FOI_25-220 Academic partnerships with Arms trade companies
Date of response: 05 August 2025
We have now considered your request of 21 July 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.
This includes, and if necessary, to fit within the time/cost limitations, can be 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)
‘Academic partnerships’ refers to arms company involvement (funder or partner) in any of the following:
• Apprenticeships and graduate schemes
• Job advertisements and career fair appearances
• Sponsorships (events, workshops, trainings)
• Studentships, sponsored PhDs, scholarships and professorships
• Department funding and relationships (e.g. knowledge transfer relationships)
• Consultancy and executive roles
Can the university please provide any relevant information or evidence of arms companies' involvement in any of the capacities mentioned above over the past eight years?
Please may this be broken down by:
• Academic year and with the start/end date (DD-MM-YY) where applicable
• The name of the arms company involved and the nature of the partnership (partnership, collaboration, consultancy, funding)
• The financial value of the relationship in pounds sterling
• The name(s) of the academic department(s) involved
• The name and description of the degree and/or research being conducted in the studentship
*Notes to FOI Officer:
The timeframe for this request should cover 1 January 2017 to 5 April 2025, or the University’s reporting period (1 August 2017 to 31 July 2025), up to the most recent completed year.
Should the above request exceed the time/cost limitations outlined in Section 12 of the FOIA, please consider the list of 23 entities as a complete list. If necessary, limit the timeframe to 5 financial years and restrict the scope to data held centrally by the university.
Please indicate in the response whether the full scope was considered or the narrowed criteria (23 entities only, and if a limited time frame).
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 Arms company involvement in Academic Partnerships, broken down by year, start date, name of company involved, nature of partnership, financial value, academic partners and description of degree and research being conducted for the full requested period, or the past five financial years (as per your suggested refined request).
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 all academic partnerships, and those which may have had involvement with Arms Companies, is held within several University departments, namely Post Graduate Research (PGR), Scholarships, Academic Partnerships, Research and Innovation Division (RID) and Careers Centre (CCEN). There is no central record of where this information is held.
For the period outlined in your request, for our Post Graduate Research programmes alone, we have identified 1,400 Post Graduate Research projects or collaborations 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 PGR research project documentation manually.
We have calculated it would take one minute per record, or 23.3 hours, to locate and manually interrogate each individual PGR research document. Which exceeds the appropriate time-limit as outlined above.
Under section 16 of the Act, and to assist you in formulating a request to which we can respond, we can provide the information for our Research and Innovation Division, and our Academic Partnership departments alone.
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.