UK funding cuts are a slap in the face for science

The writer, the last British governor of Hong Kong, is chancellor of Oxford university

Critics of Boris Johnson’s government often point to a yawning gap between promises made and performance delivered. Fortunately this was not the case with the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, and the UK continues to have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.

This remarkable feat would likely not have happened, or at least not as speedily, had researchers at Oxford university not developed an effective Covid vaccine. But the UK government now seems bent on dismantling the financial support that underpins research like this.

Universities, including Oxford, are suffering painful and damaging cuts to their research budgets. Most immediately worrying is a 70 per cent reduction in 2021-22 Official Development Assistance, the overseas aid budget used to support joint research projects with universities in developing countries.

For researchers, this is a slap in the face. Projects are being terminated or severely pared back, while new programmes will struggle to find support. UK Research and Innovation, which distributes ODA funds, has identified a gap of £120m in the funding of projects to which the UK is already committed, meaning reneging on promises made to universities and research organisations in this country and to partners overseas.

I have been chancellor of two universities. Yet I cannot recall a termination of government-backed grants on this scale and with so little warning, lack of guidance or apparent interest in the outcomes.

Oxford’s Covid vaccine, developed at the university’s Jenner Institute, would not have been rolled out as swiftly were it not for ODA funding. The “platform technology” used for this vaccine was originally developed to fight malaria. The research group which worked on this, involving scientists from around the world, was funded by ODA.

This overseas collaboration helped Oxford to implement rapid global clinical trials and to develop methods of mass production. Without this the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine could not have been manufactured so quickly at large-scale.

This is just one example of the research that ODA funding has enabled. With it gone, who will support the Africa Oxford Initiative that helps the work of universities and research institutions across Africa? Who will pay for the research partnerships that study and address health needs in African, Asian and Latin American cities? And who will write the cheques for the collaborative pandemic research done in Delhi’s slum settlements?

Projects like these can and do deliver real benefits to people, while building research capacity at home and abroad. Disease knows no boundaries; if we didn’t know this before Covid, we certainly know it now.

In 2005, I was asked to chair a committee set up by the European Research Council along the lines proposed by Lord Robert May, a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government. Research funds were to be distributed on the basis of peer review. Because of their outstanding quality, British universities benefited greatly from the EU’s Horizon research and innovation programme; we received more in the UK than British taxpayers paid to Brussels.

The UK’s exit from the EU means that we now have to pay to be part of Horizon at a cost of £1bn, rising to £2bn by 2022-23. This represents almost a quarter of the UK’s total research and innovation budget of £8.5bn.

In order to participate in Horizon next year, the government has pledged an additional £250m to the research budget and is reallocating previously announced sums to supplement it. Even if this does manage to protect parts of the publicly funded research system for 12 months, it will be merely a stay of execution. Much larger additional sums must be found in this summer’s spending review.

Without more funding, the impact on UK research will be deeply damaging and felt for a generation of researchers. After years of investment in their futures, many of the best young researchers will be forced to leave the UK for jobs elsewhere. They are unlikely to return.

In its integrated review, the government made bold statements about “Global Britain” becoming a “science superpower”. But how do we explain this aspiration to all those at home and abroad who have already been hit so hard by cuts? At present, it seems hard to give this government the benefit of the doubt that the future of the UK’s universities, its research programmes, scientists and international reputation is safe in its hands.