The news has received a cautious welcome, but observers say the cuts will still impact the economy The UK’s core civil science budget will be cut in by less than 10% over the next four years, BBC News understands.
The news has received a cautious welcome from those speaking for the research community who had feared deeper cuts to the science budget.
However, there is still concern that the cuts will still be damaging to the UK’s economic competitiveness.
The formal announcement will be made on Wednesday by the Chancellor George Osborne in his spending review.
It had been rumoured that the government would impose cuts of up to 25%.
Normally, science spending does not have such a high profile when the Chancellor sets out the government’s plans.
This year however it’s high on the political radar because strong representations have been made by the scientific community about what they have described as “long term and irreversible” damage to the UK economy if there are deep cuts to research funding.
That argument seems to have been accepted, at least to some degree, by the Treasury.
Imran Khan, director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering (Case), said it was encouraging that the government had “rowed back” from cuts of 20% or even 25% that had been rumoured.
But he added that the cuts would still hurt the UK’s competiveness.
“A 10% cut is a significant real-terms cut for UK science when nations like the US and Germany are having real-terms increases,” he said.
“The comparison (of how good the science settlement is) should not be with what is happening across Whitehall – but how UK science is going to fare internationally because we are in a really competitive global market.”
An initial assessment by Case reveals that there will be very limited scope for any capital expenditure by research funding organisations.
It also suggests there are going to be significant decreases in new research staff entering science and engineering.
“A 10% cut translates into a 30% or 40% decrease in new PhDs that we’ll have next year for instance,” according to Mr Khan.
UK scientists are involved with international astronomy programmes such as Gemini
“So it’s going to be a tough time for UK science.”
A submission to government earlier this year by the country’s national academy of science, the Royal Society, said a 10% cut would “fundamentally damage the quality, productivity and capability of the UK’s research base”.
The current annual civil research spend is around £6bn. Two billion of that goes direct to universities based on the quality of their research.
This is known as the “Quality Related” (QR) stream. Universities normally spend this money on equipment, infra-structure and can use it to pay staff or contribute to research programmes.
The bulk of the remaining £4bn is handed over and distributed among seven “research councils” which in turn hand out grants to scientists and institutions based on the quality of their research proposals. This is known as the science budget.
The new settlement is likely to see a greater concentration of QR funds to elite universities. Projects and staff in non research intensive universities will be at much greater risk of being axed.
The next step will be to distribute the new budget among the UK’s seven research councils.
This will almost certainly involve vigorous arguments about the proportion of the cuts each research council should bear.
This will be determined over the next few weeks in a series of meetings between each research council head and the director-general for science and research, Professor Adrian Smith.
Professor Smith will follow a strategic guide issued by the Treasury which sets out in broad terms the government’s priority areas for research spending. These are likely to include wealth creation and the delivery of a low carbon economy.
It’s likely therefore some research councils, such as the Medical Research Council (MRC) will do better than others because it’s deemed to fit in with national priorities.
In the MRC’s case, it will argue that it is ideally placed to translate the work of its scientists in areas such as stem cell research into new medicines and treatments and so generate wealth.
One research council that is particularly vulnerable, however, is the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
As its name suggests, the STFC runs large test facilities such as the Diamond Synchrotron in Oxfordshire and pays for the UK’s involvement in international collaborations such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), as well as astronomy programmes.
STFC’s problem is that around half of the money it spends is already allocated in international subscriptions and the running of its facilities.
So any cut in its budget will be greatly magnified and it is expected that it will have to withdraw from a major programme. Alternatively, it would have to cutback or close one of its research institutes.
William Brown, chairman and founder of Research Fortnight, a science policy newsletter, believes it will be a bad settlement for science at a time when rival nations are spending more on their research base.
“Less money will mean less bucks and less bang,” he says.
“It’ll be like Manchester United playing with 10 men. It won’t be a more efficient team. It will be a weakend team”.
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