What government measures is what it funds: a smaller university’s view of the regional growth debate

This blog was kindly authored by Dr Tobiasz Trawinski, Public Policy Fellow and Professor Penny Haughan, Vice-Chancellor and Rector, both of Liverpool Hope University.

In his first days in Downing Street, the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, promised ‘good growth in every postcode’. That same week, we were having a version of that conversation at Liverpool Hope University. We had invited Professor Julia Sutcliffe, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for Business and Trade, to a roundtable with the University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University, the City of Liverpool College, the Royal Academy of Engineering and Knowledge Quarter Liverpool. The question we put was: what stops universities doing more for their region, and what would let them do more?

The answer we kept arriving at was measurement.

The money is, at last, beginning to move. The government’s emerging Northern Growth Strategy and the new Local Innovation Partnerships Fund, alongside multi-year devolution settlements for mayoral authorities, are putting decisions about research, innovation and skills funding closer to places. For the Liverpool City Region, that is welcome. But new funds still have to be scored against something, and what they’re scored against will decide where they land. So we have one ask of the new government: establish a measure of what a university contributes to its own place, built to sit alongside the research measures when place-based funds are allocated.

The measure quietly draws the map

Roughly £1.3 billion a year in mainstream quality-related funding from Research England follows Research Excellence Framework scores. It rewards genuinely world-class work, much of it done by research-intensive universities that have earned it.

But excellence tends to be self-reinforcing (the so-called “Matthew effect”), so funding gathers where strength already sits, and each round makes the next more likely to look the same. Place-based funds are designed to offset that, but they are small in comparison.

The result is that the dominant measure captures one kind of contribution well and cannot see another at all. It does not see the work that teaching-led and mission-led universities do most: educating the local workforce and keeping graduates in the area.

What the data already shows

In the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures, the North West performs more publicly funded research and development than any region outside the Greater South East, at around 9 per cent of the UK total. The Greater South East still accounts for roughly half. Headline impact figures only take us so far. Independent studies value a single university’s annual contribution to the Liverpool City Region at anything from tens of millions of pounds to well over a billion. Those totals, like research income, largely track institutional size. They say little about value for money, and no published measure currently allows that comparison to be made. Many smaller universities anchor communities that would otherwise have no university at all, and nothing in the present framework registers it.

Most of the pieces already exist

Research England’s Knowledge Exchange Framework and the Higher Education Business and Community Interaction survey both capture engagement, but local growth is recorded as narrative rather than as a metric. In May, the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) published a new local-authority graduate mobility marker. It shows, for the first time at local level, where graduates actually end up.

What is missing is a single measure of local contribution. It could include workforce supply into priority sectors, graduate retention in the region and graduates moving into small and medium-sized firms. That is a synthesis job rather than a new burden. The ONS, HESA and Research England hold the data between them and could build it without asking universities to report anything new.

The obvious objection is that retention is a crude proxy and can be gamed. A regional university whose graduates go on to well-paid work in London has added value too, and no measure should penalise it for that. But that is an argument for building the measure carefully, not for leaving the gap where it is. Retention still counts on its own terms as it is what lets a place keep the skills it has paid to create.

Growth in every postcode needs a measure for every postcode

That is the change we would ask the new Prime Minister to make. If the ambition is good growth in every postcode, the measure has to be able to see every postcode and at the moment it cannot.

Universities should be valued for the research they win and for the local workforce they build and retain. Until we can place a value on a university’s contribution to its own place, it will continue to be overshadowed by contributions that are easier to measure.

Funding follows measurement.