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The UK must be more strategic in how it funds science, a former Covid adviser has said, as the government launches a search for business candidates to run its research awards body that has an annual budget of £8bn.
The change at the helm of UK Research and Innovation next year provides “real opportunities” for a corporate leader to take over, said Sir John Bell, an Oxford university medicine professor who is to head a new research institute funded by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
Bell’s remarks highlight an urgency to improve the targeting of public funds into priority research areas such as telecommunications, engineering biology and quantum technologies, as the government pursues its goal of making the UK a “science superpower” by 2030.
“If I had one overriding concern [it is that] we don’t do any kind of strategic prioritisation of the science base,” said Bell, who co-developed and wrote UK government-commissioned strategies for the life sciences in 2017 and 2021 and advised ministers during the coronavirus crisis.
“We basically say: ‘Well, send us a grant [application], see if we like it — and if we do we’ll give you some money’.”
The public funding system needed to be better at choosing the most important areas of research and then backing them “properly with adequate resources and effort to get them across the finish line”, said Bell.
The £1bn Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford campus, where Bell will become president in April, will focus on health, green energy, food security sustainability and government policy and economics.
UKRI was created in 2018 to bring nine research organisations into one body. Its experience had highlighted how increased British government science funding had “turned out to be much more complicated to . . . manage than I think most people suspected”, said Bell.
Dame Ottoline Leyser, a distinguished botanist who will step down as UKRI chief executive in June next year, had done a “good job” but the organisation had “still got a bit of a way to go before it gets to be really effective”, he added.
UKRI said it had “a unique position in the research and innovation system, spanning all disciplines and all sectors”.
It added: “We prioritise daily across a wide array of strategic drivers . . . ensuring that the UK has the knowledge, skills and infrastructure needed to target the priorities of the present and the future.”
The government will on Tuesday launch its search for Dame Ottoline’s successor, as well as seek candidates for other top science jobs at Innovate UK and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, both part of UKRI. The government is also looking for a new chair for the Met Office.
It is urging corporate leaders to apply for the posts, said Andrew Griffith, science, research and innovation minister.
“We are going to look for the very best and brightest,” he added. “Those people could come . . . from outside the academic world. It absolutely could be people who have led big successful business enterprises, as well as those who have got a track record of research.”
Griffith said the government was prioritising areas of science that “contribute to the top-level growth of the economy”.
It launched the Advanced Research and Invention Agency last year to pursue ideas for breakthrough technologies.
Griffith played down complaints by the Royal Society and other parts of the scientific community that high UK visa fees and NHS surcharges were undermining efforts to recruit talented overseas researchers.
“When I talk to people internationally, as I do, they see the UK as highly attractive,” he said. “They understand that every country has its own particular visa regime.”
