UKRI/STFC funding crisis: a letter

The UKRI/STFC crisis rumbles on, through an impressive Select Committee showing by research-community reps and a fairly dismal performance by the STFC Executive Chair at the same. As there has again been no clear sign of appropriate urgency among the council leaderships, who appear keen to kick the consequences of their actions into the long grass, time for a bit of awareness-raising to representatives -- in Scotland meaning MSPs and Scottish Parliament committees as well as MPs. For interest, here's what I've sent:

Dear XXX ...

You may already be aware that there is something of a crisis in UK science funding, under new leadership of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) body which distributes national research funding on behalf of DSIT. In particular, the inspiring "blue skies" research programmes under the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) are facing existential cuts. The science minister and UKRI chief executive have stated this effect is unintentional but show little evidence of acting to remedy it. With this letter I want to highlight the extraordinary damage that this situation is doing to science in Scotland, where STFC research has a prominent history and leadership across particle physics (e.g. Higgs-boson Nobel Prize), astrophysics (e.g. gravitational waves Nobel Prize), and nuclear physics.

The background appears to be a government directive to encourage more research focus on interdisciplinary and "impactful" science -- in particular ringfencing money for AI and quantum technology. "Appears", because the true situation remains unknown among conflicting, often disproven, and ever-changing explanations from the UKRI and STFC leadership. While claiming to have protected "curiosity-based" research, we have been advised to expect large cuts to long-term science projects in which the UK has established international leadership. This has included summary cancellation of UK pledges to international projects. Chief among these are the LHCb antimatter-experiment upgrade, where the UK was the leading player and the Glasgow and Edinburgh research groups were central technology leaders; and the US Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), where the Glasgow Nuclear & Hadron Physics group has key leadership and R&D roles, and research-staff contracts were predicated on work we now cannot do. Our reputation has already been severely dented by these shock withdrawals, announced over the Christmas break with zero community consultation or evidenced consideration of impact, and drawing ire from international research leaders. That the LHCb U-turn happened precisely as the UK took up the leadership of the international CERN lab for the first time in decades highlights an incredible lack of joined-up thinking.

This first chaotic misstep (technically both cancellations were separate from STFC, though its Chief Executive's recusal from the meeting due to one of several conflicts of interest cannot have helped) has been followed by botched announcements of further reorganisations to research council funding before they are even defined. This self-inflicted uncertainty has led multiple research councils to slam the brakes on their grant programmes. The vaunted new investments in AI and quantum might be able to fill the other gaps -- fundamental science is big on use and development of that tech -- but no-one knows if they can alleviate the headline damage, as their funding structure has not yet been decided. I find it impossible to view deployment of the destructive part of a reorganisation before the constructive part is decided as anything other than peak leadership failure.

Theoretical physics, up against delays in announcement of its annual funding, has missed the internationally agreed research recruitment deadline for 2026 and hence the chance to recruit the best new graduates. STFC in particular, hamstrung by the large fixed costs of its national and international research facilities, has told its research community to plan for up to 60% cuts to project and university-group funding. This is ludicrous: no tightly-managed project can survive 30%, let alone 60%, cuts and deliver any more than a small fraction of their original plan. Community review of these projects for UKRI is already a huge administrative overhead, to which the response has been years of "flat cash" cuts: there is no wastage to be "efficiency-saved". So STFC and UKRI, their new leadership having immediately haemorrhaged all community support, are on course to rapidly eviscerate the UK's international reputation in fundamental science, and to ruin the careers of an entire generation of young UK-based researchers, all while still paying hundreds of millions of pounds per year for membership of research organisations we cannot afford to properly use.

This mess is made worse by the leadership's reticence to discuss openly with the community and to spray around changing explanations and deflections, defence of the institution seeming higher-priority than fixing the problem. The current claim is that they need to wait for the (recently submitted) community impact statements; it is perfectly obvious what this paper-chase will say, so the feeling is very strongly of complacence or hoping the problem will spontaneously dissipate. Meanwhile real damage accumulates daily, not to mention the very substantial opportunity costs of scientific communities diverting their efforts from productive research into administrative and political response-mode. This was called out in impressively straight-talking terms by the Commons Science & Technology Select Committee, following hearings with both the UKRI & STFC leadership, and with representatives of the STFC research community. The most recent hearing even emphasised the mismatch of the scale of impact to the size of budget-reduction involved, which was described as a "Treasury rounding error". But yet the botched plan, insofar as it even exists, remains unamended more than two months since the alarm was sounded.

Our understanding is that government, and the public and MPs in general, are proud of the UK taking a leading role in this science, and understand that while abstract, its spin-offs are not: a pipeline of highly trained researchers moving into UK industry, inspiration for school students to apply to university science & technology courses, and direct technology such as medical scanning and radiation treatments, and of course (from the previous generation of experiments) the World Wide Web. This science is a key part of the growth agenda that the Government promised, albeit one that works on longer timescales than an election cycle. Cutting off the long-term roots, perhaps to chase the coat-tails of the AI boom/bubble, is an excellent way to kill the tree of sustainable economic growth. Your support and help in drawing parliamentary attention to this issue, and its impacts locally in Scotland, would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.