Science funding cuts will undermine UK's global standing, warn researchers

Researchers and academics have written to The Guardian to warn that cuts to UK science funding will cause long-term damage to the country's international standing and research capacity.

One letter focuses on the decision to stop funding the Lovell telescope from March 2028. George Kildare Miley, emeritus professor of astronomy at Leiden University, argues that modern astronomy is no longer just physics — it combines physics, chemistry, biology and computing to understand how the universe evolved. The Lovell telescope, at Jodrell Bank, played a pioneering role in developing long-baseline radio interferometry, linking separate telescopes to form a virtual network thousands of miles across. Removing it would weaken the ability to produce radio images as sharp as those from billion-pound space observatories like Hubble. The telescope also serves as a symbol of UK scientific leadership and a tool of science diplomacy.

Another letter from Mick Foster recalls that this short-sighted attitude to science funding dates back to Margaret Thatcher's era. Foster worked as an economic adviser to the chief scientist in the Cabinet Office in the late 1980s. He opposed the policy of rating research solely by the number of peer-reviewed publications and citations, or by expected near-term economic benefits. He argues there is still no methodology for reliably predicting which research will be economically useful, and that pressure to publish quickly and frequently is counterproductive.

Douglas Kell points out that while the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) budget is expected to rise to £10bn by 2030, most of the increase goes to Innovate UK, which funds only companies. The budgets of the research councils, which support fundamental science, have fallen by 40–50% in real terms since 2011. Universities also take a growing share of grants as overheads, leaving even less for actual science, and the pipeline of postdoctoral researchers is being choked off.

Paula Collins, LHCb deputy spokesperson at CERN, writes that the withdrawal of funding for the LHCb upgrade has come as a shock to international partners. The upgrade is a priority of the European Strategy for Particle Physics and received UK support. The cut risks cutting off a generation of UK scientists from one of CERN's four flagship experiments. Collins notes that the UK's leadership in LHCb was built over decades and brings benefits such as skilled graduates in AI and data science, advances in semiconductors and materials, and the reputation of a trusted partner. The investment is less than 0.05% of the UK's £10bn annual research budget, and she hopes it will be restored quickly.