Covid-19 pandemic ‘has reduced bureaucratic burden of research’

UK policy experts say crisis has led to improved funding processes and more efficient working

Lasting lessons can be learned from the Covid-19 pandemic to reduce the bureaucratic burden of research, a Westminster Higher Education Forum conference has heard.

Fariba Soetan, policy lead for research and innovation at the National Centre for Universities and Business (NCUB), said that while the crisis had been “debilitating in many aspects to our health, economy and wellbeing”, there were “many lessons learned from the crisis with regards to how quickly agile funding processes were set up, [and] ways of working that could be adapted and sped up”.