Ministers “are reviewing universities’ reliance on foreign income from countries such as China,” The Times says this afternoon, and will be having stern words with university leadership. There will be “action” in a few weeks. This announcement comes after a flurry of news stories in recent weeks on the UK-China relationship, though little action.

Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden’s speech at Chatham House was a little less explicit than The Times has suggested. He said:

The government has been conducting a review into academic security and I will be convening a round-table of university vice chancellors in the coming weeks to discuss our findings and our proposed response.

While you’d be forgiven for reading the article in The Times and assuming this was a new move by the government, a closer reading gives the impression that this will in fact be the review that the government has been “sitting on” since last autumn, as the SNP’s Stewart McDonald raised in Parliament in February:

Last year, the Prime Minister and other senior Ministers were given the conclusions of a Government audit of research programmes at UK universities with links to the Chinese state. The audit flagged up hundreds of programmes as being at high risk of potentially being used by the Chinese Communist party for military use, and other applications in strategic and sensitive areas as being of high interest to an authoritarian regime such as China. A smaller proportion was judged to be extremely high risk. Despite that, the Government have elected to do nothing about it.

The Cabinet Office has subsequently confirmed to us that the review Dowden is talking about was launched as part of the Integrated Review Refresh, in March 2023. (We’re also waiting to hear what comes out of the cross-departmental review into universities’ research collaborations with Iran on sensitive technologies announced last summer.)

Dowden wants to “ensure that some universities’ reliance on foreign funding does not become a dependency by which they can be influenced, exploited, coerced. Or indeed, find themselves vulnerable in the fallout from heightened geopolitical tensions.” You will notice that this is not the same as a commitment to reducing or eliminating universities’ reliance on international student fees – this, it seems, is a risk to be managed rather than a fundamental change to the way universities work.

And this action that The Times has been briefed on? (Dowden in his speech just mentions a proposed response)

The government has also said today that May will bring updated guidance for higher education institutions regarding the National Security and Investment Act. So there’s a fair bet that the optics of the government leaping into action will prove to be more like some careful additional notes around legislative compliance.

The commitment comes in its response to the Commons Business and Trade Committee’s recommendation that it offer more targeted guidance to university joint ventures, start-ups and spin-outs. The committee expressed concern over the government’s “limited initiatives” in this area, saying that national security issues should be a “key pillar” of researchers’ thinking. This gives at least a tentative suggestion of what the forthcoming guidance will cover.