The UK’s research base is internationally excellent and highly productive, and the Government is determined that this world-class environment in the UK for scientific research and development should be maintained to help to secure high value, innovation business in the UK.
In 2002 the Government reviewed the dual support model for funding university research and concluded that without some changes, the high productivity of the UK research base would not be financially sustainable in the longer term. Following an extensive consultation exercise in 2003, the Government announced three measures to help put university research funding on a sustainable basis:
- higher education institutes (HEIs) and their funding partners were asked to adopt the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) methodology to enable them to estimate the full economic cost (FEC) of research to and to ensure that this is properly considered in funding decisions;
- HEIs were asked to recover, in aggregate, the full economic costs of their activities;
- Research Councils were asked to increase the proportion of the full economic cost paid to HEIs for research (80 per cent of the FEC for applications received after 1 September 2005). The longer trajectory is to enable Councils to provide close to the full economic cost of research undertaken in universities by around 2010
The Government provided an announced an additional £120 million a year from 2005/06 and an additional £80 million a year from 2007/08 to enable Councils to fund 80 per cent of the FEC of research grants whilst maintaining the current volume of Research Council supported research in HEIs.
Read more about the fEC Review project.