Covid-19 has had a significant impact on the BHF’s funding. We are already having to cut our spend on new research awards by half this year from £100 million to £50 million.
To avoid this having a devastating impact on UK cardiovascular science, along with 151 medical research charities we’re calling on the Government to establish a Life Sciences-Charity Partnership Fund. This would be a co-investment scheme between the Government and charity funders lasting 3 years to ensure we maintain current progress in tackling the world’s deadliest diseases.
The Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) provides a key opportunity for us to persuade the Treasury to allocate budget to the Life Sciences-Charity Partnership Fund, but we can’t do this alone. We need your support to amplify our message; the more submissions the Treasury receives calling for the Fund, the more likely it will be to recognise its value and necessity.
Responding to the CSR
Go to our suggested submission
All you have to do is copy and paste the suggested submission below, into the Treasury’s online portal and send.
Of course, if you wish to add to this, please do. For example, you could explain your relationship to the BHF, highlight the impact Covid-19 is having on your research and add your own personal examples to explain why you think charity funding is unique.
The Deadline for submissions is Thursday 24th September 2020.
Thank you. Our commitment to beating cardiovascular disease through research remains undiminished. As does our pride in the world-leading work that you do with BHF support.
If you have any questions, please email [email protected].
Our suggested submission
All you need to do is copy and paste the following text below, right down to the bottom of the page.
Covid-19 has had a significant impact on the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and the whole medical research charity sector, hindering its ability to maintain current progress in tackling the world’s deadliest diseases. The Association of Medical Research charities’ (AMRC) members are planning for an average 41% decrease in their research spend in the 2020/21 financial year, resulting in a projected reduction in UK medical research investment of up to £368m. This matters because the UK life sciences base significantly benefits from having a breadth and diversity of funding routes – public, commercial and charitable. Each of these sources plays a unique role that, collectively, makes the UK a world leader in life sciences.
Due to the interconnectedness of these funding sources, a decrease in funding from one has a significant impact on the nature and scope of the research effort overall and will jeopardise the ambitions set out in the Government’s R&D roadmap and Spending Review priorities. Charities fund bold, challenge-oriented initiatives that help address the Government Industrial Strategy Grand Challenges and, given their disease-specific focus, they are uniquely placed to take strategic approaches to drive scientific advances. It is these advances that will ultimately help the UK to address health inequalities, driving better health outcomes for all and a more prosperous nation.
To avoid irreparable damage to charity-funded research and set the sector up to thrive as the UK recovers from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Government should protect critical medical research capacity through a Life Sciences-Charity Partnership Fund over the next 3 years (2021/22 to 2023/24). This transitional funding would be a time-limited, co-investment scheme between Government and charity funders, which will allow medical research charities to effectively scale back up to pre-COVID-19 funding levels and increase contributions to UK R&D thereafter. The Government should commit to an initial £310 million for the financial year 2021/22, followed by tapered funding over the subsequent 2 years to reflect anticipated gradual recovery of charities’ fundraising income.
How the Fund will benefit the Government and taxpayers
1. Maintaining and enhancing the UK’s global competitive advantage in life sciences by protecting the research jobs, infrastructure and strategic programmes that charities support:
- Last year, 17,000 researcher salaries were funded by AMRC members, including 1,750 PhD students, right across the UK.
- The BHF funds the salaries of approximately 1,700 researchers across the UK, and plays an invaluable role in supporting the next generation of expert cardiovascular scientists by funding 440 early-career researchers through career development awards.
- The BHF makes strategic investments and launches large-scale initiatives where it sees an opportunity to make transformational change. For example, its Big Beat Challenge, launched in August 2018, is a global competition offering a single research award of up to £30 million. It was designed to push the international research community to identify a real-world challenge, significant unmet need or opportunity for game-changing innovation in cardiovascular science or medicine.
- The BHF’s new £10 million Data Science Centre, established in partnership with Health Data Research UK, will provide much-needed non-physical infrastructure to facilitate the widespread use of health data in research. It will support researchers from all over the country, regardless of geographical location.
2. Delivering health improvement for patients across the UK, particularly in areas of unmet health need and inequality:
- During its 60-year history, BHF research has helped reduce deaths from cardiovascular disease by more than half.
- Despite this progress, one in four people in the UK die from, and 7.4 million people are living with, cardiovascular disease.
- This places a significant economic burden on the UK; prior to the COVID-19 pandemic the healthcare costs relating to cardiovascular disease were estimated at £9 billion each year (roughly £1 million per hour), with a total yearly cost to the UK economy of £19 billion.
- BHF’s diverse research contributions – from laboratory science aimed at understanding the causes of disease, to clinical trials to test potential treatments in patients, and translational awards to develop technologies for the commercial market – need to be maintained if the NHS is to meet its Long Term Plan commitment to prevent up to 150,000 heart attacks, strokes and dementia cases over the next 10 years. Without continued substantial BHF funding this aspiration will not be met and healthcare costs will continue to rise.
- As a patient-centric, disease specific research funder, the BHF helps de-risk early stage research in areas that will deliver greatest patient benefit. This funding helps to open-up new research areas, and in turn crowds-in further investment. The BHF’s funding therefore helps to improve both the health and the wealth of the nation.
- In 2018, AMRC charities invested £142 million into 640 rare disease research projects. Charities often provide the only investment in research for rare and less commons conditions or provide seed funding that encourages others to invest.
- The BHF currently supports a portfolio of £446 million of research at 47 institutions across the UK. It also funds the salaries of researchers in every nation and region of the UK.
- AMRC members fund research in every region of the UK and last year almost half of charity funding was spent on research outside the ‘Golden Triangle’ of R&D in London and the South and East of the UK. Without the Fund, charities will have to withdraw from areas of burgeoning research capacity and capability.
3. Driving economic prosperity by enabling charities to leverage industry and philanthropic investment in the UK’s life sciences base and provide value for money:
- AMRC members have invested £14 billion in research in the UK since 2008, with £1.9 billion in 2019 alone.
- The BHF funds the majority (55%) of all non-commercially sponsored research into cardiovascular disease in the UK, more than UKRI, NIHR, and other funders combined. It awarded approximately £100 million in research grants in 2019/20.
- Every £1 invested in medical research delivers a return equivalent to approximately 25p annually in perpetuity
- In 2018, research awards from AMRC members led to £2.7 billion of further funding from a variety of funders.
- In 2019, BHF-funded researchers leveraged - £1.27 billion of additional funding from a BHF investment of - £476 million.
- BHF funding in 2018-19 led to 12 patents and two spin out companies, which have already leveraged over £40 million from private and public sources. Charity funding as a whole has led to over 60 spin out companies in the last 5 years.
Without the Fund, we could see:
- The careers of thousands of early-career scientists put at risk
- The loss of charity funding as a vehicle for inward investment
- A limit to bold, strategic approaches in research
- The cancellation of new projects, including new clinical trials
- Reduced scope to include patient and community voice in research.
As independent funders of medical research, charities: take bold, strategic approaches to funding; drive patient benefit; fund across the entire research pipeline, enabling a ‘helicopter view’ of pathways to innovation (thereby reducing duplication and increasing efficiency); fund in all regions of the UK; nurture and attract research talent to the UK; have clear disease specific expertise and relationships with relevant communities; leverage income from public, private and philanthropic sources; are not tied down by bureaucracy.
Therefore, the loss of charity investment cannot be replaced by increasing funding in other parts of the research ecosystem.