Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what discussions he has had with medical research charities on the future availability of the Charity Research Support Fund in the event that a single public body replaces the research councils.

Recognizing the public benefit arising from research funded by charities and that charities do not pay full economic costs – the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has maintained the charity research support element of Quality Related (QR) research funding at £198m pa through to 2016-17.

The “Allocation of Science and Research funding 2016 – 2020” confirmed the Government’s expectation that throughout this period HEFCE should “continue to selectively focus funding on excellent research with impact wherever this is found … and to incentivise Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) to work with businesses and charities, leveraging additional investment, and to supervise postgraduate researchers”. It will be for the HEFCE Board to determine how much to provide for charity research support from within their overall research allocation in 2017-18, once they have received their annual Grant Letter from BEIS.

The creation of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) will bring together the Research Councils, Innovate UK and the research and knowledge exchange functions of HEFCE. These later functions will reside within a new Council - Research England. Decisions on the priorities for allocating QR research funding for 2018 onwards will be a matter for Research England.