There is a feeling among some policymakers that the UK research system lacks agility. But the key question is agility for who: for researchers, for research institutions, or for the government which funds the research?
By definition, research explores the unknown. These unknowns range from the unknown solutions to today’s challenges such as affordable healthcare and reversing climate change, to initiating the yet unknown technologies of tomorrow that will feed future economic growth.
Whose agility?
The UK government’s Plan for change: milestones for mission-led government repeatedly mentions the UK’s outstanding research base. It is also clear that government has high expectations of how our research system can demonstrate agility to pivot towards addressing major societal needs. But addressing any of these missions requires time, and hence a disciplined balance of agility and commitment to a long-term research agenda.
At a more operational level, for our national funders such as UKRI, legitimate concerns over the precarity of research careers, and the recognition that hard problems take time to solve, means that a large fraction of their annual budget is committed for three or more years into the future.
The extent of these multi-year commitments seemingly restricts the agility of the research system. However, looking more closely, embedded within these commitments are the commitments made to individual researchers to support them and their teams to pursue thematic programmes while empowering their own agility to rapidly pivot their research in response to new ideas of their own or the discoveries of others. It is precisely these longer-term funding commitments typified by support for research fellowships or the quality-related funding driven by REF that allows the UK’s researchers themselves to be agile.
It is widely accepted the UK’s research system is highly productive in basic curiosity-driven research. This productivity, we would argue, is a direct result of the researcher-led agility that our current funding system allows. However, we also recognise that government can and should identify areas of research in support of our industrial or other national needs – some on shorter time horizons.
The key is the balance between this academically-led and government directed agility – we can and do need to do both. Reaching this balance requires greater transparency from the funding agencies and an intellectually safe discussion between government and the research sector. We urge UKRI and DSIT to articulate this balance, around which we can all then work.
Speed and success
Related to these questions of agility are current problems in the funding system which if left unchecked will undermine our research productivity. The costs of research have far outstripped inflation and available research funding has not kept pace – for example, the fall in the number of doctoral training centres funded by EPSRC from 2014 to 2019 and to 2024.
These financial pressures have driven hyper competition in the sector. Success rates have plummeted, with many researchers’ experience being of ten per cent success rates or less – particularly in the schemes supporting academically-led, curiosity-driven research.
Perhaps even worse are the lengthening times taken to receive a funding decision; a decision on a three-year long application often takes more than one year to receive – hardly a route to agility of any kind.
Irrespective of these budget-constrained success rates, we urge our national funders to reduce significantly the time it takes to reach their decisions on whether to fund or not. Suggestions have been made to move to lottery funding, thereby reducing decision times and eliminating potential biases within an ultra-low success rate environment. But a lottery would not solve the issue of low success rates, and hence fails to provide the continuity of funding for people and the security of careers upon which their agility depends.
Beyond long decision times, low success rates drive many other unwanted behaviours: for example, conservatism in selection, or a tendency for the applicant to oversell.
The danger of system failure
The reality is that the public purse alone is insufficient to fund the research volume the UK requires. Hence a question for the research sector, funders and government alike is how we can maximise the gearing of taxpayers’ investments by securing industrial and philanthropic co-investment to drive economic growth and public benefit.
It should also be recognised that universities in the UK increasingly cross-subsidise the whole research system via non-publicly funded teaching, and that this aspect of the system is already highly geared. Leaving aside several successful schemes which already do this, such as EPSRC prosperity partnerships, we believe that a co-investment culture would also require system agility and prompt decisions.
We all feel that the research system lacks agility, but we each see this problem from our own perspectives. The government bemoans the forward commitment of our funders – but also needs to restrict the number of new initiatives to those that it has the resources to fund, perhaps refocussing an agreed fraction of the challenges each year. Funders think that they are empowering the agility of their researchers – but also need to realise that their lengthy decision times are harming productivity. Individual researchers should welcome the agility with which they are empowered – but must accept also the responsibility to never stop thinking as to how their expertise can be applied to benefit the economy and society.
These are the interconnected problems of agility, of balance between government priorities and curiosity-driven research, of success rates, of decision times. The system we have is in danger of failing us all – we need to talk.
