Memorandum 36
Submission from Professor Stan Cowley,
Head, Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group, Professor Mark Lester,
Dr Steve Milan, Professor Terry Robinson, Dr Darren Wright and
Professor Tim Yeoman, University of Leicester
RE: IUS SELECT
COMMITTEE EVIDENCE
27 FEBRUARY 2008
After listening to the evidence presented by
Professor Keith Mason to the above committee under your chairmanship
on 27 February, we feel obliged to write to you concerning some
statements that may have been misleading. These concern the treatment
of ground-based solar-terrestrial physics (GB-STP) facilities
in the UK both by the STFC and its predecessor body the PPARC.
Our first-hand knowledge of this matter arises from the fact that
the Radio & Space Plasma Physics group at the University of
Leicester, of which we are members, is the largest university
group in the UK involved in these studies, such that we have been
centrally involved throughout.
Contrary to a statement given in evidence by
Professor Mason, the attack on our field began almost immediately
after his appointment as Chief Executive of the PPARC in summer
2005. Without representation of our broad community within the
PPARC senior policy-making structures, the outcome of the 2005-06
Programmatic Review announced in March 2006 was the closure of
some GB-STP facilities, including the CUTLASS & SPEAR radars
operated from Leicester, as well as facilities operated by the
Lancaster University and the RAL. We at Leicester were astonished
by these decisions given the continuing high scientific productivity
of CUTLASS, and the fact that the £2 million SPEAR system
had only just been commissioned after ten years of planning. In
fact we received PPARC's "notice to quit" the same week
that SPEAR's first results were published.
This still left a substantial UK GB-STP programme
centred around the international EISCAT facility, however, such
that Professor Mason's oft-repeated statement that the decision
to pull out of GB-STP "was made two years ago" is significantly
misleading, unless he was perhaps talking about a decision he
had formed in his own mind. However, the restricted decisions
that were made two years ago have now been parlayed up within
the December 2007 STFC Delivery Plan to a withdrawal from all
GB-STP, without recourse to acceptable peer review and without
consultation with the relevant community. Indeed, since that time
follow-on grant applications made in good faith in summer 2007
by GB-STP research groups at Lancaster, University College London,
and Southampton were all announced as unfunded in February 2008.
While the plan outlined to the committee by Prof Holdaway to form
a broader funding consortium for UK STP is to be welcomed, we
are very much concerned lest his view that this would occur "just
about" in time to effect a rescue before terminal damage
has been inflicted proves to be over-optimistic. In any case,
given his track record over the past two and a half years, we
are less than trustful of Professor Mason's assurance of a "sympathetic
hearing" for such a proposal once he is released from public
scrutiny.
March 2008
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