A New STFC Funding Crisis
I started doing this blog back in 2008 and over the subsequent couple of years wrote many posts about a funding crisis affecting the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the UK funding agency that covers particle physics and astronomy research that had been created in 2007. I particularly remember the cancellation of the experiment Clover back in 2009 which had devastating and demoralising consequences for staff at Cardiff (where I was working at the time).
I moved from the UK eight years ago and haven’t really kept up with news related to the science funding situation there so I was very disturbed last night to see a message from the Royal Astronomical Society containing the following:
In a letter from its Executive Chair, Professor Michele Dougherty, the research council indicates that the budget for particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics together will drop by around 30%. The letter also asks project teams to plan for scenarios where their funding is reduced by 20%, 40% and 60%.
The full letter is here:
There’s a further report about this in Research Professional News which, unusually for that source, is not behind a paywall. It leads with
Exclusive: Science and Technology Facilities Council seeks £162m cost savings, with existing projects facing axe
The article goes on to point out the dangers of cuts of this scale to physics departments in the UK, many of which have sizeable activities in astronomy and particle physics.
The additional reduction and prospect of cuts to ongoing projects is likely to be felt as a hammer blow by physics departments in UK universities, of which a quarter are already at risk of closure.
Grim times indeed. The outlook for UK astronomy now looks even more bleak than the dark days of the funding crisis following 2008. It looks like a return to the Bad Old Days. I think we can be sure that some physics Departments will go under in the next few years. The many people I know caught up in this have my sympathy; I know how much stress this sort of thing causes from the last time.
It looks to me like the people running UKRI, the umbrella organization for all the UK research councils which has an annual budget of £8bn, have decided to throw STFC under the bus to chase shorter-term economically driven projects – no doubt including a large dollop of AI – and to hell with the long-term funding of basic research.
In Ireland we’re familiar with the consequences of that approach.
In the Dark 
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