Physicists warn of ‘catastrophic’ impact from UK science cuts

UK scientists are warning of a “catastrophic” impact on physics research due to budget cuts at public funding bodies. Research groups around the country face average cuts of 30 per cent, but have been asked to plan for up to 60 per cent.

It is understood that many groups will entirely lose funding, the number of research positions will fall and the UK will withdraw from international projects such as the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is a public body that funds science and business, under the control of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. It has announced a budget of £38.6 billion over the next four years, which it claims is actually a slight rise, though this doesn’t factor in inflation. But it has also warned that physics research is due for significant cuts.

UKRI spending is intended to further scientific research but also generate a return for the country. The organisation’s chief executive, Ian Chapman, said in a press briefing on 5 February that the organisation was now focusing more on commercialisation. “We’re a public body, in service of the UK public. The public should expect us to make those hard choices to make sure we make the biggest impact to the country, to grow our economy,” he said.

The organisation distributes grants through nine councils, one of which – the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) – focuses on particle physics, nuclear physics and astronomy. This includes the budget for the UK’s contributions to CERN and the European Space Agency. It is STFC that faces the bulk of the cuts, at a reported £162 million.

Recipients of STFC funding have been told by the body to expect cuts of 30 per cent overall, but were asked to draft different budgets with cuts of 20 per cent, 40 per cent and 60 per cent, according to the Institute of Physics (IOP), which called the news a “devastating blow for the foundations of UK physics”.

IOP president-elect Paul Howarth said in a statement that the cuts would harm “human understanding of the universe and human progress”. “The Large Hadron Collider alone has informed our fundamental understanding of the universe and the matter it is made of. Accelerators developed for particle physics are used in X-ray facilities and new cancer treatments,” he said. “This cut in UK funding will hold up advances in its experimental capability, which will mean less innovation and ultimately less economic growth. We urge the government to step back and consider how its new funding strategy will impact UK science.”

Michele Dougherty, executive chair of STFC, said in a briefing that the organisation had been too ambitious about what it wanted to achieve in previous years. “We’re spread much too thinly, we’re trying to do too many things,” she said. “We’ve got a difficult couple of years in front of us. We simply don’t have the money to do everything.”

Dougherty admitted in the briefing that international collaborations on particle physics were coming to an end and that hard choices were being made. “I think it’s a message that our international partners understand. They too are under financial constraints,” she said.

John Ellis at King’s College London says the cuts tarnish the UK’s reputation among international scientific collaborators. “That’s not the way forwards for international collaboration, and it risks labelling the UK as an unreliable partner,” he says. “People are going to say, ‘Well, look, how do we know that Perfidious Albion is actually going to do what it says it’s going to do?’”

One of the projects affected is the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson. UK funding was due to partly finance an upgrade that needs to be carried out in the experiment’s shutdown period. “I have no idea how they’re going to sort that out,” says Ellis.

Another LHC experiment known as LHCb, which is investigating differences between matter and antimatter, will also have its budget cut to zero, says Ellis, which jeopardises plans to upgrade the detectors. Reports suggest that the US-led Electron-Ion Collider, being built at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state, is another affected project. UKRI didn’t confirm whether these projects had been scrapped when contacted by New Scientist.

Ellis says the wider cuts to physics research could have long-term implications for the UK, as postdoctoral and junior researcher positions will be lost. “What you risk doing is cutting a whole generation of our young researchers off at the knees,” he says. “It’s not going to be a minor effect.”

Jim Al-Khalili at the University of Surrey, UK, warned that the impact of the cuts would reduce the knowledge, skill and experience available to run the country’s nuclear industry, as well as affect general research. “These proposed cuts are going to be devastating for our community,” he says. “If this goes through, the impact on the core programme will be catastrophic.”

Alicia Greated at the Campaign for Science and Engineering, which represents UK research bodies, says UKRI has made mistakes in how it communicated the cuts, which led to significant confusion and uncertainty. “Regardless of the rationale behind the decision to make savings in the STFC budget, which we do need further clarity on, the impact is the same,” she says. “STFC facilities support all research in the UK, not just that in the physical sciences. Less money for them could undermine a critical part of our research infrastructure.”