This letter followed evidence given by STFC Executive Chair Michele Dougherty to the Committee on 4 March.
Today, our response to the letter has been published on the Committee's webpage. In the interest of openness and transparency UKRI is also publishing it here: www.ukri.org/publications...
National 'missions' are easy to announce (or propose). But history shows that they are extraordinarily difficult to pull off.
Laura Ryan and I have pooled our thoughts about the government's 'AI for Science' missions – and what has to be true for this programme to be a success.
🔗👇
UK government R&D spending in real terms
For more than a decade, there’s been a cross-party consensus behind increasing the UK govt’s R&D spending to drive economic growth - & there’s been a substantial real terms increase in the science budget.
But the economic growth hasn’t arrived, yet. What happens if it doesn’t?
The China effect is major, but doesn’t appear to be decisive in the data across all fields. I’m going to put some more analysis out soon on this!
They do in these three topics, but don’t in most others of the 4500 topics. Am putting it down to coincidence for now while I dig into it further.
Ah, I downloaded and used the whole data snapshot with custom python queries, so didn’t use this website interface - I’ll have to dig into it a bit further to check presence of these key papers.
Thanks Tara! I'm counting papers with any author affiliation to a UK institution. (Co-authorship will count as a UK paper.) The 'UK share' is simply that number divided by the total count of papers globally. It's v v simplistic – but I think OK as a broad-brush participation metric!
I've written about the UKRI funding situation and the 'buckets' explainer, looking in detail at QR, STFC and Quantum. www.ersatzben.com/p/the-bucket...
This is one of the absolute best things I’ve read on the potential impacts of AI on society and democracy. Forensic, principled, and sober. Bravo, @williamcb.bsky.social!!
The buckets seem to me to be about administrative control, not epistemic posture. That's fine, but putting QR in Bucket 1 then assumes that universities can't walk and chew gum at the same time. But unis are actually pretty good at working with their partners to deliver on govt priorities.
Then look at Quantum: a huge fraction of the work is absolutely curiosity-driven, but it's squarely in bucket 2. This is because there is a Strategy and a Programme! But that's an administrative question which has nothing to do with how the research is actually done.
I assume it is because someone naively believes that curiosity-driven research is reducible to "stuff the govt doesn't control", and so the reverse must also be true: anything that is not directly in the grip of the state is simply a curiosity that must be indulged.
Looking again at the UKRI funding 'buckets', I find it weird that QR has been put into 'Bucket 1' (curiosity-driven research), given that it supports a range of activity across all buckets, and REF does not only measure 'curiosity'.
Quick science policy thread 1
Changes in the governance of UK science since the mid 1980s make it extremely hard to be strategic (that was the point), in terms of both process (dropped) and capability (hollowed out).
Because the media are locking in - I’ve had several calls today from broadsheet journos. And the senior physicists and mathematicians I was with on Friday were hopping mad about cuts and gearing up for a big showdown. So it needed an urgent response.
These are good questions - ones that I don’t think today‘s crisis comms can easily address. I hope we get answers.
It’s direct. Diplomatic but fairly pointed about how STFC got here, and that STFC‘s mess is not a template for discovery research across the board. And clearly taking responsibility - visibly and legibly - for tough choices. And I liked that he signed “Ian”, not Professor Sir etc. Not hiding.
This is a very good letter.
A little highlight of the new year for me is @igmansfield.bsky.social's forecasting contest. You can enter here, until 18 January!
www.edrith.co.uk/p/2026-forec...
People are, of course, entirely free to take moral positions on whatever they like - as are our public institutions. And others, equally, are free to disagree on moral grounds. (Motivated reasoning notwithstanding.)
Anyway, I’m sure this will all play out brilliantly for the HE sector come 2029… 🙈
And it’s all pushed for & negotiated by extremely well-educated, well-brought-up types, many of whom assert that this is a MORAL question about the UK's global worldview, not an OUTCOMES-based debate about how best to promote opportunity through international education for those most in need.
— let alone the UK. Life-changing for those kids to see horizons broaden before it's too late. All paid for by Turing Scheme. Compared to this impact, pumping £570m of taxpayers’ cash into Erasmus so that some PPE posho can spend a year in the Sorbonne feels like a real pisstake.
I got lots of private support for this today but also some “how very dare you” stuff. As I said to others: I keep remembering that last year my primary school teacher wife took a group of 10yo kids from deprived homes to Florence on an art trip - poor kids who had never been out of Brent —
My unpopular opinion: Erasmus+ is an elitist waste of money that only benefits young adults that have already “won” by (a) making it to university, and (b) having the plummy, ski-seasoned social capital to have heard of the scheme in the first place.
Thank you so much, Paul!
The government has talked about organising R&D into three 'buckets' - discovery research, research aligned to government priorities, and business support. This is a good idea that could fail in the implementation. Here are my 10 tests for success:
www.ersatzben.com/p/the-three-...
Appreciate your efforts on this as always Hetan. On this occasion I understand the event will be chaired by the lead author (a woman), and not a panel either- more like lightning talks. I did check these details with them before posting this, but not otherwise involved (and can't make the event).
