Some time around October, the true state of British science funding will be revealed, when the government announces how it plans to cut somewhere on the order of 25% from each of its department’s budgets. Until then, all is gossip and intrigue, with policy wonks casting hither and thither for signs of government thinking, while science academies project the effects of various cuts – and try to assert their discipline’s merit over others: the Royal Academy of Engineering has already argued that particle physics should be cut, Research Fortnight reports.

Another chance to peer into The World After October came today when new UK science minister David Willetts gave evidence at a public session of the House of Lords Science and Technology committee – a 14-member committee of unelected eminents, which has the broad remit of considering science and technology across government departments. (The Lords committee used to be in the shadow of its energetic House of Commons cousin, but its current membership includes Royal Society president Martin Rees, and it is chaired by the previous chairman of the Food Standards Agency, John Krebs. The new Commons committee members, announced yesterday, don’t seem to boast anyone of that scientific calibre, so it may be that Lords science reports are the ones to watch in the future).

Willetts started by apologising that he couldn’t say anything substantive about cuts – though he repeated, to no-one’s surprise, that negotiations would be ‘tough’ and added, as he has noted before, that funds would be concentrated in particular areas of research excellence (without saying which ones). He then reaffirmed a vision introduced in his earlier speech on research to the Royal Institution: touching on topics such as science’s importance to ‘rebalancing’ the economy, the potential role of new technology institutes and loose research clusters, the importance of strengthening links between universities and industry, and the idea that smart public procurement could boost innovation, much as the United States military budget boosts technology.

Krebs and Rees pressed Willetts on whether scientists could expect a stable, long-term budget in the future, and stressed that a modest decline in funding could precipitate a brain drain: the minister said the former was important, and asked for empirical evidence of the latter. He also asserted that spending cuts announced earlier this year of £6 billion had had only a “minor” impact on research and development. Intriguingly, Krebs said that some had talked about re-organizing the UK’s research councils and moving to a structure more like the United States’ National Science Foundation – to which Willetts agreed there were rumours but that he had no specific proposals. “We are bombarded with proposals but are not as yet convinced that there is a superior structure than currently exists,” he added.

Short of finding out what cuts would be, the committee gently probed whether anyone would be checking the overall effect of cuts in government-commissioned research by individual departments, or if there were plans to monitor the effect of cuts on science, once made. Willetts dodged the second question, and to the first said that the chief scientist, John Beddington, had met with the treasury, and also that he continued having breakfast meetings with science advisers in all departments.

Sated, the committee turned – after discussion on how to promote innovation – to the fraught question of how to measure ‘impact’, or economic payback, which British scientists are worried about being asked to demonstrate in order to gain research funds, or retro-actively when being assessed for university funding. (An audit system that would put weight on this measure, the Research Excellence Framework, has just been postponed for a year). Willetts again asked for help in “designing measures of success that do not themselves distort behaviour.” (See Nature’s special issue on metrics for more on this problem). For example, he thinks too much weight is now placed on patents as a measure of industrial impact, so that universities spend lots of money protecting middle-ranking patents rather than developing new technologies. And on the requirement that scientists predict the impact of their research – surely an impossible task – he added: “There’s no point trying to invite scientists to make predictions in which they have no confidence.” In this World Before October, the Lords committee probably thought the same of the science minister.