@johnwomersley.bsky.social
Special Advisor, University of Edinburgh. Former Director General of European Spallation Source and CEO of Science and Technology Facilities Council. Physicist and cynic. Posting in a personal capcity.
Note that this is Research England money, what used to be called HEIF funding for university infrastructure. It's not the research councils Infrastructure fund.
No, this is not defence. It is more likely the ministerial preoccupatiion with AI, plus a way to pay for the exascale investment announced earlier (noting my institutional COI on that 😉)
Ever since it was created, UKRI has been something of a solution in search of a problem. Using it to set big research priorities is not a bad thing, in itself. But doing this in a way that looks non-transparent is not the right approach
Exactly. “We need to do something to make this go away. It’s distracting attention from the important structural changes we are trying to make at UKRI.”
What about your much-vaunted buckets, Lord Vallance? Tension the PPAN grants against the rest of Bucket 1.
If that has ever actually happened, which I am highly sceptical of, it must be a recent phenomenon. It could never have occurred when each research council had its own budget set by DSIT or its predecessors.
Begs the question of who decides how much money the research council will get
The comms have indeed been terrible. But the idea that this is primarily a communication problem is just a comfort blanket for Vallance and Chapman. The message is awful no matter how it is communicated.
I think this reveals two things:
1. Actual curiosity-led grant funding is really quite a small fraction of UKRI's spend, and they wanted to 'bulk up' bucket 1 to look better
2. They see both QR and grant funding primarily as ways to support a university system. The research outputs are a by-product
University physics heads warn Vallance of STFC cuts impact.
Cuts “inconsistent” with government plan for growth, says open letter urging science minister to act.
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...
Fears over STFC cost-savings plan aired since September 2025.
Oversight body repeatedly raised concerns over “lack of transparency” with research community.
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...
Jesus. Seriously? So it seems to have consciously been done as a way to allow them to raid grant funding this year. They knew just what they were doing. And Council, despite the reservations, went along with this?
I agree with Ken - I think it's saying 'stop whining astronomers, we are going to be hitting our own internal STFC staff even harder than we have hit you.' Which is not perhaps the reassuring message they think it is.
Don't count your chickens. I think 'borne by UKRI internally' means STFC's facilities and labs will have to absorb even more savings than the grant lines. This was always the plan. Until money has been moved around there is nothing to celebrate.
The research council exec chairs are UKRI appointments. So, other than resigning in protest, she has little choice but to toe the UKRI line. The sad thing is that this loyalty may well be repaid, down the line, by her being thrown under the bus by UKRI as being responsble for the whole mess
Yes, we can assume the letter was written by UKRI corporate comms. One of the first acts of UKRI was to abolish separate research council comms teams.
It tells you that STFC is still expected to solve its budget crisis within its own liitle part of the overall UKRI budget. This insistence is what led to the problem in the first place. No ownership of the problem seems forthcoming from UKRI management.
I think this critique misses the point. If the funder itself spent 5M to deliver 5M it would immediately come in for entirely justified scrutiny. But because the 5M cost falls on university PI's, it is treated as 'free.' Is placing this kind of tax on the system really a good way to run a programme?
Correct. In civil-service speak, "unsustainable" usually just means "costs more than I am willing to pay".
Michelle being sent out to take a bullet for her superiors
The fact that the response is from STFC rather than UKRI tells you all you need to know.
Hence the feeling there's been poor management, not fully open communication, and a sense that the problem won't be fixed because the outcome (less funding for Physics and Astronomy) is actually seen as a desirable one by ministers and UKRI. All very depressing.
The frustrating thing for me is that after 2008 we all knew about the risk of pressure on grants from other parts of the programme. We put measures in place to stop it happening again. And it seems these measures have now been ignored, set aside or circumvented.
progress to date
I'm concerned that this issue is now getting left behind by the news cycle, and STFC/UKRI will be able to grit their teeth and do nothing more to address it than promise "better communication". It needs to be kept very prominent and embarrassing for ministers or nothing will happen
It was announced by UKRI and the international partners as funded two years ago. The funding was then pulled last month.
I fear that when he says 'borne by UKRI internally' he does not mean 'borne by the rest of UKRI' but means 'covered by headcount reductions and economies within STFC's laboratories'
If you are a physics teacher in the uk, or know one, please consider signing this open letter on the impact of cuts to the funding for astronomy research:
ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...
