When the then universities and science minister, Chris Skidmore, a £45 million increase in English universities’ quality-related (QR) research block grants in 2019, he billed it as “an important recognition of…the need to invest more in flexible, curiosity-driven research that has tremendous benefits to developing [the UK’s] international standing as a research powerhouse.”��

Acknowledging that there had been no “significant uplift” in QR since the Conservatives came to power, in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, in 2010, Skidmore said he was “delighted” to have delivered on one of his “personal priorities”: to “place universities at the heart of innovation for the future”.

Such talk remains music to academics’ ears. Divided up among universities on the basis of their performance in the Research Excellence Framework (REF), QR and its equivalents in the UK’s devolved nations are often billed as crucial to UK universities’ ability to make strategic investments in new research directions, taking punts on emerging research areas, recruiting world-class scientific minds, building new laboratories and generally maintaining the pipeline of new ideas and talent.

QR, which comes with no restrictions on its use, also allows universities to make up the gaps between the value of project grants and the actual cost of the research they fund, with UK charity income covering only about 60p for every pound spent on research by universities, and research council funding in the 70-80p range.

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But while the value of the UK’s “dual-support” system for research is undisputed among academics, political support for the QR element of that has not always been as enthusiastic. Notwithstanding Skidmore’s small win, the value of QR has fallen by 15 per cent in real terms since 2010, according to Universities UK, which recently called for a “sustained real-terms increase”. The Russell Group put the figure at 16 per cent in real terms since 2010 in its own recent lobbying, to a similar end.

However, there are concerns that, in the event, QR’s value may be cut again. The UKRI budget for 2025-26 has still to be confirmed even though the start of the financial year is just weeks away, and UKRI chief executive Ottoline Leyser has warned that settlements will be “tight”. That might spell trouble for QR given that it accounts for roughly a fifth of UKRI’s £9 billion budget yet suffers from a “weak political narrative” about what it buys the nation, according to Diana Beech, a former adviser to three UK science ministers, including Skidmore.

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Beech notes that there are “clear narratives of scientific breakthrough or global collaboration” around schemes such as the high-risk, high-reward Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) – which was awarded a four-year budget of £800 million on its foundation in 2021 – and Horizon Europe – to associate to which the UK pays about £2 billion a year. QR, however, “lacks that same strong compelling story” due to the multiple and often unheralded uses to which it is put.

Those uses include everything from maintaining laboratories to covering the costs of sabbaticals, research conference attendance and publication. While few would argue that any of these are unimportant, they lack the “wow factor” that politicians might be seeking. As Beech put it, its long-term payoffs “do not align with the short-term political cycles that this or any other government face”.

Moreover, “in some sense, UK research is a victim of its own success,” continued Beech – who, from April, will be director of the Finsbury Institute, a public policy centre at City St George’s, University of London. “UK universities have succeeded in doing many amazing things with the [QR] money they’ve had. You can see how someone in the Treasury might argue that universities adopt a ‘make do and mend’ approach to QR rather than providing more funds.”

Treasury officials could also be forgiven for wondering whether extra QR funding is really justified in a distressed financial environment in which many UK universities have cut both research staff numbers and scaled back research intensity, argued Beech: “Higher education doesn’t seem the safest bet for extra funding at the moment. How do you know that any extra funds won’t plug short-term problems, rather than going to research that ministers want?”

Another factor – albeit entirely out of the sector’s control – is Keir Starmer’s pledge to increase UK defence spending to 2.5 per cent by 2027 and 3 per cent by 2030 – which could see government departments handed even tighter budget settlements than initially expected in chancellor Rachel Reeves’ spending review statement on 26 March. UKRI's budget could also be eaten into by the need to deliver on Starmer's recent commitment to “” and on the goverment's����– to which an initial £25 million was allocated in last year's autumn statement. The increasing cost of Horizon Europe association could add further pressure.

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Hence the sector’s lobbying frenzy. In a speech last month, for instance, Imperial College London president Hugh Brady said the UK’s current science and technology strengths “can in large part be explained by the flexibility QR funding gives researchers” and calling QR “the envy of our international competitors”.

According to Skidmore’s predecessor, David Willetts, who was in office from 2010 to 2014, QR is widely seen as “compensation for UK universities’ not having US-level endowments”. But even well-endowed American universities may feel a pang of jealousy given the activities of Elon Musk’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). Dismissed by as , the ceiling on the indirect costs that US researchers can claim on grants from the National Institutes of Health has been slashed by Doge from a standard 40-60 per cent down to��only 15 per cent. If that order is upheld by the courts, universities could lose up to 50 per cent of their NIH funding – amounting to a possible for the University of Pennsylvania, for instance.

Musk tweeted: “Can you believe that universities with tens of billions in endowments were siphoning off 60% of research award money for ‘overhead’? What a ripoff!” But others have pointed out that , not least because most US universities have relatively modest endowments, including some of those – such as the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) – that would be hit hardest by the NIH cuts. Hence, some top universities have already announced hiring freezes.

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“The things that��indirect��costs pay for – library, IT, janitorial services, facilities management – would not go away,” explained Ralph Marcucio, professor of orthopaedic surgery at UCSF. “Someone would have to pay them, or the research proposed in grants could not be performed.”

As for the suggestion that full costs should be itemised and requested in grant applications, Marcucio said this would introduce huge complexity into an already burdensome grant system. Moreover, “as an individual investigator, it would be nearly impossible to budget for those things,” he added.��“If those were not allowable direct costs, we likely would not be able to continue doing research at scale.”

Australia’s indirect cost stream, the , is also “widely considered to be insufficient”, said Gwilym Croucher, deputy director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne. The funding is distributed on the basis of universities’ relative external grant incomes, rather than performance in the country’s now discontinued equivalent of the REF, known as Excellence in Research for Australia. But, like QR, it is constrained, worth about A$1.1 billion (£540 million) in 2025-26, distributed between Australia’s 37 public universities. ��

“About two decades ago, we had a significant debate about increasing indirect cost support, and…we had a programme called Sustaining Research Excellence that was aiming to increase indirect cost support closer to 50 cents for every dollar of direct spend,” Croucher said. However, “this only lasted a short time and was never fully funded at proposed levels.”

With concerns over clampdowns on international student numbers – which have cross-subsided research in Australia, as they do in the UK and US – the “discussion is live in Australia at the moment about structural underfunding of research and, in particular, funding for indirect costs”, Croucher said.

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“The challenge is that addressing this requires a significant investment from government, which is often a hard ask of the public when they see how successful universities continue to be in attracting international students.” In that sense, he echoes Beech’s view that universities are “victims of their own success”.

But the REF offers the UK government something that Australia’s lacks: a method for at least some political pressure to be applied to universities’ use of their block research grants. According to Graeme Reid, chair of science and research policy at UCL, the REF “provides a very powerful system of incentives and rewards for certain types of behaviour”. As an example, he notes how quickly the idea of research impact was embraced by universities when it was announced that impact would be introduced as a criterion in the 2014 REF.

Furthermore, policymakers should not underestimate QR’s role in supporting pioneering, early-stage research, continued Reid, who was head of research��funding at what was then the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills in Willetts’ day and has also worked in the Treasury. “If you look at the new academic fields of recent years – quantum, AI, engineering biology – where did those grant applications come from? QR is special because it allows researchers to do the thinking that eventually turns into grant applications.”

And his Whitehall experience makes Reid confident that, contrary to the sector’s fears, QR’s “special” status is understood by ministers. “My memory is that there was always an understanding of QR funding and what it does,” he says. “This country has a disproportionate amount of high-performing research teams, and you can attribute that, in large part, to QR”.

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As a former dean of UCL’s medical school, current science minister Patrick Vallance could be expected to understand the value of QR better than most of his predecessors. However, he has said little about the dual-support system or QR during his six months in office. His oft-repeated claim that “basic, curiosity-driven, investigator-led research” is the “goose that lays the golden egg”��might be interpreted as coded support for QR, but it could equally refer to curiosity-driven project funding.

Moreover, Vallance’s call for “much more clarity on return-on-investment” for public science spending might be seen as a particularly tough ask for QR given the diffuse way it is spent. However, last year, Research England commissioned Rand Europe to undertake an impact evaluation of strategic institutional research funding, of which QR is the biggest chunk. And, in many cases, institutions are already starting to publicly set out how their QR cash . In his speech, for instance, Brady said Imperial’s QR funding��supports research in molecular sciences, vaccines manufacturing research and environmentally sensitive materials.

One of the few in-depth institution-level studies was by University of Cambridge researchers in 2021. That study identified myriad ways in which Cambridge spent its £120 million annual QR allocation – about a sixth of its £720 million research spend in 2018-19. Those uses included supporting library spending, direct investment in subjects, supporting fellowships and contributing towards Cambridge’s Postdoc Academy, which supports about 4,000 early-career researchers.

Such expenditure might not make for a compelling political narrative, but that doesn’t make it any less vital, according to Steven Wooding, head of research on research at Cambridge’s Research Strategy Office, who co-authored the study with Becky Ioppolo, an affiliated researcher at Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy.

“Part of the value of QR is its flexibility – it takes advantage of the fact that universities know their system better than government and allows them to play to their strengths,” he said.

One particularly vital role of QR is in supporting research careers. “It gives people the chance to play with ideas that might turn out to be next big thing,” Wooding said. “It’s part of the nature of research and innovation that things that are transformative begin life looking a bit mad. If they didn’t then everyone would doing it.”

The study found that it is common even for Cambridge’s more senior researchers to experience gaps in external funding. Indeed, the majority of social science or humanities professors were not leading a grant at some point during the nine years between 2010 and 2019 – and some never will, the study adds.

QR is particularly vital for bridging the gap between externally funded fixed-term contracts, the study found, with 8 per cent of medical research posts and 5 per cent of physical science research jobs reliant on central university funds at any one point. Indeed, the study identified QR as a “key source of support for academic salaries” in general – even if staff were not typically aware of this.

Still, Wooding is sceptical about efforts to fully itemise QR’s uses and returns. “There is more to be done to say what good it provides, but there is already strong accountability [for university departments] through the REF – we don’t need to be spending time and money tracking everything; there are better ways to use our research money,” he said.

That view is endorsed by Reid, a member of the steering committee set up by Research England to oversee its impact evaluation work. The benefits of “a fully unhypothecated stream” could be lost if universities are required to identify how every pound is spent, he said.

Reid sees the UK’s dual-support system for research as representing a “sweet partnership” of both retrospective “performance-driven funding” and forward-looking “project-driven funding”. “If you took away QR funding, how do you reward past performance?” he asked.

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“It would be a sad day when we stopped trying to improve the effectiveness of research grant allocation,” he said. “But it would be a sad day, too, if we wrote off a dual-support system that has served our country so well.”