The vultures descend on the UK's science budget

Exit stage left Lord Sainsbury, Minister for Science, enter stage right mandarins bearing hatchets. They then wield these to take lumps out of the budget of the Research Councils (RCs).

 

In all, in what Research Councils UK euphemistically calls "Revisions to Research Council budgets," they have helped themselves to around £60 million from the budgets of the science RCs. Why the hand in the till? As the EPSRC press release puts it "the DTI has agreed with Treasury that some funds will need to be found from within the Science Budget in order to meet financial pressure elsewhere within the DTI".

 

It may not be a lot out of a total budget for all of the RCs, including those on the edges of science, of over £2.8 billion a year. But it is the first bit of bad news for a decade or so on the budget front. And scientists being what they are, you can expect the scientific community to see this as the beginning of the end.

 

Not being an expert in bean counting, we can't be sure that we've divined the entrails accurately, but following a link from the Treasury web site we reach a PDF file of Spring Supplementary Estimates 2006-2007 Section 2, Department for Trade and Industry. Within this we see that £27 million went from the science budget for the "Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment Directive". Nice irony there. The number is just £2 million shy of the amount taken from the EPSRC, the research council that supports research into electronics and electrical equipment.

 

Another £6 million from the RCs went to National Measurement System. Yet another case of shuffling money between scientific activities.