Funding council make 'difficult choices' to deliver £2 billion

The Science and Technology Facilities Council have made ‘difficult choices’ in order to promise £1.9bn which they say will maintain UK scientific leadership in physics and astronomy.

The funding framework will support large facilities such as particle physics experiments at CERN – but cuts will be made elsewhere

The body overseeing UK astronomy and physics says some of its programmes will be cut back to save £80m by 2011. “We’ve made some difficult but necessary choices in order to keep the UK at the forefront of international scientific research,” said STFC chief executive Professor Keith Mason. “We have targeted our money very carefully at the areas which will have greatest impact for UK science.”

Areas that will lose money were those deemed to be ‘low priority’ in a recent review - including the Integral space telescope and the Veritas observatory, both of which are concerned with the investigation of gamma-ray light; and Bison, an observatory network pursuing solar-terrestrial physics. There are also plans to sell 50% of the UK’s observing time on the Gemini telescope.

However, Professor Mason was quick to point out that the science community should not focus on the cuts, saying: “What we are doing is losing old stuff at lower priority to do new stuff, and it is vital that we do the new stuff to stay out in front. It should be stressed that there is no squeeze on projects; the volume of projects going forward is the same as going backwards.”

A significant portion of this £1.906bn funding is to come in the form of a £236.5 million investment programme to develop large-scale research facilities - made available through the Governments Large Facilities Capital Fund. Highlights of the funding from the SFTC - one of seven national research councils in the UK - include support for UK participation in global astronomy projects, particle physics experiments at CERN, a neutrino physics project in Japan, a nuclear physics facility in Germany, the search for gravitational waves and exploring whether life has ever been present on Mars.

Ian Pearson, Science and Innovation Minister, said: “By increasing public funding for science, the government is sending a strong message to the research community that it is serious about the long-term future of science research and innovation in this country.”

However, despite upbeat announcements by leading figures of the funding bodies - there are strong feelings by the scientific community of a physics funding crisis.

The community has been in uproar since the beginning of the year when it was indicated some disciplines stood to lose financial support as the STFC sought to balance its government-approved budget against its future objectives. At one point in February, it looked like the UK would lose access to the Gemini telescopes - two of the best telescopes in the world which Britain had helped to build. And for a short period, the international board that runs Gemini considered the UK to be an ex-member.

In April this year a 14-strong panel of MPs on the Innovation Universities, Science and Skills Select Committee strongly suggested the Government and STFC were culpable for the funding shortfall. The MP’s report apportioned some of the blame to the way STFC was created in April 2007 by merging the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (which awarded research grants) with the CCLRC (which managed scientific facilities).

The Government however lays blame squarely at the door of the STFC. The Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) suggest that any shortfall in budget was down to the STFC’s handling of budget allocations - stating that it is “simply wrong” to suggest that the STFC budget was cut by the government in the first place.

Whoever is found ultimately at fault - and two independent reviews have been setup do just that, both to examine the general state of physics funding in the UK and into the role of the STFC itself - it is the scientists and their work that will suffer. 

Mike Green, a member of the Particle Physics Action Group set up in response to the funding crisis, summed up the mood of the community. “Overall there is still a lot of uncertainty about how much money physics departments are going to lose from existing grants, which is making it very difficult to plan ahead.”

The projects approved in STFC’s area include:
• £50M for the Hartree Centre, an advanced computational science centre at STFC’s Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus based at Daresbury, Cheshire in the North West.
• £24M for a new Imaging Solutions Centre based at STFC’s Harwell Science and Innovation Campus.
• £30M for a new Detector Systems Centre based jointly at STFC’s Daresbury and Harwell Science and Innovation Campuses.
• £25M for ISIS Target Station 2, STFC’s world-leading pulsed neutron and muon source facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
• £92.5M for the Diamond Light Source, in which STFC has an 86% shareholding, for the design and construction of an additional ten beam lines.
• £15M for the Square Kilometre Array to develop the first prototype phase of this next generation global radio telescope.