UKRI’s three-day research grant call ‘unfair on applicants’

Shortening funding calls to as little as three working days has placed unfair pressure on university research offices and will prevent the best researchers from applying, a former director at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has warned.

Drawing attention to a recent £10 million grant call by Innovate UK related to offshore wind technology, which opened on 29 May and closed on 3 June, Kirsty Grainger said the “ridiculously short window” to apply for grants of up to £1.5 million effectively meant institutions had three days to submit their funding bids given the call spanned the weekend.

“This is a quality as well as an [equality, diversity and inclusion] issue,” explained Grainger, who was previously head of strategy at UKRI and is now director of research and impact services at the University Bath.

Such calls are “putting massive demands on the system that is under extreme strain and pressure,” she explained.

While acknowledging that applicants had been given advanced warning in mid-April about this forthcoming grant call, Grainger said the time frame still left university research offices with less than eight weeks to pull together a grant application, and the full details of the scheme were only released on 28 May.

That is likely to breach UKRI expectations that research funding calls should remain open for at least eight weeks – as detailed, for example, in the recent Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) EDI action plan, published in March.

Similar recent calls have also breached this guidance, said Grainger, noting that a £40 million call for a Fundamental AI Research Lab by the ESPRC in March, offering grants of up to £9.4 million, was open for only one month. An Innovate UK funding call worth £30 million in energy research, advertised in late May, was open for less than a month, she added.

Grainger said she respected the work of her former colleagues at UKRI to “get funding rapidly out of the door” but it was important to stick to the funder’s policies that gave sufficient time for research offices to respond to grants.

“Short timelines do not allow...the highest-quality ideas and teams to apply,” said Grainger, who first raised her concerns in an online post.

The recent spate of shortened funding calls probably reflects pressures related to the delayed confirmation of UKRI’s budget for 2025-26, following the June 2025 spending review, with research councils having relatively little time to spend their budget for the financial year or face returning their funding to the Treasury, Grainger told Times Higher Education.

“In many cases the detail of [research councils’] delegated budgets isn’t agreed until some time after [UKRI is told its budget],” said, who added that council settlements “haven’t always been announced before the spending review period starts”.

With UKRI’s councils “reluctant to spin-up new programmes” for the first year of the spending review in case spending review settlements were lower than expected, this often meant the “first year’s spend is condensed into a frantic few months of getting new calls out of the door”, said Grainger.

“This is what we are seeing now and it is exacerbated by a second constraint in public monies, that government funding allocated to be spent in one financial year cannot be rolled over and spent in the following financial year,” she said.

“It is literally spend it or lose it,” said Grainger, adding that that “teams across UKRI have to react really quickly to get money out of the door otherwise it effectively disappears from the UKRI budget".

“Teams running these calls are doing an excellent job and responding rationally to the framework in which they are working. But this does not lead to the best outcomes,” she said.

A UKRI spokesperson said its “standard position” was that “funding calls should be open for at least eight weeks to give applicants enough time to prepare strong proposals and to support fairness and inclusion”.

“In some situations a shorter window is necessary because of external or strategic factors, but when this happens UKRI expects teams to put in place appropriate mitigations such as early pre-announcements or adjusted requirements to reduce any disadvantage to applicants,” they added.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com