Research Capital Investment Fund cuts ahead

Research England has issued an update on Research Capital Investment Fund (RCIF) allocation and it has gone much further than many may have imagined. The short version is that from 2026-27 RCIF will only be provided to sustain current facilities and as a result funding is cut by £50m by 2029-30.

On the plus side, if you are a fan of supercomputers there is £750m for the Next National Computing Service and £1bn for the expansion of the AI Research Resource over the next four years. There will also be some new competitive capital funding opportunities, not yet announced, and some new infrastructure investment aligned to the industrial strategy.

Before we get into what is going on let’s get into what the fund does.

The Research Capital Investment Fund (RCIF) is a formula based funding that universities can spend on infrastructure. This funding contributes to things like maintaining existing facilities, replacing premises and infrastructure, and promoting collaboration.

The problem with capital funding is that it has high match requirements and when the sector is short of cash it’s hard to invest in new infrastructure. In its December budget explainer UKRI said that:

UKRI has prioritised transformative investment in digital research infrastructure, complementing DSIT’s £1 billion commitment in its UK Compute Roadmap to expand the UK’s compute capacity twenty-fold in the next five years.

As a result, UKRI will be making important changes to its infrastructure portfolio to support infrastructure in a more effective and transparent manner. This includes through the Research Capital Investment Fund (RCIF), competitive capital calls through research council world class labs (WCL) and focused infrastructure investment into institutes.

After tapering in financial year 2026 to 2027, investment in RCIF will be reformed from financial year 2027 to 2028 with its use focused on sustaining current facilities. Funding will then be made available for new equipment through competitive capital calls by combining resources to form a more coherent and transparent infrastructure funding approach.

It is therefore understandable that there would be a reduction in physical infrastructure, a consolidation of estates, and investment in digital infrastructure. The problem is that it’s not really replacing like with like. Yes, these are “national” computer facilities but they are predominantly based outside of the North.

Research England is aware that these changes to funding, both in terms of the amount of unhypothecated funding available and the shift in emphasis to spending grounded in maintenance and upkeep, will hit differently in different institutions. It has expressed the hope that universities will talk to each other (and to the funding council) about plans and implications – and there is some thought of encouraging and convening these conversations where there is scope for more joint working.

RCIF currently sits across two broad funding streams – HEI Research Capital England (which is allocated by a formula based on QR funding and income from non-research council sources) and HERC England (distributed in proportion to the last three years of research council income). The intention is that this will remain in the short term, but from 2027-28 onwards there will be some rethinking as the new system beds in. Both methodologies have the impact of weighting allocations towards “big money” subjects, and we get the sense that this is broadly in line with government priorities – though there is also the potential to think more about needs in allocating a smaller budget

Despite the underlying growth of infrastructure spending overall, and the promise of additional institutional capital to be made available elsewhere in UKRI plus deeper investments in national infrastructure (the aforementioned shiny computers), and despite the fact that this decision has been expected since at least the back end of last year, this announcement will be read in the sector as a cut to research. The disappearance of the “extra” £59m of maintenance capital allocated last year leaves RCIF at the same nominal level as 2025-26, but it is the further £50m going from 2027-28 that will be particularly painful unless the other sources of capital funding are more clearly understood.