Recommendation 127

Alastair Sim, Universities Scotland, told us that Scotland’s voice within UKRI was “still something that needs vigilance”.298 He was keen to see a “strong Scottish research voice on the board of UKRI” in succession to Sir Ian Diamond from the University of Aberdeen.299 He went on to say: [Integrating Research England into UKRI was not] necessarily the best thing to do. It does give a kind of instinctive closeness to a subset of UK institutions within UKRI just because there are some institutions they work more closely with than others because of the Research England embedding. We argued at the time, given the whole of the UK’s interest in UKRI and given also that devolved administrations are quite major funders of research, that they should have a structurally integral role in deciding UKRI’s priorities, along with the UK Government. I do not think that ever quite happened. I do not think anyone is acting with bad intent, but there is a sort of gravity of things. For instance, in the most recent project to support Covid, the research grant for that, only about 5% came to Scotland.300