The Science and Technology Facilities Council’s programmes will suffer significant shrinkage over the next 10 years unless the UK council’s budget is increased by more than 10 per cent, according to the STFC’s long-awaited programmatic review.
The review, published at noon on 26 March, outlines the council’s funding priorities for the next 10 years for a number of scenarios, including a continued flat-cash budget, as well as ‘flat cash plus 10 per cent’ and ‘flat cash minus 10 per cent’.
According to the review, the particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics programme (PPAN) would suffer a cumulative reduction of 37 per cent since 2009 if it continues to receive a flat-cash budget over the next four years. An “optimal” funding scenario developed for PPAN in the review would require a modest uplift in addition to the flat cash plus 10 per cent level, and would “ensure continuing vibrancy of the UK science programme”.
A council spokesman stresses that the scenarios do not represent the council’s present situation, as the review has not taken into account the significant increases in capital funding announced by the UK government over the past year. He says that the STFC is now developing a detailed programme proposal that will be subject to approval by the STFC council in May.
The review warns that if the council continues to receive flat cash, cuts will have to be made in its highest priority areas in order to keep some overall programme breadth. This would be “particularly noticeable in particle astrophysics, neutrino science, and the Large Hadron Collider experimental programme, where the UK would lose significant leadership,” it claims. “The lack of astronomy technology development investment would also lead to a loss of future scientific leadership and productivity,” it adds.
In graphs outlining expected investment in specific areas over the next decade, the review suggests that a small reduction should be made to campus centres and to computing science. It also says "there will be a need to scale back the accelerator programme in tandem with the reduced science and facilities programme in the event of a less-than-flat-cash scenario". In addition, projects where the council says funding levels should be reviewed include accelerators, e-infrastructure, specialist engineering, detectors and instrumentation, and optics.
The review, which was led by the council’s Science Board and began in mid-2012, says that protecting grant lines for PPAN, which is about 75 per cent of its entire programme, should be “high priority” in any financial scenario. It adds that reinstating PPAN’s postdoctoral fellowship scheme would be a high priority and that the number of PhD studentships would remain in proportion to the size of the PPAN programme.
The document also recommends that LHC experiments at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, remain the “highest priorities” in particle physics, while the exploitation of major facilities such as the European Southern Observatory Telescopes, E-ELT and SKA, remain the highest priorities in astronomy.
Meanwhile, the board recommends that the council’s nuclear physics programme, which suffered substantial cuts in the STFC’s programmatic review in 2009, be maintained. It also recommends that funding should be set aside for neutrino projects and that investment in gravitational-wave, dark-matter and high-energy gamma-ray experiments be maintained “for the sake of diversity of the UK programme”.
The review also calls for a shake up of the governance of large facilities in the UK, including the ISIS neutron source and the Diamond Light Source. These are managed by the STFC in partnership with Research Councils UK’s Large Facilities Steering Group—comprising officials from research councils and a representative of the Wellcome Trust.
“We recommend that the Large Facilities Funding Model be replaced with a well thought-out science-driven scheme capable of ensuring a coherent facilities programme for the UK,” reads the review. The STFC spokesman says: “Science board has told us their concern that there was no representation of facility users on the large facilities steering group. The academics’ view was that there should be academics involved as well.”
This echoes previous concerns by physicists that the large facilities model doesn’t work. For example, the Institute of Physics said in evidence given to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry on science infrastructure in July 2013 that RCUK’s “planning horizon is too focused on short-term scientific priorities, which places difficulty on the STFC in terms of managing”.