Spending Review 2025: Why headline ‘£86 billion for research’ figure isn’t as ambitious as it sounds

A spending review lays out government department budget plans for future years. This means big numbers in the headlines with the implications sometimes unclear.

At Wellcome, we care about seeing commitment from the government that it will invest in and grow the UK’s position in science and health.

Did the 2025 spending review match those ambitions?

• £86 billion budget for research and development (R&D) over the next four years, rising from an annual budget of £20.4 billion in 2025/26 to £22.6 billion by the end of the spending review
• Biggest annual increases were defence (3.6%) and health (3%), alongside increases for housebuilding and schools
• Biggest cuts were seen in the budgets of the Home Office, the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
• The R&D budget within Official Development Assistance will halve over the spending review from £800 million in 2025/26 to £400 million in 2029/30

The government plans to spend £86bn on research over the next four years. But the big winners in terms of budget increases were defence and health, alongside increased funding for transport, housebuilding and schools.

Research budgets do not see significant growth. And the big numbers that are there hide a change in ambition.

The previous government planned to grow R&D spending to £22bn in 2024/25. They then delayed that target to 2026/27. The latest spending review now reveals that this level won’t be reached until 2029.

Accounting for inflation, delaying the £22bn target to 2029 means the budget effectively stands still, rather than reaching the kind of ambitious goal that the target originally represented had it been reached sooner.

R&D budgets being protected while difficult cuts are made elsewhere could be viewed as a positive. But small increases to the R&D budget are unlikely to provide the investment needed to truly capitalise on the UK’s strengths in research, particularly given the financial distress being felt across Higher Education Institutions (HEI), with 72% of providers facing an income deficit in 2025-26.

Budgets that provide for fundamental research and infrastructure are still unclear, with further details yet to be published. In previous spending reviews the government has provided figures for ‘core research’ within the headline budgets – roughly equivalent to the funding for the national research councils that provide grants to scientists. No figures are provided this time, but given the Department for Science budget next year will be frozen, it looks likely there will be another squeeze on many kinds of research grants and other research council spending.

Despite a large increase in the health budget, there has been a proportional decline in the amount the government plans to spend on research. This is disappointing as Wellcome had urged government to put research at the heart of the plan to drive improvement and innovation in the NHS.

After the recently announced cuts to the UK aid budget, the Spending Review showed that spending on R&D as part of the aid budget will halve between now and the election. This will see the UK’s spending abroad go from £800 million in 2025/26 to £400 million by 2029/30, drastically reducing the UK’s ability to collaborate with countries on some of the world’s biggest health challenges.

The UK remains widely recognised as a great place to do science, with strength in life sciences.

It has centuries of scientific achievements and is home to many of the world’s best universities.

So the latest budgets from the spending review show reduced ambition from this government, says John-Arne Røttingen, chief executive of Wellcome.

“The previous government planned to reach £22bn a year of R&D spending last year, then pushed it back. Today's review pushes that aim back further to 2030. This is a reduction in ambition at a time when the UK desperately needs the economic growth that investing in science brings.

“The squeeze on the health research budget in particular risks limiting our ability to find new treatments and innovation in the NHS. Britain has a strength in life sciences and medicine that it should be leaning into, to benefit patients and the economy.

“Meanwhile, a consequence of the disappointing decision to cut overseas aid is that the science it funds, tackling some of the world’s biggest health threats, will be halved by the end of the decade."

Wellcome is a global funder but thanks to our history we continue to hold significant investment in UK research.

We want the UK to remain a great place to do science, we want the researchers we fund to feel well supported, and that means consistent investment. While the newly announced research budgets could have been worse under the financial circumstances in the UK, they are a missed opportunity for the country to double down on its strengths.