On average, a Universities UK affiliated university in England needs 18 full time equivalent staff just to ensure that it complies with regulatory requirements.
The total commitment of time to regulation that Moorhouse Consulting identified on behalf of Universities UK in a survey of 116 universities was an astonishing 128 FTE at executive level, 638 FTE at manager/director level, and 1,289 at officer/coordinator level.
That is a lot of time spent on regulation.
The counterpoint to all this needs to be that regulation is necessary for a sector with access to billions of pounds of public funds, and which is responsible for the development of a skilled workforce and the creation of commercially valuable research. Universities need to be answerable to the government (and, of course to other customers) when they fall short – and they need to be transparent about what they are doing and how.
