The government’s stated ambition is to make the UK one of the top three places in the world to create, invest in and scale-up a fast-growing technology business.
Research infrastructure is essential to maintaining the UK’s world-leading position by providing the facilities and resources to enable high quality research. That includes the buildings and equipment owned by UKRI and universities which researchers rely upon – as well as knowledge assets such as large-scale cohort studies.
Yet in the current climate of tight budgets, the financing of research and innovation, and notably the infrastructure necessary to underpin that work, faces a considerable challenge. UKRI has recently taken difficult decisions to pull out of projects it had planned to fund – and believes it needs to “do fewer things better” going forward.
Our latest report, DSIT’s investment in research infrastructure, examines how effectively DSIT works together with UKRI to develop and operate research infrastructure that meets the needs of government, researchers and industry.
We found that even with the considerable financial challenges faced by the university sector, there are approaches that could help advance the UK’s strategic goals.
Short-term and reactive
UKRI estimates that universities are spending £1.8 billion annually on physical research infrastructure (with £758 million of that spent entirely on maintenance). But it believes a huge £5.6 billion would be needed to return all university-owned infrastructure to a fully operational condition.
This is a particularly thorny issue since universities are responsible for many of the UK’s research infrastructure assets – and DSIT and UKRI rely on this infrastructure to achieve their strategic priorities. But neither the ministry nor its agencies are legally responsible for its condition.
And with the higher education sector facing considerable financial sustainability issues, short-term “reactive” maintenance is being carried out rather than the preventative maintenance that is usually better value for money.
The overall condition of the university sector’s research infrastructure is deteriorating, and universities are adding to it (and the future maintenance burden) by building new facilities without disposing of obsolete or redundant facilities. Many laboratories are simply old and no longer fit for purpose.
A variable landscape
Other problems can start early in the project cycle. In our review, we found that UKRI did not do enough initially, in some of the projects that we looked at, to ensure that the cost and schedule estimates contained in the business case were realistic – with the result that budgets were fixed too early before costs were well understood. In extreme cases, this has meant projects being scaled back or even abandoned.
We also found that assessments of delivery risk, as well as financial risk and contingency, varied in quality.
We did however find examples of sites exploring innovative approaches to ensure infrastructure adapts to technological changes. These include modular and adaptable workspaces on the polar research ship RRS Sir David Attenborough. At the John Innes Centre (which supports research in plants and microbiology) facilities were upgraded to let scientists control environmental factors such as temperature more flexibly and precisely.
At CoSTAR (Convergent Screen Technologies and Performance in Realtime) – which supports the UK creative industries – there are innovative approaches to facilitating collaboration between industry and academia, leading to valuable knowledge transfer.
Portfolio management
Since we last reported on this topic, DSIT has started providing a clearer direction on the technologies it believes are particularly strategically important to the UK, and its expectations about how much money UKRI should spend supporting the government’s policy priorities.
We concluded that UKRI should assess how existing infrastructure can better support strategic government priorities and innovation. Alongside this, priority projects receiving internal UKRI funding should be allowed to develop research infrastructure in line with their priorities as well as to enable contributions from other government departments and the private sector where appropriate.
UKRI should also take a broader view of portfolio management than it does currently, focusing on managing its projects so that they, collectively, achieve UKRI’s objectives. It should look to introduce more flexibility into how it manages projects such as staged funding, and it should explore whether there is scope to manage the portfolio in a way which reflects UKRI’s desire to take on more risk where this is justified by the potential reward.
DSIT should build on its current work on business cases and issue authoritative guidance specific to research infrastructure projects to ensure the projects it is responsible for approving understand what information decision-makers need.
Further recommendations include improving financial management for maintaining and operating existing research infrastructure, alongside sharing good practice in this area.
High-quality, accessible, and internationally competitive science and technology research infrastructure is essential if the UK is to meet its ambition to be a world-leading environment. But building, maintaining, and upgrading research infrastructure requires strategic decision-making to ensure that the most crucial research infrastructure is accessible – and that it’s delivered within the budget available.
