91Pro

The subjects we offer and the modes of study that our students follow has continued to evolve, but the interest and passion of our students for these specialisms remains undiminished.

91Pro has a community of academics, technicians and professional services employees, united by the common goal of improving farming, food production, animal wellbeing, and planetary sustainability across the UK and the wider world, and delivering an outstanding student experience.  To achieve our goals, we will invest in the development and skills of our people.  We need to be an employer of choice which is able to recruit and retain staff who are skilled and passionate about the work we do.

Our alumni occupy positions of influence, care deeply about the University, and want to support its success. This is demonstrated in part through the number of alumni who offer placements to our students through their organisations, and increasingly offer scholarships and bursaries to support them. We need to do more to keep alumni connected to our community, whether through CPD and further learning or enlisting further support and advice for the many challenges we and our partners face.  We will reinvigorate our connections to the Harper Adams Club and our in-country international alumni groups as a key part of building new connections with our alumni.

Our activities have been predominantly located on or connected to our campus in Shropshire where we are a part of a wider community which is integral to our impact and success. We are critical to the identity, prosperity and well-being of our local area and we have to further develop our role and identity as a civic-oriented university.  We must do more to reduce the invisible boundaries around our campus and engage with the people and organisations of Edgmond and Newport, Telford, Shropshire and the wider West Midlands region to identify areas of common interest and achieve goals of mutual benefit.  We must demonstrate the ability of our campus to be a destination for events and opportunities for engagement and community impact. We must also be willing to take our education, research and impact activities away from the campus to broaden and deepen our community engagement and impact.

Higher Education: a changing landscape

Recent policy statements and legislation have given us a clearer idea of how the HE landscape may look in the years covered by this strategy. The Government’s response in February 2022 to the 2019 Augar Review of Post-18 Education indicated that student tuition fees will now be frozen until 2023/4. So, at a time of high inflation, we will now have to address a further real cut in the unit of resource, whilst at the same time taking on board the Government’s intention to align the provision of higher education teaching grants with Government priorities and labour market needs.

We will also need to work more closely with employers, who are to be given a more central role in shaping skills provision. But there are still many uncertainties. For example, the introduction from 2025 of a flexible Lifelong Loan Entitlement giving everyone access to the equivalent of four years of post-18 education is designed to bring academic and technical education closer together; however, it is not yet clear exactly how this will be designed, or what changes will need to be made to the current system. And there is also the question of reintroducing a possible cap on student numbers, which the Government has put out for consultation.

Post- 16 Education Review

The 2022 Skills and Post-16 Education Act detailed changes to post-16 education, to facilitate changes in skills gaps such as health and social care, engineering, digital, clean energy and manufacturing. It prioritises local needs and local people; supports flexible study options via the Lifelong Loan Entitlement; aims to boost the quality of education and training on offer, to broaden careers advice for pupils  and to prioritise green skills. Our strategy will need to take account of this new post-16 landscape since non-standard routes of entry have been an important source of undergraduate students into our top-up degrees – our Extended Foundation Degree and Extended Degree programmes – and we have a tradition of recruitment from our local area. However, there are still uncertainties, particularly around post-16 qualifications: it is not yet clear which BTech Level 3 and 4 programmes will be retained given the introduction of T Levels, which were launched in September 2022.

Research, Development and Innovation

Excellent research that makes a vital impact remains an integral part of 91Pro’s mission. Public funding for research, in at least the earlier period of this strategic plan, at first looked extremely hopeful. In 2021, the Government increased public R&D investment to record levels, providing £20 million across the UK by 2024-5, including funding for EU programmes - an increase of around 25% in real terms. When the Government’s direct spending on R&D was combined with support for tax relief, total UK R&D support as a proportion of GDP was forecast to increase from 0.7% in 2018 to 1.1% in 2024-25. However, we must now work on the basis that increasing inflation will erode the value of the total spending envelope during this strategic planning period. Together with the hiatus in access to drawing down funding from EU programmes including its key R&D funding programme, Horizon Europe, this will inevitably squeeze publicly-funded research and innovation, intensifying competition for what is, in real terms, a potentially shrinking pot. The search for new strategic research partners will become a necessity.

Climate Change and the Environment

The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health and we have only a very short time in which to put it right. Indeed, the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has given a stark warning: unless countries dramatically scale up their efforts to counter the climate crisis, we face a global catastrophe. In national and global efforts to stem the impact of climate change, universities have a critical role – one that goes beyond research and teaching. They must focus on massively reducing carbon emissions from their daily operations, including from staff and student travel, and commit to sustaining biodiversity; help to educate adults away from carbon-intensive work and towards socially positive investment, and collaborate more, building alliances between scientists, artists, politics and society, particularly from marginalised communities. Acting as sustainability leaders should be at the heart of universities’ civic missions – a role particularly fitting for Harper Adams, with our uniquely relevant expertise and our close connections with our local community.

The environment - IPCC conclusions

The Intergovernmental Committee on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently warned that any further delay in global action will miss a brief, rapidly closing, window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for the planet. Looking closer to home, it identifies the environmental problems caused by unchecked climate change in Europe: risks to people, economies and infrastructure due to coastal and inland flooding; stress and mortality to people caused by increasing temperatures and extreme heat; disruptions to marine and terrestrial ecosystems; water scarcity to multiple interconnected sectors, and losses in crop production due to compound heat and dry conditions and extreme weather. Many of these scenarios, of course, became frighteningly familiar during the summer of 2022.

The environment - the domestic agenda

In the last couple of years, the UK has seen a plethora of inter-relating, sometimes overlapping, legislation and developments relating to global warming and environmental protection. The 2020 Environment Act requires the Government to prepare and maintain an Environmental Improvement Plan, with a new cycle of monitoring, planning and reporting; it establishes a framework for long-term, joined-up targets covering air quality, resource efficiency and waste reduction, water and biodiversity, and includes a specific duty to set a separate target to halt a decline in species abundance by 2030.  Biodiversity, water quality and emissions (particularly NOx and methane) are areas where agriculture is obviously implicated. Yet there remains a lack of clarity on, for example, the targets set for species abundance, the scope and targets relating to soil health and woodlands and how the various policies for the environment, such as the Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMS), will fit together under the Act. Our landscape of policy and legislation remains in a state of flux, review and uncertainty, exacerbated by the Ukraine war and the global food crisis - particularly in the UK’s responses to global warming, Net Zero and food security.

Agriculture - Translation and Change

Agriculture in England and each of the devolved nations is currently in a period of transition, lasting until at least 2027, as the Government seeks to implement a new funding regime after Brexit. The Agriculture Act of 2020 replaced the previous system of payment for farmers – the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) subsidy – with the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS). Under this new initiative, farmers will no longer be paid on a per hectare of land basis, but for actions to improve the environment – ‘public money for public goods’. ELMS will be launched in full in 2024 and BPS totally phased out by 2027. As the largest single supplier of graduates to the industry, the University is well placed to support this transition, which may have wider implications for the shape of the agri-food sector, and both positive and negative consequences for student recruitment.

ELMS

ELMS has three components that will reward environmental land management: the Sustainable Farming Incentive; Countryside Stewardship (or Countryside Stewardship Plus); Landscape Recovery. These are intended to support the economy while achieving the goals of the Government’s 25 Year Environment Plan and its commitment to Net Zero emissions by 2050. They promote joined up action between farmers and other land managers to deliver environmental objectives such as clean and plentiful water; clean air; thriving plants and wildlife. Many of the key elements in the three schemes are currently being trialled before full implementation in 2024. Further schemes relating to farming investment and productivity provide one-off payments for equipment, technology and infrastructure, for research and innovation, and for measures that include improving animal health, and tree health; ongoing payments relate to more long-term projects such as improving soil health and  managing habitats, woodlands, flood risk and water pollution. The present scenario offers clear opportunities for the Future Farm, for participation in the ELMS trials, and, potentially, for research and innovation funding for other University departments. However, DEFRA has recently announced a review of ELMS, resulting in uncertainty and concern among the agricultural community.

Food Security

It is highly likely that the decision to review ELMS, with its emphasis on sustainability and farming for nature, has been prompted by the jolt to the UK’s complacency about food security given by the Ukraine War. The UK Food Security Report in 2021 had concluded that having a global source of food supplies – only 50% of the food consumed in the UK was produced domestically – gave the food system resilience. A few months later, the Ukraine War showed just how rapidly the global food system and markets can react to significant disruptions to energy supplies and sharply increased costs of energy and food. And other, identified, risks to the supply chain remain as a result of dependence on other critical sectors - transportation, borders, labour, key inputs such as chemicals, additives and ingredients, and data communications - while the threat of cyber-attack to UK businesses, including those in the agri-food sector, is significant and growing. Meanwhile, food inflation is running at more than 10%; it is estimated that 4.2 million people in the UK are in food poverty, including 9% of children, and in April 2022, over 15% of households were identified as food insecure – missing a meal or eating less because of affordability.  Food security could now feature in the University’s research strategy and within its Social Responsibility activity.

The Government Food Strategy

Against this background of food insecurity, the Government announced its Food Strategy in June 2022. Its objectives include delivering a prosperous agri-food and seafood sector that ensures a secure food supply in an unpredictable world, and  a sustainable, nature positive, affordable food system providing choice and access to high quality products that support healthier and home-grown diets for all. Its targets include: maintaining the current level of food we produce domestically; ensuring that by 2030 pay, employment and productivity, and completion of high-quality skills training have risen across the UK’s agri-food industry; halving childhood obesity by 2030, and reducing the proportion of the population living with diet-related illnesses by increasing the proportion of healthier food sold; reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 6mt and the environmental impacts of the food system, and preparing for the risks from the changing climate; contributing to the goal of reaching £1 trillion of exports by 2030, and maintaining the high standards of food consumed in the UK wherever produced. It is obvious that this Food Strategy contains many opportunities for Harper Adams, in terms of training, research and innovation. Our own Strategy for 2023- 2030 will explore how we can make the most of these opportunities.

The Economic Background: challenges and opportunities

We need to keep abreast of the economic challenges that the University will face in the near future. Inflation (running at more than 10% in the UK in 2023) raises the cost of all our operations. Without an adjustment to student fees, it will squeeze real income and impact on our ability to invest in buildings or equipment. Government borrowing in the UK has greatly increased, and this will have a knock-on effect on funding for student support and university capital allocations. The increase in the real cost of living for students has implications for on-campus participation and an increased demand for online learning. However, exchange rate depreciation, while increasing the cost of imports, may actually make the University more attractive to international students, since UK fees will be more competitive. And, of course, we must take into account rising energy costs, increase the energy use efficiency on campus that Harper Adams has already pioneered, and work to be the exemplar of sustainability that others expect.

Brexit: unfinished business

There is, too, unfinished Brexit business, in particular the dispute over the Northern Ireland Protocol, still to be resolved at the time of drawing up this strategy. This ongoing political dispute over trade with Northern Ireland has held up the UK’s association with Horizon Europe, the EU’s £84.3bn key R&D programme, preventing UK-based researchers who recently won EU grants from receiving funding. However, the overseas trade deals which the 
UK seeks to negotiate may themselves enhance opportunities for us to develop postgraduate and research student recruitment, since this may be 
a quid pro quo condition required by partners, particularly in South-East and South Asia. And Brexit, combined with the Covid pandemic and the Ukraine war – has seen an acute shortage of labour – seasonal and permanent - in the food and farming sector (though opportunities for summer student labour seems likely to remain buoyant). We would, however, expect to see a government review of this situation in the near future.

Times of turbulence will undoubtedly create challenges for a smaller, focused institution to face.  Our optimism, pragmatism and agility will enable us to translate challenge to opportunity, delivering value and impact for the sectors with which we partner, and society as a whole.