On the whole research funding is not configured to be sensitive to place.
Redistribution
It does good things in regions but this is different to funding being configured to do so. For example, universities in the North East performed strongly in the REF and as a consequence they received an uplift in QR funding. This will allow them to invest in their research capacity, this will bring agglomerate benefits in the North East, and go some small way to rebalancing the UK’s research ecosystem away from London.
REF isn’t designed to do that. It has absolutely no interest where research takes place, just that the research that takes place is excellent. The UK isn’t a very big place and it has a large number of universities. Eventually, if you fund enough things in enough places you will eventually help support regional clusters of excellence.
There are of course some specific place based funds but this doesn’t mean they are redistributive as well as being regionally focussed. The Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) is focussed on regional capacity but it is £260m of a total annual Research England funding distribution of £2.8bn. HEIF is calculated using provider knowledge exchange work on businesses, public and third sector engagement, and the wider public. A large portion of the data is gathered through the HE-BCI Survey.
The result of this is that there is place based funding but inevitably institutions with larger research capacities receive larger amounts of funding. Of the providers that received the maximum HEIF funding in 2024/25 five were within the golden triangle, one was in the West Midlands, one was in the East Midlands, two were in Yorkshire and the Humber, one was in the North West, and one was in the South East but not the golden triangle. It is regional but it is not redistributive.
Strength of feeling/strength in places
RAND Europe has released a process evaluation of wave two of the Strength in Places Fund (SIPF). As RAND Europe describe the fund is
The Strength in Places Fund (SIPF) is a £312.5 million competitive funding scheme that takes a place-based approach to research and innovation (R&I) funding. SIPF is a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) strategic fund managed by the SIPF delivery team based at Innovate UK and Research England. The aim of the Fund is to help areas of the UK build on existing strengths in R&I to deliver benefits for their local economy
This fund has been more successful in achieving a more regionally distributed spread of funding. For example, the fund has delivered £47m to Wales compared to only £18m in South East England. Although quality was a key factor, and there are some challenges to how aligned projects are to wider regional priorities, it seems that a focus on a balanced portfolio made a difference. As RAND Europe note
[…]steps were taken to ensure a balanced portfolio in terms of geographical spread and sectors; however, quality was the primary factor influencing panel recommendations (INTXX). Panel members considered the projects that had been funded in Wave 1 and the bids submitted in Wave 2, and were keen on ensuring no one region was overrepresented. One interviewee mentioned that geographical variation of awards contributed to the credibility of a place-based funding system[…].
The Regional Innovation Fund which aimed to support local innovation capacity was allocated with a specific modifier to account for where there had historically been less research investment. SPIF has been a different approach to solving the same conundrum of how best support research potential in every region of the UK.
It’s within this context that it is interesting to arrive at UKRI’s most recent analysis of the geographical distribution of its funding in 2022/23 and 2023/24. There are two key messages the first is that
All regions and nations received an increase in UKRI investment between the financial years 2021 to 2022 and 2023 to 2024. The greatest absolute increases in investment were seen in the North West, West Midlands and East Midlands. The greatest proportional increases were seen in Northern Ireland, the East Midlands and North West.
And the second is that
The percentage of UKRI funding invested outside London, the South East and East of England, collectively known as the ‘Greater South East’, rose to 50% in 2023 to 2024. This is up from 49% in the 2022 to 2023 financial year and 47% in the 2021 to 2022 financial year. This represents a cumulative additional £1.4 billion invested outside the Greater South East since the 2021 to 2022 financial year.
Waterloo sunset?
In the most literal sense the funding between the Greater South East and the rest of the country could not be more finely balanced. In flat cash terms the rest of the UK outside of the Greater South East has overtaken the Greater South East for the first time while investment per capita in the Greater South East still outstrips the rest of the country by a significant amount.
The reasons for this shift is because of greater investments in the North West, West Midlands, and East Midlands who cumulatively saw an increase of £550m worth of funding over the past three years. The regions with the highest absolute levels of funding saw some of the smallest proportions of increases in investment.
The evaluations and UKRI’s dataset present an interesting picture. There is nothing unusual about the way funding is distributed as it follows where the highest numbers of researchers, providers, and economic activity is located. It would be an entirely arbitrary mechanism which penalised the South East for having research strengths.
Simultaneously, with constrained resources there are lots of latent assets outside of the golden triangle that will not get funding. The UK is unusually reliant on its capital as an economic contributor and research funding follows this. The only way to rebalance this is to make deliberate efforts, like with SIPF, to lean toward a more balanced portfolio of funding.
This isn’t a plea to completely rip up the rule book, and a plea for more money in an era of fiscal constraint will not be listened to, but it does bring into sharp relief a choice. Either research policy is about bolstering the UK’s economic centre or it is about strengthening the potential of research where it receives less funding. There simply is not enough money to do both.
