Regarding the first strategy, many scholars such as Shattock and Berdahl (1984), Becher and Kogan (1992), and Scott (1995) have observed that the UGC was gradually transformed from being a buffer body into a planning and executive agency. The former was ‘designed to insulate the autonomous domain of the universities from direct and detailed intervention by Whitehall’, but the latter is ‘responsible to ministers for planning university development’ (Scott 1995, pp. 15–16). Such changes have been embodied, first, in changes in UGC funding allocation strategies, and then in the nature of its successors.