FOI release

FOI2025/00754: UKRI spending by Equality Act characteristics

Some or all of the information requested was not provided because we determined that the cost to do so would exceed the appropriate limit.

Case reference FOI2025/00754

Received 25 August 2025

Published 18 November 2025

Request

Request received: 25 August 2025

I am interested in your compliance with the Equality Act s.149 Public Sector Equality Duty. Equality Act 2010 The following characteristics are protected by the Equality Act:

·        Age

·        Disability

·        Gender reassignment

·        Marriage and civil partnership

·        Pregnancy and maternity

·        Race

·        religion or belief

·        Sex

·        Sexual orientation

 

1.     Please can you tell me UKRI spending by each of these characteristics.

a.     For age if you do not have your own age bands please use the legal age for a child at the lower end and the legal retirement age (either 55 or 66 your choice) at then upper end with ‘adults’ catering for age groups in between

b.     Please also state funding by illness, if you were not already going to do that for disability.

c.      Please break out race and religion

 

2.     Please state the earliest date that you have evidence that UKRI complies with the duty across all its funding and send me the evidence

 

Clarification Received: 27 August 2025

I am interested in funding spent on the ‘beneficiary’ of the grant. So here are a couple of examples:

If you made a £500,000 grant to a mixed group of academics who were  researching ‘How to teach children how to use AI safely’ The beneficiary group would be ‘Age – sub group Children’ If you made a £1m grant to a black female academic who was researching the history of mosques in the UK. The beneficiary group would be ‘Religion – subgroup Moslem’

If you made a £750,000 grant to an early career researcher who was researching prostate cancer. The beneficiary group would be ‘Disability – prostate cancer’ and “Age – Retirement age’ and ‘Sex – Male’.

Within the protected characteristics you might have other designations. I am open-minded but looking at your past financial year would be fine be me.

Please suggest something else if this is not possible.

Please create a table with spending by the protected characteristics of the beneficiaries of your grant leading to UKRIs total grant making for the 2024/2025 year. If there is an amount of funding unaccounted for please explain.

Response

Response sent: 23 September 2025

Full details of this response are provided in the attached document.

Documents

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