UKRI
UK public body funding research and innovation across nine councils including Innovate UK.
UKRI confirmed on 9 July 2026 that the Science and Technology Facilities Council's national laboratories would lose 58% of their funding over four years, a move it defends as reallocation but the Institute of Physics calls a genuine loss of capacity.
Last refreshed: 31 July 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Is UKRI reallocating record funding or quietly gutting scientific breadth?
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UKRI has run nine formerly separate research councils under one roof since 2018, among them Innovate UK, the ESRC, the EPSRC and the STFC. Roughly £8bn passes through UKRI each year on its way to those nine councils, all answering ultimately to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
The agency's role is to allocate that flat, record-level settlement across competing scientific priorities, a task that inevitably produces winners and losers between councils and between facility maintenance and frontier research. Its own annual state of The Nation reporting and public settlements are watched closely by the research community, Parliament and industry alike, since UKRI's allocation choices shape which fields of British Science and innovation grow and which contract.
Lab funding cuts draw fresh scrutiny
UKRI confirmed on 9 July that Science and Technology Facilities Council funding for national laboratories will fall 58% over four years, mothballing the Clara electron-beam facility at Harwell and cutting multidisciplinary-facilities funding by 15%, a reduction it values at £162m by 2029/30; other UKRI councils are redirecting more than £100m to soften the transition.
Chief executive Sir Ian Chapman defended the settlement as reallocation within a flat, record-level budget when Lords peers questioned him on 14 July, five days after the cut was confirmed; UKRI is expected to publish a new strategy shortly, the test of whether that framing survives scrutiny from bodies such as the Institute of Physics.
Grant funding concentrates on fewer bets
UKRI's Innovate UK Arm replaced open grant competitions with a DARPA-style portfolio model in April 2026, scouting deep-tech companies across six priority sectors instead of running broad open rounds.
The result shows in the numbers: UK grant awards fell to their lowest count since 2016, even as the average award size rose almost 11% to £423,000, evidence that UKRI's councils are backing fewer companies with larger cheques rather than retreating from funding altogether.