One of the most overused terms in public policy is silos. Another is joined-up government. We are meant to hate the former and love the latter. It is taken as read that we should endlessly support the breaking down of boundaries between different policy areas. Supposedly, this will lead to better administration.

But any consensus should be questioned as a matter of principle to check it makes sense. Back in the days of the UK¡¯s Coalition government (2010-15), there was a prominent education minister who would stomp around his department asking, ¡°What¡¯s wrong with silos?¡± It is a valid question.

Consider this: if the argument that silos are bad is taken to its logical extreme, then all Whitehall boundaries would be wiped away. One huge department would do everything and government would resemble those trendy 1970s schools that erased the boundaries between academic subjects. That would surely fail, as real, deep expertise would be missing.

So central government has to be split into different departments to become manageable ¨C in the UK and everywhere else. In fact, even with two dozen Whitehall departments, modern government can often feel impossible. That is why successive administrations have devolved power to mayors, local authorities and quangos.

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Reforming prime ministers also desire to reshape Whitehall around their priorities. While a few departments with clearly delineated roles ¨C most notably, the Ministry of Defence ¨C are generally immune from this, other policy areas are repeatedly juggled about.

These include culture and digital. Just last weekend, The Sunday Times claimed that Keir Starmer is planning ¡°to abolish the Department for Culture, Media and Sport¡±. That department¡¯s responsibilities will apparently be reassigned to ¡°the business department, the education department and the Treasury¡±.

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In practice, Whitehall reorganisation usually just means replacing one set of boundaries or silos with another. Under Starmer, ¡°culture¡± could merge with education but be newly split from ¡°media¡±. Similarly, when higher education sat in the Business Department from 2009, it was closer to employers but more distant from schools.

Another challenge is that reshaped departments take time to settle. Some initiatives do not last. Eighteen months after the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) was set up in 2007, complained that ¡°it has not yet found its feet¡±. Six months later, the department was shut down.

For English universities, the policy challenges caused by Whitehall reorganisation have been particularly acute since Theresa May put some aspects of higher education policy back with schools in an enlarged Department for Education (DfE). Ever since, university autonomy has looked less secure and universities¡¯ claims to public resources more shaky.

Most importantly, the current arrangements mean university teaching is overseen separately to university research. In the past, we had one minister, one department and one regulator (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) covering both the teaching and research functions of universities, reflecting the secure belief that .

My experience in the early 2010s, working for a minister who was in charge of both teaching and research, suggests those arrangements worked well. Decisions on institutional funding were taken in the round. But teaching and research were split across two Whitehall departments in 2016, two funding bodies in 2018 and two ministers in 2020.

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Today, we have the DfE to oversee the teaching function of universities and a Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to oversee university research. We have the Office for Students and we have Research England. And we have a minister for skills sat in one part of Whitehall and a minister for science sat in another.

So however much people may praise ¡°joined-up government¡±, it could not be clearer that those in power in recent times have wanted the opposite when it comes to higher education. Teaching and research could easily have been kept together, whether in the DfE or in their own department (like DIUS), or in another department.

There are consequences for policy from the current arrangements that are not sufficiently well understood. If you are a government minister in the DfE, your main job is to ensure students¡¯ fees are spent on students. Your job is not to protect cross-subsidies from fees that are spent on research. If research is underfunded, as it is, then it is the role of DSIT to address that, scoring its own positive settlement with the Treasury.

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But, to come back to our question, this siloing isn¡¯t necessarily bad. DSIT¡¯s ministers and officials are in a good position to negotiate. They know the links between research and growth and have floated the idea of a long-term funding plan ahead of June¡¯s spending review. Indeed, if both the DfE and DSIT succeed in extracting extra funding from the Exchequer for, respectively, teaching and R&D, then the lack of joined-up government around universities would have worked to our advantage.

An alternative positive ¨C but unlikely ¨C development would be for the government to knit teaching and research policy back together under one roof, allowing policy to be made with a view to protecting both.

But the worst and most likely current outcome is one in which the Treasury continues assuming that large tuition fees from international students will bankroll UK research, while the ÍøÆØÃÅ Office simultaneously tries to reduce the number of international students arriving. That would both hold down research spending and ensure that home students remain underfunded. It would be a form of disjointed government that benefits no one.

is the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute and a former special adviser to the minister for universities and science (2010-13).

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