UKRI board meetings: July 2026
The minutes for the ordinary 15 July meeting of UKRI’s board have been published (the extraordinary meeting on 1 July was covered in our previous round-up).
The meeting took place at UKRI’s London HQ on Buckingham Palace Road, and was the final one with Andrew Mackenzie as chair – his successor, Leszek Borysiewicz, was in attendance as an observer.
We learn from the minutes that UKRI has concluded a governance review across its portfolio of centres, institutes, catapults and units (or CICUs, as they are styled in this excellent recent mapping). The review is said to have assessed the risks associated with current governance arrangements, and identified – unspecified – actions to ensure the “strategic alignment” of CICUs to UKRI’s objectives. CICUs “must deliver a national capability,” the minutes observe, also noting that UKRI representation in governance “isn’t linked to level of funding received.”
The board also got two further deep dives into areas of the forthcoming industrial strategy-linked priority programmes, this time in agritech and engineering biology (artificial intelligence, creative industries, advanced connectivity technologies, semiconductors, cyber, and national security and defence were covered in earlier meetings of the board). The key takeaway here is arguably how seriously UKRI is taking the launch of this new “bucket two” investment line, given its prominence in recent meetings.
Chief executive Ian Chapman’s update is said to have included discussion of “risk associated with the REF and the planned workflow,” and there are a number of mentions of grant processing and grant management, with chair Andrew Mackenzie highlighting the resource impact of the “surge in volume of grant applications facilitated by artificial intelligence.”
Elsewhere, the UKRI board investment committee says that it was “pleased” that the UK had secured a cap on its contributions to the European Spallation Source, infrastructure currently under construction in Sweden. Lessons learned will be shared for future business cases, though there is no further detail on what these were.