Organizational Spotlight: UK Research and Innovation

August 29, 2023

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In its most recent report, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) announced that it awarded £3.1 billion in grants for the 2022–2023 cycle1, up 6.9% from the previous cycle2. The UKRI is a non-departmental public body of the United Kingdon’s government.

Established in 2018, it is responsible for allocating funding to individual researchers and to research institutions3. It is further broken down into nine bodies: eight councils and Innovate UK. In the past funding cycle, the Innovate UK council awarded the most amount of money, totaling £662M over 1810 awards1.

The University College London received the most individual grants and fellowships (189) and they were also at the top of the funding list. Who were the other nine institutions who received the most funding from UKRI?

Institution

Funding Received

University of Oxford

£115.96 million

University of Manchester

£113.76 million

University of Edinburgh

£94.35 million

University College London

£93.33 million

University of Cambridge

£92.39 million

Imperial College London

£90.60 million

University of Bristol

£80.47 million

University of Sheffield

£73.77 million

University of Birmingham

£62.01 million

King’s College London

£55.56 million

About 30% of funding during this cycle went to the top 10 institutions, leaving about £2.03 billion to be distributed across the other awardees. The largest piece of the pie was the £136.10 million awarded to University College London, accounting for about 7.1% of the total. Their total number of awarded grants was about half that percentage of all awarded grants (189 grants; 3.4%), but the number of grants submitted to various UKRI councils from University of Oxford researchers (576 grants) was 10.4% of all applications submitted1.

Earlier in July, UKRI published its budget for university research and knowledge exchange through Research England. It appears that the budget will increase incrementally from FY22–23 through FY24–254. The report indicates that funding will remain steady for research and knowledge exchange, while capital funding while receive a slight boost.

References

  1. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/uk.research.and.innovation.ukri./viz/UKRICompetitiveFundingDecisions2022-23/CompetitiveFundingDecisions
  2. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/uk.research.and.innovation.ukri./viz/UKRICompetitiveFundingDecisions2020-21/CompetitiveFundingDecisions
  3. https://www.ukri.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-organisation/
  4. https://www.ukri.org/publications/research-england-funding-budgets-for-2023-to-2025/