12 June 2013 
Matt Sisson, Projects and Membership Manager
The chancellor George Osborne has announced that five new university and business partnerships will receive £291 million of investment in research projects from the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund (UKRPIF), made up of public and private funding.
The five projects, which add to the 15 projects already funded by UKRPIF, include Manchester University's £117m partnership with companies including Rolls Royce, to research and develop advanced materials to operate under harsh conditions, and the "world's most flexible factory", a £43m collaboration between the University of Sheffield's Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and companies including Boeing.
Universities Minister David Willetts said that efforts to match the UKRPIF investment with private-sector funds “has secured over £855 million from business and charities - a total investment of £1.15 billion. This is an extraordinary result, far exceeding the required private to public funding ratio of two-to-one. The UK’s world-class universities are at the forefront of our economic recovery. It’s vital we do everything we can to encourage collaboration with the private sector and boost funding for research.”
One of the recommendations of the aforementioned IPPR report is to continue to ring-fence the research budget through to the next spending review period until 2017/18, The report suggests the science budget could be supported by a “reallocation of approximately £1 billion a year that is mainly spent inefficiently on R&D tax incentives to instead set up a national network of Applied Research and Innovation Centres focused on boosting applied research in the strategic industries of the future and on revitalising regions below-average growth.” Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills championed the ability of university R&D to support growth, and told the Times Higher Education, “in a rational world we would be increasing [funding], and certainly I will argue for that.”
