Conclusion 24

UKRI told us that it is confident it has the right freedoms to operate and highlighted that the Department now allows it to move up to 1.5% of its allocated funding between financial years (reflecting the Department’s similar agreement with HM Treasury). The Department was more cautious, noting that this is the first year it has had that flexibility and that it is too early to say whether it would enable the Department to do everything it wants to do.50 The government has committed to set 10-year budgets for public R&D investment in specific areas, a step which was welcomed by organisations writing to us.51 However, the Department and UKRI acknowledged that they have so far only made use of this on two programmes: one for the National Quantum Computing Centre and one for the Laboratory of Molecular Biology. The Department noted that science is developing very rapidly at the moment, and highlighted the risk that widespread use of long-term budgets would limit its ability to change focus if required.52