The UK’s university sector is a critical national infrastructure. There are some big numbers involved. Hundreds of thousands employed by the sector, making tens of billions for the UK economy, and since I’ve worked in the sector the return on investment for every £1 of public money spent has never been lower than £8.

Universities achieve this by creating and sharing knowledge. The creation of knowledge through amazing people doing amazing research and solving problems. The sharing of knowledge through teaching and getting ideas and innovation out into the real world. For simplicity I’m going to call this Research and Teaching, and admit the lost nuance in that approach. Public money should be spent on this.

The problem is that the University system in the UK is broken. From whichever lens you look through there are stresses and strains that did not exist even five years ago. We are living through the ‘everything is fine’ meme; the one where a cartoon dog, holding a mug, sits smiling while everything around them is on fire.

What’s changed, and what is driving that fire, is not especially mysterious. The unit of resource for teaching has been eroded in real terms for years. Research is structurally underfunded and relies on cross-subsidy. Costs including estates, pensions, and pay (National Insurance) have risen. International student income has become both essential and volatile. In short, the system only worked when growth papered over the cracks, and that growth has stalled. The underlying model has been exposed.

If you’re not in the system and don’t recognise the crisis, talk to someone who is or search for ‘universities’ with anyone of the following terms: crisis, bankruptcy, collapse, redundancies. The financial model no longer matches the system’s cost pressures.

However, this crisis is not being recognised as urgent by the government, nor is the UK’s university sector being treated or governed as the critical national infrastructure that it is. Instead, we have a collection of independent organisations, universities, operating within a market, resulting in a fragmented, dog-eat-dog response to what is, in reality, a system-wide crisis. Decisions are being made on an institution-by-institution basis without a whole system approach. We have nothing to prevent regions from entirely losing critical research and teaching in subjects fundamental to their local economies. Redundancies, closures and deficits across the UK at different Universities are being treated as separate issues. There is no join up.

This is exacerbated by different government departments having responsibility for different aspects of the university system. Creating knowledge (research) sits with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the sharing of knowledge (teaching) sits with the Department for Education.

We are living in the ‘everything is fine’ meme with two separate fire-fighters pouring small buckets of water on individual fires rather than working together to remove the dog from the burning building.

If we continue with the small tweaks in response to this omni-crisis then we are going to continue to cause harm at scale. Individual institutions may “optimise” locally within a system that continues to deteriorate globally. There are alternatives, of course. We could increase tuition fees, top up research funding, diversify income streams, or let the market run its course and accept mergers, and failures. But each of these increases different risks and assumes that a functioning market exists where, increasingly, it does not. Even if more funding were available, without structural change we would simply be stabilising the same incentives that created the problem.

We will continue to do harm if solutions don’t address both the creation (research) and sharing of knowledge (teaching) simultaneously. They are intertwined and interdependent. Great teaching is build on the cutting edge knowledge of reserachers. Any intervention that treats them as separable will fail in practice, even if it works on paper.

We need a national (cross four-nations), joined-up response. A response, I suggest, that should be considered stupid and naive by the political classes because no government will have the appetite for it. It shouldn’t be a ‘shiny announceable’ that plagues our system. You know the ones, the big ideas that get splashed on the front of newspapers, that make it to the six o’clock news, but in the real world make little to no difference. The shiny announceable that give the minister or prime minister something positive to say to give the appearance that everything is moving forward, that there is momentum.

My suggestion is not that. This is my proposal.

We accept that a sector contraction is required but that this must be managed in a co-ordinated, nationally strategic, and choiceful way. That it is a contraction that covers both teaching and research and considers them as a mutually beneficial pairing. It is done with an overlay of geographic (place) to ensure that regional perspectives are integrated, and that we don’t accidentally create research or teaching cold spots. It is deliberate rather than accidental.

We start by taking Higher Education out of the Department for Education, and bringing it back together with Research and Innovation. Either into DSIT or let’s call it something new like Department for the Knowledge Economy. A pre-2016 model that aligns Universities closer to business than to primary schools.

The new department (and a new Minister for Universities) asks each University to put forward 3-10 preferred disciplinary areas that it intends to prioritise in both teaching and research (including underpinning capacities e.g. doctoral and infrastructure provision). It may put forward up to 5 secondary areas for consideration [these numbers need robust crunching].

The evidence as to why they are the best disciplinary areas for each University, including quality and capacity information will be gathered via a ‘dip-stick’ selection from existing information e.g. publications, and HESA data etc. This must not create a new hoopla of processes and teams that each University must run individually to produce.

The submissions will be reviewed and considered through a geographic lens as well as quality. This isn’t just in response to the politics of place but for widening participation, and accessibility reasons that strengthen research and the university sector, alongside the benefits to regional economic security. Where there are gaps, capacity is protected or built.

Every university will be assigned c.5 of it’s preferred disciplinary areas and given a hypothecated block grant (stability grant) for research and teaching in those disciplines. In return each university will have to guarantee a minimum number of researchers, key infrastructure, doctoral students and undergraduate places in those disciplines.

Universities are not restricted to their agreed disciplinary areas but they will only receive stability grants for the agreed areas. Funding follows agreed focus, not spread. Over time, this shifts the system away from thinly funded provision and towards depth, scale, and sustainability.

By running the stability grants system for five years we release the pressure valve for the community, enable universities to concentrate on recalibrating to a new system. We create five years in which to work with other partners to design a financially sustainable, smaller system, which has a reduced reliance on cross-subsidies to enable outstanding research. The stability grants would need to be materially larger than current REF allocations, because they are buying certainty, not just rewarding performance.

REF is cancelled as the exercise is no longer a priority in the immediate to short term.

Practically, this would need to be staged. An initial year of data gathering and negotiation. A second year of provisional allocations and funding agreements. Then a managed transition period in which institutions reshape provision, staff are supported through change, and students are protected. None of this is frictionless, but nor is the current path we are on.

This approach would deliberately disrupt some of the defining features of the current system. It would reduce institutional autonomy by introducing a level of national coordination that many universities would find uncomfortable. It risks misjudging disciplinary potential by relying on imperfect data and central decisions, potentially constraining emerging or interdisciplinary fields. There is a real risk of reinforcing existing hierarchies if not designed carefully, with already strong institutions consolidating advantage.

Some departments and roles would contract or disappear entirely, creating real human harm and regional consequences for which care and support would need to be centred. These are not trivial losses, they are the trade-offs of choosing managed stability over unmanaged decline.

It must give universities the breathing space they need to recalibrate, enabling them to devote more time to the creation and sharing of knowledge including the full breadth of translation activity which I’ve so far overlooked. To be able to continue to add value through partnering with industry to translate research into new products and services, working with local communities and public services to address social challenges, supporting start-ups and spin-outs, providing specialist advice and consultancy, and delivering professional training and continuing education.

To make this work, incentives would have to be real. The stability grant is the lever I’m proposing but it could be joined by others such as student number caps/growth, capital funding, or elements of visa policy. This cannot be a polite request to coordinate; it must be a reshaping of the system.

But I don’t think there is appetite for anything this radical, which is why it is a stupid idea.

For those of you not familiar with the Bucket metaphor, it is the latest way of describing how the UK’s main public funder of research and innovation (UKRI) allocates its £9–10bn annual budget. The metaphor is effectively cash being poured into different buckets; each bucket has its own purpose. To badly paraphrase; there is a bucket for what the community wants to do, a bucket for what the government wants to do, a bucket for what industry wants to do, and a bucket for the stuff that is wanted by all three.

I can only imagine the team meeting searching for the perfect metaphor for explaining how the money is spent. Yet I can also really imagine that someone mumbled “**ck it”. Someone else heard “bucket”. And somehow, that’s how we ended up where we are.

But I’m sticking with the Bucket metaphor. So, what do I mean by a hidden Bucket Five? It is something that sits awkwardly inside Bucket Four, but is effectively invisible. Bucket Four, the one that contains the stuff that is wanted by the community, government and industry. Only I’m not sure that this part of the bucket is actually wanted by anyone. My hidden Bucket Five is the cost of being a funder.

UKRI itself is a hybrid organisation, operating both as a funder and as a research organisation. From bases in the Antarctic to mines housing the deepest working toilet in the Northern Hemisphere. It also plays a leadership role nationally and internationally, acting as a connector and influencer to strengthen the UK’s research and innovation system. But for the purposes of this blog, I’m interested in just one part of what it does: its role as a funder.

But none of the buckets clearly mention the money needed to design schemes, run peer review, or manage portfolios, no bucket clearly acknowledges the system needed to make desired outcomes possible. That is what I mean by the hidden Bucket Five.

And when something disappears from the narrative, it’s all too easy to start believing it shouldn’t be there or cost anything at all. Or that low costs are a good thing, and there is a deeply embedded assumption that minimising the funder costs is preferrable. It pops up everywhere. In talk about ‘research bureaucracy’. In Treasury instincts about efficiency and reducing public sector administration costs. In assumptions that low, 3-4% funder cost, are the right level of percentage. The logic is simple: the less the funder spends on itself, the more that goes to “real” research. And that must be a good thing.

It’s an appealing idea. Funder administrative costs aren’t research, they are a waste and nobody wants to fund waste. The percentage of funder administrative spend should be as low as possible. Proof that money is flowing to where it “really matters”.

But this only works if you think funding is basically plumbing.

Money goes in. Money comes out. The funder is the pipe. And good pipes, as everyone knows, should be as thin and frictionless as possible. To get the money to the research as quickly as possible.

The problem is that funding isn’t a pipe. It’s a set of decisions.

Smart, consequential decisions. About what gets funded and what doesn’t, about how to balance short-term wins against long-term capability, about incremental, underpinning work or high-risk, radical ideas, about how to design opportunities so that the right people apply, rather than just the most persistent or those with the most free-time on their hands. About how to assess quality in a world where excellence doesn’t come with a tidy label.

None of that happens by accident. And none of it is free.

Once you see that, the logic starts to wobble. Because the question isn’t how little we can spend on the act of funding. It’s how much it’s worth spending to get it right.

And getting it right matters. A lot.

Funders are not just administrative go-betweens. They are the system experts. Good funders don’t just move money around. If given the time and staffing resources, they create the conditions in which better research and better innovation can happen.

They know, for example, that the way you frame a call changes who applies, that the balance between flexibility and prescription shapes what gets proposed, that the assessment process affects not just who wins, but how people write, collaborate, and think.

And when funders underinvest in the work of funding, the costs don’t magically disappear, they just pop up somewhere else, often in worse forms.

One place this shows up very clearly is demand management. In theory, you could devolve this to universities: let them decide who applies, thin the field locally, keep funder costs down. In practice, this tends to work badly. Individual universities are not best placed to run demand management processes, understandably so. It’s not their core expertise, it sits awkwardly alongside institutional incentives, and crucially, they rarely have the capacity, systems or resource to do it well. And without the resource the results can reflect internal politicking, and bias, rather than research quality. Shifting that work out of the funder doesn’t remove the cost; it just fragments it across dozens of institutions, each reinventing the wheel with varying degrees of success. Far better, in many cases, for demand to be managed by funders where there is a clearer view of the whole system, more consistency in approach, and the expertise to balance quality, opportunity, and fairness in a way that individual institutions simply can’t at scale.

Spend less at the funder, and you don’t eliminate cost, you redistribute it into places where it’s harder to see, harder to manage, and harder to get right.

If we’re really honest, UKRI manages demand better, and more efficiently, through call design and peer review than universities trying to piece together their own approaches without the capacity and systems to do it properly. And if an AI-driven wave is coming, the solution isn’t ad hoc responses, it’s to shore up the defences where they matter. More funder resource, not less.

More funder resource is not an overhead, its system-level expertise that makes the whole endeavour more efficient and effective. And yet, we persist in talking about the cost of this work as if it were a tax on “real” activity, rather than the thing that makes that activity effective in the first place.

Which is where Bucket Five comes in.

The “bucket system”, however it came into existence, gives us a neat story about where money goes. But it leaves something out. There is no bucket for the work of making the system work. No bucket for the design, the judgement, the coordination, the stewardship. No bucket for the people whose job it is to turn a pot of public money into something resembling a coherent investment strategy.

Bucket Five isn’t empty. It’s just… missing.

And once it’s missing, it becomes very easy to treat it as optional. As something to squeeze. As a sign of inefficiency rather than a source of value.

But here’s the flip.

What if we’ve got this the wrong way round?

What if, instead of asking how small we can make funder costs, we asked how effective we need them to be? What if we treated investment in funder capability as a way of reducing cost and increasing quality across the whole system? What if instead of aiming for 3-4% of the overall funding to be invested in funder expertise, we aimed for 13-14%**?

Because the people doing this work are the experts. They are the ones making judgement calls where there is no algorithm, no formula, no single “right answer”. They are the ones who understand how choices made ripple out into behaviours everywhere else.

Underinvest in that, and the whole system gets noisier, messier, and more expensive in ways that are harder to trace. Invest in it properly, and things start to join up.

Fewer wasted applications. Better targeted funding. More coherent portfolios. Stronger outcomes, not just in individual projects, but in the shape of the system over time.

Bucket Five, in other words, is where you pay for getting the rest of it right.

And perhaps the real problem isn’t that it’s missing. It’s that we’ve spent so long pretending it shouldn’t exist. And there’s another, quieter consequence of all this.

We don’t just underinvest in the work of funding, we fail to recognise the people who do it. We establish separate metascience units rather than embedding them in the heart of funders with the expert practitioners central to their work. UKRI (and funders like it) is full of people whose expertise sits at a strange intersection: part analytical, part strategic, part judgement, part systems thinking. They design schemes that shape entire fields, balance portfolios under uncertainty, and make calls where there is no clean metric to rely on. They are, in every meaningful sense, experts.

But we don’t really treat them that way.

In the UK we have the THE Awards for Universities and the ARMA Awards for research management. But nothing explicitly for funders.

Where are the awards for the programme that reshaped a field?
For the funding design that unlocked collaboration where none existed before?
For the portfolio that quietly, deliberately, built a capability over a decade?

They don’t exist. At least, not in any meaningful or visible way.

And that absence matters. Because what we choose to recognise is what we choose to value. And right now, we are very good at celebrating what funding produces and remarkably bad at recognising what makes it possible.

Which brings us, again, to Bucket Five.

It’s not just a missing category of spend. It’s a missing category of value. A whole set of capabilities that sit in plain sight, doing essential work, and yet somehow framed as cost rather than contribution.

If we keep thinking about funders as something to make cheaper, we will keep designing systems that are noisier, more burdensome, and ultimately less effective than they could be.

So here’s the challenge.

What if we stopped asking how lean a funder can be and started asking how good it needs to be? What if we treated investment in funding capability as seriously as we treat investment in research itself?

What if we made Bucket Five visible not just in accounting terms, but in how we talk about value, expertise, and success?

Because if we are serious about advancing knowledge, improving lives, and driving growth, then we should probably take just as much care over how we fund as what we fund.

*and also, as a consequence of the current timing of the World Cup, I’ve accidentally ear-wormed myself with “me and me mum and me dad and me gran and a bucket of vindaloo” – thanks Fat Les.

**politically, I understand that this would never fly. But imagine how different things could be under that level of investment. For example, paying for peer review (she whispers).

- UKRI staff need to be protected from rushed calls. They are smart people who understand the UK research community and should be afforded the time to create (and it is an art form) calls that best serve the UK. They shouldn’t be designing calls based on a KPI of a narrow window in which the money must be spent. They should be designing calls based on best outcome KPIs.

- The UK research community is in crisis, heaping on additional pressure is making the situation work. It is not right that colleagues are responding to these calls by working evenings and weekends.

- This is about quality. Trying to pull together complex ideas and complex teams and collaborations together without sufficient time to fully test them is more likely to lead to good ideas on paper that fall at the first hurdle. They are the conditions that favour existing paradigms, existing thinking, existing networks. It doesn’t encourage the new, the cutting edge to flourish.

- This is a massive Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) red flag. If you don’t think EDI is relevant, then ask yourself if you care if the UK is investing in the best research. If investing in the best possible is important then access matters; you only get the best research when you create enabling conditions and you can cast the net widely so it catches the best idea, teams and individuals. You cannot feasibly do that in two months never mind one month or days. It is a narrow and a particular range of teams and individuals that can respond within tight timeframes; it exacerbates the Matthew effect and is fundamentally unfair. Those that have the time, flexibility and resources to respond in compressed timescales tend to be senior academics, who have benefitted from the accumulation of advantages. In the UK we know that this pool, as a product of the current reward system, is predominately older, white men.

So, what could UKRI do? What is in their control?

1) Minimum call timeline policies (from opening to closing date) for open, competitive funding calls. Without exception. With ongoing engagement with government to explain why this is essential to ensuring public funding is used effectively and delivers the strongest outcomes for the UK. EPSRC (part of UKRI) have EDI guidelines that recognise that a minimum of 12 weeks is required to help mitigate against unnecessary bias. But note my wording of ‘open, competitive’ this does give UKRI some flexibility to say that it is not an open competition (it’s invite only) or that there isn’t a competition (direct selection). This might not be an entirely sensible get-out-clause but at least it is open and transparent).

2) UKRI should talk about emerging upcoming priorities early and publicly (transparently). This would allow the time for ideas development and for forming the collaborations needed to strengthen proposals. This would allow a wider pool of people to be involved. Treat the community as grown-ups, capable of engaging with uncertainty. It’s okay for UKRI to signal priorities that are being considered for the Spending Review, with a clear caveat that funding is not yet confirmed, timelines are uncertain, and the scale of investment, if any, may change. There are some comparisons here with Areas of Research Interest that we see across Government. They don’t come with a guarantee of funding. The community know difficult decisions are made during Spending Reviews and if it doesn’t then UKRI should be talking more about this.

3) UKRI could choose to be less risk-adverse by initiating funding calls earlier, in anticipation of Spending Review outcomes. Even more concrete than the sharing the ideas, UKRI could publish call text and add in expected dates. They can come with caveats of ‘subject to spending review outcomes’. Again, the community is grown-up enough to understand this.

4) Alternatively, why not use the first 6-12 months of each spending review period more creatively? An imaginative use of small ‘pump-priming’ grants in anticipated priority areas. Give the community the time and the funding to think and to organise for the larger grants opening later in the first year. This should allow money to be spent quickly in year one and lead to higher quality outcomes in later years.

I’m interested in your view? What unintended consequences need to be mitigated against? What else is within UKRIs gift to change that would make a difference to their staff, the research community and ultimately the quality of research and its outcomes?