Britain’s main source of research money for hard-core physics has revealed which projects will get the chop as it attempts to balance its stubbornly problematic budget.
The Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC) was formed in 2007 to oversee government spending on high-energy physics, nuclear physics and astronomy. It has been in financial trouble pretty much since day one.
Shortly after it was formed, the council announced that it had an £80 million hole in its budget. It managed to limp through 2008 by borrowing against future budget years and receiving extra money to pay for foreign subscriptions. But by 2009, its budget woes had caught up with it again, and it appeared to be short some £40 million.
Today’s announcement of a five-year plan to balance its books comes at the end of a six-month consultation designed to put the council on a more sustainable track. In the near term, it calls for a 10% across-the-board cut to exploitation grants, and a 25% reduction in the number of new student fellowships.
The plan also calls for a “managed withdrawal” from a raft of individual projects. The ones that caught my eye were the ALICE heavy ion experiment at CERN, an ALMA regional centre (for the giant millimetre array telescope being planned in Chile), and CDF and D0—the two particle detectors at the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.
On top of all that, the plan calls for £71 million in additional, as yet unspecified, reductions.
At a press conference, Keith Mason, the STFC’s notoriously frank chief executive, didn’t mince his words. The cuts would be “very disappointing,” to scientists, he said. But, he added, “We project that we just can’t do everything in the coming years.”
One thing that the STFC will do is slightly increase funding for the Diamond synchrotron light source (pictured above) and the ISIS neutron facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. The extra money is needed to ensure that these recently built and upgraded facilities can be fully exploited in the coming years, according to John Womersley, the STFC’s director of science programmes.
Already, there has been some anger from the community. Nuclear physicists in particular have baulked at being asked to make further cuts to their already meagre budgets. Nuclear Physics has been singled out, Paddy Regan of the University of Surrey told the Science Media Centre. “These out of proportion cuts have the potential to kill off the UK skills base in nuclear physics.”
But other statements are more tempered. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the president of the Institute of Physics called the cuts “unfortunate”. But she noted that the STFC’s consultation with the community had been better this time around than in the past.
Perhaps the most intriguing reaction came from Paul Drayson, the UK’s minister for science and innovation. In a statement, Drayson applauded the STFC’s ability to manage the crisis in a way that doesn’t, in his words, “undermine our scientific research effort”. But he added that it was becoming increasingly clear to him that placing grants, large facilities and international subscriptions in a single council was creating “real tensions”. Drayson says that a reorganization may be in order, and he hopes to find a solution by February of 2010.
STFC