Lord Drayson writes: You’ve reached my online notepad – a space I use to support Twitter and other conversations. You can follow @lorddrayson here
6 Oct 2009
My job as science minister is to act as the champion for science: securing a favourable settlement in the Government’s budget, highlighting the importance of science and technology, and upholding the principle which has governed the funding of research in this country for nearly a century. The Haldane principle dictates that while Government may set the overall budget for research, decisions about how to spend this budget are made at arms length from Government by the research councils. This rightly limits ministerial interference as to which projects should receive money.
CERN, however, which runs the Large Hadron Collider – is not just another project. It is an international treaty organisation. These bodies are like clubs with membership fees. The UK makes a decision whether or not to be part of them, and while this decision is based on the advice of the scientific community, only Government can decide to back out of them.
So let me be absolutely clear:
- The UK is fully committed to CERN and the LHC. The recent STFC Vision stated that exploitation of the LHC remains the highest priority for UK particle physics.
- STFC has been given sufficient money by Government to carry out its mission. Its budget has increased year-on-year since its creation – a rise from £624m in 08/09 to £652m in 10/11, 13.6% over three years.
- On top of this, both this year and last, the Government has provided STFC with additional funding to help it meet the financial pressures it has come under as a result of exchange rate fluctuations and historic over-commitment.
- STFC’s decision taken to cut particle physics grants (although overall funding for particle physics has gone up) was made independently and has been public knowledge for over a year. It has come into effect only now, simply because this is the first funding round for particle physics to be affected. The fact that STFC is now having to issue grants for one year only is far from ideal, but it is doubtless prudent to avoid further over-commitment.
- STFC is currently holding a ‘reprioritisation’ exercise, in which it is looking hard at how it can live within its budget.
This has nothing to do with any suggestion I made at the beginning of the year that we should focus in the UK on what we’re good at. This is STFC still figuring out how it will manage the budget it was given two years ago.
One last point. While Sunday’s deluge of tweets was a little frantic, it is great for me to be able to interact with the science community so directly. I welcome this direct exchange.
I’m also looking to have more face time with you all. Details to follow on Twitter in the near future.
