For a decade, the university was the last resource-rich public institution in the room with potential for a long place-based time horizon. That decade is over.

David Marlow

7 days ago

7 min read

Mortar board graduate cap resting on books next to a degree scroll

LED practitioners have spent years treating universities as the reliable partner: long horizons, an estate, a skills and research capability, no electoral cycle. Local Growth Plans, Local Skills Improvement Plans and cluster bids name them as anchor partners almost by reflex. To date, too few leadership teams have stress-tested whether the university is still in this position or has asked what they need for it to stay one.

Professor Andrew Jones is a good person to put that to. Vice-Chancellor and President of Brunel University of London since January 2022, he is Policy Lead for Research and Innovation on the Universities UK board, and Chair of the West London University Alliance. Under his leadership Brunel signed a civic agreement with the London Borough of Hillingdon and in 2024 joined the University of London federation, the first member to bring it a substantial physical footprint in Outer West London. He is also an economic geographer by discipline: regional development and innovation systems are his own research field, not a brief handed to him on appointment.

Andrew’s geography is one of the most consequential in England: Heathrow on the skyline, Old Oak Common and Park Royal to the east, Slough and Thames Valley to the west, 200 acres of contiguous campus, an ongoing estates master planning process.

The episode with Andrew surfaces at least five things worth pushing further.

1. The next decade of civic anchoring will not look like the last one, and the reason is probably balance sheets rather than commitment

Through the 2010s the university was the last bit of the public estate with both longevity and resource-richness. Councils were being cut, RDAs abolished, LEPs invented and then unwound, health structures reorganised twice, while universities had growing international fee income, borrowing capacity and expanding estates. That made the university as a collaborative partner a safe place-based planning assumption.

This has gone. The Office for Students now reports that 45% of English providers forecast deficits in 2025-26, up from 34% forecast a few months earlier, with nearly one in six projecting under 30 days' liquidity. That sort of context is one in which Brunel operates.

Andrew nonetheless spent our conversation on master planning, civic agreements, FE partnership, long-term research and employer partnerships. The civic role has held. But this is a tribute to the people involved. The scope and reach of the ‘civic university’ is now structural: where does place engagement sit in the institution, who owns it, and what is its budget line called when the savings programme starts? Andrew's answer is instructive: Brunel has a senior team member whose job this explicitly is, and a number of Deans whose partnership focus is an expected part of their roles. Knowing the equivalent internal mechanics in universities you deal with will be equally important.

2. Every anchor institution works across several layers of economic geography, and LED and placemaking practitioners usually engage singly with only their own

Brunel operates in at least four geographies. London: the UoL federation, the GLA, London Higher, London & Partners. West London: the Alliance, and the university alliance Andrew chairs. Hillingdon: the civic agreement. And an edge geography with no institutional home at all — the Heathrow functional economic area reaching into Slough, Bucks, Berkshire and Surrey, where, as Andrew put it, "once you get out into Buckinghamshire, you're in a different world altogether," and where other players may not see those boundaries as relevant.

Each layer has different partners, a different convening logic and a different answer to what the university is for. The common error is assuming the layer you work in is the layer the institution prioritises. Worth noting too that the layers are being capitalised unevenly: Imperial's WestTech London is building an innovation corridor across South Kensington, Paddington, White City and Old Oak, with £150 million of its own money and a formal OPDC partnership. That is inner West London, not the Heathrow edge. The under-institutionalised layer is frequently where a mid-size anchor like Brunel has the most space — and local leadership teams can make that a strategic asset.

3. Are we under-cooking creative and arts subjects in our responses to AI?

Andrew frames Brunel as a research-intensive technical university on the German model, against a UK habit of treating "technical" as a synonym for further education. One of his sharpest points came next: AI is already competent at many of the technical tasks computer science graduates used to be hired for, and considerably less good at generating the next wave of creative and cultural output.

If that holds, the skills response to AI is not more technical training. It is adaptability, multiple pathways, lifelong learning and a deliberate re-valuing of creative, arts and humanities capability alongside technical education — equipping a 17-year-old for skills nobody can specify ten years out.

Set that against Milburn's interim diagnosis (in our 29 June 2026 espresso): for every £25 spent on benefits for this group, £1 goes on employment support, and only one in five young people out of work receive meaningful help. With Milburn’s final report due this autumn, the NEET debate needs to look beyond the technical and vocational training and employment support pipeline problem. With AI Andrew suggests HE–FE partnership needs development of curriculum and progression as much as increasing throughput.

4. "Everybody thinks inclusive growth is probably a good thing" is the problem, not the reassurance and outcome frameworks are a major missing instrument

Andrew's answer on who benefits was honest: royal charter, charitable purpose, the Wilson-era founding ethos, a strong social mobility record, devil in the detail. The problem with inclusive growth as an underlying assumed principle is it does no work. A consensus assumption without allocation of responsibility leaves distributional outcomes to whoever happens to be doing the investing, trickle down and trickle out.

I asked whether the GLA should hold a higher education outcome framework. Andrew’s answer - that London's system-level leadership is good, and that universities are embedded in place whether they like it or not - is true. But is it an answer? Embedded is a description. A duty is an instrument.

Wales has civic mission as one of nine strategic duties under the Tertiary Education and Research (Wales) Act 2022. Scotland works the expectation into Scottish Funding Council outcome agreements, tied to money. England has voluntary Civic University Agreements and a regulator whose statutory attention runs to students and financial sustainability, not places: no mayor, including London's, currently holds a formal lever. For Established MSAs with Local Growth Plans and Integrated Settlements, that is an argument worth having: not whether universities are willing, but whether anything can ensure a sustained commitment from them in a bad financial year.

5. Institutional longevity can replace resource-richness as the USP which anchors a university’s reliability as a place-based partner

Andrew's account of what industry partners actually want had three parts: research that moves their business forward, skills that their business needs, and longevity. Brunel's metallurgy partnership is twenty-five years old. It sits alongside industry-scale facilities most universities cannot house, and a high proportion of industry-funded PhD students. His argument is that the project-by-project, grant-by-grant model delivers considerably less than a relationship able to evolve across several cycles of both partners' strategies. But set that against what is happening on our side of the table: reorganisation, new MSAs and Integrated Settlements are dismantling and rebuilding the institutional memory of the public partners at exactly the moment universities are being asked to hold the long view.

Mike made the point that strategic authorities lean heavily on university project pipelines precisely because those pipelines are technical and long dated. That may now be the most valuable thing a university brings to a place, perhaps more so than the estate or the balance sheet.

Andrew cautions that to maximise the economic development opportunity of potential projects (such as new facilities for translational research) requires well-founded place-based policy that lets a university judge which will make an enduring contribution to a place's strategy rather than just its own portfolio. Supplying that is the job of the LGP, LSIP or even the new Strategic Development Strategies. Without strong direction from these, universities will choose on other criteria.

Concluding remarks

Andrew is plainly committed to the civic role, and so are most of his peers. For a decade that commitment sat on top of the last resource-rich, long-horizon institution in the room. It is conviction, and in England (unlike Wales or Scotland) there is nothing load bearing beneath it: how far university place-based purposes will be ‘in-scope’ of the next chapter of devolution remains to be seen.

Andrew closed by turning the tables and asking us what conversations universities should be prioritising with economic development practitioners: the right question, and not one we necessarily answered well on the day! Have a listen, find your own five takeaways, and then tell us how you would have answered Andrew’s closing challenge.