Boris Johnson wants the UK to be a science superpower. Part of his plan is to set up a new funding agency, loosely based on the much-praised Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the US. This agency, strongly pushed by the Prime Minister’s adviser Dominic Cummings, will back high-risk, high-payoff projects with minimal bureaucratic control. But there is another part of the science and innovation landscape where at least as much attention is needed as any new proposed agency.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) was set up in 2017 to bring together all the government bodies that use public money to support research and development. These are: the seven research councils that fund academic science in disciplines such as medicine or engineering; Innovate UK, which backs mainly R&D projects in industry; and Research England, which provides grants for universities and encourages the sharing of information.
With a combined budget of over £7 billion a year, UKRI dwarfs the proposed agency, which has been allocated £800 million over a five-year period. The ARPA initiative is an experiment in research funding that may or may not succeed, as explored in Policy Exchange’s recent paper Visions of ARPA. But if UKRI itself does not work well, the consequences will be much more serious.
The US is fortunate in having a range of research funding agencies, each with its own mission and approval criteria
Theresa May’s decision to set up the body was controversial. The scientific community was uneasy about what was seen as the over-centralisation of science policy. There was concern among the research councils (especially, but not only, the Medical Research Council, which has a long and distinguished history as a semi-independent agency) about the loss of their autonomy; they would all have to compete for the same pot of money. The government claimed that the new structure would facilitate interdisciplinary research and that closer links between research councils and Innovate UK would encourage the commercialisation of academic discoveries. It would provide ‘a strengthened, unified voice for the UK’s research and innovation funding system’. In its first two years, UKRI has been responsible for several big government-inspired programmes. The most notable being the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, in which the research councils and Innovate UK are working together more closely than might have been possible under the old arrangements.
But there is a good deal of unhappiness among scientists and researchers about the way UKRI operates, mainly on the grounds that it is too bureaucratic and slow-moving. These complaints were reflected in the government’s recently published Research and Development Roadmap. Although this document did not specifically blame UKRI, it acknowledged that there was excessive bureaucracy in the UK research system:
It can take too long for funding or approval decisions to be made and scientists are distracted from doing what they do best: science… Researchers tell us that there is not sufficient funding for truly transformational opportunities, alongside other barriers to interdisciplinary research. Constrained resources require them to spend excessive time competing for funding, sometimes focusing on “safe” research topics rather than bold new ideas that can have the greatest long-term impacts on knowledge and society.
The newly appointed chief executive of UKRI, Dame Ottoline Leyser (a professor of plant development at Cambridge University), will no doubt look for ways of meeting these criticisms. But a large part of UKRI’s problem lies not in its internal processes but in its relations with its sponsor, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
Although the Department for Business does not interfere in decisions about which universities or companies should receive funds for specific projects, it controls the overall distribution of funds among the various constituents of UKRI. Its approval is required for all salaries above £100,000. Any new venture initiated by UKRI that would call for additional resources or the diversion of funds from other programmes has to be signed off by ministers, and this can take a long time. Innovate UK has very little flexibility to invest in programmes that are not driven by ministers.
Getting the balance right between independence and accountability to taxpayers (and politicians) is a long-standing problem for government-supported research funding agencies. In the US, for example, the federal agency that supports research in non-medical fields, is less adventurous in its research grants than a private funder such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Such bodies can take risks more easily and give outstanding scientists greater freedom to decide how best to pursue their research objectives. But the US is fortunate in having a range of research funding agencies, each with its own mission and approval criteria; scientists who are turned down by one agency can often apply to another.
In the UK, where such a large proportion of science funding is now channelled through a single organisation, it is all the more important that it is not hemmed in by too many administrative or political constraints. For Dominic Cummings, one of the attractions of the new ARPA-like agency is that it will be largely free of such constraints. The same approach could usefully be applied to UKRI.
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