Cameron,

Thanks for responding. You might be surprised to hear that I am actually in broad agreement with your views. It's good to see your well-argued position on this extremely important issue - it's a great shame that the upper echelons of RCUK and DIUS can't manage to muster comparably strong arguments.

The key points are as follows:

(i) Yes, the "human capital" academia produces is absolutely key to the UK economy and far outstrips any spin-out activity in terms of contribution to GDP. A number of commentators have previously (and regularly) pointed this out. I also discussed this in some detail at the Prometheus blog a few weeks ago. But, as I also mention there, how are we supposed to quantify/predict the economic impact of that "human capital"??

(ii) As you say, the economic impact summary element of the proposal will be "unmitigated rubbish". You will hear many in the academic community say something along the lines of "Well, it's only another two pages of bullshit we'll have to produce. That won't be too difficult". Any academic with any experience of grant writing will be able to churn out the vacuous nonsense that RCUK will expect. For the reasons given by Glazer at the Prometheus blog, however, this is fundamentally dishonest and is an abuse of public funding.

(iii) Your final point: I entirely agree with you that publicly-funded academics must engage with the return on investment/economic impact arguments. The difficulty, of course, is that DIUS and RCUK continually fail to work those arguments through for themselves! As is argued in Nature Nanotech. 3 60 (2008) (free version of the paper here ), it's very important to consider the fundamental economic rationale for state funding of science (i.e. public good -> market failure -> state investment). I'll not rehearse the arguments here - they're covered at length in the comments at the Prometheus blog linked to above.

----Anna----

Sorry, misinterpreted your comment. Yes, EPSRC is indeed going to prohibit those who are on the "naughty list" (or, as colleague in Nottingham has called it, the "Grants Gulag") from applying as PI or Co-I for a year.

John Denham has recently argued that, regardless of the outcome of the recent RAE (which identified "pockets of excellence" right across the academic sector), there must be a focus on the elite research groups. RCUK does what DIUS tells it to do, either implictly ("we need to win as much money in the next CSR") or, increasingly, explicitly. So, if John Denham thinks that funding localisation is a good thing, so too will Philip Esler, David Delpy et al....

Best wishes,

Philip