Britain’s national laboratories — the government-owned sites and expert teams that build and run the country’s big scientific machines — face the deepest squeeze.
The money for their scientific work is set to fall by well over half, though the overall budget for national labs and estates drops by less because a growing share is being swallowed by urgent repairs to ageing buildings.
Sue Ferns of the Prospect Tade Union which represents scientific and technical staff at the labs facing cuts described the move as a “hammer blow to UK science”.
“It is the product of a political choice. Public sector research facilities like those at Harwell, the Ryal Observatory Edinburgh, and Daresbury, now facing devastating cuts, act as catalysts to regional business ecosystems, and offer training and job opportunities to their local communities”.
At Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, the Accelerator Science and Technology Centre, which designs and builds the powerful machines that drive particle beams will see a budget cut of £8m a year by 2029.
The Scientific Computing Department, split between Daresbury and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire, crunches a quarter of the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider at Cern and its budget will fall by £10m a year, with reduced access to computing power.
And the Boulby Underground Laboratory, a deep in a mine near Saltburn on the North Yorkshire coast which conducts experiments to search for dark matter, the invisible material thought to make up most of the Universe, will have its budget cut by 40%.
Britain will remain in flagship international projects hunting for dark matter and will continue to be the second largest contributor to Cern through its subscription, which will be increased by 19% over four years.
A large proportion of the savings will also fall on the government’s so-called multidisciplinary research facilities used by researchers across the UK to answer basic scientific questions.
Overall, these will have their budgets cut by around 15% but will be given transition funding from a £100m pot to give them time to find commercial sources of income to make up the shortfall.
Three of these facilities are in Oxfordshire:
Diamond Light Source – a giant machine, half a kilometre around, that produces X-rays far brighter than the Sun to see the tiniest building blocks of matter. Its beam time could be cut by up to a fifth, and a planned upgrade is now in doubt.
ISIS Neutron and Muon Source – fires beams of tiny particles into materials to reveal how they work at the smallest scale. Under the plans, it will run for fewer hours, some of its instruments will shut, and its muon experiments will close altogether.
Central Laser Facility home to some of the most powerful lasers on Earth, used in medical imaging, cancer research and fundamental physics. Part of it — the arm that supports biology and chemistry research — will close.