So, the Diamond dividend you've mentioned a few times. What clarity is there from the Welsh Government at the moment in terms of how much they anticipate the Diamond dividend will be, and what proportion of that is going to be released to HEIs in the future?
I was very carefully not describing it as a dividend—a re-establishing of funding that we had in the past for higher cost and innovation and maintaining research funding. The timescales are difficult, because we have an annual remit letter, and we can work with Welsh Government officials, and they can only give us a sense of when they think the funding will be released. But 2018-19 is the start of the system, and because of cohort protection—so, protecting those students who came in on a different deal to the deal from 2018-19—in the early years there is an element of double cost; there's a cost of seeing out the old system and the different cost of implementing the new system. So, at the moment, we're certainly not in a position to tell the sector with any degree of certainty what funding would be beyond what we've allocated for 2018-19, with some sense of what 2019-20 numbers we're working with because we allocate our money over an academic year—so, by definition, we've already made assumptions of four months of the 2019-20 funding, albeit that's not approved yet in the budgetary process.
But you're not being given a steer at all as to what you expect the additional resource that you might have to make available to Welsh universities might be as a result of Diamond. You must have some idea.
I think it's fair to say that officials have been as helpful as they can be with us, in terms of the planning assumptions we make and indications about whether or not we are being too ambitious or not ambitious enough. So, I think they're being very helpful; as Bethan said, they're constrained by the process—they can't pre-empt a budget process. And you folks will be fully aware of that, of course. The other question I think you asked was how much of the money released by the new arrangements will come into higher education. At the moment, we are expecting all of it to come into higher education, as the product of the arrangement between the current Cabinet Secretary and the current First Minister. The extent to which any changes there cause that to come under threat is something I can't judge at the moment. But we have had in our remit letter from the Cabinet Secretary a clear indication that we can expect our resource to grow over the next few years, as the Diamond process unfolds.