The UK government has announced cuts to planned scientific facilities that are part of a broader effort to decrease its swollen budget deficit. The cuts are a loss for science, though its funding has done better than many other government sectors.

Science spending was largely spared from cuts last autumn, with one exception: facilities. Spending on these large ‘capital projects’ is set to fall by 44% to £1 billion in 2014-15 (see graph). At the time of the announcement, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, eagerly told scientists which projects were safe. The UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation, a £600 million campus planned for central London, and the phase III upgrade to the Diamond Synchrotron Light Source in Oxfordshire were both to be fully funded.

Others are not so lucky. Today, in response to a parliamentary question, David Willetts, the minister in charge of science and higher education, announced which planned projects would be axed in the 2011 budget. They are:

•A new national supercomputing service known as ARCHER.

•The Hartree Centre, a £50 million centre for computational science in energy, life sciences, materials environment and security at the Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus.

•Phase 3 of the redevelopment for the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright.

•A planned upgrade to facilities at the Rothera Research Station in Antarctica.

Given the depth of the cuts to capital projects, this is likely to be just the start of a long list of delayed and cancelled projects.

UPDATE (12/5) – Joe Brownlie, chair of the Institute for Animal Health’s Trustee Board told Nature today that the programme of improvements at the institute had not been axed.

“It’s not true to say that the development at Pirbright has been cut,” he said.

A major upgrade to existing facilities on the site is already underway and the next key stage – the phase 3 referred to in the Parliamentary answer – involves moving avian research currently undertaken at another site in Compton to Pirbright.

The reason that the answer says that this was “not provided with additional funding following the Budget 2011”, says Brownlie, is that the money has not actually been asked for yet. A request will be submitted soon.

“It’s not that it’s been cut – it’s that it’s not yet been approved. There’s every likelihood that it will be approved,” he said.