The state of research infrastructure is harming research

England’s research infrastructure is “aging, deteriorating, and increasingly subject to under-investment” – and it is estimated that to remedy these issues the sector would need around £5.3bn of additional capital funding.

That’s the key finding from the much delayed final report from Research England’s Condition of the Estate programme – work was conducted in 2024 and has already seen limited publication in the underpinnings of the National Audit Office’s report into research infrastructure published earlier this year.

One of the tacit understandings embedded in the way the UK funds research is that it can only invest in research projects and initiatives (be these curiosity-driven or closely linked to national priorities) where the capacity and infrastructure already exists. We can only really fund the majority of research via time-limited ring-fenced project allocations (and, cynically, fund these in a way that means that the full cost of performing research is not covered) because we have other non-ringfenced streams of funding that support capacity: both in terms of staffing and infrastructure.

There is funding available to support the development and update of key infrastructure: the Research Capital Investment Fund in England supports new infrastructure at provider or consortium level, while larger assets that are offered to the whole sector are supported by research councils directly as national (or international) resources).

What’s not generally on offer to providers is funding for research infrastructure maintenance. Maintaining buildings, equipment, and other assets is a complicated undertaking, involving everything from dedicated specialist staff to manage day-to-day use and upkeep, to large investments in upgrading or repairing what we have to make it fit for use. This generally comes from general, non-ringfenced, university funding – something which is notably scarce and difficult to secure.

It is capital spending that presents a particular problem – finance is harder to come by for all but the most famous universities, and when it is available there are numerous competing uses that support (for example) the student experience, environmental upgrading (leading to cheaper energy costs in the longer term), or addressing a backlog in other parts of the estate.

Research England found that (of 69 providers who responded) 25 per cent of the research estate is in condition C (major repairs needed in the next three years) or D (inoperable or in immediate danger of major failure) – 17 of these providers reported that half or more of their research estate is in one of these two categories.

The practical consequences of this state of affairs is that outdated and poorly maintained facilities are restricting the type and quality of research that can be performed, making it harder to attract funding and talent, contributing to rising energy or consumables costs, and posing safety risks. Problems with research infrastructure, due to the very specialist and complex nature of maintenance and repair, have a knock on effect on the ability of universities to maintain other parts of their estate.

Though the immediate risk is at provider level, when added up these findings constitute evidence of a severe sector-level risk. Quantifying this risk is very difficult – providers are not required to submit data to the Estates Management Record (familiar from the HESA Estates open dataset, and AUDE’s annual report), and the coverage of the condition of the estate survey (COTE) that was supported by this discrete Research England project is similarly limited. Even this report gives us the state of play round about the end of the 2023-24 academic year (at best). There is no comprehensive or timely source of data on university estates: and thus no data on the sector’s research capacity.

Likewise, HESA’s finance data doesn’t reliably split out the research estate – we do learn that investment in non-residential estates capital expenditure has fallen by 34 per cent between 2017-18 and 2022-23, while the cost of maintenance has grown bj just 2 per cent (substantially below inflation for that period).

As best as we can tell, the maintenance debt is largely found in research-intensive providers, with a larger research estate simply requiring more investment – 6 of the 17 providers with more than half of their research estate in a critical condition are in TRAC group A (which includes the majority of Russell Group universities. While the evidence points to a prolonged period of underinvestment across the sector, it is likely that the effects of this are unevenly distributed. The impact of an older estate – which could mean either 1960s buildings riddled with RAAC and asbestos, or ancient listed buildings with their own challenges and constraints for modern research – is also uneven.

It is clear that RCIF and similar institutional funding will not, by itself, be enough to remedy the issues that exist. Research England is exploring how future funding allocations can support the resilience of the estate in a wider way. There will be enhancements to benchmarking to support an ongoing understanding of the condition of the estate, but this stops short of a recommendation to gather timely and comprehensive data – even RE itself does not intent to undertake further analysis, which feels like something of a missed opportunity that will mean that the difficult decisions to come will be made more difficult by a lack of robust evidence.