What’s going on at STFC?

You might not have been following every twist and turn of the ongoing budget squeeze at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), so let’s recap.

STFC has four distinct functions. It supports university research, invests in facilities, builds national campuses, and encourages the take up of STEM programmes. This comes at a total annual cost of over £1bn. From 2021–22 to 2025–26 STFC’s costs have risen by over £200m. £125m of that increase is through rising costs of infrastructure projects, and a further £43m rise is in national laboratories and estates.

STFC’s facilities are significant. Across its innovation campuses, research facilities, and laboratories. STFC operates two national campuses, eleven national laboratories, two conference facilities, and two other national research facilities. Maintaining a sprawling infrastructure also comes with significant costs. According to UKRI’s latest annual statements in 2024–25 STFC spent nearly £200m on staff and £335m on international facilities and infrastructure.

Investment in infrastructure and facilities begets further costs as facilities always need to be maintained, built, and rebuilt as science changes. In 2024–25 STFC committed £15.9m to the Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation, over £42m for the Supercomputing Centre at Daresbury, and a range of other capital commitments.

To put it into perspective, STFC forecast their infrastructure spend will increase nearly eight fold from 2021–22 to 2026–27, and their national laboratories spend would grow 1.8x in the same period.

The problem that STFC has wandered into is that its costs have risen significantly and its core budget has remained flat. This is a particular problem when many of the costs are baked into its operating model. STFC states its budget pressure is due to rising energy costs, increasing labour costs, foreign exchange pressure affecting international subscriptions, and the “growth of the organisation’s activities and workforce during the previous Spending Review period.”

STFC has a large estate and energy costs will disproportionately impact its work. Staff costs are also part of this cost, big things take large numbers of people to run them. Estates also become more expensive to maintain as time goes on. As the National Audit Office said in their 2026 report on research infrastructure

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) – which operates a number of UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI’s) largest research facilities – currently spends around £6 million per year maintaining its physical estate (which includes research infrastructure). This is much less than it needs to spend to maintain the condition of this infrastructure and ensure it continues to meet its standards: in 2023, STFC estimated that 45% of its estate was in an unacceptable condition. STFC estimates that the ‘maintenance backlog’ (the spending required to restore the estate to a satisfactory condition) is already around £360 million and this will rapidly increase if it does not change its approach.

These costs are significant but they downwind of where STFC chooses to invest its money. Infrastructure, staff, and the associated on-costs are the cumulative cost of how STFC has decided to prioritise its work.

It leads to an obvious question that if costs were always due to rise was it unexpected that income would not always rise to meet it? In the years 2021–22 to 2025–26 spending increased by 8.7 per cent, 11.6 per cent, 6.2 per cent, and then decreased by 0.86 per cent in 2025–26. As UKRI’s analysis demonstrates STFC’s costs and budgets remained in lock-step until in 2025–26 core costs exceeded its core budget allocation.

It isn’t that the increasing costs is a new trend but with a flat-cash settlement it’s necessary to take corrective action. This includes an overall decrease to the Particle, Physics, Astronomy., and Nuclear Physics Budget by 2.7 per cent (while protecting discovery-led research and post-doctoral research funding), cutting the budget of multidisciplinary facilities by 15 per cent, cutting the national laboratories budget by 58 per cent (while increasing estates budget by 27 per cent), while increasing the budget for international subscriptions by 19 per cent to meet the full range of international subscriptions.

The impact of the cuts will be significant but it also sends a wider signal about UKRI’s priorities. Undoubtedly, this is a blow to the sector that is reliant on STFC’s facilities. The savings may be necessary but they are misaligned with any idea of using infrastructure for economic growth. The cumulative impact on researchers will be the reduction of access to key capabilities, and the prioritisation of only the “most critical building work across the scientific estate.” It is hard to see how reducing spending in infrastructure won’t diminish its long-term value and use.

Perhaps the biggest frustration isn’t just the cut but its delivery. In effect, STFC has ended up with a portfolio of work it cannot manage within its budget constraints. Its solution is to deliver the same portfolio activity but at a reduced scale. It does not speak to a set of strategic decisions about how its work supports the government’s missions, UKRI’s new approach, or the economic direction of the country. It is a budget cut, and a significant one over a short-time period at that.

As we wait for UKRI’s strategy launch it brings into sharper focus their central idea of doing fewer things with more focus. STFC may be different to other research councils but it brings into sharp relief the benefits of planned change, and the importance of long-term strategy to deal with short-term volatility.