Ministers against Science
Paul Taylor
The 2019 Conservative Party manifesto, on which Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng and their colleagues in government were elected, has a whole page about science under the heading ‘Unleash Innovation’. Two of the more eye-catching commitments are a pledge to raise spending on R&D to the OECD average, 2.4 per cent of GDP, and a promise to create a new agency for high-risk, high-payoff research – a pet project of Dominic Cummings, modelled on the Advanced Research Projects Agencies in the US. In line with the general tenor of the document, the science page argued that, once the UK was free of the dead weight of EU bureaucracy, focused government action would create a highly skilled tech economy in which we would all prosper.
In truth Brexit has, on the whole, been bad for UK science. Although the ‘brain drain’ that many predicted didn’t occur – the departure of many EU scientists from the UK was to an extent mitigated by the return of British scientists who had been working in Europe – there were high profile withdrawals. The European Medicines Agency left London for Amsterdam. Pharma companies with bases in the UK had to shift investment to the EU to build testing facilities that could demonstrate compliance with EU regulations. The question of UK scientists’ access to EU science budgets was hedged in the 2019 manifesto. The government was willing to continue to contribute, and UK scientists continued to apply for and be awarded funds, but the negotiations have proved difficult and now seem to be wrapped up in interminable disagreements over the Northern Ireland protocol. In the meantime, opportunities are being lost: in June more than a hundred UK scientists were told their European Research Council grants would be withdrawn unless they relocated to the EU.
Progress on the new agency for high-risk research has also been slow. It has a name, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, and has been promised £800 million over the next four years. In July this year, Kwarteng, then a minister at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, appointed a chairman and chief executive but there is still not so much as a website to suggest that the thing exists.
The most recent funding allocation for science was presented as progress towards the target of 2.4 per cent of GDP but the proposed increases, 5.6 per cent in 2023 and again in 2024, now look likely to be cuts in real terms. Inflation will already have taken the costs of many three or five-year research projects beyond their allocated budgets. PhD stipends, which had become an embarrassment, have had to be increased by 10 per cent this autumn. Last week I was one of a group of researchers emailed by civil servants asking for data they could present to government to help make the case for continuing with a programme to which the government was, in theory, already committed. And these are merely the problems that come from trying to work within the existing allocation at a time of higher than expected inflation: the real difficulties will come when the government has to make the serious spending cuts that will be required to pay for the increased borrowing costs caused by the chancellor’s chaotic mini-budget.
Senior staff at universities are increasingly concerned that the faction of the Tory Party now in government is significantly less interested in science than the one that wrote the manifesto on which it was elected. The National Science and Technology Council has been quietly removed from the list of cabinet committees. George Freeman stepped down as minister for science in July as a part of the wave of resignations aimed at forcing Boris Johnson out. When he realised there was no plan to replace him until after the leadership election, he offered to continue in post but was rejected. It has taken almost three months for Nusrat Ghani to be appointed as the new minister. She was a member of the lockdown sceptic Covid Recovery Group which, in November 2020, called for ‘ministers to end a monopoly on advice of government scientists, such as SAGE UK’.
Comments
We can't have experts being concerned - it's too concerning. I'm concerned concerning their concerns, because I'm not sure what their concerns concern. The next thing you know, they could be concerned concerning concerns that could be concerning concerning concerning new variants of concern. Now that would be almost worrying.