Lord Crisp – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Crisp on 2016-01-20.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they have taken to ensure parity between funding for physical health and mental health research following the 2014 Research Excellence Framework conducted by the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) is allocated funding from the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) Science and Research budget to distribute to higher education institutions (HEIs) in England. Most of HEFCE’s funding is allocated as an unhypothecated research block grant to institutions, ensuring university leaders have flexibility to support their own research priorities. While this block grant is calculated using research quality and volume information from the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF2014) at a subject level, it is a matter for individual HEIs to determine how it is ultimately distributed to particular activities/subjects.
In developing the REF, the attribution of different disciplines to particular units of assessment was agreed with the relevant professional bodies. Research relevant to clinical mental health was assessed in a unit including psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience. As this unit included a mix of research with higher costs (clinical psychology and psychiatry, and neuroscience) and lower costs (social psychology), the funding was allocated at an intermediate cost rate, reflecting the mix of disciplines.
REF2014 demonstrated significantly improved research quality in all disciplines, including psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience. As a result, the funding allocated on the basis of performance to this group increased by 16.5 per cent.
As announced in the Spending Review 2015, the Government is taking forward a review of the REF to ensure that future university research funding is allocated efficiently, offers greater rewards for excellent research and reduces the administrative burden on institutions. This review will be led by Lord Stern, and he is expected to deliver his review to the Government in summer 2016.
