The UK’s new science minister Chris McDonald has criticised the process used to select research grants as a “value-destroying activity”, saying he wants to see “faster outcomes” that will ultimately mean that “a smaller number of bigger, longer-term investments” are funded.

In his first major speech since he was appointed by new prime minister Andy Burnham in July, the Stockton North MP told vice-chancellors at Universities UK’s annual conference that he believed the current system of funding was letting down researchers, requiring them to spend too long applying for grants rather than doing research itself.

“There is a trade-off between efficient public spending, research quality and time at the bench,” said McDonald, a chemical engineer who worked at Tata Steel and then the Materials Processing Institute, a private research lab, before entering Parliament in July 2024.

“Speaking candidly, I believe that our competitive funding system only delivers two out of the three. It protects the efficiency of public money. It assures quality, but it doesn’t use researchers’ time wisely,” he said on 10 September.

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Calling for a “system that prioritises faster research outcomes over spending efficiency, whilst maintaining quality”, McDonald told the audience at Nottingham Trent University that he was unveiling “practical steps towards a smoother and simpler system” that would allow UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to put “more power into the hands of those actually running research programmes for targeted funding”.

“Programme teams will have more discretion about what goes forward and how it’s commissioned, using their subject knowledge, rather than sending everything through the full machine,” he said on efforts to limit how many research applications are scrutinised by a full peer review evaluation committee.

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“It’s similar to how an investment manager operates in finance and it is a model for success,” said McDonald.

He also wants “fewer, longer awards”, with the target that UKRI “will back a smaller number of bigger, longer-term investments”: comments that echo those made by UKRI’s chief executive Ian Chapman, who has frequently warned about the dangers of spreading too thinly the organisation’s £9 billion annual funding.

McDonald said this would mean “fewer speculative applications chasing the same cost and more effort managing investments well once made”.

He also backed UKRI’s plan to increase “distributed peer review”, with applicants assessing each other’s proposals to stop the current system “collapsing” under the weight of submissions, referring to a policy announced in UKRI’s five-year strategy released in July.

“Technology now makes polished applications easy to produce. So anyone can use ChatGPT or Copilot – possibly even I could – to generate a lengthy proposal in a very short period of time,” said McDonald on ongoing efforts to “discourage mass, low-effort submissions” and facilitate more face-to-face meetings with genuinely excellent candidates.

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Praising the efforts of his predecessor, Patrick Vallance, who held a Cabinet-level position as science secretary at the now-abolished Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, McDonald unveiled £20 million to progress ideas outlined in the post-16 skills White Paper aimed at identifying “barriers to collaboration and practical ways to overcome them”.

“It includes £4 million for pilot projects in England, testing new approaches within and between higher education providers, including shared research facilities, joint doctoral training centres and longer-term partnerships,” said McDonald, who also announced £15 million for “new models of UK-wide research and innovation partnerships, bringing together researchers to share resources and learning”.

McDonald, a University of Cambridge graduate, told the audience that he was the first fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering to be elected to Parliament. Although he had worked entirely in industrial research, he had sat on advisory boards at the universities of Oxford, Sheffield and Teesside, he explained. He had also helped to establish doctoral training centres at several UK universities, he added.

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McDonald, whose ministerial role, based in the newly formed Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, also covers innovation and investment, said he was mainly focused on championing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.

“First of all, I am the science minister and I will be making the case for science unrelentingly…There is a secretary of state for DCMS [the Department for Culture, Media and Sport] and she will do the same in the arts,” said McDonald, whose ministerial responsibilities cover all of UKRI’s research councils, including the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.

Asked directly about support for the arts and humanities, McDonald said there was not a “binary choice” between those subjects and STEM subjects but he felt it was important for him to point out the “under-representation of scientists and engineers in places where key decisions are made”.

“Part of my goal is to encourage people who are in that [science and engineering] community to consider putting themselves forward for public service,” he said, adding that there is also an “untapped pool of talent in this country” who should “consider science, engineering and maths because the evidence [shows it] could provide them with great opportunities”.

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com