Conclusion 5

The Department has given UKRI flexibility in how it funds infrastructure, but UKRI is not yet making enough use of long-term budgets. We were pleased to hear that UKRI is confident that it has the right freedoms to operate, including the power it has agreed with HM Treasury to move 1.5% of its allocated funding between financial years. The government has also committed to set 10-year budgets for R&D investment in specific areas, a step which was welcomed by organisations writing to us. However, we were surprised that the Department has only made use of this on two programmes to date. We are not convinced it is striking the right balance between providing certainty and retaining flexibility to respond to new scientific discoveries. The Department and UKRI failed to ensure the ARCHER2 national supercomputer’s replacement will be ready before ARCHER2 is turned off. The 13-month expected delay would have been longer without the University of Edinburgh’s decision to proactively prepare its site by upgrading a grid connection. However, we were pleased to hear that UK researchers will once again have access to high-quality computing when the new system opens and that UKRI believes it can mitigate the consequences of the delay for researchers in the meantime. 5 recommendation a. UKRI should consider what more it could do to identify long-standing research infrastructure which needs greater long-term funding certainty. For example, it should look at including the decision on whether to allocate a long-term budget in business cases. b. The Department should also set out a broad financial commitment around how much it and UKRI will spend on new supercomputer capabilities beyond the current spending review period.