These cuts to physics research will be a disaster for UK scientists – and for our standing in the world | Jon Butterworth

Alarm bells are ringing in the British research community. Physics departments could 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 for how to disburse £38.6 billion of public funding for research and development over the next four years. Change is always destabilizing and, as UKRI chief executive Ian Chapman says, there will always be those who lose out when change happens. Difficult choices must be made.

For example, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), one of UKRI’s subsidiary councils, announced the cancellation of several projects requested from it by the UKRI infrastructure fund. These include a nuclear physics collaboration with the United States, 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 through the STFC. The same is true for research in astronomy and nuclear physics, as well as in Britain’s large multidisciplinary facilities. STFC also takes care of international subscriptions, ranging from our Cern membership to telescopes, light sources and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. These international projects address important considerations around “science diplomacy”, or British soft power, as well as being crucial to our national research capacity. A recent success in this area has been the appointment of Mark Thomson, Cern’s first UK director-general since the 1990s, after a sustained campaign by this government and its predecessor. Given the difficulties in relations with our European partners after Brexit, this is a very positive development.

This situation is now marred by the fact that a letter announcing cuts to UK-Cern collaborations has arrived just as Thomson takes over – certainly not good science diplomacy.

Overall, STFC executive chair Michele Dougherty said UK investment in particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics would fall by 30%. This will be devastating to a portfolio of tightly managed projects that are critical to the success, and likely survival, of several excellent physics departments across the country, as well as to the careers of a generation of researchers. These fields attract many international students and researchers to the UK’s science and technology fields, and many studies have shown that they make huge contributions to the economy, often in unpredictable ways.

It is thanks to this portfolio that we reap the scientific and economic benefits of our membership of CERN and major international astrophysics projects. Without adequate investment in the UK, we cannot make the best use of the contributions we pay. Indeed, we will help fund these large-scale experiments around the world, but we will not fund enough UK scientists to analyze the data they produce.

The rationale for these changes comes from the positive recognition that investment in research stimulates economic growth. To this end, UKRI has defined “buckets”, or new categories of research, to better distribute funding. In a recent session, the House of Commons Select Committee on Science, Innovation and Technology asked for a more inspiring name than “buckets,” but for now it remains unchanged.

The first group is titled “Curiosity-Driven Research.” The second group is “Strategic priorities of government and society” and the third is “Supporting innovative businesses”. The fourth strand, “Enabling and strengthening UK R&D”, concerns investments that make a substantial contribution to the other three, such as professional training and multidisciplinary facilities.

This is at least a potentially reasonable way of allocating resources, and Chapman says the changes are mainly about transparency and measuring results, writing: “UKRI has always funded these three areas, but has not been as clear as it should be about what goes where and what results are expected.” » But the devil is in the details. What is the journey from a “curiosity-driven” discovery to something that meets a societal priority and can then be commercialized by an innovative company? And is the balance of resources – who gets what – changing? Chapman told the select committee it was impossible to answer the last question because the buckets are new.

He seeks reassurance, saying that despite pauses in several funding programs, curiosity-driven research (the first tranche) will be protected, and researchers will also be able to bid for support from other tranches. Many in the research community are concerned about this, but at least some are confident that the opportunities created will be significant. However, these assurances are difficult to reconcile with budget cuts at STFC, much of which falls squarely in the category of curiosity-driven research.

Hard choices must be made, but they must be good choices, otherwise we risk causing serious long-term damage to our research ecosystem. And making a good choice requires attention to detail which seems to have been lacking at UKRI until now. Responding to questions at his Campaign for Science and Engineering talk on Tuesday, Chapman said that, regarding the STFC cuts, “no decisions have been made” and that the impact would be assessed before things were set in stone. This is a positive sign. There is still time to avert catastrophe, but it is soon running out.