Changes are afoot in the way that we submit bids to UKRI (UK Research and Innovation), one of our major funders (this includes all of the UK research councils AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC, InnovateUK ). In the past 2 years or so we have made over 200 bids led by over 200 academics to these councils and we currently hold awards from these funders worth over £8M.

UKRI’s Simpler and Better Funding (SBF) programme is introducing a new Funding Service  which aims to be easy to use for everyone involved in research funding. This will replace Je-S (Joint Electronic Submission) which we’ve been working with for a couple of decades! 

The new Funding Service is being built iteratively, with new functionality and updates regularly released. During this phase, the new Funding Service will run in parallel to UKRI’s current online system for managing funding, the Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system.

In 2023, grant applications to research councils will start to be made via the new Funding Service rather than the Je-S system. From January 2024, council opportunities will be launched and managed in the Funding Service. 

Keep your eye out for upcoming internal UoP sessions on the Funding Service as well as guidance and support (see below for some initial drop-in sessions). Not all the details are available yet, and we expect a fairly regular series of updates from UKRI.

The UKRI have created a series of webpages here.  You can see a video of a webinar that UKRI held a couple of months ago here.

Drop-in Sessions*

The following drop in sessions are available for those who are intending to submit to a UK research council in the coming months who will be affected by the changes. Please only attend if you have questions or need to discuss an imminent application. 

*no registration required although you must be signed in to your University Zoom account to join

In the future we will be holding information and support sessions for those applying using the new system. These will be advertised through the RISDP programme and the staff newsletters.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about UKRI’s implementation of the Funding Service please do get in touch with the RIS team ris@port.ac.uk .