“My memory is that there was always an understanding of QR funding and what it does,” he says. However, last year, Research England commissioned Rand Europe to undertake an impact evaluation of strategic institutional research funding, of which QR is the biggest chunk. In his speech, for instance, Brady said Imperial’s QR funding supports research in molecular sciences, vaccines manufacturing research and environmentally sensitive materials. Reid sees the UK’s dual-support system for research as representing a “sweet partnership” of both retrospective “performance-driven funding” and forward-looking “project-driven funding”. “If you took away QR funding, how do you reward past performance?” he asked.
