News blog: Is the REF worth a quarter of a billion pounds?

And as a proportion of the funds to be distributed in QR over the next 6 years, £240m comes out at less than 1%. As Bahram Bekhradnia and Tom Shastry showed in detail a decade ago (see, for example the analysis in their report on using metrics to allocate research funds, at http://www.hepi.ac.uk/2006/05/26/using-metrics-to-allocate-research-funds/ ), the administrative and other costs associated with allocating grants via the Research Councils and other research funders are many, many times greater than that. Despite all the complaints, the REF is a highly efficient and cost-effective way of allocating research funds.

The REF is based on lies and spin, and rewards both strategies. The pretence that it is objective is manifestly absurd. Those who endorse a strategy of collaboration have started on the path which leads to staff being required to obtain a particular sum in research grants, and the consequent suicides of those who fail to respond to this sort of managerial bullying. It is now standard practice for those who have managed to obtain absurdly large grants to sell themselves to universities, and for posts to be allocated at the whim of a manager, with no consultation of the department and no advertisement of the post. Perhaps the Higher could publish lists of these incidents, and the UCU could declare them unacceptable.