The salutary tale of a failed research grant proposal

Or the ingrained commercial snobbery and sabotaging prejudice of structurally rigged UK academic funding

In this instalment of my salutary tales exposing systemic failings of British academia (who was I kidding when I said if I had to pick one crystallising incident), my experience of a grant proposal perfectly encapsulates the antipathy and disdain ivory tower academics have for commercial organisations. Especially small companies started by their own entrepreneurially minded academics.

Preparing a serious collaborative grant proposal for one of the Government’s research councils requires an enormous amount of effort. The IDIOM (Improved DecisIOn Making) proposal, two years in development, I submitted as Principal Investigator in January 2013 to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) was a multidisciplinary project aimed at improving the design of smart metering technologies. We had already completed a successful pilot study, recognised by British Gas, and the project aligned precisely with government initiatives on consumer energy efficiency.

The proposal was, with relevant forms and letters of support, 42 pages long. It involved three departments across QMUL and UCL, and requested £720,000 funding, mostly an artefact of mandatory university overheads, with an actual research budget for the proposed 3-year programme of £340,000. With the calibre of my co-investigators, my own successful track record of bidding for much larger research funds, as well as our collective track record, I had every reason to be confident. After all I was then still considered ‘part of the establishment’!

To strengthen the bid further, Agena, the company of which Martin Neil and I were directors, agreed to contribute £40,000 in free software and programming support. Agena had always worked closely with Queen Mary, hiring our graduates and funding PhDs. The proposal explicitly declared our involvement, and we took extreme care to eliminate any possible conflict of interest: all software developed through the project would be open source, ensuring Agena could gain no commercial advantage whatsoever. In effect, we were donating time, expertise and software to a project whose outcomes would be free to our competitors.

That decision, to give the project extra support, ended up being used against us.

Excellent reviews, then a shocking rejection

The peer reviews were among the strongest I had seen. Four out of five rated the proposal outstanding or excellent. We addressed the chief concern, value for money, cutting the budget by over £80,000 and provided detailed responses to all other queries. I still had every reason to be confident.

In August 2013 not only was our proposal rejected but the letter contained a defamatory and astonishing allegation:

“The applicants had planned to buy software from their own company.”

Not only was this allegation false, we had proposed no such thing, we were donating software to the project, at our own expense, with no commercial benefit. Everything was declared, transparent, and structured to avoid exactly this type of insinuation. I wrote to the ESRC CEO, challenging their libellous and unfounded allegation.

Implausible explanations and obfuscation

ESRC’s tried to blame it on a clerical “transcription error” by an inexperienced staff member with a laughable explanation. The wording of such an allegation, effectively accusing us of using the application to enrich ourselves using our own company is not an innocent clerical mishap. Rather, it bears the hallmarks of a panel member revealing their prejudice.

After I pressed them, ESRC revealed that the two panel “introducers” had scored the proposal only 7/10, in stark contrast with the excellent external reviews. I feel sure the false allegation influenced one, if not both of the introducers.

I requested a formal apology circulated to all who had seen the libel and permission to revise the costings and resubmit the proposal to the next panel.

ESRC agreed only to the apology. The resubmission was refused.

So, I appealed directly to the CEO, pointing out the absurdity of claiming a clerical error while refusing any substantive remedy. After some pressure, ESRC reversed course and agreed to reinstate the proposal, allow revised costings, and, crucially, have it reconsidered by three panel members, including an independent assessor.

Delays, deception and a second rejection

I submitted the revised material in October 2013. Weeks then months passed. Emails went unanswered. Despite the seriousness of the case and the personal reputational harm caused by their error, ESRC simply went silent.

Only after I wrote again to the CEO in February 2014 did anything happen. Suddenly, within hours, the “final decision” appeared: another rejection.

The letter revealed that the revised proposal had been sent only to the same two panel assessors as before. The very people responsible for the initial mishandling. Contrary to the CEO’s written promise, no independent third assessor had been involved. No panel meeting occurred. No fresh evaluation was conducted. I felt we had been deceived, misled. Quite cynically so.

When I challenged this directly, the ESRC changed its story yet again, now claiming that the panel chair had been consulted informally. The contradictions across their letters were obvious. One of my colleagues later summed it up perfectly: “It sounds like they made this up—the details throughout this process haven’t added up.”

A window Into academic dysfunction

I believe this experience exposed more deeply troubling truths about UK academia:

• Ideological hostility toward involvement of small companies, even when that involvement is transparent, altruistic, and explicitly structured to avoid conflicts. In contrast, academics fall over themselves chasing worthless letters of support from giants like Microsoft or Meta. Pure academic snobbery.

• Opaque, unaccountable panel processes, where internal reviewers can ignore expert peer review without justification.

• A readiness to protect the institution’s reputation, even at the expense of honesty and fairness.

• A culture of administrative evasiveness, in which errors are quietly buried, timelines endlessly slip, and commitments evaporate once scrutiny eases.

Despite outstanding reviews and a retraction of the defamatory allegation, the proposal was still rejected, both times on the same, I would say concocted, “value for money” grounds we had already resolved.

The ESRC’s handling of the case was not an anomaly. It was a symptom of a deeper problem: a funding system structurally biased against innovation, allergic to industry collaboration and far too tolerant of procedural misconduct. My experience with IDIOM was a stark reminder that academic corruption rarely appears as outright fraud. More often, it shows itself in willing prejudice, opaque decision-making and a bureaucracy more concerned with defending itself than with supporting excellent research.

If a proposal this strong, this transparent, and this well-reviewed can be derailed by prejudice, misinformation and bureaucratic stonewalling, then the system is structurally rigged against the very collaboration and impact it claims to want. In short, the story illustrates how academic snobbery toward commerce, combined with unaccountable and evasive bureaucracy, quietly sabotages excellent research while maintaining a veneer of rigorous peer review.

Appendix: relevant correspondence with ESRC