CaSE in 2025 – Director’s address to the AGM

Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us for CaSE’s 2025 Annual General Meeting.

This has been my first full year as Executive Director. On a personal level, it’s been an absolutely fascinating year, and I’ve learned a lot. There are many people to thank and recognise but before I start this update I would like to make a particular reference to the CaSE team. You will all be aware that we are a small team, I feel, and I hope you feel, we have a massive impact. That impact is because we have an exceptional group of intelligent, hardworking and kind people in the team. I am enormously proud to be able to represent the work we have done over the last year.

Context

I want to begin by recognising the context in which we’ve been working in. For the R&D sector this has been a challenging year. Since I spoke to you last year in November, we’ve had the bedding in of a new government, as well as significant changes politically, which you might want to talk about later. We’ve had financial pressures on the system, particularly universities that are under lots of financial stress, but also affecting many parts of the sector. We’re also facing geopolitical instability, particularly when we look at what’s happening in the US and the impact on R&D and R&D investment.

It’s been a really tough time for many parts of the R&D sector and our members. The clear need for CaSE and our work is more important than ever.

Policy and Public Opinion combined

A key step change for us as a team and as an organisation this year has been the integration of our policy work, which we’ve been known for for many years, and our public opinion work. When I spoke to you a year ago, a few days before the 2024 AGM, we had just been awarded, after a lot of hard work to secure it, a new £2.7 million grant from Wellcome to expand our public opinion research.

This is a major endorsement—not only of CaSE’s capability and expertise, but of the importance of understanding the public’s relationship with R&D.

As a team we have seen the value of our public opinion work to make our messaging to politicians much more compelling and impactful. It has given us insights that can now drive some of our policy work – as well as contribute to it. We have also found a massive appetite from the R&D community for this research.

Early this year as a team, we launched our refreshed organisational strategy. It sets a clear purpose and values and also combines our public opinion work with our policy work. We’ve used the strategy internally to create a clear framework for how we plan and manage our work, which makes us more streamlined and focused in what we do.

Our work this year

Now I’m going to cover some of the work we’ve done this year. I won’t be able to cover all of it, but I just wanted to give you some highlights.

Government Missions

Firstly, we worked on key political milestones. As I’m sure that you’ll all be aware, the government launched, and were talking a lot about, their missions early in the year. We also had the major fiscal event, the spending review.

A really important piece of work this year has been helping the government, and also the broader sector, understand how R&D can support the government missions. We went to Cambridge, Bath, Manchester, Edinburgh, to talk to our members and our partners to gather evidence so that we could explain and describe how R&D can contribute to the missions.

This work fed directly into our Mission Critical R&D report, which integrates not only policy evidence but – for the first time – public attitudes data on the missions. The report was well received and recognised by Treasury and DSIT – and it fed into our spending review submission.

Spending Review

We were highly active in shaping the Spending Review. Our formal submission was developed through extensive discussion with members. It set out clear recommendations on areas including public investment, regional growth, research sustainability

We provided intelligence and advice to our members to help them advocate. We have also updated our internal modelling tools so that we could rapidly analyse the impact of the final settlement on public R&D investment. The reason I wanted to mention that is the team, as you’ll know, provided a brilliant briefing to our membership to explain the impact of the spending review.

When we talk to our members, when we talk to our partners, people really value those analyses and briefings. You all know when you get a very long government document of potentially hundreds of pages, our team will look at that, analyse it, synthesise it and pull out the relevant issues for the community.

Economic analysis

Another key highlight was the publication of the economic analysis report we did in partnership with the British Academy, this has been an ongoing piece of work – published in July

We co-commissioned a report by Cambridge Econometrics which looks at the economic return of UK R&D. It looked at ten different technologies and where the UK captures value as well as the barriers in each sector.

Our joint briefing based on the report, Mapping the Economic Returns of R&D, has been shared widely and discussed across government.

Long-term budgets for R&D

In May this year government published guidance on ten-year R&D budgets. We were pleased that many of our recommendations were explicitly adopted. These recommendations were based on a roundtable we ran with representatives from across the UK R&D sector including treasury and DSIT, funders and recipients of large grants. At those roundtables, we looked at the opportunities, but also the real challenges of long-term investment.

This is an example of CaSE influencing the structure of UK R&D support for the long term.

I mentioned at the beginning some of the challenges for the sector, and I just wanted to touch on two of these, which are around university finances, which has been a massive issue, and immigration and visas.

Challenges for Universities

As I mentioned in my introduction one of the key challenges for the sector this year has been the financial pressures on universities.

Universities, and many of you on the call will have experienced , have been facing acute financial stress this year. We worked with Universities UK (UUK), and through one of our board members, the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) to publish a briefing, Research at Risk.

This report highlights how financial pressures are already shrinking research capacity in the UK. Our evidence was circulated by the Education Select Committee ahead of its April hearing on university funding.

Immigration and talent

The other theme around immigration and talent is something we’ve been working on for a number of years now. It was a significant focus in the last year.

You’ll all recognise this is a big challenge for the sector given the importance of international researchers’ contributions in the R&D process, and the very sensitive political debate we have at the moment around immigration.

We did a number of activities. We coordinated a cross-sector letter with 36 other organisations to reach targeted MPs ahead of the Immigration White Paper

We also produced a major evidence-based briefing on visa barriers, including testimonials from 15 research organisations. It’s very hard to get that type of evidence because people don’t want to talk about it. We’re proud of that piece of work and have had lots of good feedback on its impact.

Alongside this we developed a new communications guide on how to speak about researcher immigration in ways that genuinely resonate with the public, especially those with more sceptical views. As you can imagine that’s a very live issue at the moment.

I think that’s another great example of how we’ve used public opinion work deeply in our analytical policy work. We brought those together to create a strong message that’s definitely working.

Public Opinion

I want to talk now about our public opinion work. As I have said, many of our projects are now combing policy and public opinion, which is proving very powerful and effective.

I can genuinely say that CaSE is now a national leader in evidence around public attitudes to R&D, and it is central to our impact.

Two weeks ago today we launched our landmark study, Public Attitudes to R&D 2025. This is a substantial piece of work that has received a lot of interest and attention. It builds on our previous public opinion work, and we have launched this major new study which will be repeated in 2028 to track attitudes to R&D over time.

To ensure we poll the most relevant issues, the team engaged extensively with our members and right across the sector before the summer. We spoke to 50 different organisations, making sure that we were asking the right questions in our polls because we know we’re going to be asking them again.

Working with our research partner ICARO we have now polled 8,000 UK adultsandrun 8 in-person focus groups across the four nations of UK. I got to sit in one of those focus groups in Edinburgh, and it’s absolutely fascinating hearing firsthand how the public feel. We also run 20 in-depth interviews with individuals as well.

The final report was launched at an event two weeks ago, with Julia Gillard, the Chair of Wellcome and previous prime minister of Australia. She was very enthusiastic about the work and has since talked about it at at least two other events.

There are lots of important and interesting findings, but the main thrust of the work is that public support for R&D is broad but shallow. There is support for investment into R&D, but society’s connection to R&D is worryingly weak, and many struggle to see or feel the benefits it brings.

I think there’s a lot more work we need to do around this, and we’ll be following up in the coming months. Please do have a look at this great piece of work.

Next steps – what’s in the pipeline?

In terms of next steps, there are lots of plans in the pipeline, but I wanted to mention three of them.

Devolved nation elections

The first one is our work on the devolved nations elections. We officially launched the project in September. This project builds on the successful work we did for last year’s General Election. The aim will be to raise the profile of R&D with politicians in the upcoming elections in Scotland and Wales.

I have to give enormous credit to the team. Through a lot of hard work, we have secured £66,000 in external sponsorship to help fund the public attitudes research in Scotland and Wales, from 8 excellent sponsors based in – or with a strong connection to – the two nations. A remarkable level of support given the challenging fiscal environment all are facing at the moment.

This will be a major project for next year.

Future political landscape

Secondly, we are also launching a project on the future political landscape for R&D.

We are keen to build on the Public Attitudes to R&D 2025 study to explore shifting voter preferences and how this affects our members, R&D organisations and their advocacy.

The study will explore anti-R&D sentiment, polarisation and trigger issues. The results will be published in a politically neutral report next year.

CaSE’s 40^th anniversary

The other important highlight next year is that CaSE is going to be 40 years old. We will be holding our 40^th anniversary celebration on 10^th Feb – with some great speakers including the new CEO of UKRI – Prof Sir Ian Chapman. As part of our 40^th anniversary, as well as CaSE’s legacy and what’s happened in the last 40 years, we wanted to look forward.

We have launched a major piece of work called Reimagining R&D. This is about us looking ahead 20 years to think about global and national trends and how we can position the UK R&D sector to be prepared for that future.

The team have done extensive work talking to people across the UK and doing desk research to map out global drivers. We have just held two workshops to look at the future of the R&D sector and how we create a roadmap to get there

That work is ongoing and will be published next year.

Membership and communications

I’m getting near the end because I know I’ll be talking a lot, but just quickly to mention membership and communications.

Membership

This year, I know I keep saying this, but it’s been really tight financially for so many people, and our members, and a lot of them have faced some really tough financial decisions this year. Many of them have lost staff. Some of them have even lost departments.

We have had to work extremely hard to keep members on board.

Overall, we saw a drop in actual member numbers but the members we have lost have tended to be smaller organisations and the new members we have brought on board have been larger – so overall we have brought in a fairly steady income level. Given the pressures on the system, I think this has been a great achievement. I am really proud of the team for because it’s been it’s been a hard year.

This year we have been joined by a new membership officer, Albert Ensor-Clinch. That has grown capacity in the membership team. We’re excited to have the opportunity to do more with our members. 

Over the last few months, we’ve been running events across the country, including in Glasgow, Oxford, and Leeds. We did this to engage with our members and discuss how to make the most value of CaSE membership.  And we look forward to continuing these events into the next year, the first one in 2026 will be in Wales.

We have also been looking to improve our membership processes, starting with membership renewal, to make it a smoother process for members, and better and clearer for us financially.

Communications

Our communications manager has worked very hard to cover the phenomenal portfolio of outputs CaSE has generated this year.

Output has included nearly 70 analysis articles and a dozen reports or briefings, on all of the topics you have heard me discuss so far

We continued to see excellent pick up of our work and commentary in the national and trade press. A particular personal highlight was having an appearance on BBC Radio 4, because I love Radio 4, so that was exciting. I appeared on Inside Science to discuss the Spending Review in June.

On a logistical level, we have also changed the systems we use to stay in touch with our members and others interested in our work. I hope you have noticed an increased consistency in style and greater insight from across the team this year. 

The profile of our work has been very high this year. Particularly due to the impact of the public attitudes work.

Throughout the year we’ve held meetings with MPs, ministers, and civil servants across DSIT, Treasury, DBT, UKRI and others; spoken at major events and represented CaSE in a wide range of roundtables and advisory forums.

Just yesterday, I was invited to a DSIT roundtable chaired by Patrick Vallance, with Ian Chapman, to discuss their future approach to investing in UK R&D. In the afternoon I attended UKRI’s innovation summit and spoke as a panellist on the opening discussion panel with Patrick Vallance.

Thanks

I haven’t covered everything, but I hope you can hear from this that CaSE has delivered an extraordinary programme of work between November 2024 and 2025. In a challenging environment.

I want to thank our members for your expertise, your engagement, and your continued belief in CaSE and our team. Your support is what makes this work possible.

Special thanks to City St George’s, and particularly Anthony Finkelstein – who provide us with office space and lots of support.

A big thank you to our Board members for their time and commitment, and of course our Chair Bob Sorrell.

And a heartfelt thank you to the fantastic CaSE team, who are amazing and continue to impress me in so many ways. I didn’t mention all their individual names, but every member of the team has worked so hard this year.

My very last thank you is to Sinead, David, and Catherine who leave our Board this year and have all been great in so many ways. I wanted to give a special thanks to David because I can’t tell you how much time he has devoted to CaSE, and for his support and wisdom and his extreme, it’s the only words I put in capitals on my note, generosity for his time and his knowledge.

We look forward to working with all of you in the year ahead.

Thank you.