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). It looks like a return to the Bad Old Days.
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%.
All this is on top of a recent squeeze that has led to grants being delayed to make savings of around 15%. 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 a significant fraction of their activity 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. 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 and to hell with the long-term funding of basic research. In Ireland we’re familiar with the consequences of that approach.
Still, at least the UK has the Astronomer Royal as an independent voice to speak up against these cuts. The current Astronomer Royal is… checks notes… oh… Michelle Dougherty, Executive Chair of STFC.
In the Dark 
January 29, 2026 at 1:39 pm
It’s not just STFC – MRC and BBSRC have also reported they will drastically reduce money available for grant funded research this week. The curious thing is UKRI is claiming they are not reducing funding for curiosity funded research – so then where has the money gone?
Also worth nothing for context that STFC has just reduced funding in the current grant round by 15% – I know of many people who were made redundant. So it’s not just a future 30% drop – it’s that on top of the just done 15% drop. Further to that even when grants are awarded the money is not being released for month on end – I know of cases where people have been made redundant and now the groups want to try and rehire the same person because finally the money has appeared. This is no way to fund long term technical expertise needed for experimental work.
January 29, 2026 at 7:02 pm
When I was reading the document it was not clear if they actually plan to contact every individual grant recipient and ask to find X% of savings (which I don’t quite see how it would work, if the grant is allocated for a salary of a postdoc who has a contract).
January 29, 2026 at 9:08 pm
Something I don’t understand is how the statements “UKRI has received a record funding settlement over the 4-year period” and “STFC has to implement £130m of cuts” go together in the same news items …
January 30, 2026 at 1:16 pm
MRC and BBSRC have also announced significant cuts in grant led funding and now there are rumours starting about EPSRC. It looks like someone has decided to reallocate grant led funding to something else?
January 29, 2026 at 10:12 pm
It means STFC badly lost the funding battle within UKRI.
January 30, 2026 at 12:01 pm
In the recent Astronomy standard grants round, the success rate was only around 19%.
January 30, 2026 at 12:07 pm
Then the expectation will be around 13% next time…
January 30, 2026 at 12:13 pm
No because this round they are also had a large grants round (bids with multiple institutions). Don’t think this is operating next year which will ‘free up’ PDRA posts for allocation via the standard grants route. Still likely to be heavily oversubscribed I would imagine.
January 31, 2026 at 11:16 am
The oversubscription is actually twice as bad as the 19% implies: if you apply and fail, then you are now banned from reapplying in the following round. So a true open competition would have yielded a success rate more like 10%.
This is the endgame. When STFC was created in 2007, the money for astronomy grants roughly halved, as we had our pockets picked to pay for the overruns on the Diamond synchrotron. Since then, we’ve had 20 years of constant cash (modulo a slight upturn in the last few years), so close to a furher factor 2 cut in real terms. Now another 30% down. STFC might as well stop small grant funding altogether. To a good approximation, we can now say that the only route for a typical UK astro academic to get research funding is through the ERC. But this also has its drawbacks, funding only large-ish teams; I’d rather see the money spread more widely to replace the 1-postdoc STFC awards that are now becoming extinct.
January 31, 2026 at 1:20 pm
I would prefer to go back to the old departmental grant allocations – be it Rolling Grants or Consolidated Grants – where groups would have the flexibility to provide at least some support to everyone. With the current level of funding its likely that people could go for significant periods of time with zero funding, with implications for their research and also career in terms of promotion.
February 4, 2026 at 9:57 am
John is totally right about what he says regarding the subliminal message “if you want to do research get an ERC” but I am afraid this is becoming an European wide phenomenon where funding agencies just decided that it is not worth funding anything else. Indeed, it is a tragedy that small blue sky projects cannot be funded anywhere. And I am talking from the “high table” as we have in the “family” already four ERCs historically, currently starting the ERC Synergy RedH0t
January 31, 2026 at 12:28 pm
This seems to have been the worst possible time to introduce the new system for astronomy grants where many people are locked out of any funding altogether.
January 30, 2026 at 1:55 pm
February 6, 2026 at 10:15 am
[…] guest post by George Efstathiou is a response to the current STFC funding crisis I blogged about here, and specifically to a letter by the Executive Chair of STFC, Professor Michele Dougherty. I […]
February 15, 2026 at 1:38 pm
[…] 2000 per day. The drivers of this increase have been two posts about the STFC funding crisis, first mine at the end of January and then a Guest Post by George Efstathiou which has been shared very […]