“We always had the money for these projects,” he told me.<\/p>\n
“I do not understand how we ended up with a 30% cut in the particle physics and astronomy budget unless at some point there must have been a choice to reduce that aspect of the budget.” In other words, a diversion of funds from bucket one to bucket two.<\/p>\n
And away from its public suggestion that the cuts were necessary because projects were started without funding, the BBC has discovered that internally the STFC believes there has been a deliberate funding shift.<\/p>\n
Minutes of STFC’s governing council, which are not publicly available, talk of the Council’s head of strategy describing “a major shift of funding from curiosity-driven research to priority areas and targeted programmes”.<\/p>\n
I asked the head of UKRI, Prof Sir Ian Chapman, whether money had been diverted from curiosity driven research towards applied research. “No, that is not a UKRI position,” Chapman told me categorically. “Across the piece, we are protecting curiosity driven research”. When asked about the statement by his head of strategy, Chapman said it was a “mis-statement”.<\/p>\n
Chapman and the Science Minister, Lord Vallance, have consistently and firmly insisted that curiosity driven science is protected and still growing in cash terms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“We always had the money for these projects,” he told me. “I do not understand how we ended…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481477,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[2302,90,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-481476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-physics","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}