FOI_25-149 Research funded by arms trade companies
Date of response: 03 June 2025
We have now considered your request of 13 May 2025 for the following information:
In the below request, the phrase ‘arms trade companies' relates to any company on the SIPRI Top 100 arms-producing companies and Defence News Top 100 lists (see attached). This includes but is not limited to:
1. BAE Systems
2. Babcock
3. QinetiQ
4. Rolls-Royce
5. Serco
6. Cobham
7. Raytheon (RTX)
8. Airbus
9. General Dynamics
10. Leonardo MW
11. Lockheed Martin
12. Thales
13. MBDA
14. Elbit Systems
15. Northrop Grumman
16. L3 Harris Technologies
17. General Electric
18. AVIC
19. GKN Aerospace
20. Boeing
21. Ministry of Defence (MoD)
22. Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl)
23. Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE)
*If you are unable to run the request for the full list of companies attached, please treat the above list as complete.
In the below request, the phrase ‘research project' is related to, but not limited to:
Any academic research collaborations that involve any staff members or any member of the active student body with companies or institutions who have stakes in the defence industry and arms trade companies.
Please may you provide information on any funding for ‘research projects’ from ‘arms companies’ from 1 January 2017 to 5 April 2025, broken down by:
Question 1. The title and descriptions of the project or centre and academic department(s) involved
Question 2. The project partners and source of funding (to be included the source of funding does not have to be an arms trade company)
Question 3. Academic years, including the start and end date (DD-MM-YY) of the funding or project.
Question 4. Total amount in GBP provided for each project or centre (e.g. centre for doctoral training)
Question 5. Other participating UK universities
Our response:
We regret that on this occasion it is not possible to provide the requested information.
Under Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act, we can confirm that the University does hold the information requested, however on this occasion it is not possible for us to provide any of the information relating to any academic research collaborations that involve any staff members or any member of the active student body with companies or institutions who have stakes in the defence industry and arms trade companies, including any funding from arms trade companies for research projects during the period 01 January 2017 to 05 April 2025.
We have determined that the cost of finding and assembling the requested information will exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by section 12 of the Act and the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004/3244.
'The ‘appropriate limit’ of £450, which equates to 18 hours’ work, as defined by the Information Commissioner’s Office, can relate to one request in its entirety or to a series of linked requests. If the University cannot locate, retrieve and extract some or all of the requested information within the 18 hours we are not obliged to retrieve any of the requested information.
Information relating to the title and descriptions of research projects, project partners, source of funding for research projects, academic years of projects, total amount funded, and whether any other UK universities participated is held within our Postgraduate Research and Research and Innovation Services departments. There is no central record of where this information is held.
For the period outlined in your request, we have identified more than 55,000 associated research files for postgraduate research projects, which may fall into the scope of your request. The only way of identifying, extracting and recording the exact information you seek would be to interrogate each individual document separately.
We have calculated it would take an average of one minute per record, or 916 hours, to locate and manually interrogate each associated research document. This exceeds the appropriate time-limit as outlined above.
To assist you in formulating a request to which we can respond, we would be able to provide information held by our Research and Innovation Services only.
Please note we have not considered whether any exemptions may apply to such a request.
We should also point out that any revised request you submit will be treated as a new FOI request, and the 20 working-day time-limit will begin again.
We are sorry we cannot provide the data you requested, but trust this response explains our position.