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Policy and funding

Policy and funding

New money, new physics

01 Aug 1998

Last month's announcement by the UK government that it will invest an extra £1bn in science over the next three years was a long overdue shot in the arm for the country's research community. Report after report has criticized the state of research equipment and laboratories in Britain's universities, while the UK is one of the few countries in which spending on R&D has fallen as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) over the past decade. Indeed, government support for R&D as a fraction of GDP is currently little over half of what it was in 1981. The UK's new Labour government is to be congratulated, and those who doubted its commitment to science - this magazine included - are happy to be proved wrong. The boost is particularly impressive because ambitious plans to increase spending on science by 100% over twelve years in the United States, and by 50% over five years in Japan, are looking ever more unlikely.

The government plans to invest an extra £400m in new projects through the research councils, £300m in universities through a new Infrastructure Fund and another £300m for research in universities through the regional funding councils. The Wellcome Trust, a medical research charity, is contributing £300m to the Infrastructure Fund and a further £100m towards the construction costs of a new synchrotron X-ray source. Priority will be given to the life sciences and biomedical research, although additional funding is promised for “other priority areas, including the underpinning disciplines of chemistry, engineering, mathematics and physics”. The detailed allocation of the money will be announced later this year.

Physics in the UK will do well to maintain its share of the science budget – currently about 18% – and Ian Halliday, chief executive of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), admits that he feels “slightly nervous about what will happen”. However, there are some grounds for optimism. The government has confirmed that PPARC can spend £104m on building detectors for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and a further £13m per year on running costs after 2005. Although not new money, these sums were large enough to require treasury approval. The UK’s world-class astronomy community should now start lobbying to secure funding for its programme.

So how will mainstream physics fare in the scramble for the new money? Physics has been squeezed at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) since its formation in 1994. When allocating its budget, the council already takes into account how each of the research areas it funds would benefit from additional support, so large increases for physics are unlikely. However, the pressure on physics and related work in materials and other areas at EPSRC should at least be eased.

The money from the Wellcome Trust will also ensure that a third-generation synchrotron radiation source will be built in the UK, probably at the Daresbury Laboratory. Plans for such a facility, DIAMOND, have remained on the drawing board since 1994 because the UK has lacked a system for building large new facilities that will be used by more than one council. With DIAMOND now likely to cost the government less than half the original price, there could be opportunities for other large facilities – such as neutron sources and radioactive beam facilities – to make their cases. And physicists need not lament the fact that they will no longer be the major users of synchrotron radiation. Like X-rays, lasers and magnetic resonance before it, synchrotron radiation should be seen as another spin-off from basic physics into other areas of science.

Overall the increase will be more modest than those mooted for Japan and the US: the “science budget” – essentially the money spent by the UK’s seven research councils – will rise by 24% over three years. But it is still much larger than expected and, more importantly, real rather than hoped-for money. The challenge for physicists and their representatives is to ensure that physics receives as fair a deal as possible when the money is distributed.

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