Robin Bisson

@robinbisson.bsky.social

964 Followers 898 Following

UK News Editor, @resprofnews.bsky.social. Mostly #researchpolicy, #researchfunding, #highered. British Journalism Awards finalist. Once likened to Tintin. Also into rivers. Tip? robin.bisson@clarivate.com

In order to remain sustainable, STFC must make significant cumulative savings: a decrease of £162 million relative to our forecasts for their operational costs. The £162 million is the total net reduction in STFC’s annual costs that they must achieve by the end of the 2029 and 2030 financial year. It is not a £162 million saving in each year of the current SR period. Instead, STFC needs to reshape its cost base
current weight of evidence does not suggest that Partial Randomisation is a highly impactful and effective tool for achieving bias reduction, novelty, efficiency, or greater fairness
Instead, panels chosen from the college of experts will triage which grants should go through to peer review, after which “they’ll all get invited to interview, and we anticipate that the success rate at interview will be between a third and a half”. “This makes the system faster and a lot more efficient,” he said.
“MRC researchers will benefit from the life sciences budget that has been allocated [and will] also benefit from other critical techs [such as] engineering biology and AI,” Chinnery said. “My job, the job of our teams at MRC, is to make sure that our research community benefits from these other resources that are coming into UKRI in this record settlement that we’ve landed, tapping into those technologies.”
“It is still going to be down a bit compared [with] where it was—it is part and parcel of redirecting and readjusting our funding into some of the other buckets and preparing those schemes in order to allow bucket two to deliver.”
Lopez told RPN: “The Conservative pledge to direct £2bn per year of UKRI funding into a Sovereign Defence Fund to develop dual use technologies does not represent a funding cut but rather an urgently needed redeployment of public funds into research and development projects that are in our national security interests. “As the world becomes ever more dangerous, we are clear that we need to focus our remarkable British scientific and technological capabilities more explicitly on defence.”
Universities are still the top destination for public R&D funds, but spending within government departments is catching up
Much of the rise in R&D spending has taken place outside UKRI and higher education funding bodies
Government expenditure on R&D has risen more rapidly in real terms from 2022 than pre-pandemic
“I look at that with concern because, with the large investment that UK taxpayers have put into SKAO, surely the follow-on—the funding of the students, of the astronomy—must be there,” he said.
Speaking to Research Professional News, Marcus Munafò, deputy vice-chancellor and provost at the University of Bath, said: “I think there’s a risk we could end up in a situation where some technologies or certain disciplines fall off a cliff—go past a certain threshold because they don’t have a critical mass of funding to support them. “That bit seems to be missing from the debate; we need to think about the research ecosystem as national capability and infrastructure that we need to keep healthy to allow us to react to unknown scenarios in the future.”
over the last five years, inflationary pressures have increased STFC’s total costs by an estimated £136 million per annum compared to financial year 2021 to 2022 this includes £50 million of increased costs per annum for access to international infrastructures, split roughly fifty-fifty between unfavourable movements in foreign exchange rates and subscription costs the remaining £86 million includes further cost increases in the rest of STFC’s portfolio, split between staff costs (£34 million), grants (£16 million), utilities (£7 million), net operational costs (£6 million) and inflation on capital (£23 million)
“Researchers like ourselves, whose curiosity-led fundamental and applied research is funded by other funding councils, rely on STFC-operated facilities,” they wrote. “Without continued access to these facilities, significant areas of UKRI-funded research simply could not proceed.”
UKRI's overall budget is increasing and is forecast to outstrip inflation
Inflation has piled pressure on STFC's budget, which has stayed relatively flat in cash terms
Student visa applications have been down in most months of the year
Applications over a 12-month period have dropped after rallying in 2025
Monthly visa applications have been lower, year-on-year, since October 2025