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Alarm bells are ringing in the UK research community. Physics departments may close and researchers leave the UK. What is happening and why?
The alarm comes from changes in the way taxpayers’ money is invested by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which recently published its plan on how to disburse £38.6bn of public research and development funding over the next four years. Change is always unsettling, and as the UKRI’s chief executive, Ian Chapman, says, there will always be those who lose out when change happens. Difficult choices must be made.
As an example, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), one of UKRI’s subsidiary councils, announced the cancellation of several projects it had been asked to take forward by the UKRI infrastructure fund. These include a nuclear physics collaboration with the US, a powerful microscopy facility at Daresbury and a major UK-led project at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as Cern.
My own research in particle physics is funded via the STFC. So is research into astronomy and nuclear physics, as well as large UK multidisciplinary facilities. STFC also takes care of international subscriptions, ranging from our membership of Cern to telescopes, light sources and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. Those international projects carry important considerations around “science diplomacy”, or UK soft power, as well as being crucial to our national research capacity. A recent success in this area was the appointment of Mark Thomson, the first British director general of Cern since the 1990s, after a sustained campaign from this government and its predecessor. Given the difficulties in relations with our European partners post-Brexit, this was a very positive development.
It is now marred by the fact that a letter announcing cuts to UK-Cern collaborations arrived as Thomson takes over – most definitely not good science diplomacy.
Overall, Michele Dougherty, executive chair of the STFC, has said that UK investment in particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics will fall by 30%. This will be devastating to a tightly managed portfolio of projects that are essential to the success, probably even the survival, of several excellent physics departments around the country, as well as the careers of a generation of researchers. These areas are major attractors of students and international researchers into UK science and technology, and many studies have shown that they make huge contributions to the economy, often in unpredictable ways.
It is through this portfolio that we reap the scientific and economic benefits of our membership of Cern and the large international astrophysics projects. Without proper investment in the UK, we can’t make best use of the membership fees we pay. In effect, we will be helping pay for these large-scale experiments around the world, but won’t fund enough UK scientists to analyse the data they produce.
The justification for these changes stems from a positive recognition that investing in research drives economic growth. To this end, UKRI has defined “buckets”, or new categories of research, to better apportion funding. The House of Commons science, innovation and technology select committee in a recent session asked for a more inspiring name than “buckets”, but for now it stands.
Bucket one is labelled “Curiosity-driven research”. Bucket two is “Strategic government and societal priorities” and bucket three is “Supporting innovative companies”. Bucket four, “Enabling and strengthening UK R&D”, is for investments that make substantial contributions across the other three, such as skills training and multidisciplinary facilities.
This is at least a potentially reasonable way of allocating resources, and Chapman says that the changes are mainly about transparency and measuring outcomes, writing: “UKRI has always funded these three areas but has not been as clear as it needs to be on what goes where and what outcomes are expected.” But the devil is in the detail. What is the journey from a “curiosity-led” discovery through to something that addresses a societal priority and then maybe gets commercialised by an innovative company? And is the balance of resource – who gets what – shifting? Chapman told the select committee that last question couldn’t be answered, because the buckets are new.
He seeks to reassure, saying that, despite pauses to several funding programmes, curiosity-led research (bucket one) will be protected, and researchers will be able to bid for support from the other buckets, too. Many in the research community are worried about this, but there at least some who are confident that the opportunities created will be significant. However, these reassurances are hard to square with the cuts at the STFC, much of which fall squarely on the category of curiosity-driven research.
Difficult choices have to be made, but they have to be good choices or we risk profound long-term damage to our research ecosystem. And making a good choice requires an attention to detail that seems to have been lacking from UKRI so far. In answer to questions at his lecture to the Campaign for Science and Engineering on Tuesday, Chapman said that, regarding STFC cuts, “no decision has been made”, and that the impact would be evaluated before things were set in stone. This is a positive sign. There is still time to avoid a disaster, but it is running out.
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Jon Butterworth is professor of physics at University College London, and a member of the ATLAS Collaboration at Cern
