Long and winding road

The problem of sustainable R&D funding should not be dodged

Labour leader Keir Starmer’s promise of “long-term stability for researchers”, made at his party’s conference in Liverpool last week, should have been music to the ears of the R&D sector. After all, a sustainable funding model is the most fundamental issue the sector faces, with a widening gap between research costs and grant levels, and tuition fee income increasingly unavailable to plug it.

But despite the stoic Starmer apparently “fizzing with enthusiasm” for science, as shadow secretary Peter Kyle put it, the party remains largely silent on how this stability would be reached, and what it would look like.