Appendix
The apparent funding uplift in the CSRO7 settlement
for STFC actually falls well short of covering the responsibilities
assigned to STFC following the merger of PPARC and CCLRC. This
shortfall is only marginally offset by the increased expenditure
on Full Economic Costing, which was itself introduced as a result
of the Government's creditable recognition of the previous systematic
underfunding of research.
In the very short term, the ensuing programme
cuts might appear to benefit the UK, since we expect the well-trained
physicists made redundant by these cuts will be snapped up within
the broader economy, in all major areas from high technology to
finance. However, such precipitous cuts will surely cripple the
training environment for future generations of scientists. The
threat of many staff redundancies is already causing widespread
depression amongst students and this mood can be expected to infect
the prospective student population, causing a reduction in the
flow of trainee scientists. The combination of a sudden loss of
research funding and the accompanying reduction in student numbers
will then likely lead to the closure of physics departments. Such
an outcome is particularly perverse at a time when other Government
funding is providing uplift specifically to increase the ability
of physics departments to recruit and train students. Indeed,
it surely undermines some of the Government's laudable initiatives
to generate a substantial science-trained workforce.
STFC funding of pure science benefits the economy
through training scientists and more directly through knowledge
transfer to high-technology areas. These range from advanced software
and cutting-edge medical imaging to such practical technology
as airport luggage scanners and number-plate recognition. A reduction
in research volume will necessarily impact on these economic benefits.
The Standing Conference of Astronomy Professors
requests that the following practical proposals be urgently
considered by the Government to rectify this unfortunate situation,
and that appropriate safeguards be put in place to avoid any recurrence.
1. Balance between financing facilities
and exploitation in STFC. A significant contribution to the
current situation has been the financial structure of STFC's responsibilities.
In particular, the "near cash" element of STFC's budget
is much smaller than for the other research councils. This imbalance
means that relatively modest cost changes in the non-cash element
of the budget have a disproportionate effect on the near-cash
budget which provides the only flexibility for changing expenditure
patterns. Since scientific exploitation for astronomy and particle
physics dominates this element, it is this exploitation that will
be lost through the funding fluctuations that we are now seeing.
Such fluctuations are particularly problematic because they can
arise from non-cash shortfalls in subjects that have nothing to
do with the areas of exploitation research that STFC supports
through grants. It therefore appears to be fundamentally impossible
in practice to ensure an appropriate balance between facilities
and exploitation within a particular field. To mitigate this problem,
we propose that for accounting purposes the non-cash elements
of STFC's budget be devolved to the research council that makes
use of the facility: for Diamond, for example, appropriate costs
should be included within the MRC budget. STFC would, of course,
retain its overall management role for facilities, and thus achieve
the primary benefits of a single facilities structure for which
it was set up.
2. International Subscriptions. The
risk that has now been placed on STFC to deal with changes in
international subscriptions puts a further inappropriate squeeze
on its ability to deliver science, since these risks must be met
entirely from the small near-cash budget that funds exploitation.
Since the subscriptions exist not only to deliver science but
also to raise the country's profile on the international stage
and to generate revenue from the contracts that are placed with
UK industry, it is not appropriate for STFC to fund the entirety
of any fluctuations. The situation is particularly perverse in
the case of subscriptions that are linked to GDP, since an increase
in the nation's wealth leads to a corresponding rise in subscription
and a balancing cut in our ability to carry out scientific research
with these facilities. The SCAP therefore suggests that this element
of the STFC budget should be paid directly from the Treasury as
a reflection of its geopolitical nature.
3. Measurement of Economic Impact. It
is generally accepted that pure science areas can have a dramatic
economic impact in the long term (one need look no further than
the creation of the worldwide web in CERN), and that they have
further less-tangible effects through inspiring future generations
to engage with science, and through training of mathematically
and scientifically literate, high-quality graduates. However,
these hard-to-quantify benefits have not been generally factored
into discussions of the importance of funding science. Rather,
measurement of economic impact has tended to focus on more direct
knowledge transfer and near-market impact. The SCAP recommends
that serious consideration be given to establishing a methodology
for including the wider effects in the calculation of the economic
impact of science, before they are squeezed any further out of
the equation and their benefits are lost to the country.
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