From December ‘07 through late January of this year I wrote a number of blog posts on the crisis in UK physics funding, and these were critical of both scientists and the research bureaucracy.

The latest in this sorry saga comes in the form of a report from the House of Commons’ Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, published this morning. This used to be called the Science and Technology Committee, but the downgrading of science in the government’s eyes has been reflected in parliament’s committee structures. Please forgive me if from now on I refer to it simply as the “science committee”.

All of us with an interest in this business knew that the committee would be critical of the management of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). But I was certainly not expecting the hatchet job on STFC management that we have been handed today in the form of the science committee report.

The committee is clearly after the head of STFC chief executive Keith Mason and his senior colleagues in council. If they don’t get this much, there will I’m sure be major changes at the top. Some of them may be positive, but going by the contents of the report I do not feel particularly positive about either the prospects for UK science funding in general, or the STFC in particular.

To summarise the key points of the report, the committee welcomes the fact the government has committed to a 2.5% per annum (real terms) increase in the science budget. But it is sharply critical of both the Department of Innovations, Universities and Skills (DIUS) and the STFC for poor decision making, and the STFC for what it describes as a PR disaster.

On the other hand, the budget, while increasing, does not cover government-set spending commitments such as the requirement for research councils to cover 80% of the full economic costs of research. The committee is also unhappy that the government appears to be tying large parts of the science budget to cross-council programmes that follow what it says is a government, rather than scientist-led agenda.

STFC comes off very badly indeed in the committee’s eyes, and its formation is said to have been both “untimely and poorly conceived.” Untimely, as there was no way the new body, having been formed only in April 2007, would be ready for the (late) 2007 spending review. Poorly conceived, as the STFC was saddled with debts from its two predecessor agencies (PPARC and CCLRC), despite assurances from government that there would be no legacy issues.

So far, so good. But the committee is scathing about reported weaknesses in the STFC’s peer review system, and also its communication and management. The upshot is that the science committee is demanding that the council wait for the results of this year’s Wakeham review of UK physics before implementing the cuts proposed in the delivery plan published last year. Others – and I cannot for now find the references – have said that this is not a viable option.

The committee is also calling for “substantial and urgent changes” in the way in which the research council is managed. DIUS is accused of performing “below par”, which, while not as bad as the “not fit for purpose” used by a former cabinet minister to describe his own department, amounts to a severe slap on the wrist. Secretary of State John Denham will be quaking in his boots.

Having read pretty much all of the report over the past few days, I would say that there is much in it with which I agree. The establishment of the STFC was indeed badly handled, and the government has not lived up to its promises.

Regarding the council, there has been something of a communications deficit. But I wouldn’t call this a public relations disaster as the breakdown in has been between STFC management and the physics community. My impression is that Keith Mason and his colleagues took delivery of a poisoned chalice in the STFC, and, to employ another over-used metaphor, they were caught between a rock and a hard place. This should not be read as a defence of their performance.

One particular bee that the science committee has in its bonnet is what it describes as the current government’s abrogation of the so-called Haldane Principle, which asserts that detailed decisions on how to spend the science budget should be made by scientists rather than politicians. Indeed they should, but what the committee is describing is a realisation of the Haldane Principle suited to an age in which science funding was more neatly compartmentalised into narrow subject disciplines than it is today.

We are now seeing more and more interdisciplinary research projects, and these require managing in ways that are not served well by the old research council structure. There is more political pressure on science, as the committee says, but I am not convinced that the situation is as bad as that painted by the committee. It would help much if scientists were more proactive when it comes to proposing solutions to problems presented by the way in which they themselves want to work.

Regarding the problems of the STFC, the science committee has done a good job in highlighting what lies behind the funding shortfall, and what its implications could be. But what the committee hasn’t done is consider adequately why STFC management felt it had no choice but to make the decisions it did. Not that Keith Mason and his colleagues have done a particularly good job of explaining their situation, mind you.

There is little I want to say about the science committee’s damning of Mason et al. for their decision to cease all support for my old research field: solar-terrestrial physics, aka geospace science. As I’ve said before, I don’t think that the geospace science community in the UK has made a particularly good case for its work. There is some frustration overseas with the way things have developed in recent years, and the general lack of research productivity by UK scientists (myself included, even though for much of the time I was a Brit working abroad!).

There is a small number of top-class geospace scientists in the UK, but that does not make the community as a whole a “world leader”. To be honest I’ve lost count of how many “world leading” countries there are in this particular research field.

One of the only things I agree with in that section of the report dealing with geospace science is the quote from EISCAT director Tony van Eyken:

“The prospect of the UK belonging, for several more years, to an international
association, namely EISCAT, which it does not then exploit, is very damaging to its
credibility as a competent research nation”

Van Eyken is absolutely right, but the reason why EISCAT would not be exploited while still funded by UK taxpayers is that his organisation is governed by international treaty. Indeed, this is one of the principal problems faced by STFC, and it applies also to the UK’s membership of the European Space Agency and CERN. Is it right that these international bodies are funded from the same pot as research projects that are not governed by political treaties? I think not.

Finally, I wonder if the science committee sees the irony in damning the STFC for its internal communications failures, and then proposing to solve this problem by establishing a new position of “Director, Communications c£75k, Swindon” (which is how it is presented in the back pages of this week’s New Scientist magazine). Presumably this new post will come a support staff and well-financed public relations infrastructure. Oops! There goes another million quid.