Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with reference to page 79 of the Industrial Strategy, what the timetable is for the establishment of the knowledge exchange framework.

I wrote to the Executive Chair (designate) of Research England on 24^th November commissioning The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) (and Research England from April 2018) to initiate work and consult with the sector on the development of a new Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF), which will bring together a comparable range of measures of effective collaboration and knowledge exchange. This requests that a consultation on the Framework should be issued by Research England in Spring 2018, with the implementation of the KEF to take place in Autumn 2018. On 1 December, HEFCE published details of the Technical Group which will advise HEFCE/RE on the design and delivery of the new KEF metrics system, along with a call for evidence. Details are available at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/ke/kef/metrics/.