For more than a decade, there’s been a remarkable cross-party political consensus in the UK in support of funding scientific research.
Despite the wider pressures on public finances, public spending on science has been increasing in real terms, and further increases are planned. But that consensus is now breaking down – and, in my view, the wider UK research community has not yet woken up to the threat. We can’t take continuing government and public support for science for granted, and the science funding system needs to adapt and demonstrate that it is delivering for the nation, to make sure that support continues.
The recent English local elections made clear that the old political duopoly is breaking up – and what’s driving many supporters of both Greens and Reform is a sense that the old system is broken. “Burn it all down” is an emerging political theme. There are obvious new threats that the country needs to respond to, notably increasing geopolitical insecurity. The Conservative Party’s plan to cut UK Research and Innovation’s funding by 20 per cent, moving the money into direct defence R&D, is a signal that, whoever forms the next government, times are changing.
But perhaps the biggest issue the research community must face is this: the justification for increases in the government’s research budget has been that more R&D will lead to economic growth – but that growth has not materialised. GDP per person is about 29 per cent lower than it would have been if the pre-2008 trend had continued, and this stagnation manifests itself directly in people’s wages and living standards, which on average have barely increased over the last twenty years, and in governments’ difficulties in funding public services.
We know that research and innovation does produce economic growth, but we need to be much more sophisticated in our understanding of the different ways that happens. Not all research is the same, and different sectors of the economy need to be supported by R&D in different ways. We have to get the balance right between different kinds of research, and the different outcomes we can expect from each kind, to get the return that the nation expects from science.
Ten years story
Here are three examples of the different ways science has delivered for us over the last ten years or so.
In 2015, a multinational collaboration, with a UK contribution funded by STFC, discovered gravitational waves. This was a breakthrough in understanding the fundamental structure of space and time, at last confirming a century old prediction of Einstein. It has given us a new tool for studying the universe – the first signal came from two black holes colliding. The gravitational wave signal that the scientists detected was miniscule; this was a technological breakthrough as well as a scientific one, leading to new technologies in optics and photonics.
At the beginning of 2021, as everyone will remember, the anxiety of going into a third wave of Covid was mixed with hope, as the vaccine programme got started. The development of effective Covid vaccines in such short order was a remarkable achievement, that was enabled by years of research – research that saved about 20 million lives worldwide. In the UK, Medical Research Council support over the years for the Oxford group led to the AstraZeneca vaccine.
But there’s less well known story from the pandemic; the mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna depended on highly specialised lipid molecules to encapsulate and deliver the delicate mRNA molecule. Manufacturing of these chemicals had to be rapidly scaled up from grams to tonnes – and the company that did this was the Yorkshire based company Croda, with much of the manufacturing done in their plant in the Staffordshire town of Leek, expanded with UK government support in 2021.
These three stories illustrate three dimensions of research and development. There’s basic science, focused on uncovering deep truths about our world and the universe it sits in – but from which unpredictable benefits may emerge in the future.
There’s the research we need to do to meet society’s needs, expressed through government priorities. We need to be prepared for pandemics, we need to do the research that will support the high tech businesses we need to generate growth and good jobs – and, sadly, increasingly we’ll need the research needed to keep us safe in a dangerous world.
But none of this will deliver unless we have innovative businesses that can take new products and better processes and scale them up, generating jobs and value in communities throughout the UK. This is where the UK has been weak; out of the world’s top 100 R&D performing companies, only two are British – the pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and GSK.
Priorities and choices
The government primarily funds science through UK Research and Innovation, the umbrella organisation for research councils like STFC and MRC, as well as the business focused agency InnovateUK, and there are changes happening in the way funding is organised in UKRI. But what’s driving those changes isn’t an attempt to downgrade the importance of fundamental research. It’s a recognition of the importance of all three dimensions of R&D, and the need to keep them in the right balance. And it’s a move to make that balance very clear, both to the government and to the country more widely. In return UKRI needs consistency and clarity from government about what the long-term priorities of the nation should be.
We in the scientific community need to step back and reflect on the wider circumstances the country finds itself in. We have deep seated economic problems – the lack of productivity growth since 2008 has led directly to wage stagnation and problems funding public services. Our nation is profoundly economically divided, with much of the UK outside the Greater Southeast looking more like Southern Italy and Portugal than Northern Europe. And now we are reminded of the fragility of our energy supplies, and the need to defend ourselves and our way of life.
Research and development – from all disciplines, including the arts and humanities and social sciences – should have a central role in addressing the crises of this moment. But our funding system needs to be organised in a way that makes this possible, and that is explicit in the way it balances the three dimensions of R&D – basic research, supporting government priorities, and making sure our innovative companies can grow.
The changes in UKRI, to align funding to Science Minister Patrick Vallance’s “three buckets”, is a move in this direction. It’s a major upheaval, that’s rightly being implemented with some urgency, and there are understandable anxieties in the community about what’s happening. But Government – and more importantly, citizens – need to understand what they are getting from public research and development.
At a time of rapid change, it’s easy, and understandable, to want to focus on what’s happening in one’s own discipline. But the stakes here are much higher, and the research community would do well to reflect on what changes are needed to maintain a wide consensus in support of the whole of our national research enterprise.
We only have to look at the USA – where President Trump is proposing a $5.9 billion cut to the National Institute of Health, and $4.8 billion cut to the National Science Foundation – to see what happens if the consensus in support of science is broken. To maintain that consensus, UK science must deliver.
