UKRI should do extra to drive innovation agenda and keep away from fraud

The UKRI, the biggest single public funder of analysis and innovation within the UK, wants funding assurance. The UK analysis and innovation: Offering assist by means of grants report by the Nationwide Audit Committee (NAO) discovered that the organisation’s ongoing challenges embody a scarcity of joined-up path from authorities departments; inefficient knowledge programs; and the necessity to think about additional assist well-managed risk-taking by means of organisational tradition.

The report discovered a scarcity of coordination in how the federal government expects UKRI to assist the supply of a variety of goals.

The UKRI makes use of its finances to assist the federal government’s analysis and innovation agenda. Given the multi-year nature of UKRI’s investments, it must make a excessive degree of monetary commitments into future monetary years, which, the NAO stated, limits the finances out there to answer rising authorities priorities by means of initiating new programmes. 

Because of the broad nature of UKRI’s exercise, authorities departments point out their coverage priorities to UKRI by means of a wide range of means, together with advert hoc and routine conferences, authorities methods and mission statements, and spending assessment budgets. Nevertheless, the NAO reported that these will not be consolidated or ranked.

The report’s authors discovered that since its institution, UKRI has been grappling with consolidating the info of its predecessor organisations, which ran separate programs and had knowledge high quality points. Though it has now developed a system to categorise grants by theme algorithmically, primarily based on the award title and outline, monitoring or analysing different features of spending throughout UKRI stays a tough guide train. The NAO was instructed by UKRI that round 15% of its grants don’t have a full description on its system or the descriptions are poor high quality, which signifies that spending on these grants can’t be precisely mechanically categorised.

There are additionally points referring to fraud. The NAO reported that the counter-fraud group on the UKRI is under-staffed, which suggests there’s a backlog of circumstances and restricted capability for preventative work.

The report from the NAO discovered that in 2023-24, UKRI investigated suspected fraud on £42.6m of grants. It recognized £4.6m of fraud; prevented £13.5m and recovered £80,000. The NAO famous that UKRI has recognised there are points with its method to fraud, and stated it was reorganising its danger, assurance, counter-fraud and company governance group. In response to the NAO report, the UKRI is engaged on a brand new counter-fraud technique and a brand new method to funding assurance; has recruited new workers; and begun efforts to enhance group tradition and replace fraud danger assessments. The NAO was instructed to count on enhancements by September 2025.

The authors of the report concluded that UKRI, which spends round £9bn yearly, wants to determine a powerful method to grasp how its work is offering a return on funding for taxpayers.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, stated: “UKRI performs a key function in supporting a considerable and profitable R&I system, in search of to take a excessive danger, excessive reward method to grant funding. Nevertheless, it lacks any measurable goals to trace progress and doesn’t have the fitting knowledge to handle grant spending strategically.

“For the nation to stay international leaders in R&I, UKRI should do extra to assist its decision-makers, foster resilience and guarantee our programs can proceed to answer rising challenges.”