What Diabetes UK doesn’t make clear about the £50 Million Fund for a Cure

What the £50 million 'gift' really involves The billionaire behind the gift: Redrow founder Steve Morgan, a substantial Conservative Party donor whose housebuilding company faced major fire-safety controversies. A £50 million gift with strings attached: Extensive contractual restrictions give the donor's Foundation continuing rights connected to funded research. A potential financial return: Commercial discoveries could generate income for the Foundation, potentially exceeding individual research grants. Diabetes UK's own new-research commitments fell around 53% between 2023 and 2025, despite assurances that the £50 million would supplement its usual research budget. Who decides what research gets funded? Which treatments receive funding and which struggle to attract support? Taxpayers may help fund the research, while the NHS could still pay for the resulting treatments. Will we get the best possible cure, or the most commercially attractive one?

 

Back in 2022, Diabetes UK announced the Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge, built around a £50 million gift from the Steve Morgan Foundation intended to accelerate research towards better treatments and ultimately a cure. It was described as the largest single philanthropic gift ever made to diabetes research in the UK.

The gift also came with an intensely personal story: Steve Morgan’s son has type 1 diabetes. That may help explain why the announcement was received so positively and why there appears to have been so little scrutiny of what the £50 million arrangement actually involved. But there’s a ‘catch’!

The research it funds may ultimately prove extremely important. But this is not £50 million simply handed over with few strings attached. Firstly, the money is tightly restricted, with many ordinary expenses excluded. Researchers and universities accepting the funding must agree to onerous, extensive and continuing conditions covering how the research is conducted, how discoveries are handled and what happens if those discoveries later have commercial value.

These conditions are all set out in contractual agreements, which also reveal that the Steve Morgan Foundation retains ongoing rights connected to the research. If successful discoveries lead to a marketable product, whether a ‘cure’ or not, some of the resulting income can flow back to the Foundation. In other words, there is the possibility of a return on the investment.

That makes the word “gift” considerably more complicated than it first appears — and the fuller picture deserves to be understood.

Who is the billionaire behind the £50 million gift? Steve Morgan made his fortune founding Redrow, one of Britain's largest housebuilders, before establishing the Steve Morgan Foundation, a registered charity with a substantial investment portfolio that historically included millions of Redrow shares. The housebuilder was acquired by Barratt in 2024. His business interests have extended far beyond housebuilding, encompassing property development, financial investments, healthcare — including a substantial investment in Spire Healthcare, one of the UK's largest private hospital groups — and other industries. Behind the £50 million diabetes gift is a business history involving substantial Conservative Party donations, offshore investment structures and the cladding and building-safety scandal that followed the Grenfell Tower fire. Although Redrow was not involved in Grenfell Tower itself, it was among the developers facing substantial costs over defective buildings. Its estimated fire-safety remediation provision reached £200 million in 2022. Following Barratt's acquisition, 27 buildings across 12 former Redrow developments entered its building-safety review programme, with further potential defects identified in London and Edinburgh. Redrow even offered leaseholders loans to pay towards repairing defective homes. At its Celestia development in Cardiff Bay, residents faced serious construction defects, including missing fire barriers and problems involving timber cladding. In January 2020, MP Stephen Doughty challenged Redrow's proposal to lend residents money towards the repairs. Years after Grenfell, fire-safety remediation remains unfinished at former Redrow developments, including Birmingham's Hemisphere, where fire engineers identified a 100% failure rate in the building's external wall systems. Redrow initially did NOT offer to undertake the remedial works. Instead, it objected to government Building Safety Fund payments that it would be required to reimburse, arguing that insurers should meet the costs. Steve Morgan has also been a substantial financial supporter of the Conservative Party. The Times reported that he donated £1 million in 2019, during Boris Johnson's general-election campaign. Separately, his Bridgemere investment group made £1.6 million in registered Conservative donations between 2019 and 2022, followed by £25,000 supporting Tom Tugendhat's 2024 leadership campaign. Bridgemere representatives also met government ministers concerning planning and housebuilding. Morgan's financial interests include Guernsey and Jersey-linked investment structures. Redrow's accounts disclosed four investment companies holding a combined 16.8 million Redrow shares for the benefit of his children in 2018. Several were registered offshore. In December 2025, registered control of Bridgemere UK transferred to Zedra Trustees (Guernsey) Limited, a professional trustee company. Morgan also owned Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club for nine years before selling it in July 2016 to Chinese investment conglomerate Fosun, reportedly for approximately £45 million. The Steve Morgan Foundation is a legally separate charity. However, its £50 million Grand Challenge funding agreements include conditions concerning intellectual property, commercialisation and potential future revenues. These are financial rights worth understanding when examining who funds the search for a type 1 diabetes cure.

This is not how most of us donate

An ordinary supporter might run a marathon, raise £1,000, make a monthly donation or leave Diabetes UK money in their will. Unless that gift is specifically restricted (and there’s nothing on the website to explain how, or even if, this could be done), once the money raised is handed over to Diabetes UK, the charity decides how it can be spent across the organisation.

The Grand Challenge is very specific about the costs it is willing to cover, such as researchers, consumables, equipment and project support. Universities are not given unrestricted money to develop projects funded under the programme. Instead, extensive controls are written into their contracts, along with rights for the Foundation concerning the direction of research and the priorities that researchers should follow. They can't even make a media announcement without approval from the Foundation.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with a major funder negotiating strict conditions, this is very different to the idea of a “gift” to find a cure and is clearly a different kind of arrangement from the donation made by most Diabetes UK fundraisers and supporters.

How does the £50 million fund work?

Although the £50 million Grand Challenge is presented as one programme, the funding is administered through two charities, Diabetes UK and Breakthrough T1D UK (formerly JDRF UK), with different contractual arrangements. Universities receiving grants do not simply receive the money and carry on independently. The agreements govern how funding is spent, how research is conducted and reported, and what happens if discoveries become commercially valuable.

The Grand Challenge funds three specific areas of type 1 diabetes research:

1.    Replacing beta cells: Developing ways to replace, regenerate or protect the insulin-producing cells destroyed by type 1 diabetes, including growing new cells from stem cells for transplantation. The aim is to enable people with type 1 to produce their own insulin again.

2.    Tackling the root causes of type 1 diabetes: Developing treatments that prevent or stop the immune system from attacking insulin-producing cells, potentially protecting remaining cells or preventing the destruction of transplanted replacements.

3.    Developing novel insulins: Creating new types of insulin, including ultra-fast-acting and glucose-responsive ('smart') insulins that could automatically respond to changing blood glucose levels, reducing the risk of highs and lows.

It’s important to note that while novel insulins could improve the treatment of type 1 diabetes, they are not a cure for the underlying condition. Therefore, not all of the £50 million is directed towards finding a cure, and the focus on novel insulins also appears intended to support commercialisation.

Conditions that continue after the grant is paid

Importantly, a potential cure for type 1 diabetes could also become a valuable commercial asset, with the rights licensed or sold to another company for profit. A university or biotechnology company might develop a promising treatment and then sell or license the rights to a larger pharmaceutical company to undertake clinical trials, manufacture it or bring it to market. Those rights could subsequently be sold or licensed again. Research originally funded by a charitable gift could therefore generate substantial commercial income before a treatment ever becomes available to people living with type 1 diabetes.

Terms under Breakthrough T1D UK

The Grand Challenge conditions published by JDRF UK, now Breakthrough T1D UK, are particularly explicit. They give Breakthrough T1D UK and the Steve Morgan Foundation a combined entitlement to 10% of defined net income arising from the commercial use of funded research, capped at five times the value of the original grant.

For example, a £2 million research award could potentially generate up to £10 million in combined returns to the two organisations. This is the contractual maximum, not a guaranteed payment, and the agreement does not publicly specify how the income would be divided between them. It should not be assumed that the Foundation and Breakthrough T1D UK would each receive half.

Terms under Diabetes UK

Diabetes UK administers its Grand Challenge awards under different contractual arrangements. Its partnership conditions state that universities owe obligations separately to both Diabetes UK and the Steve Morgan Foundation, with each entitled to enforce its rights. They also provide for a separate Revenue Sharing Agreement if discoveries arising from the funded research are commercially exploited.

Unlike the Breakthrough T1D UK terms, the publicly available Diabetes UK Grand Challenge conditions do not specify a fixed percentage of commercial income payable to the two organisations.

How does this differ from ordinary charitable research funding?

Revenue sharing itself is not unusual in medical research. Diabetes UK's standard research agreements already contain commercialisation provisions, with its published revenue-sharing arrangements providing for approximately 35–40% of relevant net revenue in specified circumstances where it fully funded the research. Wellcome's standard share is 25%. These arrangements allow research charities to recover some of the financial value created by successful discoveries and potentially reinvest it in further research.

The distinction with the Grand Challenge is that the Steve Morgan Foundation is not simply providing £50 million and walking away. Under both funding routes, the original philanthropic funder retains contractual rights connected to research financed by its donation, including potential rights to future commercial income.

That creates an important contrast with how the funding has been presented publicly. The £50 million has repeatedly been described as a philanthropic gift towards finding a cure for type 1 diabetes. Yet the agreements impose continuing obligations on the institutions receiving the money and preserve financial rights for the Foundation if discoveries become commercially valuable.

This is not a simple no-strings gift. The funding is restricted to specified purposes, research institutions must comply with extensive contractual conditions, and successful discoveries could generate returns to the original donor's Foundation long after the grants have been paid — potentially exceeding the amount awarded to an individual research project.

Grand Challenge route	Who can receive commercial income?	Public share
Breakthrough T1D/JDRF	JDRF UK + Steve Morgan Foundation	10% combined, capped at 5× grant
Diabetes UK	Diabetes UK + Steve Morgan Foundation	Not publicly stated

What’s not clear is how these research priorities have been chosen. Are they the approaches most likely to lead to a cure, those best suited to commercialisation or those most likely to generate profitable outcomes?

Meanwhile, Diabetes UK’s own new research funding has fallen

The £50 million headline can also obscure another important change. At the time of announcing the Steve Morgan gift, Diabetes UK said “At Diabetes UK we invest more than £6 million every year into new research projects looking at all types of diabetes and its complications.”

And then explicitly stated: “The Steve Morgan Foundation’s £50 million investment will come on top of our usual research budget.”

But looking separately at Diabetes UK’s own identifiable commitments to new research gives a very different picture. Commitments to new research from Diabetes UK’s core funds have been falling.

	Diabetes UK total income by year	Diabetes UK funding for new research	% spent on Diabetes UK core research
2021	£37.7 million	Over £6.6 million	18%
2022	£37.9 million	Over £6.2 million	16%
2023	£42.7 million	£7.3 million	17%
2024	£38.4 million	£3.93 million	10%
2025	£43.84 million	£3.4 million approx.	8%

In October 2026, the website states that “Right now, with your help, we’re funding around 120 research projects and invest £6 million into new diabetes research every year.” But the accounts show that this wasn’t the case in 2024 or 2025! So, while Diabetes UK can publicly associate itself with an unprecedented £50 million programme towards a cure, its own identifiable commitments to new research have fallen sharply.

Read our article: For every £1 Diabetes UK received — Just 6½ p was committed to New Research 

£50 million does not just add money — It can shape the research agenda

This raises a wider issue because a targeted £50 million programme is large enough to influence what researchers choose to study, which teams universities build and where early-career scientists see opportunities.

Researchers understandably follow funding. If substantial fellowships, project grants and career opportunities are concentrated around a small number of themes, laboratories will adapt accordingly.

The Grand Challenge deliberately focuses on selected routes towards cures, including restoring insulin-producing beta cells and stopping the immune attack involved in type 1 diabetes. Diabetes UK says these areas were narrowed down after listening to scientists and people with diabetes.

But people with type 1 diabetes have also identified a much broader range of priorities. Recent patient-priority work includes preventing and understanding hypoglycaemia, diabetes distress and burnout, cognitive effects, hormonal changes and improving person-centred care. Diabetes UK itself says those priorities should guide researchers and other funders.

A large targeted fund therefore creates an unavoidable opportunity cost.

It may encourage more researchers towards areas capable of producing transformative therapies, while other important questions compete for a shrinking pot of Diabetes UK’s own core research money.

For people living with type 1 diabetes, a cure is an obvious ambition. But it is not our only need. Research into severe hypos, cognitive effects, complications, mental health, treatment burden and everyday care can improve lives long before any cure arrives.

One wealthy funder’s chosen definition of progress should not quietly become the research agenda for everyone else.

Someone still pays the costs the £50 million doesn’t

Excluding administration and university overheads from charitable grants does not make those costs disappear.

UK universities receive substantial public research support. In England, public funding includes specific support recognising that charity-funded research often does not meet the full economic costs of conducting that research.

So a Foundation can legitimately say that its money will not pay general overheads while the science takes place inside laboratories, universities and research infrastructure supported partly by taxpayers.

Stage	Who may provide the money or value?
University infrastructure	Taxpayer / university
Defined research project	Charity or Foundation
Scientific discovery	Researchers and university
Patent, licence or spinout	University + commercial partners
Later development	Venture capital / pharma / biotech
Finished treatment	Potentially purchased by the NHS
Commercial income	University, researchers and contractual funders

That is how modern biomedical research often operates. But it is very different from the simple impression that one philanthropist has paid for the whole journey from laboratory to treatment.

The economic value does not necessarily stay in the UK

There is another question rarely put to patients: who ultimately captures the value created by UK research?

Research England has itself highlighted weaknesses in the UK's ability to translate university spinouts into sustained domestic growth, including financing gaps at pre-seed and scale-up stages.

Successful UK research can therefore be publicly supported here, commercialised through a spinout and later financed, licensed or acquired internationally.

That does not mean the UK receives no benefit. Research creates skilled jobs, investment and valuable companies.

But the UK can carry substantial early risk through publicly supported universities, NHS research infrastructure and charitable funding without necessarily retaining all of the ownership and long-term commercial value.

The NHS may then become a purchaser of the resulting treatment.

For the type 1 community, the economic question is straightforward: if UK taxpayers support the laboratories, UK patients contribute to the research environment, charities finance the science and the NHS may eventually buy the treatment, how much of the long-term value created stays in Britain?

Restricted millions make unrestricted donors more important

The tightly controlled £50 million also helps explain why ordinary unrestricted donations and legacies are so valuable to Diabetes UK.

The charity still has to fund its own organisation: fundraising, staff, professional education, campaigns, support services, technology, governance and policy work. A restricted research fund cannot simply be transferred to those activities.

An unrestricted donor therefore gives Diabetes UK something the £50 million Grand Challenge does not: flexibility.

That distinction is particularly relevant to gifts left in wills. A general legacy to Diabetes UK is not automatically the same as leaving money specifically for cure-focused research.

The major funder can stipulate where its money goes, protect it from many general costs and retain continuing rights connected to successful research. The ordinary unrestricted donor generally does none of those things.

A much more complicated 'gift'

None of this suggests Grand Challenge research itself is undesirable. If one of its projects eventually produces a treatment that transforms life with type 1 diabetes, that should be celebrated.

Nor do patents, licences or revenue sharing make medical research improper. Those mechanisms are often necessary to turn discoveries into treatments.

But most people hearing about a £50 million philanthropic gift towards a cure would probably not imagine a lengthy contractual framework restricting expenditure, preserving rights for the Foundation, requiring commercial revenue sharing and potentially allowing returns much greater than an individual grant originally awarded.

Nor would they necessarily realise that Diabetes UK’s own identifiable new-research commitments have fallen by more than half since 2023, or that concentrating £50 million into selected cure-oriented themes can itself influence the direction of UK diabetes research.

That is a much fuller picture than the word “gift” suggests.

Surely if they find a cure, none of this matters?

The Grand Challenge is already concentrating its funding around particular routes, including beta-cell replacement, treatments that target the immune system and new forms of insulin. A future “cure” could therefore be a cell therapy, an immune treatment, a transplant-based approach or a combination of treatments that requires specialist centres, ongoing monitoring, repeat treatment or expensive drugs.

Finding a cure would be an extraordinary achievement. But finding a cure is not necessarily the same as finding the best cure, the most permanent cure or one that is affordable and accessible to everyone who needs it.

The £50 million available through the Steve Morgan Foundation can influence which research teams grow, which ideas are pursued and which treatments eventually make it into clinical trials. Funding on this scale can steer researchers, resources and attention towards particular approaches while other possible routes receive less support, influencing which treatments are developed fastest and reach patients first.

For those with type 1 diabetes waiting for a 'cure', the question is not simply whether the Grand Challenge eventually delivers a treatment that is curative. It is whether the programme is structured to explore the best possible solutions for our community, including those that may be less commercially attractive.

The Grand Challenge contracts continue to matter after a discovery has been made. Diabetes UK and the Steve Morgan Foundation retain significant rights over funded projects, including controls over important changes, licensing and how discoveries are developed into products. If a university decides not to protect or develop a discovery from the research, the funders can potentially step in and take over that process, with some of their rights and reporting requirements continuing for up to 10 years after the grant has ended.

That raises another question. If Grand Challenge funding becomes concentrated around technologies that can be patented, licensed and developed into commercial products, what happens to approaches that may be simpler, cheaper or more permanent but less commercially attractive? They could take longer to develop, struggle to attract funding or never be tested on the same scale.

And the £50 million does not necessarily represent the full cost of the research. Grand Challenge funding calls can expect universities and other organisations to contribute some costs themselves, while projects may also rely on NHS infrastructure, public research funding and other charities. If all of those resources help produce a breakthrough that is later licensed or sold to a commercial company, the NHS could ultimately find itself paying to buy a treatment whose development it helped support.

For people with type 1 diabetes, the real test of the Grand Challenge should therefore be more than whether somebody can eventually announce that a cure has been found. It should be whether the best possible routes were properly explored, whether the resulting treatment is genuinely accessible, whether the NHS can afford it and whether the people whose donations, data, participation and public services helped create it actually benefit from it.

The Grand Challenge is being presented as a once-in-a-generation attempt to transform our future. If our community is helping to fund the research, taking part in the studies and placing its trust in the organisations making these decisions, we should be entitled to ask a simple question: is the Grand Challenge being structured to find the best possible cure for people with type 1 diabetes, or simply the cure that its funding and commercial system is best equipped to produce?