Will UKRI’s funding buckets shore up UK research’s sandcastle?

Patrick Vallance’s “three buckets” model for UK science began life as a workaday metaphor to frame how the country spends about £20 billion of public money on research and innovation every year. Funding flowed to “basic, curiosity-driven, investigator-led research”, “applied research” and “R&D-intensive companies”, the science minister told MPs just over a year ago, adding he wanted to be “clearer going forward what proportion we are putting” into each.

But the mundanity of Vallance’s metaphor belied an impact that is now becoming clear, as the funder pauses and redirects funding streams according to which bucket it thinks they belong in – prompting pandemonium in the research community.

Structural reforms to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), announced in December, are “the biggest upheaval in UK government research funding since the 1980s,” contends Richard Jones, emeritus professor of materials physics and innovation policy at the University of Manchester. In the intervening decades, he said, “we’ve had a system [whereby] research councils…have essentially been given a pot of money and told to go away and deliver against some quite general outcomes. This [bucket-focused system] is a much more hands-on, state-led approach to funding research.”

The result is that UKRI has outlined future budgets “by R&D buckets”: £3.7 billion for curiosity-driven research (bucket one) in 2026-27, £1.9 billion for “strategic government and societal priorities” (bucket two) and £1.6 billion for “supporting innovative companies” (bucket three) – rising to £1.9 billion by the end of the current spending period in 2029-30. A fourth bucket for “enabling and strengthening UK R&D” will receive £2 billion a year to cover infrastructure and doctoral spending, among other things.

In practice, this means researchers will be able to bid for about £815 million of applicant-led funding this year, rising to £866 million by 2029-30 overseen by the research councils. Meanwhile, a similar amount will be available from cross-UKRI programmes focused on bucket-two priority areas, including life sciences, quantum technology and defence and national security.

The move to have each industrial strategy sector overseen by a “senior responsible owner” drawn from UKRI’s executive chairs represents a significant shift but is in tune with the spirit of the legislation in 2017 that created the umbrella body to bring more strategic direction to science funding, explained Jones.

The legislation followed a report by Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse, published earlier, which called for the creation of an overarching body to better coordinate the individual research councils’ strategies, encourage interdisciplinary working and provide one voice to government. “If [we] don’t get closer to government, we’ll see our budget [fall] away,” he said at the press conference launching his report in 2015.

But although UKRI was created, the government “never really got round” to driving the greater integration that Nurse envisaged “even though it had the power”, Jones said. “Now we have a science minister who knows the system inside out and has strong views on how research funding should be spent. There are dangers with governments having control over research budgets, but I don’t think it’s illegitimate for democratically elected governments to set broad, strategic aims for research.”

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Yet the announcement of UKRI’s shake-up of funding structures has not gone smoothly so far. Last month, sector bodies condemned “devastating” news that the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is seeking to find annual savings of £162 million by 2029-30, with executive chair Michelle Dougherty stating that the resulting 30 per cent drop in grants available to physics and astronomy researchers reflected Labour’s desire to “deliver more applied and targeted research towards strategic government priorities and innovation”. Researchers have reportedly been asked to model how they could cut their active research budgets by up to 60 per cent.

UKRI’s chief executive, Ian Chapman, told MPs that the efficiency measures would have happened regardless of the structural changes because they are mostly due to unforeseen increases in energy bills and currency fluctuations that have pushed up the higher cost of subscriptions to major international projects such as Cern – as well as overambitious commitments to future projects by the council.

But it isn’t just big physics that has been thrown into high panic recently. The suspension of applications to grants schemes conducted by the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) – plus limits imposed on approvals to bids already in the system – have heightened concerns the rearrangement of funding streams may reduce funding to fundamental research.

Bucket-one funding is scheduled to decrease as a proportion of the whole anyway, from 40 to 36 per cent – or from 51 to 48 per cent when bucket-four infrastructure funding is excluded. But while the stated curiosity-driven budgets for most of the research councils, including the EPSRC, are higher than those set out in their 2022-25 delivery plans, those for the MRC and BBSRC are considerably lower. For instance, the budget for the MRC in 2026-27 is put at £113 million, compared with the “close to £200 million” per year stipulated in its delivery plan for 2022-25 for “discovery research”. At the BBSRC, the drop is from “over £150 million” in “investigator-driven research projects” to £112 million. UKRI has stated that the difference will be made up by cross-council funding sources, but the lack of detail has made researchers in bioscience very nervous, particularly given the grant application pause – which, in the MRC’s case, will last until at least the summer.

Moreover, those pauses have already been “immensely damaging”, according to Mark Hanson, a Wellcome Early Career fellow at the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation.

“There are many scientific groups that straddle both [curiosity-driven and strategic priorities] pools, so to suddenly cut both of them leaves the entire UK molecular biosciences field in the lurch,” he explained.

“Even a one-year delay is immensely damaging in long-term consequences as staff will fail to be retained, and even if new staff are hired, there will be a loss of expertise if they cannot overlap with existing staff for sufficient time,” continued Hanson, adding that UKRI “must get the MRC responsive mode online as soon as possible if the UK research community is going to weather this unnecessary and chaotic storm”.

Writing for Times Higher Education, a mid-career scientist in UK bioscience noted that given the precarity of staff without permanent contracts, “What might register merely as an irritating delay for a senior professor can translate into stalled contracts, a thinning CV and a destabilised career for those in the middle.” This means that UK-based researchers might choose to relocate to “systems that offer longer grant durations, larger awards or more predictable funding environments”, the researcher warned.

Chapman has urged the sector to focus on UKRI’s record settlement in November’s Spending Review, which will see its budget rise to just under £10 billion by 2030, and he has promised that “curiosity-driven research is protected overall”. However, there remain concerns about whether the strategic rearrangement of funding might reduce university income in less obvious ways.

The biggest concern, for many, centres on the £2 billion annual allocation of quality-related (QR) funding in England, and its equivalents elsewhere in the UK. This has been assigned entirely to the curiosity-led bucket one, despite the fact that universities use this cash for all sorts of activities – everything from PhD studentships and policy engagement to EDI offices and building laboratories. Since impact case studies account for 25 per cent of an institution’s score in the Research Excellence Framework, on which QR allocations are based, a sizeable chunk of QR is also focused on applied research, critics note.

“Classifying all of this as ‘curiosity-driven’ is a massive fudge,” observed Ben Johnson, a former ministerial adviser on science and now professor of practice in research and innovation policy at the University of Strathclyde, in a lengthy Substack post on the buckets model. Instead, QR should be “recognised as multi-bucket funding”. And if it must be confined to one bucket, its status as “the closest thing the system has to a genuinely enabling and strengthening investment” in research capacity means it should go in bucket four. “Classifying it alongside infrastructure, talent, and facilities would better reflect what it actually does,” Johnson concluded.

For his part, Chapman seems comfortable with the idea that the buckets are mutually leaky, telling the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee at the start of February that QR goes “in multiple different directions”. Yet he insisted that the 50-25-25 split in funding unveiled for buckets one, two and three announced in December will not dramatically change the direction of UK research funding, referring to “high-level mapping” of the current system that he promised to share with the committee.

Yet experts remain concerned that fuzzy terminology could be used to mislabel applied research streams as fundamental research, skewing the university system towards government-set objectives.

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“The phrase ‘curiosity‑driven’ or ‘investigator‑led’ needs to be clearly defined or dropped,” said Kirsty Grainger, director of research and impact services at the University of Bath, who was previously head of strategy: careers and culture at UKRI. “Better terminology might be ‘disciplinary’ (bucket one) and ‘thematic’ (bucket two),” she suggested.

But even if UKRI adopts clearer definitions and protects blue-sky research, other risks remain, warned Grainger. For instance, “How will health of discipline be monitored and protected?” she asked. With research council grants often crucial for supporting the research base in disciplines that might not fall neatly into government or societal priorities, reducing council budgets could have knock-on effects, Grainger noted: “What happens if the level of project funding needed to sustain critical disciplinary skills capacity in the UK drops below what [UKRI provides]?”

Another question is how we would even know that had happened. “The new structure doesn’t let us clearly assess total disciplinary investment…upfront or help us understand the potential consequences for the health of disciplines [of any proposed changes],” she said.

Moreover, Chapman’s plan to slim down research councils’ own operating budgets could leave them “depleted” in other ways, “particularly in terms of people, experience and expertise”, Grainger worries, noting that councils “have an umbrella view across their patches that individual academics don’t have”.

“They go beyond operational delivery with their expert insights and understanding of their areas, which allows them to add value by creating connections across academia, government, industry and internationally,” said Grainger.

Chapman insists that greater transparency in the “link from mission to delivery” will arise from having a single person owning a portfolio of research investments – such as EPSRC executive chair Charlotte Deane’s oversight of UKRI’s £1.6 billion AI programme. Previously, such research was scattered across different councils, resulting “in the worst cases, [in] duplicative or orthogonal” programmes of inquiry.

Yet requiring executive chairs to wear two or more hats – as research council heads as well as owners of areas of industrial strategy – raises the risk of conflicts of interest, for both individuals and councils, said John Womersley, a former STFC executive chair.

“What Ian Chapman seems to be trying to do is deliver a structural change in funding without changing the structure of UKRI, and that’s going to be very hard,” said Womersley, speaking in a personal capacity.  

“I have argued before that the simplest and clearest way to deliver these three buckets would be to reorganise UKRI into three separate entities, each of which could then focus on doing one thing well. Reportedly, though, he has ruled out any near-term structural changes to UKRI.”

Meanwhile, the rationale for the changes is “getting muddled up by what is happening to curiosity-led research, especially in fundamental physics and astronomy”, said Womersley. Describing Chapman’s explanation for the cuts at STFC as merely the result of rising costs as “confusing at best”, he said the lack of clarity “undermines UKRI’s ability to tell a coherent narrative about what the new funding model will look like”, Womersley believes.

Chapman conceded, under questioning from MPs, that UKRI had “not done a good job” of communicating how funding allocations to different research councils would change – but blamed “leaks” from within the organisation for forcing it to “rush communications out when we had not done…engagement” with researchers, causing “upset and uncertainty”.

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Uncertainties about the new funding architecture certainly abound – in particular, around the very real question of who will win or lose from the changes. Yet continuing with the previous system would have held even greater risks given the need for a clearer articulation of the political case for science funding, observed Manchester’s Jones.

“We’ve had a long period of consensus on increasing research funding, but I feel increasingly nervous about this,” he said. “The economy is not really working and political divisions are growing – this is a world of uncertainties and I don’t feel we can take support for granted.”

Yet Jones also acknowledged that Vallance’s grand plan to hand politicians more power over research directions will not necessarily increase their inclination to protect research budgets – and could spectacularly backfire. With Reform UK consistently leading in UK opinion polls and modelling itself on a US administration that has attempted to slash research spending, many will be sceptical that the four-buckets model will protect UK science’s sandcastle from being undermined by an incoming tide of anti-expert populism.

Vallance – the former UCL medical dean turned Covid-era chief government scientific adviser – is “hugely respected and highly qualified to make these changes – you cannot accuse him of not acting for the very best of reasons”, Jones said. “But I’d be less confident in saying a future government will use these new powers over research so wisely.”