Akhila K Jayaram is a writer with Young Voices UK and a campaigner with Conservative Young Women.
During a recent speech on boosting Cambridge to become Europe’s science capital, Michael Gove delivered extensive plans on building a new ‘urban quarter’ in the city, including details like gentle density and how to counter the water shortage. However, the speech failed to answer one critical question: where will these scientists come from?
Science has been a global endeavour since time immemorial, with researchers moving to labs and universities around the world to learn cutting-edge techniques. The UK is currently competing with nations such as the USA, Germany, Australia and Singapore for the best talent. This talent is highly-skilled and therefore highly-valued on the labour market, possessing doctoral degrees which take years of specialised training and comprising pioneers pushing scientific boundaries. But high upfront immigration costs and relatively low salaries threaten to put the UK behind the rest in the race for innovation thanks to our inability to attract this kind of talent.
A five-year skilled worker or global talent visa, which aims to attract trained future scientific leaders, will set you back £3,700. Costs can reach up to £15,000 if the researcher chooses to bring along their spouse and children. Meanwhile, in mainland Europe, the upfront cost to an employee ranges from a modest £145 in the Netherlands to £313 in France. This disparity in costs is further exacerbated by relatively low salaries in academic institutions for early career researchers in the UK and Western Europe, where the median salary is around £34,000.
Academic institutions in the UK often act as a bridge to facilitate the immigration costs by providing an interest-free loan to such scholars. But this is a sticking plaster on a wider issue which requires a policy rethink.
The Health and Care Worker visa provided a model for reduction in immigration costs through exemption of the immigration health surcharge. While that may not be a politically viable solution in this case, the government should consider offering a reduced rate in recognition of the scientific expertise these individuals bring to the UK. A more radical solution would be for universities to absorb these costs as many other private companies do, with a pre-condition for researchers to successfully complete their contracts.
The discussion about high immigration costs would be a moot point if academic salaries were high enough to cover them. This brings us to issues of how UK research is funded and how grants are spent. Most fundamental research activities are funded through UK Research and Innovation, with a smaller proportion coming from charities and industrial funders.
The paucity of funding among competing priorities coupled with intense competition for limited funds keeps salaries for early career researchers low. Moreover, researchers have to earmark a percentage of research grants for institutional overheads to include administrative and estate costs, thereby further reducing the available money for actual research. Lower salaries also affect the retention of UK nationals in academic research, with less than 20% of physical scientists and engineering PhD graduates staying in the sector post-graduation.
While it is expensive for universities to maintain extensive facilities, early career researchers are the ones paying the price. The focus of policymakers and UKRI should revert to attracting and retaining this crucial talent in order to drive discovery and innovation, which in turn will chart the UK’s growth story.
To make that happen, academic research should open itself up to more private sector funding. This could provide a much-needed lifeline for research. It would also direct more research towards innovation and commercialisation. For example, universities could take less equity from spinouts generated by researchers, for science-based startups to be seen as lucrative investments by venture capital funds.
If research were seen as an investment rather than a charitable donation, then the sector would enjoy higher levels of funding than it does now. In that case, some public funding could be diverted towards more ambitious ‘blue skies’ research to ensure that the UK continues to push scientific boundaries by answering some of the most challenging unsolved questions.
There remain untapped opportunities to restructure research and move research organisations out of the traditional university model. More research-focused institutes could follow the tried-and-tested model of the Max Planck institutes in Germany or, closer to home, the Francis Crick Institute. By decreasing institutional overhead spending deducted from research grants, institutions could instead divert funds towards ensuring early career researchers are well-paid on secure permanent contracts. Without these structures in place, the UK risks losing talent to other sectors and even more lucrative countries.
According to HESA’s 2022 statistics, around 23 per cent of academic staff and 41 per cent of postgraduate research students, who would form the next generation of scientific researchers, were non-UK-domiciled. If the government wants to position itself as Europe’s next science superpower, researcher mobility and remuneration must be our top priority.
Akhila K Jayaram is a writer with Young Voices UK and a campaigner with Conservative Young Women.
During a recent speech on boosting Cambridge to become Europe’s science capital, Michael Gove delivered extensive plans on building a new ‘urban quarter’ in the city, including details like gentle density and how to counter the water shortage. However, the speech failed to answer one critical question: where will these scientists come from?
Science has been a global endeavour since time immemorial, with researchers moving to labs and universities around the world to learn cutting-edge techniques. The UK is currently competing with nations such as the USA, Germany, Australia and Singapore for the best talent. This talent is highly-skilled and therefore highly-valued on the labour market, possessing doctoral degrees which take years of specialised training and comprising pioneers pushing scientific boundaries. But high upfront immigration costs and relatively low salaries threaten to put the UK behind the rest in the race for innovation thanks to our inability to attract this kind of talent.
A five-year skilled worker or global talent visa, which aims to attract trained future scientific leaders, will set you back £3,700. Costs can reach up to £15,000 if the researcher chooses to bring along their spouse and children. Meanwhile, in mainland Europe, the upfront cost to an employee ranges from a modest £145 in the Netherlands to £313 in France. This disparity in costs is further exacerbated by relatively low salaries in academic institutions for early career researchers in the UK and Western Europe, where the median salary is around £34,000.
Academic institutions in the UK often act as a bridge to facilitate the immigration costs by providing an interest-free loan to such scholars. But this is a sticking plaster on a wider issue which requires a policy rethink.
The Health and Care Worker visa provided a model for reduction in immigration costs through exemption of the immigration health surcharge. While that may not be a politically viable solution in this case, the government should consider offering a reduced rate in recognition of the scientific expertise these individuals bring to the UK. A more radical solution would be for universities to absorb these costs as many other private companies do, with a pre-condition for researchers to successfully complete their contracts.
The discussion about high immigration costs would be a moot point if academic salaries were high enough to cover them. This brings us to issues of how UK research is funded and how grants are spent. Most fundamental research activities are funded through UK Research and Innovation, with a smaller proportion coming from charities and industrial funders.
The paucity of funding among competing priorities coupled with intense competition for limited funds keeps salaries for early career researchers low. Moreover, researchers have to earmark a percentage of research grants for institutional overheads to include administrative and estate costs, thereby further reducing the available money for actual research. Lower salaries also affect the retention of UK nationals in academic research, with less than 20% of physical scientists and engineering PhD graduates staying in the sector post-graduation.
While it is expensive for universities to maintain extensive facilities, early career researchers are the ones paying the price. The focus of policymakers and UKRI should revert to attracting and retaining this crucial talent in order to drive discovery and innovation, which in turn will chart the UK’s growth story.
To make that happen, academic research should open itself up to more private sector funding. This could provide a much-needed lifeline for research. It would also direct more research towards innovation and commercialisation. For example, universities could take less equity from spinouts generated by researchers, for science-based startups to be seen as lucrative investments by venture capital funds.
If research were seen as an investment rather than a charitable donation, then the sector would enjoy higher levels of funding than it does now. In that case, some public funding could be diverted towards more ambitious ‘blue skies’ research to ensure that the UK continues to push scientific boundaries by answering some of the most challenging unsolved questions.
There remain untapped opportunities to restructure research and move research organisations out of the traditional university model. More research-focused institutes could follow the tried-and-tested model of the Max Planck institutes in Germany or, closer to home, the Francis Crick Institute. By decreasing institutional overhead spending deducted from research grants, institutions could instead divert funds towards ensuring early career researchers are well-paid on secure permanent contracts. Without these structures in place, the UK risks losing talent to other sectors and even more lucrative countries.
According to HESA’s 2022 statistics, around 23 per cent of academic staff and 41 per cent of postgraduate research students, who would form the next generation of scientific researchers, were non-UK-domiciled. If the government wants to position itself as Europe’s next science superpower, researcher mobility and remuneration must be our top priority.