UKC

£800 million for what? 

Blue skies.

Aria 51?

Boris's mates probably

Aria drive car

Blue sky research which has a good chance of not paying off on an individual project (i.e. which wouldn't be considered feasible by a commercial entity), the hope is that research which does pay off will offset the failures/ partial failures.

It's based on the model utilised by Advanced Research Projects Agencies in the US (the most well known being DARPA).

I'm cautiously optimistic, certainly a better use of money than the majority of MP's salaries or the donations to Dido Harding's holiday fund made on our behalf by the prime minister.

It’s one of those things where £800m is a big number and sounds impressive, but probably falls  far short of what is needed.

For showering mates with money ?

One would hope to replace the funding from the EU Framework programmes?

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/advanced-research-and-invention-...

Ah. More Tory obsession with painting everything blue, eh...?

Three different (but not mutually exclusive) reasons:

1.  Because it was part of Dominic Cummings's deal with Johnson.  He's a huge admirer of the USA's ARPA agency in the 60's, and he claims he insisted on creating something like it as a condition for joining the government.  He gave it enough momentum in government that, even after he left, the process of establishing it kept on rolling on.

2.  Because the government wants to create a science funding agency that is less burdened by the bureaucracy and political interference that it has itself imposed on the main funding body, UKRI.

3.  Because in principle it's worth trying out different ways of funding science, because no-one knows how to do it perfectly.  This body aims to give much more freedom to a programme manager to commission research that advances their own vision, rather than waiting to see what proposals come in from the scientific community.  The example from ARPA is JCR Licklider, whose vision of networked computing helped get the internet going.  

Yes, it's not that big in the scheme of things.  £800 m is over the life of the parliament so it's more like £200 m a year.  For context, the main science funding agency UKRI has a budget of about £8 billion this year; total government R&D spending is pencilled in at about £14 billion, and there was a target (which BEIS still think is in place, though the Treasury may differ) to raise this to £22 billion by 24/25.  

The danger of course is that this new shiny thing will be used to distract attention from a retreat from these much bigger, and arguably more important, commitments.

Yeah, £800m is a big number to a household, in terms of a national research budget it's pretty small! Richard J has rightly pointed out that it's a lot smaller UKRI funding, realistically we need people working on blue sky research as well as people working on practical applications of existing technologies (so projects like the UK SMR which are more about implementing existing technologies in a better way).

In theory its not that bad an idea. The US DARPA has had some great successes some well known and some not so much. Anyone using Siri is using a product originally developed for one of DARPAs projects and most self driving cars trace their origins back to the DARPA projects.

I think though their budget is rather higher and of course politicans have to be willing to accept the inevitable failures which is tricky.