UKRI must do more to drive innovation agenda and avoid fraud

The UKRI, the largest single public funder of research and innovation in the UK, needs funding assurance. The UK research and innovation: Providing support through grants report by the National Audit Committee (NAO) found that the organisation’s ongoing challenges include a lack of joined-up direction from government departments; inefficient data systems; and the need to consider how to further support well-managed risk-taking through organisational culture.

The report found a lack of coordination in how the government expects UKRI to support the delivery of a range of objectives.

The UKRI uses its budget to support the government’s research and innovation agenda. Given the multi-year nature of UKRI’s investments, it needs to make a high level of financial commitments into future financial years, which, the NAO said, limits the budget available to respond to emerging government priorities through initiating new programmes. 

Due to the broad nature of UKRI’s activity, government departments indicate their policy priorities to UKRI through a variety of means, including ad hoc and routine meetings, government strategies and mission statements, and spending review budgets. However, the NAO reported that these are not consolidated or ranked.

The report’s authors found that since its establishment, UKRI has been grappling with consolidating the data of its predecessor organisations, which ran separate systems and had data quality issues. Although it has now developed a system to classify grants by theme algorithmically, based on the award title and description, tracking or analysing other aspects of spending across UKRI remains a difficult manual exercise. The NAO was told by UKRI that around 15% of its grants do not have a full description on its system or the descriptions are poor quality, which means that spending on these grants cannot be accurately automatically classified.

There are also issues relating to fraud. The NAO reported that the counter-fraud team at the UKRI is under-staffed, which means there is a backlog of cases and limited capacity for preventative work.

The report from the NAO found that in 2023-24, UKRI investigated suspected fraud on £42.6m of grants. It identified £4.6m of fraud; prevented £13.5m and recovered £80,000. The NAO noted that UKRI has recognised there are issues with its approach to fraud, and said it was reorganising its risk, assurance, counter-fraud and corporate governance team. According to the NAO report, the UKRI is working on a new counter-fraud strategy and a new approach to funding assurance; has recruited new staff; and begun efforts to improve team culture and update fraud risk assessments. The NAO was told to expect improvements by September 2025.

The authors of the report concluded that UKRI, which spends around £9bn annually, needs to establish a strong approach to understand how its work is providing a return on investment for taxpayers.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “UKRI plays a key role in supporting a substantial and successful R&I system, seeking to take a high risk, high reward approach to grant funding. However, it lacks any measurable objectives to track progress and does not have the right data to manage grant spending strategically.

“For the nation to remain global leaders in R&I, UKRI must do more to support its decision-makers, foster resilience and ensure our systems can continue to respond to emerging challenges.”