Having faced two lengthy inquisitions by parliamentary committees on the back of preparing for a decade-defining spending review – not to mention doing exit interviews with the press – Ottoline Leyser’s final weeks as chief executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) have been far from the quiet slide towards the exit door typically enjoyed by top science administrators.
Yet the publicity has been the exception rather than the rule. Leyser has generally shied away from the limelight during her five years of running the UK’s main research funder – particularly when compared with her omnipresent predecessor, Mark Walport, who bestrode UK science having done substantial stints as Wellcome Trust director and government chief scientific adviser before his appointment as UKRI’s inaugural director in 2018.
Leyser, by contrast, had only previously run the University of Cambridge’s plant science-focused Sainsbury Laboratory before being somewhat unexpectedly selected to succeed Walport when he retired in 2020 – reputedly by prime minister Boris Johnson’s then all-powerful chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, who took a particular interest in science and was considered by many at the time to be the country’s de facto science minister.
But Leyser came in with a strong agenda to shift the incentive system within academic science “to value a much wider range of truly excellent contributions”, as she put it at the time. And she insisted that she was “certainly not going to pussyfoot about” in pursuit of it.
Leyser announced as long ago as January 2024 that she would not seek a second five-year term as UKRI chief; it was announced in February that she will be succeeded by Ian Chapman, who was previously chief executive of the?UK Atomic Energy Authority since 2016. But she still believes strongly in the wisdom of that approach. And, speaking to 探花视频 in her Westminster office ahead of her departure from the ?9 billion-a-year funder at the end of this week, she insisted she enjoyed trying to articulate it to MPs – in answer to their probing questions about UKRI’s role, operations and ambitions.
Could Leyser perhaps point to a UKRI-derived widget used by most Brits every day, asked one MP on the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee on 17 June, later bemoaning the UK’s failure to produce a Tesla-like tech manufacturer. Some fellow committee members were keen for more regional research spending; some wanted more focus on AI; others worried about under-pressure arts and humanities university departments. Some wanted more “high risk, high reward” research unencumbered by bureaucracy, while others lobbied for more timely checks on researchers’ progress, with a view to clawing back unsuccessful grants.
Rather than resenting the near-impossible demands on UKRI, Leyser said she was delighted that the organisation grabs the attention of politicians, Whitehall and the wider public in so many different ways. “We are namechecked in hundreds of government strategies and seen as important to delivering on those strategies – that is fantastic,” said Leyser, alluding to a recent finding by the Public Accounts Committee that UKRI’s fixed budget made it very hard to deliver against the seemingly-endless series of expectations – some of which are contradictory – that have been placed on it by ministers since it formed by an amalgamation of the UK’s seven research councils, plus REF coordinator Research England and innovation funder Innovate UK.
Leyser’s hope is for UKRI to be trusted to deliver via what she – in a Scrabble reference – called “triple word score” investments. “That might be a project that delivers on a skills ambition, [on] net zero and on expanding research funding outside the Greater South-east – if we’re given the ability to manage our spending in portfolios which are dynamic, we can tick three boxes at one time,” said Leyser, adding that this would not happen in a structure with “hundreds of ringfenced pots of money” pre-assigned to specific individual goals.
When fighting her corner with MPs, Leyser has been reluctant to indulge them by rattling off stories of where targeted investments in British science have led to billion-pound start-ups (there are several she could namecheck) or futuristic projects that might one day lead to a blockbuster pay-off. But why?
“Some of these questions are based on the notion that as soon as research leaves the lab, a few of its benefits will arise that will change the world,” she explained. “Yes, this can happen and it’s wonderful – and it’s important to tell those stories – but we also cannot give up on the systemic arguments for investing in research: that need to train people, to invest in infrastructure and institutions.”
Trumpeting the pay-offs from a few individual success stories would distract from what is really needed for UK research, she added: high levels of sustained research funding. And while she conceded that “people struggle with the breadth, depth and interconnectedness of UKRI’s portfolio of research”, her concern is that “if you reinforce that model [of picking winners], it undermines the case for curiosity-led research, skills investment, infrastructure spending. And then [high-innovation] businesses go overseas because those are the things that attract [them] to the UK.”
Communicating the complex ecosystem behind UK research has been one of Leyser’s roles during her tenure, but political attention in recent months has increasingly focused on that “high-risk, high-reward” agenda raised by the Science and Technology Committee – and, in particular, the UK’s new agency charged with pursuing that mission, the Advanced Research and Inventions Agency (Aria). The recent spending review, for instance, pledged to “significantly scale up” Aria’s activities in the four years up to 2030, raising its initial budget of ?800 million to at least ?1 billion.
Aria is the chief legacy of Cummings’ time in Downing Street, modelled on the US’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). Cummings strongly believed that standard UK funding structures are too risk-averse, for which reason he deliberately established Aria outside the UKRI umbrella.
The organisation’s ?50 million geoengineering research programme, aimed at combating global warming, certainly has a wow factor that excites the popular and political imagination in a way that Leyser’s references to 26,000 active UKRI-funded projects perhaps do not. And that may be reflected in the fact that while Aria got its funding boost in the spending review, the overall budget for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), which funds UKRI, will increase by only 0.9 per cent a year in real terms between 2025-26 and 2028-29. That looks like a reasonable settlement until you factor in the long list of additional new spending commitments that the department has been tasked with underwriting, including AI fellowships, a ?500 million scheme to fund R&D “missions” and a ?750 million supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh.
In addition, according to the UK’s industrial strategy, published earlier this week, UKRI will also be “pivoting its programmes and budgets towards research and innovation priorities” in order to deliver “innovation, commercialisation and scale-up”. But Leyser stressed that the success of UK science would continue to depend on UKRI’s bread-and-butter funding programmes.
“I’m a huge fan of Aria, but it cannot do anything without the platform provided by UKRI,” she said, pointing to the talent pipeline, infrastructure base and institutional research strength made possible by UKRI’s year-to-year funding – including the large block grants distributed via the Research Excellence Framework (REF).
Leyser would not be drawn into speculation that DSIT’s funding settlement would lead to a reduction in the traditional research councils’ budgets – negotiations with the department are ongoing. But she decried academics’ standard tendency to ask the “zero-sum” question of “how much money will my research council get?” in the wake of spending reviews.
UKRI, she pointed out, is “increasingly operating collectively” across councils. Hence, wondering “how much opportunity will there be to push forward my favourite research project” was “out of date”, she insisted: “It is not helpful for making the case for research investment if it is being made in multiple parochial ways, rather than in delivery for the UK approach.”
Indeed, better cross-council working was the key rationale for UKRI’s foundation, set out in Paul Nurse’s . But also instrumental to any success that the agency has had so far has surely been the 30 per cent budget rise that the research councils have enjoyed since 2018. Mightn’t much of the good work unravel if grant funding now goes into decline just as universities’ capacity to internally bankroll research is being decimated by the financial crisis that is forcing UK universities to lay off thousands of research-active academics – or to?oblige them to concentrate on teaching?
Leyser’s answer to that question has surprised and alarmed many within the sector. She told the Science and Technology Committee that while a “consolidation” of research in UK universities is “inevitable” given their current financial plight, this “will not necessarily be a huge negative for the UK’s research and innovation endeavour”.
Maybe Leyser is looking for silver linings, but hers is certainly an optimistic spin on what she concedes is a “major financial crisis” affecting universities. She is not indifferent to what is happening, she told THE, agreeing that it is “really difficult for the individuals losing their jobs – I cannot emphasise how hard this is”. But she doubled down on her insistence that the downsizing of research could be a good thing if it helped to reset an academic culture in which departments are incentivised to recruit ever more researchers to compete for the same limited pot of REF funding – which is distributed on the basis of both research quality and volume.
Currently, she said, researchers are all under “ridiculous pressure” to “deliver on exactly the same sort of things across all universities, so we have incentives that drive expansion and incentives that drive homogenisation”. The result is that “we are destroying the diversity in our university system”.
To alleviate some of this pressure, the next REF, due in 2029, has already been redesigned. Earlier this month, it was announced that there will no longer be any restrictions on how many outputs any individual can submit to the REF, nor any minimum requirement – a decoupling of individuals and outputs that was first more than a decade ago, in work compiled for the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.
The REF changes have been criticised in some quarters for diminishing universities’ incentives to recruit early-career researchers and those on fixed-term contracts, but Leyser is adamant that Research England is right to chart a different course, with a view to furthering institutional diversity.
“We need to realign incentives so that different sorts of universities are doing different [research] in different places across the UK,” she said. “This is not about concentrating research into a small number of research-active universities. We need all our universities to be celebrating and leaning into their USPs, their skills and specialism – so we need systems that incentivise that...high-quality collaborative approach…Universities need to be collaborative but also diverse.”
But doesn’t Leyser’s appeal for more top-down “coordination” of research activity threaten to encroach on university autonomy – particularly given that a lot of research is funded by the ?12 billion universities receive from international student fees each year?
“Universities should absolutely be free to make decisions about their funding,” Leyser insisted. “Nonetheless, the nation benefits from a hugely diverse connected university system and there is a role for government in thinking what system of higher education – both for research and teaching – that the [nation] needs.”
Leyser’s desire for the Department for Education to play a role, alongside DSIT, in ensuring this more connected whole-sector approach might appear to hint at support for a policy that many believe would massively stabilise English universities: the return of student number caps. Without them, the income of many university departments can fluctuate wildly given year-to-year swings in undergraduate recruitment, unions argue, with such financial uncertainty harming key areas of research. Put differently, is research in some areas too important to be left to the mercy of 18-year-olds and their Ucas choices?
Leyser, however, insisted that this wasn’t the point she was making, observing that all university admissions systems “have their own strengths and weaknesses. I would like to see a system in which students have really high-quality information about the differences between universities, and, therefore, what might be the right one for them.”
Such information would be all the more important if Leyser got her way and institutional diversity were to increase. But she does not see that diversity translating into geographical or hierarchical stratification. For her, the key to the health of the UK research base will be to align the incentives such that research flourishes in different places across the country and that different types of excellence are all recognised and rewarded.
“It comes back to the fact that the things we have decided to value are a very limited number of things,” Leyser said. “That creates league tables that dominate that conversation, rather than saying, ‘This university has a specialism in this’ or ‘This university teaches more strongly in problem-based learning’.
“We need to celebrate those differences. But the current system fails to do that.”
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