Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, how she plans to promote research into new models of (a) assessment and (b) support.

The government’s November 2023 ‘Response to the Independent Review of the RDI Organisational Landscape’ announced the creation of a new Metascience Unit, jointly run across the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), with an initial funding commitment of £10m. The unit will deliver a competitive grants programme and will also conduct experiments to test and robustly evaluate the effectiveness of changes in the funding processes delivered by UKRI.

This programme of work is intended to generate evidence on more effective ways of funding and supporting scientific research.