AUSTERITY is the watchword for many governments as they struggle to recover from the global economic upheaval. The UK is no exception, and on 25 November chancellor George Osborne will lay out his plans to cut public spending. While other countries have invested more in science since 2008 in an attempt to drive economic growth, the UK has not followed suit.
That strategy, a legacy of the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, . But in May, UK voters kicked that government out and replaced it, for the first time since the 1980s, with a Conservative government dedicated to sharp cuts in public spending. Back then science funding took a beating; for scientists it was a time of retreat and pessimism. Fears are widespread that history is about to repeat itself.
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“We’re in trouble,” warns campaign group . At the Conservative party conference last month, the secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, Sajid Javid, whose remit includes science, fuelled concerns rather than quelled them. A long-standing fan of Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister who cut science spending in the 1980s, Javid didn’t once mention the “s-word” in his speech.
On the surface, the structure of research in the UK looks much the same today as it did in the 1980s. Most of the work is done in universities, which receive their principal funding in two streams. Grants for individual projects come from the seven . This is complemented by block grants from the higher education funding councils (HEFCs) for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
But put the system under a microscope and you see that it has changed radically. In the old system, power was massively distributed. A vice-chancellor, research council head or minister might have wanted researchers to pursue an objective, but it would only have happened if scientists themselves were interested.
Today, threatened with ever-more fragile income streams, universities look more like corporations, with hierarchies of managers supervising academics. Research councils have shifted their funding away from curiosity-driven research and towards directed programmes. New criteria that prioritise commercial relevance alongside knowledge for its own sake are widespread. To win funding, researchers increasingly need to adjust their goals to fit those set out in council five-year plans.
HEFCs now hand out block grants only after reviewing the performance of every university department in the country in an exercise called the . Again, the criteria for success increasingly reflect the economic dreams of the Treasury rather than those of enquiring minds.
Levering the lab bench
Conservative ministers, who in the 1980s explicitly delegated spending decisions to scientists, now take pride in writing their own priorities for researchers and picking investments they think are likely economic winners. Osborne himself has outlined and frequently picks major science projects for funding.
Unlike his predecessors, Osborne now has levers that operate all the way down to the lab bench. UK science is halfway to becoming a gigantic machine operated from the top. The question is, what happens in this new world if the money runs out? The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has been asked to identify cuts of 40 per cent. Science and the universities, the research councils and HEFC for England account for two-thirds of its £18 billion budget.
“UK science is halfway to becoming a gigantic machine operated from the top”
The government divides its spending into two parts, cash and capital. Cash is for things like research council grants, and once it is spent, it is gone. It accounts for more than 80 per cent of spending on science. Capital is for things like buildings, telescopes and research ships – costly kit with an enduring life.
Capital spending on science, £1.1 billion for 2015-16, is protected by a Conservative pledge to increase it in line with inflation. Indeed, the advocacy group estimates that by 2020 spending will have been £800 million higher in total than if it had grown in line with inflation from when Osborne became chancellor in 2010.
By contrast, the cash has been squeezed for five years and is vulnerable to further cuts. CASE estimates that cash spending is already about £1 billion lower in total than if it had grown in line with inflation since 2010. And by 2020, that shortfall could be growing at close to £1 billion a year if the government continues to keep the cash “flat” at £4.6 billion a year, as it has since 2010.
These headline figures don’t give the full picture of the pressure on UK research, because other sources of funding are also vulnerable to cuts. For example, universities get part of the £600 million spent by the government’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, to develop potential new products and services. Last month, the Financial Times reported that ministers are considering .
Tuition fees paid by students are also important because most large universities use their teaching income to subsidise research. The coalition government raised the cap on tuition fees to £9000 and provided students with heavily subsidised loans to pay the fees. The result, despite austerity, has been a rise in university incomes – and billions in overspending at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
The government wants to stop that overspend. Its first move has been to scrap grants for poor students and make graduates repay more of their loans earlier. But more is to come. Many Conservatives think universities have cheated austerity and the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange recently called on the government to . The scope, both political and financial, for a real squeeze on universities by the Conservatives is huge.
It is already clear that there will be a rearrangement of the institutional furniture. The Research Excellence Framework, for example, and the money that flows from it, could pass from the HEFCs to the research councils. And it is also clear that Osborne cannot make cuts of 40 per cent at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills without huge damage to science.
Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, refuses to accept that cuts to science funding are inevitable (see “Science is the exception“). “I think George Osborne generally recognises the great importance that science has to drive the economy, for societal good and for our culture and civilisation, and for making our country worth living in,” he told journalists in September. “Implementing cuts of 25 per cent or 40 per cent would destroy the scientific endeavour. Nobody but Neanderthals would cut the science budget by that amount.”
“Cuts of 25 per cent would destroy the scientific endeavour. Nobody but Neanderthals would do it”
If funding is tightened, the temptation will be for ministers to earmark the scant cash for things they think are important. In the Britain of 2015, they have the mechanisms to do this – mechanisms that Thatcher never sought. That would mean doubly severe cuts in other fields, leading to a loss of depth and diversity. In future, when the government recognises it has missed something important – as it did with the internet in the 1990s – the country may well lack the capacity to respond. In scientific, economic, social and security terms, the UK will have become less agile and more fragile.
Leader: “UK spending cuts must spare science, our key to prosperity”
(Images: Chris Radburn/PA/Press Association Images, Peter Cook/View)
This article appeared in print under the headline “Crunch time for science”