University Grants (Hansard, 17 February 1983)

§ Sir Keith Joseph

The University Grants Committee has announced universities' recurrent grant for the academic year 1983–84 as shown in the table following.

For six universities the grant distribution allows some increase in the student number targets which were set in July 1981 and in the related grants. The increases amount to 425 students in science, 30 in business management and 50 in the arts. These are additional to the revisions for 12 universities that were announced in last year's grant letter.

The UGC will be writing further to universities about equipment and furniture grant for 1983–84 and about the level of recurrent grant for later years.

Following is the text of the general letter about the grant distribution which the chairman of the UGC has sent to all universities. Copies of the annexes relating to grants for individual universities will be placed in the Library of the House.

UGC Grant distribution for 1983–84
University or College	Recurrent grant £ million
Aston	13.54
Bath	11.89
Birmingham	34.31
Bradford	13.64
Bristol	26.34
Brunel	12.04
Cambridge	39.24
City	10.72
Durham	16.14
East Anglia	14.05
Essex	7.55
Exeter	14.19
Hull	13.33
Keele	7.89
Kent	9.51
Lancaster	12.52
Leeds	38.60
Leicester	16.31
Liverpool	34.45
London Graduate School of Business Studies	1.76
London University (excluding Imperial College)	185.43
Imperial College	27.29
Loughborough	16.59
Manchester Business School	0.99
Manchester	42.65
University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology	14.63
Newcastle	28.72
Nottingham	24.90
Oxford	40.62

208W

University or College	Recurrent grant £ million
Reading	17.33
Salford	12.89
Sheffield	29.25
Southampton	22.39
Surrey	11.95
Sussex	12.77
Warwick	15.74
York	9.97
Total England	862.13
Aberystwyth	9.31
Bangor UC	10.18
Cardiff UC	15.84
St. David's Lampeter	1.76
Swansea UC	12.31
Welsh National School of Medicine	5.95
University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology	7.88
University of Wales, Registry	1.99
Total Wales	65.22
Aberdeen	20.53
Dundee	13.71
Edinburgh	40.15
Glasgow	39.77
Heriot-Watt	9.69
St. Andrews	10.47
Stirling	7.52
Strathclyde	21.11
Total Scotland	162.95
Total Great Britain	1,090.30

I am writing to give the Committee's decisions about distribution of recurrent grant for the academic year 1983–84. The figure for your own institution is in the Annex to this letter. I expect to be able to write about equipment and furniture grant for 1983–84 within the next few weeks, and about the level of recurrent grant for later years by the end of July.

The Level of Recurrent Grant for 1983–84 2. Recurrent grant for academic year 1983–84 (August 1983 to July 1984) was announced by the Secretary of State for Education and Science on 8 November 1982 in a statement about education expenditure for the financial year (April 1983 to March 1984). Of higher education, he said Excluding the additional cash for new technologies, the cash available for each sector has been set at a level consistent with the planned contraction for higher education. … The cash for each sector allows for the tuition fee for home full-time and sandwich course students on courses designated for mandatory awards to be held at the present level of £480. Referring specifically to the universities, he said:— Subject to Parliamentary approval … recurrent grant for the 1983–84 academic year will be £1,213 million. To the extent that an element of this grant covers part of the 1984–85 financial year, it is subject to review in the usual way. The grant allows for the higher employers' contributions to the Universities' Superannuation Scheme from April 1983 as well as certain other unavoidable increased costs. The effect of these changes is to increase the recurrent grant available to the universities in the financial year 1983–84 by about £40 million above the level planned in Cmnd. 8494, before taking account of the Government's 3½ per cent. pay assumption. I am also allocating £50 million in the financial year 1983–84 to be used by the University Grants Committee—as in 1982–83—specifically for restructuring, including the cost of redundancies. 209W 3. The grant of £1,213 million is about £26 million higher than the cash figure which underlay the provisional grant distribution for 1983–84 indicated in Circular letter 10/82 of 20 May 1982. The increase reflects:—

(a) the Government's decision to cover the cost to universities of the increase in their contribution to the Universities' Superannuation Scheme with effect from 1 April 1983;
(b) the reduction to 3½ per cent. of the Government's assumption about increased expenditure on pay in the financial year 1983–84;
(c) the Government's decision to hold the home undergraduate fee unchanged at £480 and to compensate for loss of fee income by an addition to recurrent grant; and
(d) an adjustment to take account of the fact that one or two specific items of university recurrent expenditure over which universities have little or no control, notably local authority rates, increased in financial year 1982–83 by more than the percentage allowed for in the provisional cash figure for academic year 1982–83 announced in December 1981.

The grant does not make any provision for the cost in excess of 4 per cent. of 1982 pay settlements for non-clinical academic and academic-related staff or for non-academic staff. It does, however, continue the partial provision for the excess cost of the 1982 clinical academic staff pay settlement about which I wrote to the universities concerned on 20 November 1982. 4. The grant does not include provision for new blood or information technology, announced in a statement by the Secretary of State on 16 December. I wrote to you on 14 January about these two schemes in Circular letters 1/83 and 2/83.

The basis of the recurrent grant distribution for 1983–84 5. With universities still in the process of adjusting to the reduction in Government funding, the Committee wishes to minimise any further changes. It has therefore adopted the same approach as for the provisional distribution. The same assumption has been made that all universities are making steady progress towards the student number targets given by the Committee. Account has been taken in the same way as last year of the Government's decision to hold the home undergraduate fee unchanged at £480 and to compensate for the loss of fee income by an increase in recurrent grant: the practical effects are therefore as described in paragraph 8(c) of Circular letter 10/82. 6. The only additions to the provisional grant distribution to individual universities which call for special mention are:

(a) grants relating to restructuring or to new developments, including the Committee's biotechnology initiative, about which the institutions concerned have already been told: the annex to this letter notes any adjustments that apply to your institution (except where we have asked for clarification of certain financial details);
(b) an improvement has been made in resources per student in computer science (included within mathematical sciences on Form 3), geography and psychology (both included within social studies), because increasing use of laboratory facilities makes these subjects more expensive to maintain than other subjects in the general group to which they are assigned for Form 3 (Finance) purposes.

7. The recurrent grants shown in the annex do not include any element for local authority rates or for sewerage rates where these are paid separately. Increases in local authority rates continue to differ by unpredictable amounts, so that it is neither practicable to assume that all universities are more or less equally affected nor to forecast the individual changes. I expect to announce the Committee's decisions about rates grant by the end of July. 8. Provision in 1983–84 for capital projects costing less than £1 million will again be made in the form of an earmarked allocation of recurrent grant additional to the block distribution. It remains open to universities to increase the amount available for such projects by using the block grant up to a total (including the earmarked allocation) of 3 per cent. of recurrent grant. 9. The Committee will continue for 1983–84 the ad hoc arrangement for paying instalments of grant that it adopted in 1982–83. In particular it will, for the same reason as in this year, bring forward to January 1984 the payment of three-quarters of a normal monthly instalment of block recurrent grant, leaving the balance of that instalment to be paid in March 1984.

Other points

RESEARCH 10. I emphasised in Circular letter 10/82 that preservation of 210W the dual support system of research was a major concern of the Committee, which would continue to take into account universities' research commitments as a factor in determining recurrent grant. The Report of the Joint Working Party of the ABRC and the Committee published a month later (the Merrison Report) expressed strong concern about the vulnerability of university research to disproportionate reductions in funding, with the danger of damage to the nation's fundamental research capability. I wrote last July (Circular letter 13/82) about recommendations addressed directly to universities, and asked for an account of any action which they proposed to take. I would, in particular, commend again the recommendation that universities should consider the establishment of research committees to identify priorities and allocate funds for research. I should be glad to have the views of those universities which have not yet commented on this proposal.

MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES 11. The Committee's advice to universities in the May 1980 letters of grant was that they should admit about the same number of home undergraduates in 1980 as in 1979. The actual 1980 intake to the mathematical sciences (USR category 31, including computer science) turned out to be an exceptionally large increase, one which applied to no other subject. It was followed in 1981 by a further small increase and by a small decrease in 1982. A special survey recently conducted by the Mathematical Sciences Sub-Committee found that it would nevertheless be possible in most universities to meet the Committee's student number targets for Science without admissions to the mathematical sciences falling below the steady state intake appropriate to whatever numbers were included in the institution's academic plan. There are however a few universities which (on the evidence of the survey) would require severe reductions in admissions in the mathematical sciences in order to achieve by 1984–85 their recommended targets for science. I shall be writing to them about this.

CONTINUING EDUCATION 12. As announced on 17 January 1983, the Committee has set up a working party to advise it on future developments in continuing education. Universities are meanwhile reminded that the numbers for part-time, extra-mural and continuing education students given in terms of full-time equivalents in the annexes to Circular letter 10/81 were (together with the recommendations concerning fees) intended as indicators of the provision made by the Committee for part-time study of all kinds. They were not to be taken as upper limits.

SOCIAL STUDIES 13. The Committee hopes that universities will bear in mind the need for sufficient support staff, including computer officers, for social studies departments. The increasing quantity of equipment to be found in some of these departments needs to be matched by enough technicians to ensure its efficient use. Elsewhere in social studies, the contribution to research provided by secretarial support should be taken into account in considering non-academic staffing levels.

CENTRAL SERVICES 14. The Committee wishes to reiterate its hope that, where universiti have felt obliged to make cuts in non-pay expenditure in areas that are important to the continued health of research and teaching (such as expenditure on consumables and other materials, including library acquisitions), their forward planning will pay particular attention to the need to maintain such expenditure at a sufficient level. 15. The nature of computing within universities is changing as a result of rapid advances in technology. Apart from the widespread introduction of microcomputers, increasing emphasis is being placed on the development of networks as a fundamental means of communication. The Committee therefore believes that universities should consider carefully the maintenance of appropriate staffing levels in central computing services. The installation programme for local area networks in universities being funded through the Joint Network Team of the Computer Board and the Science and Engineering Research Council covers only the interconnection of equipment funded by those bodies. In order to obtain full advantage from this development, universities need to make an appropriate allocation of resources, in the form of equipment and staffing, for the connection of departmental and administrative computers (including word processors) and for the training of specialists to design and implement the necessary systems and of non-specialists to exploit these systems. 211W 16. Finally, the Committee emphasises the importance of expenditure on the maintenance of premises. In some instances there is evidence that this is substantially below what is needed if urgent and expensive repairs are to be avoided in the future. The Committee is embarking on a sample survey in order to update the findings of its 1980 report 'University Needs for Maintenance and Minor Works'. Yours sincerely, EDWARD PARKES