Funding crisis? Not another one...

What goes around comes around, and the start of 2026 has, for particle physicists of my vintage, brought strong feelings of deja vu. These harken back to 2007, when the UK government self-inflicted a funding crisis with the creation of STFC, the UK agency that has since then funded our fundamental science research. For those new to the issues old and/or new, sit back, this is going to take a bit of explaining...

Born to be bad

Back then, the problem was that politicians had decided that it made sense to tie funding of large experimental facilities to the funding of science that would use them. This sounds pretty reasonable. Previously there had been a split, with the UK-based facilities and national laboratories funded and operated by CCLRC (no, you don't care what the acronym stands for) and the research itself, plus international particle and astro physics facilities -- most obviously, but not only, CERN -- funded through PPARC (ok, fine: Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council).

I was only a young'un back then and out of the loop on what particular genius cooked up this rearrangement, but the observant among you may note that from a particle and astro perspective, the facilities and scientific "exploitation" were already gathered together in a coherent way within PPARC. This was a very large deckchair-rearranging exercise... which for some reason also gathered up nuclear physics along with the particle and astro deckchairs.

The real consequence of the merger was to acquire an expensive set of tangentially related UK facilities, most notably the overspent Diamond light-source and ISIS neutron/muon source -- both of which, despite being fairly big particle-accelerating rings, are of virtually no interest to particle physicists: other than prototyping of muon cooling, they are much more of interest to applied materials science and similar.

Their overspends, however, immediately became a budget problem for the particle and astro bits of the new STFC. This led to community action -- including well-intentioned but irrelevant contributions from yours truly -- and attempted engagement with the tail-end of the "New" Labour administration, who were dismissive and played somewhat on our naivety by asking us to hold back and let them sort it out -- of course they did not. Ultimately, the campaign was crushed to invisibility when the rather larger and more immediate concerns of the 2007-8 "Credit Crunch", now labelled the "Great Recession", overtook the national bandwidth.

SNAFU: situation normal, all f'd up

Why this historical tour? Well, the last few months have seen the start of Ian Chapman as new chair of UKRI, the new (relative to 2007) umbrella funding organisation that distributes money to STFC and other research councils. And between the Christmas/New Year break and this month he has unleashed chaos upon the sector with what seem to be a set of unilateral reorganisations toward modish "government priorities".

First, any confirmed project in the "infrastructure grant" channel unlucky enough not to have already received payments was abruptly cancelled -- though, in Whitehall fashion this was bowdlerised to first "deprioritised" and now "paused" -- regardless of the extent to which international partners were locked in on the understanding of UK contributions.

Not content with the dog's breakfast of communication surrounding this and his new (and seemingly arbitrarily resourced) funding "buckets" system, Chapman compounded his science-community popularity by forcing screeching halts to established funding schemes across all of UKRI. This involved horrifying suggestions of 30% cuts (sorry, that word wasn't used; try "efficiencies" or similar bowdlerisation) as standard, and potentially up to 60% cuts on some projects. While this applies across all UKRI research, the headline cuts to "curiosity based research" fall heaviest on STFC -- not only because STFC's science is predominantly "curiosity based", but particularly because of its structural combination of expensive, fixed-cost facilities and the rather squishier researchers who use them.

It would be obvious to a moderately intelligent child that if half their pocket money is inflexibly ringfenced to pay for bus fares, then a 30% reduction in the total would translate to a 60% reduction in their spare cash for sweets or Robucks, but it doesn't seem to have occurred to the extraordinarily rapidly-elevated Chapman that a similar logic applies to STFC. Cuts on a budget with large fixed commitments are multiplied on to the remaining, more flexible parts.

In his defence, Chapman was made chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority within 9 years of his PhD, having already joined the senior management team 2 years previously, and is UKRI CEO in just over 18 -- he was still a PhD student when the 2007 STFC crisis hit, and like most politicians behind this policy lacks institutional memory of the structural fixed-cost multiplier issue. However, he and they should be aware that just a few years ago we were in precisely the position of paying handsomely to join international facilities that we then didn't fund researchers for; this was patched up at that time, and yet here we go again.

Chapman then proceeded to compound this offence to the researchers operating -- and looking for post-PhD jobs -- in STFC science by claiming the problem has come from currency fluctuations driving up the cost of international subscriptions: we know from our 2007 dealings that in fact the government hedges against such increases, and a fairly basic analysis shows that in fact the GDP-indexed CERN subscription bill has slightly reduced over the last 5 years. What I hear is that a more honest assessment of cost overruns are based in (human and energy) operating-cost increases at STFC's UK labs. Welcome back to 2007.

My overall impression is of a personal prejudice and cavalier failure of planning diligence on the part of a hyper-ambitious science-administrator keen to do whatever will impress his new masters -- the increasingly desperate, "growth-focused" Starmer government. While the exact meaning of his "buckets" is yet to be seen, the mood music seems clear that rather than investing in the sort of abstract but technically challenging fundamental science that created the Web, medical PET scanners, early machine-learning advances, and other such economic goodness, "industrial priorities" now means the government micromanaging its research toward established industrial R&D areas like "AI". Those, in other words, that are already well along their hype cycle and where we are already late to the party for the subset that do have lasting substance. The lack of vision is ... disturbing.

The rebellion

There have already been several excellent public push-backs, from Brian Cox, Jon Butterworth, Paul Nurse (doyen of UK science, ex-head of the Crick Institute, former and current head of the Royal Society, and parent to an ex-particle physicist), Vincenzo Vagnoni and Tim Gershon (spokespersons current and elect of the LHCb experiment, whose UK-led Phase-2 upgrade project was abruptly... ahem, "deprioritised") and many others. The STFC science community, and more generally the wider UKRI one are undivided and determined not to be played this time.

Discussions with, and more recently public statements from, Chapman and science minister Patrick Vallance have suggested that the consequences on STFC science were unintended. And I found it heartening that in the recent Science & Technology Select Committee interrogation of Ian Chapman the committee several times raised UK fundamental science as an unqualified good thing. Less inspiring has been the effective abdication of leadership and community representation by STFC's own relatively fresh leader, Michelle Docherty, who in a separate indication of basic failures of judgement was forced chose to stand down from their parallel and contradictory role as president of the Institute of Physics. (As noted here, a conflict of interest / judgement gap remains in her role as Astronomer Royal.)

Break the cycle

So there we go. Different decade, same shit -- although this time I find myself living through the mess not as a fresh-faced junior postdoc, but a relatively grey-bearded prof. There are (very faint) hints of light at the end of this self-inflicted tunnel, if we read substance into the softening of rhetoric and admission of unintended consequences, but the onus is on government to do something. Reconsidering the position of the ambitious new administrator who's managed to cause two sector-wide panics and broad funding hiatus in as many months of being in post would be a start.

And above that, the politicians who came in preaching growth and infrastructure investment should understand that basic research (and separately, the UK university sector as a whole) are national assets to be resourced and leveraged not over a few-year election cycle but over decades.

This post is quite long enough already, so I'll stop here. Thanks for reading. But in particular I also noted the cost of this uncertainty as researchers junior and senior shift more or less of their active time to following and countering these disruptions: the integral of this opportunity cost is extremely high. And it's not just crises: administrative overheads in science in general are a generally unaccounted opportunity cost acting as a drag-anchor on research. If the public that apparently demand this accountability were aware of the cost of providing it, government/funder attitudes would likely change. More in a follow-up, when I'm able.

PS. I see Ken Rice and Peter Coles have also covered this ground] nicely. Good to also have an astro perspective -- we really are in this together, and need to stay that way.