The Collaboration for a Sustainable Future programme

The government’s post-16 education and skills white paper last autumn wanted the higher education sector to collaborate – or rather, to build on existing collaborative activity:

“We ask the sector to build on its strong track record of collaboration by increasing the visibility and awareness of effective practice. Collaboration in areas such as shared services, infrastructure and research partnerships such as the N8 Research Partnership or the Midlands Innovation university partnership have already demonstrated the sector’s ability to work in this way.”

There was to be a role of the government in incentivising this, and in part it was presented as a means to reduce research costs:

“We will further support providers in reducing the overall costs of research by supporting effective collaborations across institutions to share resources and infrastructure, minimising duplication of effort, including better maintenance and staffing of shared research and development equipment and facilities.”

This wasn’t exactly a new way of thinking – for one thing, Research England’s shared technology transfer office pilot was already ongoing at this point. But its central placement within the white paper showed that the idea had become important to the government’s research policy thinking.

Science minister Chris McDonald announced the new Research England Collaboration for a Sustainable Future programme in his debut ministerial speech to the Universities UK conference. Ministers like to have something to unveil in public appearances if they can manage it, but this was a fittingly chosen one: targeted at local economic growth, at cooperation rather than competition, and by design regionally diverse.

The funding call has now launched – £15m for cross-UK innovation partnership seed funding, £4m for England-only institutional collaborations, and a separate £750,000 opportunity for higher education sector groups and/or alliances which are coordinating collaboration.

It’s also noted within the call that the programme will “help us identify where Research England could deliver interventions that make the most difference for sustained joint working.” The (relatively modest) investment on offer isn’t only about funding collaboration, then – it’s about developing effective research policy.

Coordinating organisations

The £750,000 on offer for “coordinating groups” is a small but interesting part of the fund. It is explicitly for sector alliances, associations and non-profit organisations that convene English higher education providers, included new groupings put together for this opportunity.

Those not currently in possession of UKRI funding eligibility are encouraged to apply (though groups “without a clear, coherent and articulated reason for being coordinated to respond to the scope of this opportunity” are not).

The university sector is “under acute and accelerating pressures,” potential applicants are told, and Research England is interested in “practical and ambitious ideas” from “those who can identify and enable joint working”:

“We expect to fund support for coordinating groups to convene, identify barriers, challenges and create potential solutions for a sustainable cost-effective future and publish that information in an accessible output(s) which will enable others in the research and innovation system to learn from your activity and take forward ideas, for example a report.”

Eligible groups can apply for between £10,000 and £100,000 for 12 month projects, for costs “associated with convening mechanisms” (roundtables and so forth), publication expenses, and staff costs incurred in coordination and management of the activities in question.

The larger pot

The £4m England-only pilots are for projects between £100,000 and £1m (though Research England says it only envisages funding one project at or near the maximum). The objective is to support a “transition toward sector sustainability,” in part by testing and derisking new research collaboration which are more efficient and cost-effective.

Some suggested collaborations, between a minimum of two HE providers, include shared back office research and innovation services, or a “single front door or streamlined offer” for investors, businesses and/or other partners.

Projects that would go ahead without additional funding, or which are deemed better supported through existing funding streams, are not eligible. And nor are investment in buildings or equipment, equipment sharing, studentships or fellowships, nor “restructuring or decisions driven solely to reduce financial spend.”

The £15m UK-wide fund – cross-UK innovation partnerships seed funding – is for awards between £1m and £5m over 36 months. Research England expects partnership applications to “be new and novel reasons to bring together complementary strengths across the self-defined geographical areas.”

The geographies involved may be self-defined (cities, regions, other economic regions) but the projects will be expected to play to local strengths – and be responsive to local government priorities.

Applicants are “strongly advised” to look at the Research England Cambridge x Manchester partnership as an example of a funded cross-UK innovation partnership. This partnership was launched in 2023 – with the endorsement of one Andy Burnham, then Greater Manchester mayor – and awarded just under £5m from the Research England Development Fund in 2025.

Given how the Cambridge-Manchester venture is held up as an example of what new collaborations should be seeking to emulate, applicants will surely be taking a careful look at how it has been set up. Its so-called Baseline Report from spring 2026 outlines its operating framework – presumably Research England should now be expecting proposals which plan to “move from activity to yield as the organising principle,” which promise “selective coupling” rather than blanket integration, or which “treat recycling as a cluster asset and measure it as a funnel”.

Winners and losers

For the whole of the Collaboration for a Sustainable Future programme, Research England is funding 100 per cent full economic cost – though large-scale projects across wide geographical areas can have a tendency to require more time and financial investment than one might expect.

Whether these new projects can genuinely generate the potential for greater savings than they cost to seedfund must be seen as something of a gamble – but what’s clear is that successful collaborations will set a direction of travel for how the government’s wider ambitions for research system reform are implemented.

There’s also an inevitable political dimension to any question of which regions get funded, which do not, and which are chosen to work together. While – for now – this is only a relatively small-scale investment in collaboration and the creation of innovation partnerships, it can quite easily have an outsize impact on the landscape of university research in the UK. As such, there will be some difficult choices involved in assessing which projects move forward.