The British Universities Directors of Finance notes this week:

“The Treasury Announcement last week confirmed what many in the sector had suspected – that in England BIS has to find £450million in efficiency savings from its annual budget. It is not yet known how the savings will be found, but an article in the Times Higher suggests HEFCE could claw back some of the £4billion already allocated for 2015-16. It adds that “If the £450 million cut were to fall squarely on Hefce’s allocation to universities, it would be equivalent to roughly one-third of all teaching grants for 2015-16 (a total allocation of £1.4 billion) or a third of research funding (£1.56 billion allocation).”

The announcement comes during a week when both the OECD and the IMF expressed concern that the government was implementing too much austerity, and that it should reduce the scale and speed of the cuts.”