Fast grants for British Progress

We are launching a fast grants programme to fund ideas for British growth and progress.

How is policy made? Many of us grew up imagining it as the work of important people, with important ideas, in important rooms. Reality is much more mundane – which can be good news, because it means good policy ideas can come from anywhere and anyone.

A blog post or tweet can become government policy. In 2024, when David and I set up UK Day One, the idea was to crowdsource policy ideas from unlikely places for a new government. Various policies were picked up, including a whole new town and telemedicine solutions to NHS shortages. When we then launched the Centre for British Progress, our experience as a start-up think tank showed us that – despite its inefficiencies and frustrations – the SW1 ecosystem is open to good proposals from new places.

Political scientists have a name for people for people who get fresh ideas through the Overton window: policy entrepreneurs. John Kingdon has observed that policy often changes not because someone powerful suddenly has a good idea, but because a policy entrepreneur has spent years quietly working up a credible solution and is ready to put it in front of decision-makers the moment a ‘policy window’ opens.

We want to back the next generation of policy entrepreneurs. This is why we are launching Fast Grants for British Progress: small grants for original research and policy work on British growth, with a decision within two weeks. You don’t need credentials or an institution, just a good idea and a reason why you’re the right person to pursue it.

The origins of the fast grants model

In April of 2020, in the depths of COVID weirdness, a new funding model took shape. As the first lockdowns began, Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, and Patrick Hsu discovered that funding for urgent coronavirus science was not reaching researchers in good time. Leading virologists were stuck in months-long application processes for new grants, and couldn’t even repurpose grants they’d already won. All the while we languished indoors, schools stayed shut, and people died.

The response was Fast Grants. Through this approach, a scientist could complete an application in under thirty minutes, receive a funding decision in days rather than months, and have money in hand a few days later. They built the system in roughly ten days. Conditions were deliberately light: short progress updates, a requirement to publish findings openly, and no intellectual property strings.

Within about a year, Fast Grants had made roughly 250 awards totalling more than $50 million in testing, virology, drug development, and clinical work. This included the early funding behind SalivaDirect, the saliva test later used across major institutions. More importantly, it demonstrated that short applications and fast decisions don’t necessarily lower the quality of the work, but they do change when good research happens and by whom.

This funding model outlived the pandemic. A similar ethos powers Emergent Ventures, which funds individuals with unconventional ideas, and a wave of new programmes like Impetus Grants. Large public funders have also started experimenting with the model. The NSF’s recent budget proposes testing ‘flexible fast grants’ against standard review timelines.

We want to bring the fast grants model to Westminster.

We want to hear from you

We are open to a range of proposals including:

Research and analysis: Bring us the research that builds the evidence base for policies that advance British growth. Comparative international studies, empirical research, economic models, data analysis, whatever floats your analytical boat.

Policy proposals: Policy-makers might be on board with the direction of travel, but not know how to get there. Can you create concrete policy proposals that the government can actually use?

Opinion and primary research: New work that generates novel data about what people think or know – think polling, focus groups, expert interviews.

Campaigns: Public communications designed to advance a specific policy case. Anything that gets the word out.

Tools and infrastructure: Is there something the ecosystem is missing? Build datasets, calculators, websites, or other resources that others can use and build on

We see huge opportunity in work on the following themes. But we might well be overlooking something important. If you think that’s the case, tell us! We welcome proposals on other topics related to UK growth and progress.

• The UK attracts frontier firms in AI, defence tech, computational biology, space, and robotics, but often loses them as they scale, often to the US. What determines where these industries ultimately cluster, and what would it take to change a founder’s decision to stay?

• The UK is one of the most centralised large economies in the developed world, and many argue this starves regions of the resources and accountability that drive growth. Where is centralisation damaging, and what does the international record tell us about which forms of devolution succeed?

• According to Tyler Goodspeed, Europe’s dependence on bank finance combined with the Basel III regulations explains the post-2010 divergence between Europe and the US. How can these regulations be rolled back or improved to promote growth without violating international treaties or risking a new banking collapse?

• A typical UK pension-holder retires with a materially smaller pot than an equivalent Canadian, Australian, or Dutch saver, and some point to regulatory caution around trustee mandates as a leading explanation. How much is this conservatism actually costing UK pension-holders, and what would have to change for them to capture the returns their international peers earn?

• Research on agglomeration (Moretti, Duranton, and others) shows large and compounding returns to innovation and growth when high-skill firms and workers cluster together – yet the UK’s strongest hubs remain constrained. The Government has committed to supporting the Oxford–Cambridge corridor, growth zones and wider planning reform. How do we turn those commitments into the density and connectivity clusters needed to realise their potential?

• Britain’s energy costs are among the highest in the developed world, and this is widely treated as a limitation on growth and reindustrialisation. But how much does the price of energy actually matter to an advanced, services-based economy, and which of the proposed routes to bring it down would deliver the most?

• Much of AI’s economic value, and much of its social disruption, will come not from the frontier labs but from diffusion – as firms adopt AI to do work once done by people, or work that was never done at all. What are the main barriers (practical, political and legal) slowing that diffusion in the UK, and what would it take to manage the transition in a way that is both sustainable and popular?

Are you cooking yet? Apply here.