Events

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability: repetitions, false starts and technical interruptions are removed, and nothing has been added. Speakers spoke in a personal capacity.

Introduction

Michael Salmon Good morning, everybody, and an enormous hello from everyone at the Research Agenda team. I’m really delighted to welcome you all to the first ever Research Agenda live event – the first of many to come, I’m sure. I’m Michael Salmon, the editor of Research Agenda, and today’s session is all about what has been going on at UKRI in the last 12 months or so: a new strategy, new buckets, quite a volatile policy environment, changes in government, devolution – all kinds of really important and consequential things. We launched not that long ago, but we’re already right in the thick of coverage of big changes, and it’s great to have the chance to talk about them with you all.

A bit of housekeeping. We’re streaming live on the Research Agenda website, and there’s a chat box to the right of the video, or below it, depending on your device. Put in your name and details and you can send messages – questions, thoughts and comments are welcome throughout. If you’re not already signed up to our emails, there might be a minute’s lag while it validates you. And the burning question: yes, this session is being recorded. If you’re signed up to Research Agenda emails, a special one will arrive tomorrow with the recording, the resources and some reflections from the team – and even some news about our next live event in January.

There are three parts to this 90-minute session. I’ll introduce what we’re talking about, and – as it is our first event – say something about what Research Agenda is and why we started it. Then my colleague James Coe will interview Stian Westlake, the executive chair of the ESRC; please send questions and thoughts in the chat and James will work them in. Then we have a fantastic panel to go deeper and make sure we cover the full breadth of the changes at UKRI. Today is Armistice Day, so we’ll take a short pause around 11am, and come back at about 11.03 to continue the panel.

As many of you will know, Research Agenda is a new initiative from the team that has been involved for many years with Wonkhe, the higher education news, commentary and analysis site. This is something a bit different: we’re focusing entirely on research and innovation, which is itself an enormous landscape, so that we can go deeper into the issues and speak to everyone working in the sector. We launched in September, and it has been really lovely getting to know new people, hearing feedback and seeing so much engagement from all corners of the endlessly fascinating space that is UK research.

We’ve set ourselves up primarily as a news organisation, reporting in a way that is useful, insightful and helpful to people’s working lives: telling you what’s going on, making sure you can find it and read it in context, and hearing your thoughts on it. Whenever a big story drops – to pluck an example out of the air, this morning’s final REF guidance – the Research Agenda homepage will have the latest news from every corner of research policy: funding, people, Europe and international, the industrial strategy, innovative companies, government and politics.

We also have our briefings. The Research Agenda briefing is our in-depth email, with essays, commentary and links to interesting reading from around the sector. We’re piloting Readout, a morning email telling you what’s new on the site. Have a look at the briefings menu at the top of the page – it’s all free to sign up to in 2026. Our essays are written by experts and colleagues from around the sector, sometimes including our team: we’ve had Ian Chapman, and Stian, who joins us shortly, as well as people from universities, funders, business and industry. Getting independent and diverse voices on the site is really important to us, so if there is something you would like to say, please get in touch. There’s also much more: webinars – this is the first of many – data we’re working hard to make useful and clearly presented, and a research calendar where you can see what’s coming up and add your own events.

Inevitably, I’ll take a moment to plug our subscriptions, which will largely be by institution. We said from the start that Research Agenda would be free to read all the way through 2026, so as of today there are 50 days left in what we’re calling our founding period. During the founding period, organisations that come on board benefit from reduced subscription rates, frozen for three years – you still subscribe annually, but the founding rate holds from the beginning. We’re keen to have as many organisations with us as possible and keep our readership as broad as we can, and research-performing institutions are banded by research income so that it’s as accessible as we can manage. If that’s of interest, please get in touch – it’s mark@researchagenda.news.

Now to set the scene for five minutes before we turn to James and Stian. One of the brilliant things about Research Agenda so far is the variety of people engaging with it – universities, charities, other research institutions, funders, industry – so let me run quickly through the big beats of research policy and change at UKRI in what we would all agree has been a very busy year.

First, Ian Chapman taking the reins as UKRI’s chief executive, in the context of both the spending review and the industrial strategy being in place; once those were unlocked, a lot of change flowed from them. The government set out some of its thinking on research formally in October through the post-16 white paper, and in particular the specialisation agenda: the idea that research institutions should focus more, play to their strengths and not spread themselves too thinly – and, comparably, UKRI being more strategic and making bigger and better bets.

The end of last year brought the final UKRI allocations for how it will spend its record R&D settlement over the coming years, including the infamous buckets – the way UKRI presents what it spends on discovery research, on government priorities and on supporting innovative companies. The bucket model has generated many an op-ed, and I’m sure our guests will have thoughts. Since January especially, there have been ongoing arguments about decisions at the Science and Technology Facilities Council on research infrastructure, with Jodrell Bank perhaps having the most cut-through; the national press coverage and political and parliamentary attention have given UKRI an additional issue to reckon with.

Innovate UK reforms are still gathering pace, with lots of changes to how UKRI as a whole approaches commercialisation – arguably the area of research policy the government is currently most interested in. UKRI’s own strategy was published just a few days before Keir Starmer departed and Andy Burnham arrived, with big, ambitious commitments on cutting grant processing times and speeding up UKRI as an organisation. Andy Burnham’s arrival has thrown another spanner in the works: everyone is talking about local growth, an innovation nation and clusters. We have a new science minister, Chris McDonald. And more recently we’ve had the Budget, which heralds tighter finances for research as departmental budgets are redirected towards defence, in a way we’re still waiting to see play out. There’s loads more to talk about, including UKRI’s own changes as an organisation – but now I’m going to bring on to stage my colleague James Coe and Stian Westlake.

In conversation with Stian Westlake

James Coe Stian, how are you doing? Thank you for joining us. You are officially our first interviewee of the Research Agenda era.

Stian Westlake Thank you very much – it is such an honour to be here. I’m a big early fan of Research Agenda. You’re putting out such interesting material, and I know from your Wonkhe heritage that you have the ability to get to the core of so many often quite technical but very important issues. So I’m honoured to be the first guest.

James Coe I didn’t even have to pay you to say that, which is always a bonus. I spent a bit of time on your LinkedIn this morning: you’ve been executive chair of the Economic and Social Research Council for coming up to three and a half years. Before that you were at Nesta, and before that the Royal Statistical Society. There’s a theme in your career – what gets you up in the morning?

Stian Westlake The thing I’ve always been interested in, in my research, my writing and my policy work, is the knowledge economy: how we invest in ideas, and how those improve the economy and people’s lives. The two books I co-authored were on that, and much of my work at Nesta related to it. But the problem with writing stuff is that occasionally someone asks you to do something about it. So working as a ministerial adviser, running a learned society and now having the privilege of running a research council at UKRI have been great opportunities to put some of those things into practice – and you learn a lot trying to do this stuff for real.

James Coe I was reading some of your work in preparation, and I was struck by a Nesta report from 2013, Plan I – I thought it was “Plan 1” at first and wondered why you were writing about student loans. Some of what you wrote about was regional inequality; that we don’t value the intangible economy properly; that there isn’t a link between financial architecture and spending; that productivity is low; and that people don’t value R&D as they should. How have things moved on in the past 13 years? Are you optimistic or pessimistic – did they listen to you?

Stian Westlake Let’s start with the optimistic side. When I was saying things like that in 2013 – and a few other people were – we really felt like voices in the desert. We called it Plan I because there was lots of conversation about plan A and plan B, which was all macroeconomics: plan A was austerity, plan B a sort of neo-Keynesian stimulus. The idea that innovation and technology mattered was something people who worked in universities cared about, but in government policy it was pretty marginal. To the extent government was interested in research and innovation, it was a few Tory special advisers hanging around Silicon Roundabout, if anyone remembers that – kind of cool, but very niche.

Since then there has been quite a change in how mainstream it is – in the world of ideas, among policymakers and in think tanks, no doubt driven partly by tech money but also by ideas coming from researchers in universities. It has risen up governments’ priorities for spending, and Theresa May’s commitment to spend 2.4 per cent of GDP on R&D was a little bit iconic in putting quantity at the forefront. Then, as the 2010s rolled on, there was increasing interest not just in how much government spends on R&D but in how it does it. ARIA is a big play on the idea that if you can fund innovation in a really good way, it will be amazing. There are other versions of that in research on research and the metascience work I’ve led – I know you’ve got James Wilsdon on the panel later. Quality as well as quantity. So on the optimistic side, this has really risen up political priorities, spending and general salience.

James Coe Stian, before you go on – could I ask you to come a little closer to your microphone? That’s much better, thank you. So the optimistic case is that it has gone from a niche, outsider interest to a mainstream political debate.

Stian Westlake Absolutely, and that translated into money, with a series of very good spending reviews for public R&D. That’s a big win for all of us who care about this area. But we have to be realistic: the problems haven’t gone away. The economy isn’t growing the way it could, we still face lots of challenges, and in some ways the divergence between the innovation economy in the UK – and arguably Europe as a whole – and the US has grown in that period. So there’s still a lot of work to do. Some of it sits within classic research policy; some of it is outside it – planning, housing, land use. But there is so much more appetite to work on this now than there used to be.

James Coe I’m always struck that R&D spending has gone up over the past decade while productivity has flatlined. That makes me think one of three things must be true. Either R&D and productivity are not linked, which would be terribly worrying, and I don’t believe it. Or things would have been even worse had we not spent the money. Or the time horizons are too long, or organisations aren’t deploying R&D in the right way. What do you think is going on?

Stian Westlake I don’t have a strong research-based answer, but my intuition is a couple of things. First, things would be worse had we not spent the money. Successes like Google DeepMind haven’t transformed the UK economy, but they are material and have helped aspects of the wider economy. Second, there are complementary things we need to get right, many of which sit outside the R&D system – planning and land use, which affect the ability to set up businesses to take advantage of R&D, and access to finance for businesses to scale, which is a big priority for the government and something I spend time thinking about at the ESRC.

There’s also a case that making sure we fund R&D in the best possible way won’t solve the problem on its own, but it will be important – which is why metascience and the reforms we’ve been making at UKRI are helpful at the margin. UKRI, or any funding agency, is not going to solve economic growth on its own. I hope I’m not selling out our comms team when I say that. But we are a vital part of a nutritious breakfast, as they say.

James Coe “A vital part of a nutritious breakfast” – that could be a tagline. I agree you can’t fix the economy on your own. But reading your strategy, the ways UKRI says it contributes to growth include productivity gains, quality jobs, regional and national growth, helping innovative companies, tackling regional inequality, creating new markets, raising living standards, fuelling competitiveness, attracting investment, social impact – onwards and onwards. That strikes me as very hard, if not impossible. What is your theory of how UKRI’s work grows the economy?

Stian Westlake The list makes it sound as if we’re trying to do more things than we necessarily are. Those are all benefits you get from successful R&D, but what we try to do is a smaller number of things.

The first thing we do is invest in curiosity-driven research. It depends which metaphor you want: if you’re a chemical engineer, it’s the feedstock; if you’re more naturally minded, it’s the wellspring of future economic growth. One of the great things about Patrick Vallance’s time as science minister is that he put a stake in the ground for that, time and again, and it’s now enshrined in the buckets approach. It has always been part of what the research councils and then UKRI did, but it’s really good to have it set down as one element, because it is essential.

The second is what you might call applied R&D: working with businesses and other organisations in a way that crowds in investment, to your point, but further downstream, with more proximate impacts, tying in with things like the industrial strategy, which has a coordinating effect. You mentioned creating markets – the advance market commitments we’re doing on quantum computing are an example of the kind of partnership we can do there. There’s a multiplicity of tools, from advance market commitments and challenge prizes to collaborative R&D.

The third is helping businesses start, scale and stay in the UK, which is the core activity of Innovate UK – part of UKRI, but it feeds right through into the research councils’ work, which is why the new UKRI strategy takes a much more integrated approach. As well as being cute because it all begins with S, “start, scale and stay” represents a real change in how Innovate UK operates. Some people at the university end of the audience might be less interested, but it matters, because across UKRI we’re trying to be more choiceful in what we do.

My colleague Tom Adeyoola, executive chair of Innovate UK, has an anecdote that really brought this home to me. Innovate UK employs lots of skilled people to be choiceful about how we spend money. The R&D tax credit scheme is algorithmic: you apply, and if your application passes, you get the credit – a much lower-touch kind of investment. Historically, the ratio of applications to funding was the same in the two. So we had a very high-touch way of funding through Innovate UK that was funding at the same rate as a high-volume scheme. In Innovate UK’s new Velocity programme we want to be more choiceful – to take the idea of companies not just starting but scaling and staying in the UK, and apply intelligence to how we support businesses and which businesses we support. That’s a really valuable step forward.

James Coe Everybody has an opinion on what UKRI does. The Public Accounts Committee says UKRI doesn’t take enough IP; universities say they take too much IP to get spinouts off the ground. Let me ask a few direct questions about UKRI’s inner workings. Are buckets still the main operating model for how you think about the world? They appear in some strategies and not in others.

Stian Westlake Buckets are very much part of how we operate. I’ve just been writing my papers for the next ESRC Council meeting, and I use the buckets framework to describe what we do. It’s quite hardwired: bucket one, curiosity-driven research, is mostly run directly and delegated to councils, whereas bucket two is collaborative across UKRI. The lived experience of working at UKRI is that buckets really determine how we operate.

It’s worth pausing on the infamous word. It’s probably not the most charismatic word to use. A few months into the discussion, before a formal government document had been published, someone in a meeting with Patrick Vallance sheepishly suggested that buckets might not be the most inspiring way of describing them – perhaps they should be pillars, or foundation stones. Patrick basically said: we could spend all year naming these things; I’m making an arbitrary decision that they’re called buckets, and we’re not going to discuss it any more. So buckets it is. Not a great term, but it really does help determine what we do. I know the panel later includes people extremely knowledgeable about innovation and research policy, and it’s always possible to problematise it – is it too linear a model, don’t things slip between them? But although it’s a simplification, it is really helpful.

James Coe As much as anything it’s an internal mechanism for organising budgets – which is even less sexy than calling them buckets. Stian, could I ask you to sit forward again, so everyone can see you clearly? So buckets are still the organising model. Missions next: you have an entire missions programme covering everything from policing and environmental change to better use of finance. I like the idea of coalescing all your resources around a single thing, but the language feels very much like the Starmer government. You must have had the internal debate about whether to keep calling them missions.

Stian Westlake This relates specifically to the R&D Missions Accelerator Programme, a half-billion-pound programme for which I am the responsible officer. You’re absolutely right that the missions we fund were originally the missions in the Starmer government’s plan for change. But the key thing about them is that they are really quite enduring priorities. I’ve talked to Chris McDonald, the science minister, about them, and he is very bought in and thinks it’s a great way of doing things. And the idea of mission-oriented innovation certainly didn’t come from Keir Starmer’s brain, big though it is.

What’s so interesting about the programme is that, for a limited number of themes with a clear government priority – for example, reducing violence against women and girls as part of the safer streets mission – we work with government to identify quite specific challenges and targets, and then very skilled challenge directors run those challenges. All of my challenge directors are really good, and often from outside the research system, so they bring a valuable different perspective, and use a range of innovation funding mechanisms to try to achieve things. It’s a really exciting way of proceeding. It’s never going to be the majority of how UKRI funds things, but it’s a useful tool. And there are other areas of mission-led innovation: the quantum missions programme, a big area of our industrial strategy investment, is also quite mission-oriented and involves advance market commitments. So mission-oriented investment is one tool in our toolkit, and it’s not going away despite the brief association of missions with the previous administration.

James Coe I like the framing of UKRI as a helpful intermediary that turns the ambitions of government into things universities can actually do something with. So buckets live on, and missions, or something mission-oriented, are still with us. Now we have the Burnham government, with devolution as the big plan. I have two feelings. One: UKRI is not set up to do devolution. You work with lots of partners, but mayoral combined authorities are pretty new in the lifespan of research environments, and I worry about their capacity to deploy funding usefully. Two: UKRI has massive ambitions to transform the economy and society. What if mayors just fund things that have nothing to do with those ambitions? How do you square that circle?

Stian Westlake I think there’s quite a lot of compatibility, and we’ve been working really closely with mayors and with No 10 North on how devolution should play out in relation to R&D. There are programmes already active. The Local Innovation Partnerships Fund, which many of you will be aware of, involves devolving funding to mayoral strategic authorities to fund specific projects in their innovation plans. It’s up and running, it will be continued at the next fiscal event, and it’s one really exciting way of doing this. It has been a really effective partnership – I’ve been doing lots of work on it with West Yorkshire Combined Authority; in fact, I was in Leeds yesterday with the team working on more projects. They have developed a quite exciting innovation plan.

If you look at what the government has been saying about its theory of growth under devolution – Dan Tomlinson, the growth minister at the Treasury, gave a really interesting speech at the West Midlands Growth Summit a few weeks ago – it’s predicated on the idea that there is valuable local knowledge about what’s going on in local economies, which helps you coordinate investment in all the complementary things you need to achieve growth: R&D, but also skills, transport and so forth. That comes back to what we were saying earlier. R&D on its own will probably not get you growth, but if you can coordinate R&D, planning, transport and skills, you have a better stab at delivering the benefits. So that partnership gives us a chance.

James Coe We’ve been doing some work with UCL on a commission for research and better economic growth, and one thing that strikes me is that sometimes places need another lab, and sometimes what they need is a faster train – and we are siloed into those things. Now some quickfire questions. Funding will be the forever challenge. The Budget suggests BIST will lose another 1 per cent of funding, which will flow down to UKRI. At the same time, your success rate for bids is around 20 per cent. So you seem stuck in a bind: lots of activity that ultimately goes nowhere, a lot of bureaucracy in the system, and less cash. How on earth do you square that triangle?

Stian Westlake There are a few things. First, we’re working hard to give potential applicants and research organisations as much clear guidance as we can. In some places that’s about tiering the structure of our process, so there will potentially be shorter expression-of-interest rounds and people waste less time on applications. Partly it’s about working more closely with research organisations on demand management. Understandably, demand management increases work for them, but if we do it in the right way and give advance notice, it will be less painful. And more generally, being more choiceful about what we do and clearer about our future pipeline of work will give people more clarity. We can’t make the pie bigger, but we can at least make the process of getting to it as legible and painless as possible.

James Coe You can’t make the pie bigger, but we can all have a sharper knife. Will AI transform all of this and make the conversations we’re having now seem somewhat antiquated?

Stian Westlake It’s a question no one really knows the answer to, but when we think about our future risks and opportunities, you have to be open to the possibility that over the next year or two you could see a dramatic increase in AI capability that transforms how research happens in a lot of areas. We’re working quite hard on how we respond. We have a very big programme investing in AI research itself – a huge area of focus in bucket two. We have a programme looking at how we can use AI to transform our own operations, which has to be pursued with great care: looking at how, in a way that doesn’t take human judgement out of the picture, we can use AI to make our application processes more efficient and work better for people. That’s something we’re looking at experimentally.

More broadly, if you’re someone doing research, you can imagine scenarios where AI totally transforms that process, and then you start to get some quite profound questions about what the balance of a funding agency’s portfolio should look like. At the moment, about 50 per cent of the ESRC’s money goes on research grants, 25 per cent on data infrastructure and about 25 per cent on PhDs and talent. Maybe those things would change in a world of genuinely superintelligent AI. I don’t know the answer, and we’re not changing anything immediately, but we’re keeping our eyes open, because things could change very rapidly.

James Coe I was reading Research England’s guidance today, and it talks about AI in self-administration but not in judgement – I can see that becoming more pronounced. We have a couple of questions from the chat. A really good one from John Warren: pricing policy supported by UKRI is increasing the unit rates for university TRAC facilities. Has UKRI audited its funding to see whether these price changes are driving specialist analysis out of the university sector and into commercial suppliers – are we crowding out activity?

Stian Westlake That’s certainly very much on my mind from an ESRC point of view, because one of the things we fund a lot of is survey-based work – population studies and so on – where there is a really interesting and delicate partnership between universities and suppliers of polling services, some of whom are commercial. All I can say is that it’s something we’re keeping an eye on, both on TRAC and on the various full economic cost rates. It’s a great example of a system where we need to watch for unintended consequences. A very good question.

James Coe The other one is on a similar theme. UKRI is predicated on a model of excellence wherever it may be. But in a devolved funding landscape, your governance doesn’t necessarily reflect all the interests of the regions and nations – there isn’t a guaranteed place for them on many of your governing committees. Do we need to update that?

Stian Westlake There are still some questions about how precisely the devolved settlement will work. But going on what has been set out so far, in the Rewiring the State Cabinet statement, the core excellence-oriented work – bucket one, curiosity-driven research – is still expected to be a UKRI and research council function rather than devolved to mayoral strategic authorities. I haven’t asked them, but I don’t get the sense that many mayors want to become funders of core curiosity-driven research in universities either, at least for the time being. So to some extent that question isn’t in play at the moment.

Where it does raise a really interesting question for me as an executive chair is whether there is more capability-building work we need to think about. In some areas of social science – and this is true elsewhere – applied work will disproportionately get funded in the south east of England or the golden triangle if you just go on where the quality is, probably for reasons of path dependence: that’s where it has been funded for a very long time and where the excellence has built up. As we think about the future of our applicant-led mode at the ESRC, there’s a question about whether, in strategic investments, we want to selectively grow capability in other places. You have to be very cautious, because you can’t magic capability out of the air, and we certainly don’t want a world of jam-spreading. But where there is a real concentration of expertise, it is a relevant question whether it’s possible, and desirable, to grow expertise gradually in other selected places over time.

James Coe It’s such a challenge to imagine a UKRI that is more diffuse, more devolved and more about capacity building in places, because you’ve been incentivised for a very long time to build up central capacity. I wrote a piece on the site arguing that one of your major challenges is that you have to respond to governments, and governments don’t necessarily want coherent policy agendas – which obviously you can’t comment on. Two last things. Your theory of economic growth is a sensible one: you crowd in investment and grow things. But some incentives across UKRI seem to pull against it. Infrastructure funding is struggling in all kinds of ways, because often there isn’t the university match funding and finances are tight. And when we talk about impact, we often mean economic impact, but it doesn’t matter where that impact happens. How do you align the incentives with this big growth idea?

Stian Westlake On infrastructure funding and the bigger question of university finances, we have to acknowledge it’s a challenge. We know university finances are in a difficult position. The economic rents universities used to be able to rely on – from international students, and from home fees when they were more sustainable – aren’t what they were, and historically they subsidised research more than they do now. Through Research England in particular we work really closely with universities on that, and you’ll have seen yesterday that my colleague Christopher Smith is now the preferred candidate to run Research England, so there’s a strong sense of continuity there.

James Coe Congratulations, Christopher.

Stian Westlake The other, wonkish thing that’s quite useful is that our ability to work closely with the OfS, and thereby with the DfE, has really improved in the last year or so. It’s great to be working with Ed Peck, and with Ruth Hannant and Polly Payne, the newish joint chief executives. When HERA was being drafted, that link was meant to work well. It has been challenged in the past, but it’s working better now. UKRI cannot fix the university finance issue, but we need to be involved in those conversations to make sure we can play our role.

More broadly, on growth across the country: if you look at where UKRI’s R&D funding goes, we are the most regionally dispersed part of what the government used to call the R&D stack. Health research through NIHR, defence research and R&D tax credits are more concentrated. So we have the great good fortune that research-intensive universities exist – I won’t say in every part of the country, but in many parts, including parts with relatively little business R&D. They are the bridgeheads for that kind of investment, and it’s through UKRI that we can fund research there. So I’d be optimistic from that point of view.

James Coe It’s always cheering to talk to you – I feel better than when we started. Last question, in the last minute: what should we be looking out for from the ESRC over the next few months, in the build-up to Christmas and beyond?

Stian Westlake Social scientists will probably know we’re in the middle of refreshing our applicant-led mode – what used to be called responsive mode. We have some very long-standing staff members, and as far as we can see, this is the first proper refresh we’ve done for several decades, which is really exciting. We’re trying to do it so that we can properly support great curiosity-driven research in the social sciences. That includes a great scheme called Connect, which is meant to give researchers the space to come up with the big ideas of the future; challenge awards, which are effectively big centre-style awards that could be used for centres or other big projects; and a range of awards in between, including a very rapid-response, policy-relevant award.

We’re also doing some really interesting experiments using our metascience unit, which is itself really transformative: how we can make the application process easier for reviewers, but also how we make sure it works well. Peer review is a real black box, so we want to make sure we get as good decisions as possible out of the system, and that includes questions about what an appropriate use of AI is. And then further progress on the R&D missions: how we can harness R&D to tackle violence against women and girls, help the creative industries work effectively, and tackle challenges in early years opportunities – super important to the government, to citizens and to a flourishing society. So, lots to look forward to.

James Coe Stian, thank you so much for your time. I’ve got pages of notes and I reckon I’ve covered half – we didn’t do as much on metascience, AI, ARIA and everything else, so we’ll have to have you back. We’ll be cheering you on, given the size of your mission. Thank you, and I’ll pass back to Michael.

Stian Westlake Thank you, James. It’s a pleasure to chat to you.

Panel discussion

Michael Salmon Thank you, James, and thank you very much, Stian. Good morning to our panel, and thank you for joining us. As we’ll pause at or just before 11am, I’ll ask everybody to take two minutes to share some initial thoughts on UKRI’s recent changes – the new strategy, the funding allocations – and perhaps the one big thing the audience needs to hear from your perspective. Then we’ll take a short break and come back for deeper dives. To the audience: please keep your questions coming. We’re joined by Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy; Sarah Chaytor, director of strategy and policy at UCL; Steph Smith, associate director of research and innovation policy at the Russell Group; and James Wilsdon, executive director of the Research on Research Institute. Hetan, could I come to you first?

Hetan Shah Thanks, and great to be here. I thought I’d pick out a couple of areas that have maybe been a little underplayed. I’m glad universities came up towards the end there, because it feels to me that one of the biggest threats to research these days is less what’s happening with research funding – although we need to keep an eye on that, and there are lots of big issues – than what’s happening to the university sector more generally, and the loss of capacity within it. That has to be a core area we keep an eye on. The division between the universities brief at the DfE and the research brief, now at BIST, is something we’ve long argued ought to have been brought together, and it was again a missed opportunity when we had yet another machinery-of-government change. That makes it difficult for UKRI, because it has one bit of the brief – but, as Stian was saying, it’s not its job to fix higher education policy.

The other thing that hasn’t been talked about, coming back to UKRI’s strategy, is the international agenda. It was really striking how much that was underplayed in the strategy. It was written with a domestic audience in mind and quite a domestic focus. In these times, when basically every issue the country faces has an international dimension – even inflation, which feels like the most domestic of issues, is driven very much by international events – we have to take a much more global outlook. There feels to me a slight lack of clarity about how we’re planning to do that and what UKRI’s role is within it, which is a shame. There are some things going on, but it would help to clarify them and bring them to greater prominence. That’s allied to the lack of a clearer government agenda in this space, a point we’ve made several times. If you go back to the old integrated review, it had a whole strand on how research and science could play a key role in the international agenda, but that feels as if it has dropped off a little. So those are some opening gambits.

Michael Salmon Some very good ones, which I think we should return to. Sarah, could we turn to you for a quick two-minute first take?

Sarah Chaytor Thanks, Michael. Hetan has done at least part of my job for me by talking about university finances, so I don’t need to add to that at this point, other than to agree vehemently with what he said. I wanted to pick out two things from James’s interview with Stian. The first is the renewed emphasis on public spending on R&D being seen as an investment that will generate growth. I absolutely buy that argument. But I get a little worried that we risk a reductive narrative that ignores the much wider economic growth and economic impact we should be seeing from research. The more we talk about UKRI effectively turning one pound into three, for example, the more we risk giving the impression that this is a sausage machine, where you put money in and more money comes out. So I think it’s really important that we keep the narrative focused on the outcomes of research, around a broad definition of economic growth and the things that underpin it. We know research makes a massive contribution to the foundations of growth, whether that’s health and wellbeing, transport, skills, or just giving people a decent place to live.

The second is that I think we’re seeing a greater focus on an ecosystem approach from UKRI – less a collection of individual investments and disciplines, more strategic coherence as well as being “choiceful”, which is not my favourite word. Looking at the interconnected ecosystem and some of the foundations that support the pipeline of research is really welcome. But I’m very mindful that it needs to be an interconnected ecosystem. It’s great to think about how we grow strengths across the country, but we also need to think about how we connect those strengths so that we have a nationally coherent research base. And when we think about building specific capabilities, I wouldn’t want us to overlook the fact that one of our great capabilities, in my opinion, is the breadth of our research base, which underpins our ability to work in an interdisciplinary way, our future resilience and our ability to respond to societal challenges.

And finally – I’d love to come back to this – I don’t think we talk enough about research use, and about how we enable research use by wider societal actors. We know it doesn’t just happen by magic because we want it to. So a bit more attention to how we do that, and what UKRI’s role might be in enabling it. Thanks.

Michael Salmon Thanks, Sarah. Let’s turn to Steph.

Steph Smith We’re at a really interesting point for research and innovation. There was a lot to welcome in UKRI’s new strategy in the summer, particularly its ambition to be more strategic and make clearer choices. But two tensions remain. Sarah and Hetan picked up the first: the tension between the sheer ambition placed in front of us and the capacity we have in the system. We’re asking universities to do more – drive growth, attract investment, support big national priorities, and do all the local work as well – at a time when financial sustainability is a real issue. Part of that tension is structural. The way our system is funded means that neither publicly funded teaching nor research covers its full costs. The deficit on research – and it’s worth reiterating – is £6.3bn a year, which is so much money I can’t even conceive of it. We rely on international student income to bridge that gap. Yet at the same time, the government intends to put in place an international student levy, and its own estimates put the cost to English universities at about £1bn in lost income over the first three years. So there are big tensions between those ambitions and what’s happening on the other side: can we deliver?

The second tension, which others have alluded to, is how we bring together the national and regional ambitions. Hot on the heels of the UKRI strategy, we had the Rewiring the State publication, and we have a roadmap coming. What does that even mean for UKRI’s strategy at this point? We still don’t know. How do we make the most of the devolution agenda? Because there are fantastic opportunities there – and also risks, as always, around fragmentation. What will UKRI’s role be in marrying the national and regional pictures so that they make sense coherently at national level? That won’t be covered in the strategy because it hadn’t been planned for, and the roadmap isn’t out yet. So there are really big questions about what the next six months will look like.

Michael Salmon Thank you, Steph. With apologies to James Wilsdon – we’re about to hit 11 o’clock, so we’ll take a short break now for Armistice Day, and James, I’ll come to you straight afterwards.

The session paused for the two-minute silence.

Michael Salmon Thank you very much, everybody. We’ll continue the discussion for at least another 20 minutes, and please do keep putting questions in the chat – there are already some coming through. James, over to you for your initial thoughts on UKRI’s latest direction and some of the policy tangles it finds itself in.

James Wilsdon I agree with all the points Hetan, Sarah and Steph have made. It struck me in James’s conversation with Stian, and others have just re-emphasised it, that the devolution agenda – leaving aside its substantive pros and cons – is coming in at precisely the time when UKRI is, in one sense, finally getting a grip of its original mandate to provide a tighter strategic brain and coordination for the system. That is quite a challenge, because devolution potentially pushes against that, and unravels the capacity of the centre of UKRI to maintain a degree of coordination, in that by necessity devolution involves giving away control and oversight to other actors at other levels of the system. That’s not an argument against devolution, but it is an organisational and policy challenge, and it will be interesting to see how UKRI navigates it over the next couple of years.

I agree with Stian on many things – I’ve worked with him in different ways for many years – and I think what he and others have done within UKRI to advance a more metascientific approach to the funding system is right. Leave aside the word metascience: a system that is more grounded in evidence, which tries things out, tests and builds on what works, is a better system, and many of us have argued for it for many years. So I welcome any moves in that direction. But the scale of change in the science system – in the UK, yes, but globally at the moment – is, without getting too hyperbolic…

James Wilsdon’s connection dropped at this point.

Michael Salmon It seems we’ve temporarily lost James – we’ll come back to him, and I’m particularly keen to get into AI. In the meantime, I want to pick up university finances in a bit more depth. It’s clearly something we’re all concerned about, but what exactly is UKRI’s role? I’ve seen suggestions in the chat that there’s more it could do on advocacy, and there are policy questions – it has recently been reflecting on how its terms and conditions and grant management affect things like cost recovery. Hetan, what should UKRI be doing in this space that it isn’t currently?

Hetan Shah The first thing to say is that the main issue here is a policy agenda that is not for UKRI to sort out. Look at what happened in the Budget: there was very little about universities. The main thing was that the international student levy will cost a bit more than expected, and the next thing coming down the track is giving EU students domestic fees – well, who is going to pay for that? So I think more leadership at the political level on higher education is the core thing. What UKRI can do is a secondary question. UKRI can take it into account, and the fact that it has been trying to protect QR and curiosity-driven research has been really important. But its power is relatively limited in all of this. There are big questions about how we structure the buckets – and the recent report on how QR is being used raises one. If QR isn’t really going on curiosity-driven research, and you took that out of bucket one, what would be left? So getting a better picture of what research funding is actually doing will be really important. But, as I say, that is secondary to political leadership on higher education.

Michael Salmon Would anyone else like to come in on that? Sarah – we have you on mute.

Sarah Chaytor Sorry – it has to happen once in every webinar, and it’s always me. I really recognise the tension Hetan is outlining: universities undertake the majority of research, including UKRI-funded research, but UKRI has very few levers to pull. We have to recognise that. In the short term, I think there’s more work to do on increasing the sustainability of UKRI research funding – increasing cost recovery levels and full economic cost rates. Perhaps more controversially, I think we need to take a serious look at the volume of research versus the funding level we allow for specific awards. We also need to recognise that universities are co-funders of research. We are not passive recipients of money; we put our own money in too. So how can we better leverage that co-funding? I really welcome some of the announcements from UKRI pointing towards longer-term investments, which are really positive for stability and planning, and the increasing emphasis on encouraging collaboration across the system – another way of making the pie go a little further. And we have to acknowledge that the cuts to research capital funding just announced by Research England present a real challenge for universities, so that needs more attention.

The other point is longer-term and more fundamental, so not much use in the short term. Going back to Hetan’s point about why universities were overlooked in the Budget, I continue to think there’s a risk that in the research and university sectors we operate in a bit of a bubble. We think we’re really important because we fundamentally believe in the value of investing in knowledge and undertaking research, and that it contributes to people’s lives. I’m still not convinced that is a widespread view across wider society. It still doesn’t connect with enough people in their normal daily lives. Until we sort that problem, we may always feel overlooked in policy and Budget announcements, because we’re not going to be a doorstep issue; we’ll be a secondary issue that we all know is really important. So the role for UKRI there is to build a research base and public research investment that really does deliver a direct connection to improving people’s lives.

Michael Salmon Thank you, Sarah. Steph, you can weave in your thoughts on that, but I also wanted to ask about something we haven’t explored much: what the arrival of BIST means for UKRI – the move of its sponsoring department, the disappearance of DSIT, and the new, or at least revised, agenda coming from the ministers and the new secretary of state. How does that fit in, and perhaps complicate, what UKRI is trying to do?

Steph Smith I think everyone agrees that broadly speaking it’s a positive move – in some ways a return to the days of BIS. I take Sarah’s warning that we don’t want to see universities through a reductive lens, one thing in and one thing out. But I do think it’s positive for understanding how we contribute to the economy, and there’s good join-up between this view and the Treasury’s view of the world. So I don’t see it as a bad thing. But sitting across two departments with slightly different aims continues to be a tension for us, and it isn’t an easy one. Because we’ve just had these big machinery-of-government changes, it’s very unlikely to change again soon.

Michael Salmon Thanks. James, let’s come back to you – your connection may still be a bit spotty, but let’s give it a go. I’d like to talk about the revisions to grant funding UKRI announced at the beginning of September – some trailed in the strategy – under something like “grants in the age of AI”, and Ian Chapman’s drive to bring grant processing times down substantially. How workable is that objective, given the stories everywhere about growing volumes of applications, and funders and journals struggling under them?

James Wilsdon Hopefully the connection holds. As Stian said, and as Ian has said in various statements, they recognise the scale of the challenge. Whether they’re responding fast enough, given what’s coming down the track, is the point of debate – not a criticism of UKRI so much as a reflection of the speed at which things are moving. AI is a big part of it, but there are other things going on in the system too, including the pressure on university finances, which is another factor driving up volume and demand. I’m perhaps a bit more alarmist on this than Stian sounded earlier. If we look at the data across many funders – and we’ve published on this recently at RoRI – the scale of what’s happening is pretty clear. As UKRI, you either continue to impose more demand-management caps in various parts of the system, which pushes the problem out of sight and maybe out of mind but creates a further set of challenges – we’re grappling with this at UCL right now, as Sarah will attest – or you face the problems created by an AI-augmented system, where you have not only volume growth but other things going on. You have upward score compression – quality compression upwards – which means that all the signals and proxies we have relied on as indicators of quality are becoming less and less reliable as manifested in text-based proposals. So our whole system of funding, in so far as it relies very heavily on that artefact, is teetering on the brink – we said in our piece in Nature, of possible collapse.

This is going to be a far more profound challenge as wider use of these systems becomes pervasive through higher education and research. This isn’t based on a rigorous study, but if I observe my own colleagues at a university like UCL, it’s still a very small proportion who are really across the full potential of advanced AI tools to augment – and I say augment, not replace – their expertise in producing things like proposals, leaving papers aside for a moment. But those who are using them realise very quickly quite how powerful these tools are. That’s a potential boon to Ian’s agenda of reducing bureaucracy, at least at the level of applicants, but it doesn’t solve the problem at funder level. So I very much welcome the approach UKRI is broadly taking, and I think the stance of the metascience unit is very sensible. But the question has to be whether the system is even capable of adapting at the speed required to cope with the juggernaut of AI-powered change that is going to hit it in the next 12 to 18 months. I have my doubts.

Michael Salmon If guests have a burning desire to come in on any topic, please do. Hetan, the other side of UKRI’s grant changes is not just how it processes them but what it often calls bigger, longer grants – the “big bets” of the Budget – reshaping things, potentially empowering programme managers more, and doing more in industrial strategy areas. How do you see that playing out?

Hetan Shah It’s a question I wanted to answer, so I’m glad you asked. From my perspective – and we fed this back to Chris McDonald, the new science minister – you need to think about what works for different disciplines and how different sorts of outcomes come about. Certainly in the humanities and social sciences, bigger isn’t always better, and you need a mixture of grants. At the British Academy we give £10,000 small research grants, and there is huge appetite for them in our sector. They create not just the seeds of new work that bids up to ESRC, AHRC or ERC grants, but complete projects in their own right, for that sum of money. I think government and UKRI can find it hard to think in that way.

The language of big bets comes from two directions. On the one hand, there’s a theory of change around strategy: you literally do take big bets. But there’s also a requirement from the other side, which is more administrative: if you have just a few big projects, they’re much easier to manage, both from a peer review perspective, as James was saying, and once the grants are in place. So I worry that the big-bets approach doesn’t necessarily reflect how the research landscape operates. It dovetails with the white paper you mentioned, which has been a bit of a damp squib – no one really knows what it means or where it’s going – but it gestures towards specialisation within institutions. The recent report showing that specialisation, breadth and good outcomes can all sit together was really quite powerful. From a humanities and social sciences perspective, you don’t necessarily need to buy big kit, and there aren’t necessarily lots of arguments for scale. You may well feel there are good reasons to have good history departments in every university – and the REF shows you can, with lots of very strong departments in places you wouldn’t necessarily have expected.

Michael Salmon Thank you. We’ll take about five more minutes on the panel – there are some really insightful comments and questions in the chat. Sarah, one relates directly to your earlier comments. Rachel at QMUL asks how we can ensure that excellent research is valued for its broader social, cultural and civic contributions, as opposed to only the aspect that translates straightforwardly into economic growth. What can researchers do, and what can the sector do?

Sarah Chaytor It’s a great question. We shouldn’t overlook that we have tools like the REF – for however long it continues – that recognise this retrospectively. My concern is more how we recognise it at the point of building capabilities and investing in new research. Often it’s an afterthought, or we treat it as something you invest in project by project, rather than as broad, pervasive infrastructure across the system. That’s the big gap I see. When we think about specific capabilities, we aren’t thinking about what I’d call knowledge mobilisation infrastructure: how you connect research to wider society. That’s partly about individual research capabilities and building it into individual projects, but it’s also about a broad capability and infrastructure that, for me, is just as important as physical equipment or digital infrastructure, and needs sustaining across and beyond individuals and projects. Without it, it’s very hard to see how you properly value – or realise – the potential for civic engagement, transforming public services or informing public policy. I think that’s a bit of a gap in the current UKRI strategy. It’s particularly important for the devolution agenda, because the huge opportunity there, for me at least, is to ensure that R&D addresses the needs and priorities of places across the UK – and it won’t do that if we work in a piecemeal way.

Michael Salmon Steph, there does seem to be some growing scepticism in the chat about how devolution plays out. You’ve touched on this, but how will UKRI deal with it if the forthcoming white paper really is radical and pushes a lot of power very quickly into mayoral combined authorities and other new local structures?

Steph Smith My sense is that the roadmap, if that’s what it’s called, will be so broad and lacking in detail that it won’t be clear exactly what is being handed over and when – it will deliberately obfuscate in that way. I think UKRI is a smart organisation and will make the most of the opportunities. As far as we understand, there’s a whole chapter on devolution for research and innovation within the roadmap, so it isn’t something we can ignore. We have to embrace it positively, and there are huge positives. I imagine the convening role of UKRI, and capacity building, will matter for all universities, because mayoral strategic authorities are in such different places. Places like Manchester, which are leading the way, have 30 or more years of doing this, and will tell you from their lived experience that they didn’t get everything right; there’s still stuff for them to learn, and they’re the trailblazers. So there’s the question of capacity building, and how UKRI can support it without endlessly replicating the same structures, such as peer review, in every place – how you do that so we get value for money for public spending as well. There’s a lot for UKRI, and Innovate UK if we’re talking about later-stage innovation funding, to do to support all of that – and a lot for universities to do, which, if we’re talking about full economic cost, is work we’ll probably have to do for free again. But it’s part of the demand.

Michael Salmon James, a final word from you, picking up some very well-made observations in the chat about the effects of these changes on individual researchers – new approaches to managing grants and peer review, and the AI avalanche generally. How does UKRI manage this, and what responsibilities does it have to individual researchers?

James Wilsdon I think UKRI recognises there’s no simple solution, because it’s happening across the whole system at once. You have to look at how to manage it in the context of different instruments and their purposes, and the perverse or unintended consequences of changes in one area for other parts of the system. The part that worries me most is early career researchers. If text is becoming less reliable, as I was saying, it’s tempting to revert to other proxies for deciding who does and doesn’t merit funding. That leads you to reintroducing interviews, as we’ve seen with the MRC, or other higher-touch models. Demand management is another form of it: you rely on the university’s capacity to recognise locally what is good relative to less good, and for that to go forward into the system. All of those approaches are very susceptible to Matthew effects – reinforcing the dynamics of current funding – and they close off entry routes for newer players, early career researchers and others. That’s the big worry for me. The move to larger grants is a further pressure on early career researchers and newer entrants too. So that’s the part of the system most vulnerable to many of the changes we’re seeing, and it needs to be addressed specifically and deliberately, as a focus of funding policy, to avoid further damage to the pipeline of researchers coming up through the system.

Michael Salmon Thank you, James. Unfortunately we’re up against 11.30 – I would happily have heard from our panel at much more length. Enormous thanks to all of you. To the audience, thank you so much for coming: we’ve had more than 500 people with us, which is enormously positive. We’ll be editing this video and making the resources available, with a briefing in your inboxes tomorrow morning, analysis from the team, and details of our next event. I can tell you now: it’s on 19 January, and it’s about the REF – which we haven’t talked about today, partly by design and partly because we’re all still digesting this morning’s final guidance, with full coverage on our site. It will be a good moment to ask what the REF looks like now we have the final guidance, and what it means in the context of enormous financial pressure. I’m very happy to say Kim Hackett will be joining us from Research England and the REF team, with another wonderful panel. And if you’re at the Universities in UK Research and Innovation conference at the beginning of December, Research Agenda will be there in force – please come and talk to us about research policy, subscriptions, gossip, anything you like. Thank you all very much.

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