This week’s budget was, as usual, sprinkled with announcements about science capital spending. This continues a trend that has been evident for some time, whereby ministers use such announcements to demonstrate their commitment to infrastructure investment. The political appeal of this is understandable: such projects are widely seen as investments in the future and garner much the same media attention as announcements about other kinds of infrastructure. Yet the cost of major capital projects in the sciences is typically orders of magnitude less than major transport or other infrastructure projects.
Of course ministers have good reasons for wanting to get closely involved in such decisions. Even if modest compared to other kinds of major infrastructure, we are still talking about large sums of taxpayer’s money. And doubtless ministers are sincere in their desire to use science spending as a tool of rebalancing in the context of their agenda of devolution, city deals and the “northern powerhouse”.
But the dangers of a top-down, project-by-project approach to science infrastructure are clear. Just last week a report from the independent National Audit Office concluded that post-2010 decision making about major science infrastructure projects has been chaotic. Indeed, the one body that gets a clean bill of health from the NAO in this regard is the Higher Education Funding Council for England – which is to be abolished.
The NAO Report is not without its flaws. It recommends the use of economic impact criteria that are simply not relevant to most science investments, however expensive. And long-term planning for major projects is always difficult in a context of austerity punctuated by the sudden availability of funding. This probably explains some of the ad-hoc nature of decision-making about science capital in the early part of the Coalition Government.
And the UK has long had a problem providing good support for research infrastructure, including major capital facilities. Over the decades, the growth of block funding for research – originally intended to provide for the ‘well-found laboratory’ and to tide researchers over between grants - has failed to keep pace with the growth of competitively won research grant funding. And most of that block funding is now deliberately concentrated in a small number of institutions on the basis of research assessment performance.
As far back as the mid-1980s, survey evidence indicated massive infrastructure and equipment funding gaps. The Major government and especially the Blair government attempted to redress the balance, the latter with major new streams. But – partly because they were seen as a once in a lifetime opportunity by researchers and institutions - these streams tended to favour the building of big, shiny new facilities rather than upgrading the facilities and equipment behind the science that was already going on.
So, the UK has long struggled to keep research infrastructure investment aligned with general research funding. English devolution and the northern powerhouse agenda add to the temptation ministers must feel to directly intervene in choices about which projects to support. The recommendations of the Nurse Review into the future of the research councils, which propose an all-powerful head of the revamped ‘Research UK’ risk making capital decision-making even more personality-led and less accountable to the scientific communities and the taxpayers than it is now.
A “batteries not included” approach to science capital is wasteful not just of scarce public resources but also of scarce scientific human resources. Because of the scale of the spending involved, the largest capital funding decisions will always be political, so it is right that ministers, who are accountable to Parliament are involved. But the options under consideration, and the way they are prioritized, must be seen to have been identified from the needs of the research base, not from the gut instincts of ministers or scientific leaders. Science capital planning needs to work in sync with our more general research policy in a way that is transparent and accountable both to scientific communities and to the taxpayer. If ministers want to tackle persistent and growing regional disparities in research activity in England, the UK-wide science capital budget is the wrong tool. Instead they need to look at how the operation of our funding system as a whole drives those disparities.
Kieron Flanagan is Senior Lecturer in Science and Technology Policy at the University of Manchester. On Twitter he is @KieronFlanagan
