Robin Bisson

@robinbisson

UK News Editor, @resprofnews.bsky.social. Mostly #researchpolicy, #researchfunding, #highered. British Journalism Awards finalist. Once likened to Tintin. Also into rivers. Tip? robin.bisson@clarivate.com

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Robin Bisson@robinbisson· 20d

The forecast cost overruns, before the prioritisation exercise are 2026-27: £96m 2027-28: £199m 2028-29: £197m 2029-30: £192m The 2029-30 costs have risen further “primarily in relation to UKRI’s commitments to international subscriptions and the protection of PPAN grant postdocs”

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· 20d

Chapman said the following in an open letter to the research community in February www.ukri.org/news/open-le...

In order to remain sustainable, STFC must make significant cumulative savings: a decrease of £162 million relative to our forecasts for their operational costs. The £162 million is the total net reduction in STFC’s annual costs that they must achieve by the end of the 2029 and 2030 financial year. It is not a £162 million saving in each year of the current SR period. Instead, STFC needs to reshape its cost base

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· 21d

Very clear from Burnham in this written statement to parliament that science has gone into the business department for "commercial application and job creation" Signal of a longer term rebalancing of the science budget towards applied research? questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-stat...

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· 26d

I think it's interesting how exaggerated it is, given 50% of UKRI spending went to the greater south east in 2023-24, and spending elsewhere has been going up (proportionally) Aria's statement is also an interesting take - quite a lot of research-intensives outside the SE!

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Jul 2

UKRI has put its money where its mouth is on improving the lot of postgrad research students, hiking up the stipend multiple times in recent years But inevitably this has put pressure on how many new PhDs it can fund each year - there has been a 22% drop over a decade, even as funding has risen 🧵

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Jun 25

The official statement on this from the Research Funders Policy Group was published today: wellcome.org/about-us/pos... Noteworthy that they say only "enterprise data protected" AI tools will be used in processing grant applications (i.e. not the free ones..)

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Jun 23

Another massive ERC win for the UK in the latest round of Advanced Grants - showing last year was no fluke There are suggestions the UK should look at trying to just join pillar 1 of FP10 because it performs so well in winning ERC/MSCA grants Is it possible the EU would let it though?

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· May 14

Here's another snap of @johnmorgan3.bsky.social from the awards last night, along with @francesjones.bsky.social who was shortlisted in the best writer in science and technology category Is that a prize bottle of English sparkling wine you see? Yes it is 🍾

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· May 13

Interestingly, however, the UK Metascience Unit (which is co-run by UKRI) concluded in 2025 that (see assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/685a83...)

current weight of evidence does not suggest
that Partial Randomisation is a highly impactful
and effective tool for achieving bias reduction,
novelty, efficiency, or greater fairness

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· May 6

'Tortured phrases' was not a concept on my radar until today The editors of this report on forensic scientometrics (i.e. the study of research misconduct) must have enjoyed choosing examples they've cited figshare.com/articles/onl...

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· May 1

Chinnery said that another "big change", which wasn't immediately clear when MRC announced it has replaced its funding boards with a more flexible college of experts, is that not every application will be peer reviewed

Instead, panels chosen from the college of experts will triage which grants should go through to peer review, after which “they’ll all get invited to interview, and we anticipate that the success rate at interview will be between a third and a half”.

“This makes the system faster and a lot more efficient,” he said.

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· May 1

On the other hand, more funding will be made available in new 'bucket 2' schemes focused on govt priorities Life sciences has a £1bn budget over the spending review, and Chinnery is heading up the programme to spend it

“MRC researchers will benefit from the life sciences budget that has been allocated [and will] also benefit from other critical techs [such as] engineering biology and AI,” Chinnery said.

“My job, the job of our teams at MRC, is to make sure that our research community benefits from these other resources that are coming into UKRI in this record settlement that we’ve landed, tapping into those technologies.”

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· May 1

The MRC budget is £799m in 26/27, of which £415m is for curiosity-driven research Lots of that CDM budget is accounted for by funding for institutes (LMB, Crick, etc.), so there is £113m for applicant-led schemes Chinnery indicated these schemes will be "down a bit" compared to previous years

“It is still going to be down a bit compared [with] where it was—it is part and parcel of redirecting and readjusting our funding into some of the other buckets and preparing those schemes in order to allow bucket two to deliver.”

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 24

Update to this story - the shadow science secretary Julia Lopez has doubled down on the policy Early sign of political consensus around R&D funding cracking?

Lopez told RPN: “The Conservative pledge to direct £2bn per year of UKRI funding into a Sovereign Defence Fund to develop dual use technologies does not represent a funding cut but rather an urgently needed redeployment of public funds into research and development projects that are in our national security interests.

“As the world becomes ever more dangerous, we are clear that we need to focus our remarkable British scientific and technological capabilities more explicitly on defence.”

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 17

In 2022-23, UKRI and the HE funding bodies provided nearly 60% of all public R&D funding In 2024-25, that fell to just under 50% In terms of where the money ended up, universities still accounted for the biggest share in 2024-25, but far more research happened *within government depts* than before

Universities are still the top destination for public R&D funds, but spending within government departments is catching up

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 17

Here are the real-terms increases across different sources of public R&D spend UKRI (excluding Research England) 2023-24: +0.8% 2024-25: +5.4% Higher education funding bodies 2023-24: -9.3% 2024-25: -1.4% Civil government depts 2023-24: +10.5% 2024-25: +24.1% MOD 2023-24: +23.1% 2024-25: +13.6%

Much of the rise in R&D spending has taken place outside UKRI and higher education funding bodies

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 17

Getting ONS R&D stats 2 years after the fact always feels a bit...old news BUT, I do think there's some interesting stuff in there Namely, that while there were two years of real-terms growth in UK public R&D spending of ~9%, this pretty much took place outside funding for the university sector 🧵

Government expenditure on R&D has risen more rapidly in real terms from 2022 than pre-pandemic

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 16

It's got to sting for recently rejected ERC applicants that blocks on resubmissions have been extended by a year Maria Leptin said the ERC is making the move because panels are dealing with ~250 applications compared to 50-150 in the past The message is v much 'only apply when absolutely ready':

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 15

The UK is spending £327m on the Square Kilometre Array Observatory between 2021 and 2030—around 20% of the entire budget SKAO is also headquartered in the UK and its outgoing head, Philip Diamond, is a Brit Diamond told @isaacbarbosa1.bsky.social he is worried about cuts to astronomy funding 🧵

“I look at that with concern because, with the large investment that UK taxpayers have put into SKAO, surely the follow-on—the funding of the students, of the astronomy—must be there,” he said.

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 15

There's definitely a reshaping of UK research going on Some of it is intentional - govt encouraging unis to specialise, UKRI directing funds for applied R&I to industrial strategy areas Some of it isn't - unis taking individual decisions to save costs that add up to impact on national capacity 🧵

Speaking to Research Professional News, Marcus Munafò, deputy vice-chancellor and provost at the University of Bath, said: “I think there’s a risk we could end up in a situation where some technologies or certain disciplines fall off a cliff—go past a certain threshold because they don’t have a critical mass of funding to support them.

“That bit seems to be missing from the debate; we need to think about the research ecosystem as national capability and infrastructure that we need to keep healthy to allow us to react to unknown scenarios in the future.”

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 14

ICYMI (because I certainly did), last week STFC published some numbers about where its cost pressures have come from Increasing costs of international subscriptions is the biggest driver www.ukri.org/publications...

over the last five years, inflationary pressures have increased STFC’s total costs by an estimated £136 million per annum compared to financial year 2021 to 2022
this includes £50 million of increased costs per annum for access to international infrastructures, split roughly fifty-fifty between unfavourable movements in foreign exchange rates and subscription costs
the remaining £86 million includes further cost increases in the rest of STFC’s portfolio, split between staff costs (£34 million), grants (£16 million), utilities (£7 million), net operational costs (£6 million) and inflation on capital (£23 million)

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 11

Top CBA captioning from the Times here

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 10

While lots of attention has been on expected cuts to the particle physics, astronomy and nuclear programme, hundreds of researchers from other fields are also raising concerns about cuts to STFC-run facilities which they rely on

“Researchers like ourselves, whose curiosity-led fundamental and applied research is funded by other funding councils, rely on STFC-operated facilities,” they wrote. “Without continued access to these facilities, significant areas of UKRI-funded research simply could not proceed.”

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 10

Meanwhile, UKRI's total budget is forecast to rise modestly in real terms through the spending review So STFC will take up a smaller proportion of overall spending by 2030 STFC's woes have been blamed on its growing cost base, but surely decisions made in the allocations process also play a role?

UKRI's overall budget is increasing and is forecast to outstrip inflation

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 10

I think this says a lot about the pressure STFC is under: its budget will not have risen (in cash terms) between 2023 and 2030 Inflation is obviously going keep eroding that, and more so with the Iran war (Details of STFC budget figures over the spending review have not been published before now)

Inflation has piled pressure on STFC's budget, which has stayed relatively flat in cash terms

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 9

Hopes for a strong January enrolment period - which sees a moderate peak in applications - to shore up university finances have been dashed Application numbers were down 17 per cent in December and 31 per cent in January compared with the previous year

Student visa applications have been down in most months of the year

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 9

This comes after a moderate recovery in international student visa applications in 2025 Numbers fell off a cliff in 2023 and 2024, hitting a nadir in November 2024 Applications in the year ending March 2026 numbered 413,100—the lowest total over a 12-month period since January 2025

Applications over a 12-month period have dropped after rallying in 2025

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Apr 9

We've been tracking applications for UK student visas for many months now and the trend is...not good March figures released by the Home Office today show there have been 6 straight months where numbers were down on the year before 🧵

Monthly visa applications have been lower, year-on-year, since October 2025

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Mar 30

The panel made very clear statements about cuts: “funding conditions have become beyond what we can class as ‘challenging’ and are now regarded as critical” See www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

Robin Bisson@robinbisson· Mar 25

Double-take detail in this interview with Edith Heard, head of the Crick Her French husband decided against getting a spouse visa because of the UK's "intrusive" immigration rules If that's happening with one of the UK's most senior scientists, how many others are being put off completely?