An interesting report has just appeared which profiles research funding in UK higher education. It notes the growing concentration of funding in a smaller number of institutions, the dominance of science funding, and the smaller scale of UK activity when compared to that in US universities.
The report is discussed at Education news & jobs at the Times Higher Education Supplement
The top four insitutions (Imperial College London, Cambridge, Oxford and University College London) together account for 25% of research expenditure. Imperial, the largest, had research income of 153M pounds in 2001/2. By comparison, Johns Hopkins University had research income of 566M pounds (approx 1 billion dollars) in 2001.