Too Fast to Think? Why UKRI Calls Are So Rushed, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

And why UKRI teams are doing a great job.

There are increasingly tight-turn around time calls on the UKRI Funding Finder. Some are eye-wateringly short (just days from the call opening to the call closing).

Let me tell you why I think the teams running these calls are doing an excellent job and responding rationally to the framework in which they are working.

I am not suggesting that this is an optimal framework, or that it leads to the best outcomes. In fact, the opposite is true, and I have serious concerns about both quality and fairness. And I have some suggestions as what could be done differently.

My reflection is that the current rush of short deadline calls is driven by government funding rules and the spending review process and timings.

There are two parts to this.

First, spending reviews are timed in such a way that UKRI doesn’t find out its spending review allocation until very close to the start of that spending review period and in a lot of cases the details of delegated budgets (to Councils) isn’t agreed until sometime after. This is because the granularity of spending review outcomes doesn’t allow for the details to be worked out in advance. In recent history this means that UKRI (and then the lag to Council allocations) comes close to the wire and hasn’t always been announced before the spending review period starts.

UKRI has been risk-adverse, and reluctant to spin-up the new programmes (funding calls) for the first year’s spend ahead of the budgets being finalised due to the high level of existing commitments it has on its book. Especially at the start of a spending review period, there is very little “headroom” (cash that hasn’t already been promised for something) for new activity. If the spending review outcome is lower than expected UKRI tend to prioritise existing commitments (there are notable exceptions in recent history). They don’t start new stuff until they are absolutely sure the money is there otherwise they’ll be very quickly overspent by millions.

To achieve the first year’s spend, everything gets condensed into a frantic few months to get new calls out of the door (which is what we are seeing now). The early years of the spending review therefore tend to be underspent, but due to the normal lag in grant funding expenditure, the latter years of the spending review then end up overspent.

It’s a repeating pattern.

This is exacerbated by the second constraint in public monies, that government funding allocated to be spent in one financial year cannot be rolled-over and spent in the following financial year. It is returned to treasury. It is literally spend it or lose it.

Combined, this means that teams across UKRI have to react really quickly to get money out of the door otherwise it effectively disappears from the UKRI budget......

Now, none of this means that UKRI couldn’t put in different ways of working. They absolutely should for so many reasons:

- 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?