Scotland’s enlightenment legacy is not just about our history. The search for knowledge, invention and innovation is the foundation on which we will build our future too. Few countries are better placed than Scotland to help lead the world into a new age…That thread runs from the Scotland of David Hume and Adam Smith, to the country of John Logie Baird, Alexander Graham Bell and Marion Ross, and onto our modern day nation of Peter Higgs and his Nobel Prize winning discovery.
Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish First Minister, speech, 2019
The devolved governments & local authorities in the UK undertake a range of regulatory and other tasks that entail science & evidence, as well as (in some cases) funding entities that undertake R&D on their behalf. Skip to the end for the main conclusions.
Scotland
The Scottish government operates various scientific advisory structures apparently appointed by elected officials (politically appointed in US terminology), notably, the Chief Scientific Advisor; Scottish Science Advisory Council; Chief Scientific Adviser for Environment, Natural Resources & Agriculture; CAMERAS board (Coordinated Agenda for Marine, Environment and Rural Affairs Science); & the Chief Economic Advisor.
In addition, the government has civil servants, who in principle are appointed non-politically (i.e., not by the elected officials). These officials oversee various directorates. The most significant scientific-type positions would appear to the directors of advanced learning & science, climate & energy, digital, environment & forestry, marine Scotland; & the Chief Medical & Nursing Officers (list not exhaustive).
The government conducts research across four areas, namely, social, economic; health; food, rural affairs; and environmental research (health is, confusingly, dubbed the ‘Chief Scientist Office’). Research seems to be undertaken primarily by civil servants and/or via research contracts with universities and the health care system; the notable exception is the food, rural affairs & environmental research which is delivered by six Scottish government labs.
In 2017, these labs were integrated into a network known as the Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutes (SEFARI) that ‘deliver the Scottish Government funded Strategic Research Programme (SRP), which addresses key mid to longer-term challenges for Scotland’s environment, agriculture, land use, food and rural communities.’ Impressive as it sounds, it must be admitted this is quite a small-scale activity, comprised around 390 staff, and £48.5m (2016-2017). As far as I can tell, these labs are the only actual entities that could do something; the rest is a collection of committees & strategies.
We ought also to add the healthcare research budget (Chief Scientist Office), which amounts to around £65m p.a. One must also note developments cited in the most recent budget, such as the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland (NMIS) – possibly funded to the tune of £75m (lump sum); & a ‘commitment to increase grant support for business R&D from £22m to £37m p.a. for the 3 years 2018-21’; as well as the subventions from the Scottish Funding Council to universities (£1.8b). Overall, therefore, we come to an estimate of (very roughly) £2b p.a. spent on R&D and higher educational activities by taxpayers, the bulk going to higher education.
The emphasis seems to be on the universities as the core delivery agency (a UK-type solution). While the SEFARI initiative looks promising as an alternative to the university-led model, its budget and staffing are small. Overall, it is hard to comment further because it is all quite recent; I have yet to see any substantial appraisals, such as by the National Audit Office.
Wales
As far as I am aware, the Welsh government buys R&D by funding university-led consortia. These include Health & Care Research Wales, & the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD) – possibly others.
The most recent official report on Welsh government R&D was written by Reid, and published in 2018. His recommendations primarily revolved around increasing the visibility of Welsh government-funded R&D, presumably in the hope of obtaining additional funds from London.
His suggestions included that the Welsh government should establish a research office in London to lobby for funds; that Welsh researchers should be given incentives to drum up more funding from London; & the Welsh government should merge all (?) R&D & innovation funding into one branded fund. Reid believed that such a fund would raise the ‘visibility, coherence and impact’ of Welsh R&D, and wanted to name it the St David’s Investment Fund (after the Welsh national saint). Regrettably I do not know if any of these proposals were actually implemented.
Reid reported that the total sum spent on R&D in Wales was £435m p.a. (2017). Given Wales has around the population of Uruguay (about 3 million people), we should note the two countries spend about the same. (Uruguay, by the way, has an intriguing record of achievement in science & research policy). However, Reid also wrote that only £35m p.a. was actually within the control of the Welsh government (the remainder presumably funds paid for R&D based in Wales, rather than funds paid by Wales for R&D).
The stated context for Reid’s report is Brexit which will cut off Wales from vital EU funds, making it dependent on London for all funding. What can be said is it is regrettable that steps were not taken before. Recalling the haphazard deck-chair rearranging of Welsh universities by the Welsh government over two decades, there is a certain irony for calls once again to play as a team (in the UK, universities are not treated as a strategic national strategic asset).
With such an apparently small amount of funding, there would be severe limitations on what could be achieved. Overall, we could say that Wales has not really carved out its own strategic R&D goals, being dependent on English advisors, and London’s funding. One is at a bit of loss to say anything positive about the policy environment.
Recalling the reference to Uruguay, consider the SARAS Institute, which is a partnership between the Uruguayan & local government & university, & the Dutch agricultural research institution, Wageningen, with an innovative, community-led and application-oriented ethos. Wales has some intriguing models of its own, namely, institutions such as the Center for Alternative Technology (an NGO) & the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences (the latter tracing its heritage back to the pioneering environmentalist, Stapledon).
Agri-food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI) Northern Ireland
There shall be a body corporate to be known as the Agri-food and Biosciences Institute…[its] function…is to undertake scientific work in the fields of (a) agriculture; (b) animal health and welfare; (c) food; (d) fisheries; (e) forestry; (f) the natural environment; and (g) rural development and enterprise….[t]he Institute shall carry out such scientific work as may be assigned to it by the Department.
The Agriculture (Northern Ireland) Order 2004
In 2004, the above statutory instrument or order under the Northern Ireland Act 2000 merged the Agricultural Research Institute of Northern Ireland (ARINI) and the ‘science service’ of the oversight (agriculture) department, to form a legal entity called the Agri-food & Biosciences Institute (AFBI). ARINI was an old institute that dated from 1927. According to the AFBI website, the revitalized institute was established in 2006; it has all the appearances of a ‘traditional’ national research lab, i.e., it has deliverable goals assigned in public law, a statutory duty to support the work of its oversight department, and an actual building with people in it. As such, it is a rarity in the UK.
AFBI has a budget of about £55m p.a., and around 650 staff; it operates seven sites across NI, as well as a research vessel valued at £53m. It reports to the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA); it has a board composed of local business people and farmers.
A 2018 review of AFBI seemed generally positive, making comments such as ‘AFBI science is held in high regard by those who use it and AFBI scientists are recognized as working hard to deliver for their customers.’ AFBI undertakes contract consultancy work; apparently during 2018-19, it ‘secured over 74 new contracts from a diverse range of customers in public and commercial sectors.’
I made a freedom of information request to uncover how much the UK central government (& UK devolved administrations besides Northern Ireland) was allocating the institution via consultancy contracts. This would be in addition to core funding. The response (AFBIFOI20200701) revealed 41 contracts between 2009-2020, total value £6.4m, or on average about £500k p.a.
This seems like good performance in that the institution is regularly securing contracts from UK government; as such, I get the impression AFBI is one of the foremost application-oriented government labs in UK & Ireland. Logically, AFBI would have been integrated into Ireland’s Teagasc, as an all-Ireland facility, but the politics of the border intervened (the institutions do, however, collaborate scientifically). AFBI’s parent department, DAERA, is implementing a Science Transformation Programme; hopefully this will reinforce, rather than weaken, the institution, and make it more visible to the world at large.
Some unrelated points:
- NI government departments no doubt also engage in scientific activities, such as the Housing Executive & the Departments of Health, Infrastructure (Analysis, Statistics and Research Branch), & Economy (university funding). My assumption is scientific activities will involve contracting and/or schemes encouraging knowledge exchange, rather than operating legal entities equivalent to AFBI.
- The NI executive issued a draft industrial strategy in 2017, Economy 2030 – Industrial Strategy for Northern Ireland; it is unclear to me if this is now moot. The strategy was presumably (?) empty prevarication because NI (being a somewhat socially-unstable artifact of the Irish independence process), is obviously not a discrete economic or political entity even in principle.
- Other activities of note include the US-Ireland R&D Partnership Program & the Center for Cross-Border Studies, which stem from NI’s very particular political history.
Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) in England
The Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) were established by the Labour government in 1998, comprising nine agencies, one for each region of England, with combined budget of £2b p.a (2005-2006). Long a weird object of hate for the right of the Tory party, the RDAs were closed by the Conservative-Liberal coalition in 2010. Under legislation, an RDA was expected to:
(a) further the economic development and the regeneration of its area; (b) promote business efficiency, investment and competitiveness in its area; (c) promote employment in its area; (d) enhance the development and application of skills relevant to employment in its area; and (e) contribute to the achievement of sustainable development in the United Kingdom where it is relevant to its area to do so.
The RDAs had the power in law to acquire equity in firms, create firms, and buy and sell land, but only with the permission of the central government; they derived their budgets not from local levies but via central grants, which until 2001 were hypothecate (spending ratios determined centrally). This must have restricted autonomy.
According to a 2003 report, the national budget across all the RDAs was £2b p.a.; of this, £240m was estimated as ‘SET [science & technology] related expenditure’. Averaged across the nine authorities this amounted to £26m p.a. per RDA. How was this budget spent?
I must admit to not being particularly sure on what the RDAs did, beyond a bit of general knowledge that they part-funded things called technology & innovation centers (TICs). These were possibly buildings, or clusters of buildings, akin to science parks or start-up incubators (this information will be gathered somewhere). It is not entirely clear if many of these would qualify as viable standalone institutions, and I believe a number, e.g., the Manufacturing Technology Centre, were later absorbed into the Catapult network.
Given the hatred of RDAs by the UK’s right-wing it is fun to note the enthusiasm shown for regional structures by the German conservatives (Baden-Württemberg – the CDU stronghold).
The state of Baden-Württemberg set up ZSW in 1988 as a non-profit foundation bringing together universities, research institutes and companies. Today, it is one of the leading institutes for applied research in the areas of photovoltaics, renewable fuels, battery technology, fuel cells and energy systems analysis. Some 230 scientists, engineers and technicians and 90 student assistants and trainees are currently employed at ZSW’s three sites in Stuttgart, Ulm and Widderstall.
Research in Germany Land of Ideas
The German Länder apparently fund over 160 local R&D institutes. These have local governance and are attuned to the specific scientific challenges as perceived in the region; distinct in structure and goals from the universities and national programs; and a basis for obtaining further funds. Questions of course remain about which came first – the economic development, or the R&D institute (mostly flows from wealth to R&D, not the other way).
The approach of founding an R&D institute was effectively taken by at least one of the English RDAs, which established the New & Renewable Energy Centre (NaREC) in 2002; seemingly a cut above other TICs, it resembled an embryo version of ZSW. Regrettably, however, this entity was later broken up, and the remainder merged into the Catapult network; a missed opportunity to establish a distinct institutional base for regional R&D.
In 2003, the science and technology committee in the House of Lords looked into the operation of the RDAs. Regrettably the House of Lords is not elected, and the committee itself was not strong on expertise germane to local government, but the overall thrust of their report was that more information sharing and communication between different agencies was needed (alongside cuts to the bureaucracy). It is unclear to me if the recommendations were implemented by the government, but in my view it seems unlikely they would have produced major impacts.
Regional development agencies are commonplace around the world; they had previously been established in the other UK jurisdictions, namely Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (these were not touched by the legislative developments described above). The point is that the RDAs in England, created in 1998, were not a new phenomenon in the British Isles, but it remains unclear to me what was learned from the previous experiences going back decades. What ought to have become permanent fixtures were abolished after a decade of operation, and lessons learned yet again lost.
Science and research in local government
Local authorities undertake a wide range of functions requiring science and evidence to deliver effectively, including supply of services, & commercial activities. One can immediately think of examples, e.g., recycling, street layout, social services, primary & secondary education, & building & operating residential accommodation. One emerging area of business for local authorities is energy generation and supply – see work of Britton, et al.
Another core area is regulation. The local authorities do this in conjunction with central government agencies, which are of course not elected and generally not democratically accountable on a day-to-day basis (see table beneath). Indeed, it is in the negotiations between local authority and central expertise that we probably see the most interesting phenomena in terms of interaction of local democracy with taxpayer-funded science and research. By this I mean balances between the technocratic element, and the local, more evidently democratic element (to the extent that we can really apply such rigid categories to the day-to-day practices of negotiation).
| Topic | Public law | Local government | Central agency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Safety of food & animal feed | Food Safety Order 1991; Food Safety Act 1990; Food Standards Act 1999 | Environmental health department | Animal & Plant Health Agency (APHA); Food Standards Agency (FSA), FERA |
| Public health | Health & Social Care Act 2012 | Director of public health | Public Health England (PHE) |
| Pollution | Food & Environment Protection Act 1985 | Environmental health department | Environment Agency |
| Workplace health & safety | Health & Safety (Enforcing Authority) Regulations 1998; National Enforcement Code 2013 | Environmental health department | Health & Safety Executive (HSE) |
| Product standards | Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005/29/EC | Trading standards department | APHA; FSA; Office for Product Safety & Standards |
| Building standards | Building Act 1984 | Building control department; fire brigade | ? |
There is evidently a complex legal interplay defining responsibilities – far beyond my knowledge. In food safety, & health & safety, there seem to be relatively well codified relationships between the national agencies & the local authorities as far as I can tell. The Grenfell Tower disaster (2017) reveals abject, lethal, failure in building control.
Obviously we have a range of activities – many of them regulatory – that local authorities engage with, as noted above. Some of these are legally defined, others relatively less so. Delivery of all of these would in principle benefit from science and evidence, although it is hard to say in practice what exactly would be useful.
To my knowledge, one local authority in the South of England, Southampton, appointed an (unpaid) chief scientific advisor (in 2012). I lack information on how this played out but deciphering the scientific needs of a local authority would need more than a single volunteer – besides which, scientists have long been elected as officials in local authorities (i.e., it is not the absence of individuals with scientific training, but insufficiency of funds, time, &, presumably, certain kinds of topic-relevant expertise).
As I have noted before on this website, science and research are peas in a pod, but as we can see there are probably very limited opportunities for local authorities to commission research that addresses operational questions. If we look at the table above, we can see central institutions such as FSA that indeed commission scientific research on topics of interest; but it is unclear to me what legally-defined abilities local authorities would have in determining central priorities. Some of the larger authorities are presumably commissioning research from consultancies, academics, and other sources.
Conservative governments in the 1980s & early 1990s eliminated locally-attuned research & technical training in the polytechnics (removal from local authority control 1988; abolition 1992).
The policy emphasis in around 60 per cent of polytechnics was on research serving the needs of the community, supportive of the teaching function and staff development, and of scholarship and scholarly activity. Collaborative, group and interdisciplinary research was favored, with collaborative having the highest emphasis. Action research barely featured, although applied research had a high priority; fundamental research had almost the lowest priority.
Pratt, 1997, The Polytechnic Experiment: 1965-1992, p.141
We can debate the extent to which local communities genuinely controlled the activities of polytechnics (rose tinted spectacles are best avoided); the point is that today there is little or no opportunity even in principle for local priorities to prevail on research. There is also no local authority-wide research institution (bricks & mortar, budget, legal entity) tackling a range of problems relevant to local government. The Local Authorities Research Consortium (LARC) was launched in 2012; it was a collaboration of local authorities interested in research on child welfare (not clear if other topics were covered). It is unknown to me if this scheme is still running. Given cuts to local authority budgets, it would surely be wishful thinking to expect local authorities have time or funds dedicated to research.
Conclusion
The question being asked in the above is the extent to which decision-making on scientific activities is invested in the local community. As we can see, there is little or no local control of science. This can be seen as part of a wider centralizing policy consistently undertaken by Conservative governments to reduce local control, rather than something expressly to do with scientific activities. But local scientific activities have not been completely wiped out.
Moran (2005) argued that the UK had become a regulatory state with a centralized bureaucracy concerned with regulating economic activities such as electricity and gas supplies, water, communications, etc. His view, citing the work of Scott (Seeing Like a State), was that confidence in this rational, technocratic approach far exceeded its capacities to deliver, leading to continual failure, or at the least failures-in-waiting.
We must, however, admit that a part of this regulatory activity resides in elected local authorities that retain responsibilities for regulating food safety, public health, product quality assurance (trading standards), etc. Herein lies a good deal of vestigial scientific activity, but which is regrettably ill-supported institutionally, and reliant on a patchwork of different relationships between local governments and scientific agencies in central government. This is notable in the links between science & research, where the local government does not have the executive power to commission its own research to support regulatory activities, but would instead need to lobby on the priorities of central agencies. Nevertheless, genuinely intriguing local models of scientific governance might emerge from looking at local roles in the various regulatory structures, as well as delivery of services.
Universities are not discussed much in the above, despite at least two decades of rhetoric around what they claim is their local role, or rather the possibility they could fulfill local roles (if they were given funds to do so). It is important to remember, indeed, that 30 or so universities were built on the vestiges of the former polytechnic system; yet, the exact memory of that experience is probably lost and would need to be created anew.
I will hopefully address issues of the universities at another time, but it is obviously a bit more complicated when we begin to ask questions about local control of activities. That is to say, a legal basis for democratically-elected, representative, local authorities to rule, i.e., determine budgets (rather than merely advise). The rhetoric about local roles for universities does also tend to push against the centralizing tide of history, not to mention the business model of many of them, built on high fees from overseas students, and central government sinecure. Accordingly, the extent to which universities actually respond to local needs will be determined by day-to-day decisions of their managers and staff, not by legal imperatives.
Turning now to the devolved administrations, questions arise about whether we indeed see ‘local’ activities. The Scottish nationalists want to assert Scotland as an independent country, therefore its science and research policy are driven by that agenda. NI is obviously stuck between the UK and the Republic of Ireland due to partition; Wales still very much in the shadow of its English neighbor.
Northern Ireland’s AFBI represents a genuinely interesting and underappreciated phenomenon because it has the features of an actual national lab, but has definitive local input through its board and in principal democratic control via management from its oversight department. This is a rarity in the UK, and presents an opportunity to develop innovative governance models for local, application-oriented science.
Overall, there is probably a much bigger discussion regarding how different parts of the ‘British’ polity conceive science as a nationalist, internationalist, European, ‘localist’, or indeed unionist, emblem. Suffice to say at this juncture the way these impulses play out legally and institutionally seems a core element of understanding science in the UK.
Science Think Tank 