UUK efficiency report urges ‘new era of collaboration’

 Image: Universities UK

Report criticises previous push for competition in higher education and calls for collegiality

Universities UK’s Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce has published its report.

The UUK report identifies seven opportunities open to the university sector: pursuing innovative collaborative structures; sharing more services and infrastructure; using economies of scale and sector buying power; supporting digital transformation; adopting a common approach to assessing efficiency and benchmarking costs; evolving leadership and governance; and creating the right policy and regulatory environment.

It also identifies action needed from central government to enable universities to drive change.

Presenting the report on 2 June, taskforce leader Nigel Carrington, a former University of the Arts London vice-chancellor, said it would introduce a new era of collaboration.

He said: “This work will not negate the sector’s need for an improved funding settlement, and the sector and government will need to continue to collaborate to deliver this, but the sector must also take the lead on realising opportunities for cost saving and transformation itself.”

Summit

Carrington (pictured) had already given some indication of what would be in the report when he addressed UUK’s University Transformation and Efficiency Summit last month.

He said then that the taskforce had been considering a business case for shared higher education services and infrastructure at a national level, how to offer advice and guidance on university mergers and federations, and how digital transformation could facilitate cost savings.

The taskforce would urge universities to find ways to harness their joint buying power to drive down procurement costs, he said.

He called for legislative reform to promote more collegiality in the sector, and was highly critical of how the Higher Education and Research Act and subsequent creation of the Office for Students had promoted competition rather than collaboration between higher education institutions.

In a document published by UUK at the time of the summit, Carrington argued that some of the more fundamental changes to be recommended by the taskforce would be possible “only if we have more active support from government, both in terms of investment and regulatory change”.

Government help will also be needed to address challenges around falling cost recovery rates for research and statutory duties around pensions, he said.

More than half the costs of universities come from staff salaries and overheads, but pay and conditions have not come under the taskforce’s remit, he said, although “major transformation and cost savings cannot be achieved without changes in our staffing structures”. 

At a glance: The seven recommendations from the UUK taskforce report

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said the report “confirms the higher education sector is likely to come out of its current financial exigencies looking very different to how it does now”.

“The word of 2025 in the university sector is ‘coopetition’, as universities know they need to balance their past fierce competition with a bit more cooperation,” he said.

“The taskforce is right to question, however, whether full mergers would tend to deliver what policymakers hope to see. Someone wise once said, institutional mergers are often a silly person’s idea of what a smart higher education cost-efficiency policy looks like. The key test will be following through. There have been past comparable sector-wide initiatives, which have gone nowhere. So I am particularly pleased to see so much consideration being given to what comes next.”

Mary Curnock Cook, former head of Ucas, added: “For some universities, the positive suggestions in this report might take too long to deliver the efficiencies needed in the much shorter term. In this respect, there’s an important role for governance, particularly from lay members, to help steer more immediate interventions.”