It can’t have been easy writing UKRI’s new five-year strategy.
The organisation could spend its £9bn annual budget doing an enormous range of things. It could spend every single penny on making the UK unbelievably good at one thing. It could put the whole amount out for researchers to explore the deepest depths of their imaginations. It could build even more 1,100m underground laboratories or fund even more rockets and satellites.
£9bn a year makes UKRI the largest research funder in Europe and through its investments the guardians of many more billions of pounds of spillover benefits. Although UKRI has some budget challenges (see STFC) it has the luxury, and the pressure that comes with it, of choosing what to do.
The success of the strategy can’t be that UKRI has done, can do, and will do lots of things – the whole point of being a research funder is to fund research. Its success is whether the strategy is internally coherent in pointing UKRI toward a clear vision, and externally coherent in rising to the social and economic challenges of the country.
The language of buckets is absent (bar the odd reference in the 2026–27 delivery plan) but their spirit remains with the organisation’s mission focussed on discovery research, addressing government and societal problems, and helping companies to start up and scale up in the UK. These three ambitions are underpinned by two key enablers: investment in talent, infrastructure and partnerships, and reforming UKRI’s transparency, effectiveness, and efficiency.
Mission and our money
UKRI’s budget had already been announced so there aren’t a lot of new spending commitments. Chief executive Ian Chapman has promised a clear line “from our mission to our money,” and in discovery science this comes through. The mission is to let researchers get on with exploring things and this will be backed by £3.3bn with a promise to the effect that “changes to our allocations approach for strategic institutional research funding in England will be implemented by the end of the Spending Review period.” This includes QR and Research Capital Infrastructure Funding.
There is a promise to meet the ambitions of the post-16 white paper – but scant detail on how specialisation will work in practice. While UKRI can concentrate its funding, it can’t force providers to do likewise and there is little explanation of how its new approach will cause, or at least encourage, providers to spend money on the places where they have a genuine strategic advantage. Except, that is, when it comes to the programmes UKRI funds directly.
UKRI is launching a new “priority programmes” scheme (by December 2026) which will be a new multidisciplinary portfolio of programmes to meet the government’s ambitions. This will be overseen by its own programme board and aligned to the industrial strategy. In total, UKRI will “target £11.9 billion of investment over the SR period across the industrial strategy sectors and the UK government’s wider priorities.” This money will be found from across buckets two and three. It is a big chunk of money and good news if your institution specialises in digital and technologies, life sciences, advanced manufacturing, clean energy, defence and national security, the creative industries, professional business and financial services, or the big lump called “other priorities” which includes resilience, space, and food and animal health. To strategise is to choose and it is a big bet on where the UK’s strengths are.
In bucket three there are new measures to support the UK’s most innovative companies. In short, UKRI intends to run fewer business support schemes but with greater integration and funding between them. The place where investment becomes a bit more Burnham-coded is where there is a commitment to entirely devolve all £500m of the Local Innovation Partnership Fund. In addition, there will be support for 5,000 new doctoral studentships across the UK every year. This sounds a lot, but UKRI has supported more new studentships than this every year since 2015.
Engine revved
Funding aside, perhaps the most eye-catching commitment within the strategy is the pledge to cut median grant processing times in half over the five-year window. Specifically, the idea is to bring the application-to-decision wait down to 90 days for applicant-led calls, and just 60 days for targeted calls. It’s quite the ambition, given the direction of travel in recent years – the objectives and key results document notes that in 2025–26 the median decision time was 194.5 days for the former and 127 for the latter.
In part this will be achieved by “demand management”, such as restrictions of the number of applications per institution – a measure which will always require careful negotiation with the research community, as the strategy alludes to. But equally, some of the speeding up is envisaged to come via more experimental methods, with the support of the DSIT/UKRI metascience unit. This might – of course – involve leaning on AI to make processes more efficient, but part of the plan appears to rest on “testing innovations at scale”, including distributed peer review and the use of desk rejection to more quickly winnow down applications.
The strategy couches the need for increased speed in language of researchers’ time being better spent elsewhere, but it is also explicitly intended to bring about a decrease in the proportion of UKRI resources being used in the process. This points to a tension: testing out new approaches requires a commitment of time and expertise, rather than locking in immediate savings. The delivery plan for 2026–27 expects a (modest) reduction in average grant time to be achieved by April 2027 – it would not be surprising if this proved to be a stretch.
Future shock
For some of the aspirations of the strategy, 2031 already feels just around the corner, not least when it comes to the complex and unwieldy task of changing up the grant process and driving year-on-year decreases in research bureaucracy for both academics and UKRI itself.
But for some of the others, 2031 feels like another country. This is long after the next general election, but much of the strategy’s success is tied up with an industrial strategy which might not survive a change in government – you sense this concern must already be on UKRI’s radar. And given the financial state of the university sector, it’s unsurprising that commitments like “sustaining the UK’s world-leading position in research excellence” don’t have particularly firm metrics attached.
We are told that in the coming year Research England will be working with partners to deliver a “coordinated, system-wide view of the resilience of the sector.” But it’s not clear what follows if such an exercise reveals, as it surely will, diminishing capacity in key areas.
UKRI has chosen to invest the public’s money in the places where it believes the UK has a genuine competitive advantage. Making this advantage real needs a sector which is in shape to make use of UKRI’s new impetus. Not to say anything of the funds to co-invest in programmes of work. Now is the test, to see not only whether UKRI can deliver on its promises, but if it can bring the sector with it on doing fewer things better.
