UKRI’s transformational year
This morning Research Agenda has published an essay by Ian Chapman, UKRI’s chief executive, on his first year in the role. Here we recap the key events of the last 12 months or so, a period which has seen huge changes in research policy, the consequences of which are still playing out.
There’s an argument that the start of UKRI’s transformational year should be dated to Ottoline Leyser’s valedictory evidence session with Parliament’s science committee back in June 2025. The outgoing chief executive was candid about her views on how the research system needed to change, talking of the inevitable need for “consolidation” in university research in particular, an end to “unstrategic expansion” – and a rethink of how UKRI’s policies could diversify, rather than standardise, the landscape.
It’s clear that this openness about future policy thinking reflected ongoing discussion within government about what became the post-16 education and skills white paper and its commitment to “drive specialisation and collaboration” in research through funding reforms. The publication of this document ended up delayed until October, but it continued a direction of travel within research policy which was by this point clear in its aspirations, if not its mechanisms.
In the meantime, Ian Chapman had begun his tenure as chief executive, and narratives around institutions “playing to their strengths” were well-established. In part this reflected the publication of the government’s industrial strategy in summer 2025, which gave political cover to more interventionist and purposeful approaches in various areas of Whitehall.
The 2025 spending review had seen a healthy departmental settlement for DSIT, but questions around how this would materialise in the budgets for cross-departmental R&D and for UKRI in particular continued to percolate throughout the autumn. When these arrived, however, it was clear that UKRI had done well in making its case to government, with the support of then science minister Patrick Vallance. In his essay for Research Agenda, Ian Chapman has called this a “remarkable vote of confidence from government in the power of research and innovation” – and he is right to do so.
What’s often overlooked in focusing on the numbers themselves is that Whitehall does not simply make an overall allocation and then later thrash out the details; a large part of the story has been how UKRI and DSIT sought to strengthen and clarify the way they made budget asks of the Treasury, giving the government a more coherent picture of what it was investing in and what this investment might bring. And this leads us on to the infamous buckets.
Patrick Vallance’s bucket terminology divided government spend into four categories: “curiosity-driven” foundational research; strategic government and societal priorities; support for innovative companies; and cross-system investment. This was always about making research and innovation more legible to the centre of government, and in its own terms was very successful, even if the language itself seems to already be slipping into disuse. It helped to present the research system’s various value propositions to those holding the purse strings – but also created various consequences for how UKRI operates, and how the research system is supported, which seem set to continue reverberating for years to come.
The most high profile side-effect of December’s budget allocations was to bring to a head the financial pressures which had long been building at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). It’s been the area of research and innovation which has most broken through into the media and politics over the last year, and the firefighting involved for UKRI – and ministers – has taken up a huge amount of system bandwidth.
Arguments over potential cuts to physics research spending were followed by confirmation of swingeing reductions in many elements of the council’s infrastructure portfolio and national/international projects. MPs, mayors, and even the new Prime Minister have all weighed in. The government and UKRI have at times fallen back on the strategy of painting it as primarily a comms failure – but the allegation that decision-making has not been transparent enough continues to be heard regularly, and the issue clearly has some distance left to run.
Things continue to change
Elsewhere in the year, Innovate UK’s new strategy promises a big shake-up to innovation funding and business support. The Catapult network is being reviewed, companies within industrial strategy sectors are the new priority, and the funder is at pains to stress how it is “becoming more deliberate” in what it supports. Relatively new executive chair Tom Adeyoola has been clear in his public appearances that he feels the organisation needs streamlining and focusing. Delivery plans later this autumn will show exactly how deep the changes go.
Shortly before Andy Burnham took office (and its sponsoring department disappeared, replaced by BIST) UKRI launched its new five-year strategy. Much of the contents reflected, rather than announced, the changes in operations which the year has seen – but the emphasis on bringing grant processing times down read as pretty radical, as we summarised on our sister site Wonkhe at the time.
UKRI’s response to the age of AI, as the grant modernisation measures are presented, will see significant changes to how it operates – and, by extension, to much of the UK research system. More active demand management, larger and longer-term investments, distributed peer review, staff-led desk rejection, AI involvement in assessment: these are all steps that will pretty fundamentally reconfigure research processes, and are ripe for fractures between the metascientists pushing for new approaches and the applicants experiencing their effects.
There’s plenty more to come too – as Ian Chapman’s Research Agenda essay announces, each of the research councils is “going through an exercise to identify their operating models for the future.” A perhaps underexplored consequence of UKRI’s new strategy and approach to funding allocation is how the role of the research councils has been reconfigured, with a more active centre now setting policy and direction, to say nothing of much more cross-UKRI programming.
Taken as a whole, there’s a clear case to be made that the last twelve months or so have been among the most significant in UKRI’s (relatively short) lifespan. We’ll be reflecting on what has worked, why it’s happened, what’s got the research community most concerned, and what happens next at an event on Wednesday 11 November.
UKRI, transformed is a Research Agenda webinar taking place on Wednesday 11 November between 10.00 and 11.30. A full line-up of speakers will be announced shortly. The event is free to attend – add it to your calendar today.