What the sudden demise of the UK’s department of science means for the future of research
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Left to right: The UK’s new minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, business secretary Jonathan Reynolds and justice secretary Alex Norris attend their first Cabinet meeting on July 21.<br>Stefan Rousseau/PA Images/Alamy
https://theconversation.com/what-the-sudden-demise-of-the-uks-department-of-science-means-for-the-future-of-research-288121
https://theconversation.com/what-the-sudden-demise-of-the-uks-department-of-science-means-for-the-future-of-research-288121
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The obituaries were being written before the body was cold. Within hours of Prime Minister Andy Burnham confirming that Whitehall’s responsibilities for science and technology would be absorbed into a new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (DBIST), Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, was on Radio 4 warning that “science isn’t a slave to business”. The trade association TechUK declared it “the wrong change at the wrong time”.
You might imagine that something ancient, ineffable and essential to British science had been ripped away. In fact, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) was only born in February 2023 – a surprise late tweak to the machinery of government under Rishi Sunak’s faltering premiership.
Science has never enjoyed a settled home in Whitehall. For most of the period from 1995 to 2023, it sat precisely where Burnham has put it now: inside a business super-department. Notably, the single most important protection UK science secured in that era – a ring-fenced budget through the George Osborne austerity years – was won from inside the Business, Innovation and Science department, under then-business secretary Vince Cable.
The historian David Edgerton has long argued that Britain’s fondness for tinkering with the machinery of government is a form of displacement activity. What actually shapes the fortunes of research is money, people and demand for what they produce, not the nameplates on London’s Victoria Street.
On that test, the outlook for science is far calmer than some reactions to this latest move would suggest. Under plans published last October, the UK’s total research and development budget is locked in at £58.5 billion over the four-year spending review to 2030 – a real-terms increase.
Machinery changes move budget lines across departments; they don’t unravel them. As yet, nothing we’ve heard from the Burnham government suggests the settlement for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is at risk.
A US wrecking ball
If we want to be reminded what real damage to a science system looks like, we only need to glance across the Atlantic. While London rearranges the departmental furniture and dishes out new email addresses, Washington is taking a wrecking ball to the foundations of its public science system.
A 2027 budget request will halve the size of the US National Science Foundation, if passed. A draft White House rule, due to take effect in October, will hand political appointees the power to vet federal research grants against “the president’s priorities” and terminate awards mid-stream.
A predictable exodus has begun. The Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi has just left the University of California, Berkeley for Tsinghua University in China.
Top researchers consider leaving US amid funding cuts. Report: PBS NewsHour.
Set against political commissars patrolling the borders of knowledge, the UK’s science soap opera feels deeply provincial – a debate about which secretary of state sponsors oversight of a gradually swelling budget.
And the institutional layer beneath this is in better shape than doomsayers allow. UKRI’s new strategy has set a clear five-year path: priority programmes in AI, quantum and clean energy, faster funding decisions, and a welcome seriousness about experimentation with the modes and means by which we manage public investment in research.
Not everyone is happy with UKRI’s approach to prioritisation. But a funder with a published strategy, agreed budget and hard targets is a more durable asset than a three-year-old ministry. The research councils have outlasted every department that ruled over them, and UKRI will outlast this too.
Nor should the science community be spooked by closer proximity to business. When I leave my office at UCL and stroll down the Euston Road through London’s Knowledge Quarter – dubbed “the new square mile” – I pass by the Wellcome Trust, the Crick and Turing institutes, the British Library, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. Day in, day out, this dense weave of labs, firms and cultural institutions delivers what the triple helix of government, industry and academia is all about.
And we can find versions of the same story unfolding in Manchester, Sheffield, Cambridge and Glasgow. Rather than...