is a point of concern that it is now seven years after the referendum and five years after the Reid report, and we still do not seem to have any real clear long-term replacement plan for European structural funds. I do worry that in Wales—not just in higher education—there has historically been an overdependence on relying on funding that comes to us because we are a poor nation. There is an almost built-in incentive for us to remain poor and an assumption that we will always stay that way.
On that note, I may I again thank you? We look forward to continuing the correspondence and engagement with you.