FOI_25-166 Defence and security funded research

Date of response 01 July 2025

We have now considered your request of 03 June 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

Clarification received: 03 June 2025

‘I'd like to proceed with resubmitting the request for information held by the Research and Innovation Services only.’’

Our response:

Please see accompanying document, our ref: FOI_25-166 Appendix A.

On this occasion, it is not possible to provide all the requested information. The Act contains a number of exemptions that allow public authorities to withhold certain information from release. quest.

Section 1(1)(a) of the Act requires a public authority to confirm whether it holds information that has been requested. However the Act also provides exemptions from this duty, where verifying whether information is or is not held would in itself reveal information that would otherwise be exempt under the Act. We have determined that the following exemptions apply to the information you have requested:

Given the nature of the information concerned, any acknowledgement that the requested information is held, or not, would reveal relevant information and some of the negative consequences outlined above. We therefore neither confirm nor deny that the requested information is held, and no inference can be taken from this refusal that the information you have requested does or does not exist.

The decision neither to confirm nor deny that information is held is subject to a public interest test and our consideration of this test is set out below.

The factors in favour of disclosure would include the following:

· Transparency and openness

· Public understanding of the issue/activity in question

The factors in favour of non-disclosure would include the following:

· Contractual requirements to maintain confidentiality of information provided by a third party which could lead to an actionable breach