Regional funding drive will have ‘winners and losers’ - McDonald

Efforts to distribute research spending across the UK’s regions will lead to “winners and losers”, the science minister has said.

In his first appearance in front of the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Select Committee on 21 October Chris McDonald said the UK is looking to develop a “small number” of “internationally significant clusters around the country”.

The prime minister Andy Burnham has asked UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to commit £1 billion over the next four years to back regional innovation clusters.

On selecting which areas will receive funding, McDonald told MPs that “the driving force…will be the opportunity to strengthen or create nationally or internationally significant clusters in areas that align to the industrial strategy”.

Although he said the criteria for identifying the clusters was yet to be announced, McDonald said that “private industry investment is a really good measure of whether a cluster is there and it’s working or not”.

“I really don’t want to rush it because I also want to be clear…that this means that there will be winners and losers,” he warned.

Giving more detail of the fund’s nature, he said: “it will be held centrally, but it will be distributed around the country in collaboration with the relevant authorities in those areas”. He added that there will be “a level of coordination” needed when administering the funds.

Asked by the committee chair and influential MP Chi Onwurah where the money is coming from within the UKRI budget, McDonald said that there is currently a “reprioritisation of activity” under way within the agency.

He suggested that the money would come from the organisation’s budgets allocated to governmental and societal priorities, rather than from curiosity-driven research budgets – as some had feared. He also indicated that £270 million of the £500m UKRI Local Innovation Partnerships Fund will be ring-fenced for devolved R&D funding.

McDonald said that Burnham had chosen him as science minister in July because “I have spent my career commercialising science”.

Dissolving the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology into the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) was “all about alignment” of science policy, industrial strategy and defence, McDonald said, adding he has “the ability now to manage the end-to-end pipeline of scientific discovery through to commercialisation”.

Freddie van Mierlo, Liberal Democrat MP for Henley and Thame, asked McDonald about cuts to the UK’s three multidisciplinary facilities, made as part of an exercise to deal with spiralling costs at UKRI’s Science and Technology Facilities Council. Van Mierlo also claimed that he had been informed of a further £100 million shortfall in STFC’s budget.

Van Mierlo said that STFC staff were told that “if there is a facility to be closed, it will be the ISIS Neutron and Muon facilities”. Times Higher Education has confirmed that STFC staff were told this by senior leadership at an all-staff meeting on 14 October.

McDonald did not respond to a request from van Mierlo to make a commitment to keep the three facilities – also including Diamond Light Source and the Central Laser Facility - hosted at the Harwell Campus in Oxford open beyond 2028.

He said: “What I’ll tell you quite explicitly and clearly is that the STFC plan is intended to keep the [three facilities] open, and financially sustainable, which they haven’t been.” McDonald also requested that van Mierlo inform him further of the alleged £100 million additional shortfall in writing.

On 20 October, van Mierlo wrote a letter, seen by THE, to BIST secretary Jonathan Reynolds, asking him to “clarify whether the ISIS and Diamond facilities risk being closed as early as 2027, due to lack of funding”.

frances.jones@timeshighereducation.com