Thom Brooks argues that the government should make greater use of university academics as specialist consultants. University academics are well-placed to provide the kind of specialist advice governments have acquired from consultants because it is often these academics who helped train the consultants. Moreover, they would likely cost much less than the specialist consultants used by successive governments.
Central government spent over £500m on consultants and staff on short-term contracts across 17 departments in 2012/13. This figure was reported to be about £800m if staff “off payroll” were included. This is not surprising. Modern governments require specialists to assist the effective management of complex programmes. Specialist consultants have a valuable role to play for government. The “newsworthiness” of this story is that the figures appear relatively high despite pledges by the government to reduce the use of consultants.
The challenge is how to more effectively support the use of consultants benefiting improved efficiencies and reducing burdens on taxpayers. The current model has been to recruit fewer specialist consultants and offer less remuneration. But there is a better model that can and should be embraced: the greater use of university academics as specialist consultants.
University academics are a largely underutilised resource for Whitehall. Recent years have seen the launch of a new so-called “impact agenda” rolled out by higher education bodies, such as HEFCE and RCUK, where research “impact” is assessed and a factor in determining higher education funding. The role of this assessment of research impact has been contested and some argue it presents higher education funding with problems difficult to avoid.
These activities operate against a backdrop of supportive rhetoric by successive governments for university academics to demonstrate their research impact as one important part of what public funding for higher education should demand. The increasing importance of impact in British academia should be broadly welcomed and can benefit research even in areas thought vulnerable to neglect in such a climate, such as philosophy and the humanities, as I’ve argued elsewhere. Nonetheless, many academics complain that interacting with government and civil servants remains far too constrictive: government rhetoric in support of academics demonstrating research impact is not met by governments providing academics with a greater space to create impact in good governance and public policy.
This has been an opportunity lost. Most university academics I know are eager to contribute to policy areas, if only there were more opportunities. There are multiple potential future benefits. The first is that university academics are well-placed to provide the kind of specialist advice governments have acquired from consultants because it is often these academics who helped train the consultants. A second potential benefit is many university academics are in a position to provide such assistance through funded leave from their teaching or between teaching terms. For many academics, this engagement will provide real benefits for their current and future research through first-hand interaction at the policy coalface. Plus, there could be real benefits for their teaching of students, as they would benefit from the first-hand knowledge their lecturers would acquire.
Finally, university academics would likely cost much less than the specialist consultants used by successive governments – and there could be innovative ways of supporting funding. I conclude with one possible model. University academics could form research policy units both within and across institutions that could bid for specific short-term projects in Whitehall. The application process should be as simple and transparent as possible. Teams could then be accepted for work on specific tasks assisting government over the short-term. This might help open up work for government far beyond London permitting greater inclusiveness of research teams across the country and this is a further potential benefit for such a scheme. It might also serve as a useful “top up” to funding received in relation to research impact that can be targeted for specific funding.
If governments want more efficient and cost-beneficial ways to secure effective specialist advice, university academics are an invaluable resource that has been underutilised. It is time Whitehall looked more closely at how opportunities can be created so that academics might provide the policy impact and good advice that government demands.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.
Thom Brooks is Reader in Law at Durham Law School arriving in 2012. He is an Associate in Philosophy with links to research centres in Law, Government and Philosophy, including Centre for Criminal Law and Criminal Justice;Centre for Ethics, Law and Life Sciences, Centre for the History of Political Thought, Gender and Law at Durham, Human Rights Centre and the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. Brooks has held visiting appointments at St John’s College, Oxford; St Andrews and Uppsala and he taught previously at Newcastle. He is an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Brooks is the founding editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy. He tweets from @thom_brooks.
The author is right and makes a sensible proposal, but there is a strong antipathy held by many in government for academe. Sadly, since universities are in a sense the original ‘think tanks.’
The last commenter, though, might have revealed part of the rationale for the government preference for consultants rather than academic researchers. The notion of research ethics and integrity, of critique and adherence to at least some notion of either impartiality or at least contestation of ideas, isn’t necessarily always what they are looking for in commissioned ‘research’, particularly in areas of political contention. Perhaps the old New Yorker cartoon with the boss sitting in his chair speaking to an assistant saying “That’s the policy, now go and find me some evidence to justify it” captures it best.
Mind you, there are plenty of academics with political affiliations that are bound to endear them to whichever parties make the government of the day. 😉
I think the points made in this article are very well observed. Firstly, as major funders of research in both science and the humanities, government should be ‘harvesting’ the fruits of this investment in the shape of evidence for policy formulation and implementation. Secondly, as someone who has worked (in Ireland not in the UK) in both political and academic arenas, it dismays me that special advisors to Ministers are often PR experts employed to ‘spin’ rather than experts in the policy brief they are attached to, which is really what this type of job needs and should entail.
See new Times Higher interview about this piece – http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/academic-consultants-could-save-government-time-and-money/2007392.article
Academics have an insular outlook on life and have no idea about the real world except for what they’ve studied or what their computer models tell them. They are half our problem (Look at the climate change fiasco). What any government needs is somebody that has actually WORKED FOR A LIVING in the relevant field.
Of course; prejudice gives you a far better basis for making decisions than actually talking to people who have studied the issue in depth.
So academics should undervalue themselves?
Why should they charge less than the people who – often – know less (they are often NOT specialists)? And in charging the same, should they not make a contribution to their universities, in just the same way as consultants’ fees contribute to their firms’ overheads?