Update on the new UKRI strategy and delivery plan

It has been a busy week for UKRI with the announcement of the results of the ‘prioritisation’ exercise for the STFC last Thursday and then the publication of the new UKRI strategy on Monday. Alongside the strategy, UKRI also published a delivery plan for financial year 2026-27.

CaSE has taken a look at the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) strategy and, in particular, its delivery plan to pull out a few initial thoughts.

Curiosity-led research

There are a lot of references to protecting curiosity driven research in both the strategy and the delivery plan – with commitments to reform applicant-led programmes “to achieve simpler, faster processes to back excellent, bold and novel ideas in a more agile way, encouraging intellectual risk-taking and greater responsiveness to opportunities.” As part of its reform of applicant-led programmes, UKRI states it will publish revised guidance on a new novelty- and excellence-weighted approach to assessment processes by January 2027. There is also a target to reduce grant processing times by 50% by 2031.

The delivery plan commits to increasing UKRI investment in university-based R&I, with a total of £2.6 billion of formula funding for the financial year 2026-27. This formula funding figure includes Research England’s quality-related research funding (QR), Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) and Research Capital Investment Fund.

UKRI also states it will develop interventions to improve research cost recovery on its programmes to contribute to longer-term resilience of the R&I system.

STFC

Last week, UKRI published the outcome of the ‘prioritisation’ process at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to bring down projected costs to be in line with the STFC budget as set out in the spending review. The consequences will be significant cuts to some areas and facilities funded by the STFC. We covered in this in a previous post.

In this new delivery plan, UKRI states it is aiming to produce an optimised plan, by September 2026, for the budget for STFC programmes across the next four years “to support long-term sustainability and continued internationally leading contributions”.

As part of UKRI’s stated ambition to ensure national capabilities support government priority outcomes (in bucket 2), the delivery plan also says UKRI “will refocus STFC’s world-leading facilities and technology-development capabilities on government priorities”. Achieving this is set to include UKRI delivering a 10% increase in activity aligned with Industrial Strategy sectors and wider government priorities across STFC’s national laboratories and multidisciplinary facilities.

Public support

The UKRI delivery plan includes developing a communications approach to increase public confidence that public investment in R&I can improve the lives of people in the UK.

The public are both the supporters of tax-funded R&D, and the intended beneficiaries of it, so it is great to see UKRI placing the public at the heart of this new strategy. The delivery plan highlights that “while people recognise the value of R&I, they are less clear on how it benefits them personally” – a key finding of CaSE’s Public Attitudes to R&D 2025 study.

UKRI’s ambition to make the outcomes of R&D “more visible, relatable and grounded in everyday experience” will send a strong signal to the wider sector, that we need to collectively tell our story better and prioritise making R&D matter to more people.

Bucket 2 – Government Priorities

UKRI’s plan states that in the financial year 2026-27 it will launch and establish its “cross-organisational programmes”. Directors for each Priority Programme have been appointed and are reported to be responsible for overseeing initial investment, coordinating and making best use of UKRI’s existing portfolio of investments, centres, institutes, catapults and units, and finalising further investment plans over the year.

The bucket 2 programme plans will reportedly vary depending on the specific portfolio, extent of existing commitments and where R&I interventions can most effectively drive sector growth and impact. UKRI indicates that over the year, programme boards will be learning and adjusting their plans for further activity, and will be based on clear logic models to inform monitoring and evaluation.

The strategy says URKI will target an average £3 of additional investment for every £1 of public investment across the priority programme investments in bucket 2. This is an ambitious leverage ratio – care will need to be taken that it doesn’t crowd out new technologies, research and collaborations where it is more difficult to meet this ratio, compared to established collaborations and research partnerships.

Place

The delivery plan says that UKRI “will unlock the potential of people and places by nurturing high-potential regional R&I clusters, aligned to regional, devolved government and national priorities”. They will publish a refreshed Place Funding Policy this year, as well as continuing the roll out of the Local Innovation Partnership Fund, alongside wider investment to support the UK Government’s ambitions for the Northern Growth Strategy, OxCam Arc, and other clusters of place-based innovation-led growth across the UK. We are watching to see what happens next on R&D and place with the upcoming change of Prime Minister.

Other activities this week

• UKRI have published their annual report and accounts for 2025-26.

• Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT)’s annual report and accounts for 2025-26 has been published. One interesting area to note is that in 2025-26 Horizon Europe associated cost £2.043 bn against an allocated figure of £2.736 bn. In 2026-27 the planned spend is £2.565 bn compared to an allocated figure of £2.12 bn. CaSE will be engaging with Government to ensure any underspend stays within R&D, and that any over-spend is not taken from other programmes.

• Sir Ian Chapman, UKRI CEO, appeared before the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee on 14 July, where he talked about the new strategy and the STFC prioritisation. He spoke about how the allocations were made and that most councils, including STFC, have flat budgets – that this was a decision ultimately made by DSIT and Treasury. The additional money within the research budget is allocated towards an uplift in QR, the new supercomputer and the R&D missions fund in bucket 2 and the Local Innovation Partnership Fund.