BIS Capital Consultation – advance notice
As a Member of the EPSRC ICT Strategic Advisory Team I’d like to alert members of our ICT research community to the fact that a BIS Capital Consultation is going to be launched this month, probably with a March deadline. This is to identify UK priorities in building a world-leading science and research infrastructure for the 2020s, across the whole landscape and is for £1.1 billion in 2015/2016 and to grow with inflation to 2020/21.
Following advice from Dr Liam Blackwell at EPSRC, the earlier consultation on this has provided some direction on the balance between capital for projects, institutions, and national facilities (including international collaborations). This is now moving into a phase of securing input on choices for a more detailed plan for capital investment.
Once we get more detail on the timescales, EPSRC will be drawing this to the attention of departments in the ICT landscape, but in the meantime it would be helpful if you would use your networks to alert people to this forthcoming consultation. It would be also useful if you could reflect on the weighting this gives to areas which can plan out large scale capital investments, just because of the way the approach is structured.
More later.
Professor Gerard Parr
Chair in Telecommunications Engineering
University of Ulster Coleraine
Northern Ireland, UK