At my university, RAE/REF appears to have reduced the amount of junk being published. It has been made clear to all that publications that won't get into the REF are considered worthless (for the purposes of being considered a researcher) and people not publishing REF-quality material will be considered "teaching-only" staff. The practical effect of the latter is that such people get more lecturing, more tutoring, and more mindless admin than people doing proper research; the staff then, wisely, don't see the point of spending time producing junk.
You would think that it would operate like this... At my place it does, save for cases where there's some senior person who doesn't want to be embarrassed by not being ref-able, in which case it is not unheard of that they let them submit junk. And there's one department in my field that's notorious for having multiple people in its department submit papers from their department's own working paper series. Of course, they score terribly, but you really do wonder what they're thinking...
