Performance report

Chief Executive's introduction

What we do and who we are

What we did

How we did

Who are we?

How we work

Public involvement in our work

Our strategy

Our achievements for the year

Performance analysis

Our people

Financial review

Key issues and risks

Sustainability report

Chief Executive’s introduction

This has been another remarkable and demanding year which began in the depths of the pandemic but has ended with some visible signs of recovery. I am exceptionally proud of the way that our committed and dedicated staff have worked to overcome these challenges and the great successes we’ve achieved.

Our rapid response to ensure that urgent COVID-19 research could get started quickly continued this year, including reviewing PregCoV (a new study funded by the Department of Health and Social Care looking at the best COVID-19 vaccine dose interval for pregnant people), which raised many ethical considerations about involving pregnant people in research.

We have taken the learning forward from our COVID-19 response to apply it to our standard urgent public health response and other rapid services.

As the UK moves beyond the restrictions of the pandemic we have looked towards our future ways of working. We’ve worked with our staff and listened to their ideas to ensure that our offices provide the right working environment as we return. We’re also planning for how we can make the most productive use of our time in offices and working together in face-to-face meetings, while still keeping online ways of working when this is the most efficient.

Our committed Research Ethics Committee (REC) members who give their time generously, have continued to meet online to review research studies, enabling the HRA to operate efficiently and respond rapidly when needed. Our face to face REC development days have brought together committees to develop skills, build relationships and work as a team with their REC. Members have heard about and discussed changes to ethics review and topical themes in health and social care research.

We have established our HRA Community Insight Group, a panel of REC, Confidentiality Advisory Group (CAG), ad Public Involvement Network (PIN) members. This group is supporting our work to make sure that our volunteer community reflects the population that it serves and is always recognised for its crucial contribution to health and social care research.

High quality health and social care research must be transparent, we have continued work against our Make it Public strategy, which was launched in 2020 to ensure that trusted information about all health and social care studies is always made public. We have introduced streamlined registration for Clinical Trials of Investigational Medicinal Products (CTIMPs) and a new final report form to measure how well the research community is meeting its transparency responsibilities. In November 2021 we held our first Make it Public conference. Almost 600 people came together online to confirm their commitment to making research more transparent and to discuss how we should work together to continue to improve transparency practice.

At the end of 2021 we celebrated our tenth anniversary. It was an opportunity to look back over a decade of transforming the research governance landscape, take stock of how far we have come and plan for the future. The HRA was created in 2011 to streamline a complex and bureaucratic regulatory environment, stifling health research in the UK. Over half of applications to the HRA are for research that will take place in multiple places. Applying to one, rather than multiple regional organisations for approval has reduced duplication.

Financially we’ve achieved significant efficiencies in the use of public money by being careful in our procurement and maintaining online ways of working. This has resulted in revenue savings for the year of over 10% of our budgeted expenditure. Balanced with growth across the organisation compared to the previous financial year of just under 20%.

It hasn’t all be plain sailing though. We’ve had some difficulty in recruiting our full establishment. An area we’ve found it particularly difficult to get the right people is in technology roles.

Work continued last year to develop IRAS, the Integrated Research Application System, building a world-class hub for health and social care research in the UK. The first studies to benefit have been CTIMPs submitted through combined review, which brings together Research Ethics Committee review and Clinical Trials Authorisation from MHRA. Combined review halves the time it takes to get approval for new clinical trials compared to those going through the previous two track system. However, the IRAS development has not been smooth and we have not made as much progress as we had hoped to by the end of this financial year.

I want to end this introduction by looking to the future. Working closely with public contributors (patients and the public who contribute to research) we have developed a new strategy that will guide us over the next three years. This strategy clarifies our social mission of always putting people first in research, while making it easy for the research community to do research we can all trust. You’ll see more on that throughout this report and over the next three years as we really start to live the change that we want to see.

What we do and who we are

Our vision

Our vision is for high-quality health and social care research that improves people’s health and wellbeing.

Our mission

Our mission is to protect and promote the interests of patients and the public in health and social care research, working with partners across the UK.

We do that by providing expert advice and guidance to researchers and by reviewing research studies through 64 Research Ethics Committees in England, the Confidentiality Advisory Group and specialist review and assurance of research on behalf of NHS organisations.

Our role

The HRA was established in 2011 to streamline the regulation of health and social care research in the UK. With our core purpose of protecting and promoting the interests of patients and the public in health and social care research, we:

• make sure research is ethically reviewed and approved
• promote transparency in research
• give expert advice to researchers
• coordinate and standardise research regulatory practice
• provide independent recommendations on the processing of identifiable patient information without consent, for research and non-research projects.

We work with other organisations in the UK to regulate different aspects of health and social care research, ensuring research approvals and oversight are streamlined and proportionate. We are England-focussed but, through our joint working with the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, lead the oversight of health and social care research on behalf of the UK. We deliver our work from five locations in England: Bristol, London, Manchester, Newcastle and Nottingham as well as many home-based staff.

We review about 5,000 new research studies each year, ranging from observational studies in care settings, tissue banks and research databases, to large, multi-centre clinical trials of new medicines and advanced therapeutics. We also review around 8,000 substantial amendments to research studies and 8,500 minor amendments.

We develop and manage the national health and social care research digital application portal, IRAS, on behalf of partners across the UK. IRAS enables researchers to apply for research approvals from different regulators and review bodies.

How we work

Our 286 staff support our committees and advisory groups, provide specialist advice, guidance and learning to researchers about governance of current and emerging areas of research, develop policy and effectively administer the organisation.

We could not operate without the HRA Community - Research Ethics Committees members, Confidentiality Advisory Group members and Public Involvement Network members – who make an invaluable contribution to our work and the experience of people taking part in research so that findings can improve care. They give their time generously, and, for many of them, freely, enabling the HRA to operate efficiently and respond rapidly when needed.

To deliver our ambition to make it easier to do research that people can trust and ensure that health and social care research is conducted with and for everyone, it is important that we are informed by a range of insights and experiences that reflect the population that we serve. We are working with our Community members to ensure that choosing to join the HRA Community and work with us is a positive experience that is open to everyone.

The HRA is run by a board made up of our Chair, Professor Sir Terence Stephenson, our Chief Executive, Dr Matt Westmore, two executive directors and four non-executive directors. Three executive directors attend the board as non-voting members. The rest of the executive committee attend board meetings, but do not have vote on matters arising. The board gives strategic oversight, agrees high level policy and ensures that the HRA is run effectively and efficiently.

Our strategy

Our strategy sets out how we aim to achieve our vision of high-quality health and social care research that improves people’s health and wellbeing. For 2021/22, our strategy and business plan focused on three key areas

We plan our work to deliver our strategy and our statutory functions. We do this by preparing an annual business plan which is embedded throughout the organisation in our performance, people and risk management processes. These processes help ensure we successfully deliver on our strategic priorities and statutory functions. Importantly it helps our people understand their role in delivering our plans.

We have refreshed our strategy for 2022 to 2025, building on our achievements in this strategic period and providing strategic direction for the next three years.

Our achievements for the year

This year we celebrated our 10th birthday and reflected on our many achievements over this past decade. We also recognised the many people who have helped make this possible and keenly look to the future to continue what we were set up to do, continually improve and support a better health and social care research environment.

This year’s performance has been strong, building on the successes of the past ten years, learning from our experiences and driving forward improvements whilst always delivering quality services to enable great research.

This year, we reviewed 4,579 new research studies and 7,259 study amendments as well as transforming our services in collaboration with other regulators to significantly reduce research approval timelines. Combined review cut an average of forty days off the time to recruit the first research participant between 2018-2021 compared with the separate services. This service was developed hand in hand with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). It offers a more streamlined research approvals process for all Clinical Trials of Investigational Medicinal Products (CTIMPs) and is now our standard service for these applications. CTIMP applications represent 18% of the new research studies reviewed this year. In addition, we launched fast track ethics review, following a successful pilot in 2020, again offering quicker approvals where needed. We also widened our radiation assurance service to accept all studies involving ionising radiation exposures taking place in NHS and HSC secondary care settings and put in place changes to how we support student research. These adjustments enable a more tailored approach for students offering relevant learning experiences of how modern health and social care research is conducted. The majority of students are at Masters level, and their supervisors are now signposted to more appropriate ways of getting research experience such as shadowing research teams, learning about the range of roles that support team science, or getting experience of public involvement.

We delivered our on our transparency aims through our Make it Public strategy, most notably by providing streamlined registration for clinical trials, making it easier for researchers to carry out transparent research. We collaborated with ISRCTN, a leading trial registry recognised by the World Health Organisation, to achieve this commitment. The new registration service was launched in January 2022. All CTIMPs applications submitted through combined review can be registered on the ISRCTN registry immediately when they are given full approval. This is free to trialists and reduces the burden on them. Reduced information is captured for deferrals and trials already registered on ClinicalTrials.gov do not need to register on ISRCTN to avoid unnecessary duplication.

We held our first Make it Public research transparency conference welcoming almost 600 attendees and launched our first research transparency annual report, updating on the progress we have made towards the vision laid out in our Make it Public strategy. We also implemented new reporting standards to improve transparency in research in line with our strategy.

We launched Think Ethics, aiming to make ethics review more innovative, efficient and trusted. This looks to build on many of the changes made in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and lessons learned in our day to day operations, supporting Research Ethics Committees with our fellow regulators in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. We created an ethics review advisory group to support this work and also welcomed more than 120 Research Ethics Committee (REC) members from across the UK to participate in a webinar to discuss what is important to them about research ethics, what builds trust and what opportunities there are for improvement in the current system.

We embedded the move to virtual REC meetings, widening access opportunities for members and researchers.

We contributed to the government’s Health and Social Care Bill as well as the Life Sciences Vision both of which will have implications for our future strategy. The Future of UK Clinical Research Delivery: 2021 to 2022 Implementation Plan was published and the HRA continues to play a central role in enabling UK research sector developments including our work leading strands of the Recovery, Resilience and Growth programme with DHSC in addition to our research systems transformation programme.

We embraced user research throughout our work to help improve our services and their future design. Activities benefiting from this approach included our research systems transformation and streamlining data driven research. We are keen to develop this discipline in 2022/23 and are building improvements into our delivery design as part of the next phase of our research systems transformation. This year we released new digital functionality improving the services we offer researchers, including functionality to support our combined review and refinements to the identity gateway in collaboration with National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). We also put in place improvements to our digital booking service for REC meetings and moved our expense reimbursement processing to digital for our HRA Community.

Our HRA Community is the bedrock of our work. Over the past year we have established a Community Insight Group so that we can better listen to and act on what our Community tells us about their experiences, and invite their advice and challenge to inform the work that we are doing. They are helping shape work to improve their experience working with us and ensure that this is open to everyone, so that our work is informed by a range of insights and experiences that reflect the population that we serve. This has included helping us to mark our tenth anniversary in a way that was meaningful to our Community and reflected their contribution, and helping shape our new campaign #StepForward to attract healthcare professionals to become Research Ethics Committee members and play a key role in making sure health and social care research is ethical and fair for patients.

We are always looking at what we can improve at the HRA, both in the services we provide and how we organise and deliver these. Our future ways of working programme supported our people to work well throughout the pandemic and delivered a framework of measures to help our people adjust to the changing landscape. Our flexible working policies have been refreshed to support our peoples’ wish for improved worklife balance. We also successfully delivered on our estates strategy, closing our Nottingham office and moving to Equinox House, provided by NHS Supply Chain, offering a modern, flexible work environment. We published our equality diversity and inclusion strategy, developed a new three year people strategy and enabled our staff-led green team to create and propose a sustainability strategy for the HRA. Recognising the effect of the pandemic on people’s mental wellbeing, we piloted an organisational Mental Health First Aider resource to offer staff an additional safe confidential means of support – our MHFA group is now being expanded and being run as a long term arrangement. We are proud that our organisation has continued to build on its commitment to supporting our disabled staff by achieving Disability Leader status, the highest tier of the government’s Disability Confident scheme. We have expanded our range of employee benefits to include provisions for paid volunteer leave and the option of buying or selling annual leave each year.

Delivering value is essential to our work. Many of the improvements we deliver result in efficiencies in delivery of health research and in the NHS as well as better care for patients and the public. We also look to create value and efficiencies in our operating model. This year we implemented an online ethics review model for full review. This new model has enabled a more accessible and user-friendly service but also released 5% year on year savings to HM Treasury.

We have achieved much in this year and look forward to delivering a full programme of services and innovation activities in the year to come.

Performance analysis

We regularly monitor and evaluate our performance against our strategy, business plan and financial plan. We continuously refine our performance framework, using insights and knowledge gained to:

• deliver meaningful change for patients and the public
• understand how our activities contribute to the delivery of our strategic plan and improve the researcher experience
• support continuous improvement across all activities and the research landscape
• enhance our ability to demonstrate value to the public purse.

We set targets for our performance to help us understand how well we are doing and provide assurance to our Board, DHSC and the wider research community. Internally, these targets drive our operational delivery and strategic portfolio of change including programme activity and continuous improvement. The way that we manage our performance and its relationship with risk and uncertainty is explained in more detail in our governance statement, page 35.

As a learning organisation, we regularly review and refine our performance management and reporting systems to ensure we continue to deliver our on our strategy ambition and statutory requirements.

Monthly operational performance metrics are collated and monitored by delivery teams focusing on continuous improvement and statutory compliance.

Every other month, we collate a strategic performance report for our executive team and Board. This, combined with user satisfaction data and financial reporting, provides assurance on how we are meeting our strategic ambition and highlights areas for focus and improvement.

Individual staff objectives that complement and support these organisational objectives are developed during the annual appraisal process and monitored throughout the year during regular one-to-ones between staff and their managers.

Our performance metrics monitor our achievements on both financial and nonfinancial activities to provide a comprehensive view of our work. Non-financial performance indicators include measures such as how engaged our staff are and user satisfaction ratings.

Our performance against our strategic objectives

Our work to achieve this falls into three areas:

• robust review of research underpinned by good practice in public involvement
• transparency and openness in research
• trustworthy use of patient data in research

Our work to achieve this falls into three areas:

• streamlined research approval
• intuitive research management systems supported by clear guidance and learning
• consistency and collaboration across the UK.

Our work to achieve this falls into three areas:

• a diverse organisation which includes and respects all
• skilled, high-performing people
• an organisation that makes good use of public funds

Our people

Our staff and Community members have continued to demonstrate an outstanding commitment to UK health and social care research. Together they have been tireless and innovative in their approach to respond to the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic during its second year while continuing to ensure that we can provide excellent services and supporting our ambitious transformation work to make it easier to do research that people can trust. Their contribution together ensures that we can deliver for the people that we serve.

We could not operate without the HRA Community - Research Ethics Committee members, Confidentiality Advisory Group members and Public Involvement Network members – who make an invaluable contribution to our work and the experience of people taking part in research so that findings can improve care. They give their time generously, and for many of them, freely, enabling the HRA to operate efficiently and respond rapidly when needed. To deliver our ambition to make it easier to do research that people can trust and ensure the health and social care research is conducted with and for everyone, it is important that we are informed by a range of insights and experiences that reflect the population that we serve. We are working with our Community members to ensure that choosing to join the HRA Community and work with us is a positive experience that is open to everyone.

Our HRA Community is the bedrock of our work. Over the past year we have established a Community Insight Group so that we can better listen to and act on what our Community tells us about their experiences, and invite their advice and challenge to inform the work that we are doing. They are helping shape work to improve their experience working with us and ensure that this is open to everyone, so that our work is informed by a range of insights and experiences that reflect the population that we serve. This has included helping us to mark our tenth anniversary in a way that was meaningful to our Community and reflected their contribution and helping shape our new campaign #StepForward to attract healthcare professionals to become Research Ethics Committee members and play a key role in making sure health and social care research is ethical and fair for patients.

The HRA demonstrated that we were able to innovate at pace in response to the pandemic. We have continued to innovate our services in 2021/22 embedding fast-track review in our core service offering and creating further improvements by launching combined review in collaboration with MHRA. These successes continue to be reflected in strong user satisfaction results which saw a peak of 90% scoring the HRA at 7/10 or above in October 2021. Our target measure of 75% was exceeded throughout the year. Interactions with our staff scored particularly highly, with an average satisfaction rate of 9/10.

As we moved through the second year of the pandemic, we continued to create opportunities for our staff to stay connected and to focus attention on people’s wellbeing and support. We looked ahead and developed our future ways of working framework to ensure our staff were supported and had clear parameters to work as Covid-19 restrictions started to lift and we were able to plan a return to our office locations.

We are an organisation that values investing in supporting, engaging with and listening to our staff. We want them to work in a healthy, compassionate, inclusive environment, enabling staff to work collaboratively as they provide an excellent service and develop and grow as their career progresses.

We believe this investment in our people delivers significant benefits: our annual staff survey continues to show high levels of staff satisfaction and strong commitment to the organisation.

The overall staff engagement score is impressive at 82%, 15% above the public sector benchmark. This score is important with strong links between staff engagement levels and organisational productivity. The survey also showed 95% of staff are committed to helping the organisation be successful.

We also run ad-hoc surveys in the year to check-in on our staff’s well-being, feelings about returning to office spaces and responses to our future ways of working plans to help inform our hybrid working arrangements.

In terms of staff engagement activities, we have an active staff forum and have built productive relationships with our trade union partners, Unison and Managers In Partnership, through our work on the Joint Negotiating Committee.

During this year we invested in learning to develop our capabilities in targeted areas including policy, digital, project, programme, benefits, change management and continuous improvement. We also provided learning support for our Equality Diversity and Inclusion work (see page 57). We ran over 45 virtual sessions for staff learning on relevant topics.

Our online training has been particularly important during this pandemic, which has seen over 24,400 visits to our training site, supporting over 12,300 users. In addition, we have delivered 71 virtual learning sessions attended by our community members and researchers.

We have several staff led initiatives which aim to further enhance the HRA as a great place to work:

• Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – we want everyone at the HRA to feel welcomed and supported at work (further detail on our work here is included on page 57).
• Ways of working – we have an attractive and flexible approach to working, enabled by policies, technology and a culture that supports staff to work well, wherever that might be. This remains a priority as we come out of the pandemic, so that we can continue to provide a great working environment for all our people work well.
• Mental Health – we piloted an organisational resource of trained Mental Health First Aiders available to give immediate support to staff who have struggled or been in distress.

There is always more we can do to maintain our commitment to our people. We strive each year to create an environment for them to be the best they can be, supported professionally and personally in delivering high-quality services.

Financial review

Our accounts consist of primary statements (providing summary information about our income and expenditure in the year, our assets and liabilities at the end of the year, and how we have managed our cashflows) and detailed notes to these statements. These accounts have been prepared based on the standards set out in the Government Financial Reporting Manual (FReM) to give a true and fair view.

We remained within our agreed revenue and capital allocations for 2021/22. Total funding from the government for the year was £24,719k (2020/21: £18,221k), of which:

• £21,954k (2020/21: £16,199k) was revenue funding, from the Department of Health and Social Care
• £2,765k (2020/21: £2,022k) was capital funding from the Department of Health and Social Care.

Income received from cost sharing arrangements included:

• £349k (2020/21: £286k) from the devolved administrations for providing support and IT systems for the research ethics service
• £37k (2020/21 £35k) towards the costs of our Manchester regional office from HS2.

Our total net expenditure for the year was £19,290k (2020/21: £16,199k) resulting in an underspend on our committed revenue funding of £2,665k, 12%.

More details of our expenditure are as follows:

• £5,512k (28%) funded our core services including HRA Approval, confidentiality advice service and technical assurances
• £1,544k (8%) funded our chief executive office, policy and engagement activities and corporate governance
• £1,629k (8%) related to depreciation of core infrastructure costs such as laptop costs and amortisation of our digital research systems
• £614k (3%) funded our premises, facilities management and estates development activities.

In addition, to our core statutory activities, we invested in specific strategic programmes:

• £3,960k revenue and £1,147k capital costs on HRA Digital research systems transformation including streamlining services across the research ecosystem
• £321k on Think Ethics, including the launch of fast track ethics review
• £596k on building capacity to support DHSC on Recovery, Resilience and Growth programme
• £301k on Make it Public our research transparency programme including launch of streamlined registration on a UK registry for applications processed through combined review.

We take great care to plan our activities well. Our business planning process looks to invest our resources in a way that best achieves our strategic and statutory priorities, efficiently and economically. As part of this process in 2021/22, we identified gaps in our internal skills and capabilities that were needed to deliver our business plan including our research systems transformation programme and supporting DHSC Recovery, Resilience and Growth programme. To address this, we increased our workforce by 24%, including growing our pool of change and innovation specialists, enhancing our digital and cyber skills, building internal commercial expertise, increasing our public involvement capacity as well as supporting a more resilient operational service model.

This growth has been balanced by efficiencies achieved through service improvement including moving our research ethics review service online and significantly reducing our estates footprint. These among many other innovation and change initiatives meant we were able to release 5% year on year savings to the public purse. At the same time, we have maintained service quality, keeping high levels of user experience and achieving over 97% of our statutory timelines for CTIMPs of medicinal products.

Cash balances decreased as planned in year to correct for the increase in cash balances last year. Last year’s balances were unusually high due to a challenging forecasting environment from the pandemic and a longer approval timeframe for our research systems business case than previously anticipated. In addition, the announcement of the third lockdown in England meant plans to reintroduce face to face meetings were curtailed to meet government guidelines, reducing planned expenditure in that year.

Key risk and issues: Delivery of transformed and improved research systems

A new and improved research system has the potential to meet the requirements of the health research community and make the UK an attractive place to conduct research. A significant risk to this is whether the HRA has sufficient capacity to deliver a complex programme with multiple connections and dependencies across various organisations. The development of a highly effective, people centric, streamlined, quality research application system is a key factor in making the UK an attractive place to conduct research. Our inability to do so would have a significant impact on researcher and patient experience, our service delivery and ability to innovate at pace, sector intelligence and ultimately the HRA and UK’s reputations. We have recruited a talented and experienced Chief Digital Transformation Officer to lead our digital programme. We have also strategically reviewed the first phase of the programme, learning from this phase to inform our proposed ‘to-be’ architecture, delivery approach and refreshed roadmap. The HRA Board has approved this approach which offers the best opportunity to deliver the programme benefits whilst managing the programme risks and offering value to the public purse

Key risk and issues: Delivery of business plan objectives

There is a risk that the HRA is not able to secure and deploy resources and capabilities to deliver our ambitious strategic programmes working alongside DHSC, MHRA and the research sector together with our regulatory activity. The risk is specifically related to our capacity to move at pace to deliver all necessary capabilities and capacity to achieve our business plan objectives. The HRA business and financial planning process identified areas where additional skills and capacity were required to support the delivery of business plan objectives. We set aside financial allocation to invest in this additional capacity and have streamlined our recruitment approval process to reduce timelines. Our end to end recruitment process is also under-review to improve efficiency and timelines. In addition, our people strategy includes strategic workforce planning and will work with Directors to identify key roles, skills and expertise as well as a plan to deliver these. A three-year strategic plan has been developed to aid this strategic workforce planning.

Key risk and issues: Diversity of the Board, Directors and senior management

There is a risk that the HRA makes decisions that do not take account of a diverse range of views and undermines its effectiveness in meeting its public sector equality duty. The HRA has very low representation from individuals with protected characteristics at Board and senior management level and is not representative of society. The HRA is committed to providing a service which promotes human rights, equality and diversity and does not discriminate against any staff, potential staff, members, partners, service users or anyone that deals with us in any way. The HRA has developed an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy, with support from staff led interest groups, and has appointed an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Manager to help deliver this strategy. The Board has undertaken EDI training and learning and development events have been held with senior managers and staff. Whilst decisions concerning the recruitment and appointment of Non-Executive Directors and the Chief Executive are undertaken by the Cabinet Office, and outside the HRA’s control, other staff positions are managed internally and recruiting managers have completed interview skills training to help consider fairness and consistency when recruiting.

Key risk and issues: HRA loses the trust of research participants and the public

There is a risk of an adverse event resulting from a Research Ethics Committee (REC) decision, the conduct of a research study, or from lack of public involvement / influence. This, along with poor research practice or the HRA failing to perform its statutory function would negatively impact the reputation of the HRA. This would result in fewer participants choosing to take part in research. The HRA has robust procedures in place with RECs constituted in accordance with Governance Arrangements for RECs with clear standard operating procedures, training requirements and accreditation measures to ensure consistent quality in decision making. The HRA’s transparency strategy is promoted across the research landscape supporting the HRA’s role to facilitate safe and ethical research. Work is underway to update the HRA’s governance structure to create space and opportunity for patients, service users, carers and members of the public to bring their lived experience to influence the work of the HRA and become a key part in how the HRA makes decisions.

Sustainability report

The HRA is committed to environmental sustainability and achieving net zero. To help make this happen, our green team has developed our first sustainability strategy.

This staff led group consulted, engaged and collaborated to set out and gain agreement for our sustainability goals for the next few years. We look forward to delivering on this ambitious strategy in 2022/23, embedding environmentally sustainable practices into our daily business, making sustainability the norm.

We work in partnership with our colleagues at DHSC and our own green team, to improve our environmental performance across many different indicators. Our approach has been to focus on staff led initiatives alongside strategic commitments set out in our estates strategy and now sustainability strategy to deliver significant, lasting change.

We continue to build on our successes, learning from our experiences and from our health community of sustainability leaders. Our focus this year has been to report on our Greening Government Commitments and establish a baseline of data to track our performance in future years.

We have also confirmed a permanent move to online Research Ethics Committee meetings complemented by occasional face to face member development days to enable team cohesion. This change in operating model has significantly reduced our reliance on business travel and has also reduced researcher travel (although not reported in these numbers). In addition, we continue to embrace digital working rolling out SharePoint to enable virtual collaboration and a desk booking system across all our offices to improve utilisation of our workspaces.