Willetts: I don’t want research restricted

In many ways, these statements by Willetts are encouraging, but they do seem rather at odds with the REF. For instance, "research funding should be based on the projects that were bidding for money, not just the institutions where they were based" - well, yes, that's always been true, but we're currently engaged in an exercise that is geared up solely to allocating money to institutions. The REF is generally not good news for those involved in a "strong strand of research within a particular discipline" if they are part of a larger unit of assessment that overall doesn't have a lot of 4* outputs. And then we hear: “What constitutes blue sky and what constitutes impact are deep questions…but I have no desire to reduce the imaginative blue-sky thinking of our excellent academic community.” But the REF gives considerable weighting to "impact" in funding allocations. So if this is not just hand-waving, then to achieve the goals in his speech, it seems that Willetts would need to reduce the proportion of research funding allocated through QR. Having read the arguments in this blogpost - http://telescoper.wordpress.com/2013/06/25/university-research-funding-will-the-axe-fall-on-qr/ - I'm wondering if there's a coded message that the proportion of research funding allocated through QR will be abolished or greatly reduced.