UKRI responds on research infrastructure

The eye-opening statistic in the National Audit Office’s report on research infrastructure in March was that it would cost in the order of £5.6bn to restore university-owned research infrastructure to a “fully operational condition”.

This estimate came via Research England, presumably via its (still not publicly shared) Condition of the Estate survey from 2024. The funder also calculated that English universities were spending around £1.8bn on research infrastructure, including more than £750m on maintenance.

This sat awkwardly with things like the Research Capital Investment Fund being “tapered” over the spending review period – but helped explained some of the other changes we’re seeing to how UKRI provides block funding for research, which will be refocused on maintenance alone rather than new equipment and facilities.

As is the way with these things, the NAO report begot a House of Commons Public Accounts Committee hearing, in which the £5.6bn restoration price tag had an airing. UKRI chief executive Ian Chapman was pretty clear in response:

The report rightly acknowledges that to maintain the existing estate we have a deficit. What it doesn’t assess is whether we want to maintain that existing estate, all the infrastructure that currently exists at the moment. But we should be constantly making active priority decisions, saying ‘that investment that we made 20 years ago – do we want to maintain that piece of infrastructure, or do we want to offboard it?’

He added:

The portfolio of things that we want to maintain is smaller than that number [the £5.6bn figure] and therefore, we think, is manageable within our settlements.

Oddly enough, this came in response to a question from Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe (who the Conservatives ceded a committee place to, presumably to annoy Reform). He had arrived at the conclusion that the issue at hand was not whether DSIT/UKRI funding for university-owned research infrastructure was sufficient, but rather whether universities were secretly spending their infrastructure funding on other things and neglecting their labs.

“The committee wants to know that taxpayers’ money is being spent well,” Lowe said, and ensure that said money wasn’t “just disappearing into a woke university abstract experiment.” A thorough piece of prior investigation on his part had determined that UK universities are employing staff in roles such as “senior continuous improvement manager, associate director of belonging and engagement, events and experiential learning officer, immigration compliance associate” – was this where the missing billions was ending up? (Odd too to hear that UKVI compliance staff are on the Restore Britain shitlist, but we are where we are.)

Chapman’s comments on being more strategic with investments were the central takeaway from the hearing, for those wondering how UKRI sees the appropriate response to the £5.6bn figure – which is somewhat ironic given said figure came out of Research England’s work to better understand costs. The argument about the bill being manageable if UKRI can prioritise effectively is, however, in keeping with the shift towards a greater use of competitive calls for capital funds that was announced in March. It would also seem to suggest that quite a lot of “offboarding” will be needed.

Much of the remainder of the session looked at challenges with specific capital projects, drawing in particular on representations from the physics community which have successfully kept the pressure up on likely reductions in spending, even if UKRI and STFC are still not quite yet in a position to give definite answers.

The written evidence submitted to the inquiry is well worth a look too, and speak to the issues around competitive funding for infrastructure more than the hearing ended up doing. Universities UK stresses that, even if the Research Capital Investment Fund is restricted to maintenance, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it actually covers maintenance costs: “the scale of the backlog is such that the current RCIF envelope is insufficient to prevent it from growing larger.”

On a shift towards a more competitive landscape for infrastructure investment, the representative body argues that this “increases uncertainty for universities that need to plan infrastructure investment alongside staff investment over several years.” The Russell Group’s submission also pushes for UKRI to restore levels of formula-based capital, saying that increasing reliance on competitive calls “risks leaving parts of the research ecosystem under-supported.”

Elsewhere a joint submission from various sector bodies (UPEN, UKCGE, UK ITSS and various others) makes the case that thinking about infrastructure can’t be separated from thinking about staff and conditions – “soft infrastructure”:

We recognise that DSIT and UKRI have improved their understanding of the UK’s physical and digital research infrastructure landscape, including future needs in areas such as advanced computing and major facilities. However, our experience suggests that DSIT’s current approach to research infrastructure does not fully reflect the broader system, capabilities, and workforce upon which that structure relies.

There’s plenty more in there that’s worth a read, though regrettably it doesn’t seem to be in keeping with the big-kit-for-industrial-strategy framing that’s currently finding favour in government.