Why don’t universities value senior research-only staff?

Us lose money on R because R grants/contracts rarely include adequate overhead recovery. The gaining of such external R funding is also a fickle and uncertain process. Hence they are reluctant to take on permanent R staff. Simple!

The sad fact is no body values experience and universities are chronically under funded. The cap on tuition fees for going on 10 years is crippling universities that are not independently wealthy (Oxbridge etc). If you look back 20 years research intensive universities had SOs and SSOs in hard science departments. These positions provided career progression for researchers that could not or would not move into lecturing roles. Now what happens is experienced post docs eventually leave academia because funding bodies won't employ them as the salaries are higher than a newly minted PhD (no value for experience). This creates a knock on effect as the PhD students realise there is no serious career path because the chances of becoming a PI are slim and the salaries don't justify the stress.. So in my experience most PhD students leave academia immediately. If the precarity situation is not resolved there won't be any post docs in academia in 10 years time.

Yes it is unfortunately the truth ( as per David Palfreymans comment above) that research in universities is entirely a loss making activity. I sympathise with the author but she also basically explains the problem in her own article; she was employed on a series of contracts dependent on short term external funding. To be made permanent would have required the university to take on the risk of hiring her on a permanent basis when there was no certain source of future associated income to pay for her post. The university decided ( rightly or wrongly ) that it was not worth the risk. The author sounds skilled and capable, including capable of raising contracts. She could consider joining the ( swelling) ranks of self employed expert consultants and independent researchers. She would be taking the risk on herself of course but for truly experienced people this can be a viable alternative and also can turn out to be more rewarding than being on the internal university treadmill. Often considerably better paid as well... certainly a viable option for someone with expertise in public policy, who could operate with low overheads. Less viable for eg a lab based researcher.

We do have a very small number of research only full professors. These people were brought in at an already senior level (reader or senior research fellow - equivalent to senior lecturer or associate professor) on there own funding they had personally secured. Permanence only came after they had brought in several 10s of millions in research funding.

As a fully grant-funded research professor I understand the hardships, but this is my chosen career. What does irk me, however, are the people who get promoted to a tenured position - by hook or by crook - then "take their foot off the gas" knowing that they have a job for life. Why can't the same rules be applied to all senior staff?

Thanks - an important article which points to the extent to which UK universities do not value their own staff or their expertise. The other side to the coin is that permanent teaching roles (which are only as 'permanent' as the next student recruitment cycle) increasingly offer little time for research apart from short term externally funded projects, and staff with decades of teaching experience are little valued either. Research in UK universities is now largely an activity (one of many) carried out for free by staff in their spare time, for which their employers claim credit.