Our submission to the Comprehensive Spending Review 2025

To deliver on government missions and a decade of national renewal, the government must double-down on investment to the UK’s world-class higher education sector at the Comprehensive Spending Review.

The submission to Treasury represents the first formal opportunity to shape the government’s thinking as it allocates departmental budgets at the Comprehensive Spending Review. 

In our submission, we set out how UK universities are integral to the delivery of the government’s ambitions, while setting out ways that further investment would enable them to go further for the benefit of all. 

Critically, it outlines the sector’s financial fragility and the risk that a continuation of the status quo would erode capacity in our world-leading sector.

Universities are engines of growth in communities across the UK and we need them, and their growth-enabling activities, to be firing on all cylinders. They are also creators of opportunities, enabling learners to obtain vital skills, knowledge, and social capital that will support them throughout their lives. To continue and strengthen their role in these missions, the submission sets out the measures required to put universities on a sustainable and secure footing.

The proposals, which build on our Blueprint recommendations, include:

• Supporting growth by increasing investment in research and innovation activity and promoting the UK as a first-choice study destination and partner.
• Boosting opportunity through the reinstatement of maintenance grants for the most disadvantaged, uplifting maintenance loans, and establishing a Tertiary Education Opportunity Fund.
• Enabling all this activity to be continued and strengthened by putting the sector on a sustainable and secure footing.

Our submission to the Comprehensive Spending Review (pdf)