The claim
“I think it’s a very big step forward. We should congratulate everyone involved. This government’s commitment to the science budget is without any doubt, not least because, while we’ve had to make difficult cuts, we’ve preserved the science budget.”
David Cameron, 4 July 2012
The background
The “big step forward” is the discovery of the Higgs boson particle at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland. Don’t worry – we’re not going try to FactCheck the existence of the “God particle”.
Many British scientists were involved in the CERN research, and Mr Cameron congratulated them at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions.
But is he right to say that the government is maintaining the spending that makes scientific breakthroughs possible? FactCheck fires up the electron microscope.
The analysis
The “science budget” in Whitehall-speak is the money allocated to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) for science and research.
BIS passes the money on to the seven research councils, national academies like the Royal Society and other bodies like the UK Space Agency.
Our annual contribution to the running of the Large Hadron Collider – about £108m a year – comes from this money.
Before the 2010 spending review, there were dark rumours that the science budget was set to be slashed by around 25 per cent, along with many other departmental budgets.
There was a sigh of relief then, when George Osborne announced that science and research spending would in fact protected in cash terms and ring-fenced.
Jubilation in the scientific community dried up somewhat when it emerged that something of a fast one was being pulled.
Freezing the budget at £4.575bn every year until 2015 means, of course, that the effects of inflation will erode its value and create a real-terms cut.
Forecasts for how big this will turn out to be depend on inflation projections, but it looks like a real terms cut in the region of 15 to 20 per cent by 2015 is on the cards.
So frozen didn’t really mean frozen. And ring-fenced meant something different too.
Before 2010 the BIS science budget included spending on large capital projects. But this was taken out of the reckoning in the first coalition Comprehensive Spending Review.
Not entirely surprisingly, capital investment is set to fall over the next three years, according to research carried out by the Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK (CaSE).
CaSE estimated that £1.7bn less will be spent on research when you take into account the differences between what the current and previous government included in the science budget. But recent announcements of about £400m of additional investment mean that figure may have to be revised.
That £4.6bn spent by BIS isn’t the only way the government supports science. Other government departments have research and development budgets too, which don’t count as part of “the science budget” but are an important way in which new technologies are developed.
This is where it gets trickier to work out what’s going on, since many departments haven’t published their projected research and development spending yet.
CaSE reckon that Defra was planning to spend £43m less over the last financial year, and the Department of Health might end up spending slightly less in real terms too, depending on inflation.
A written answer from defence minister Peter Luff in April this year revealed that Ministry of Defence spending in research and development fell from £1.752bn in 2009-10 to £1.560bn in 2010-11.
That’s the lowest level for more than a decade and 30 per cent less than the 2000 figure.
Science spending at the Home Office is more difficult to gauge, but the department was criticised last year for scrapping the Forensic Science Service, a world-class innovator in the world of crime scene analysis.
The House of Commons Select Committee on science and technology said: “We are concerned that no formal assessment was made of the impact of closing down the FSS on forensic science research and development before the decision was made and announced.”
All of this means that scientists and politicians are concerned that there may be a lack of joined-up thinking on science across government, with different departments and policies sending conflicting messages.
Andrew Miller, the Labour MP who chairs the science and technology select committee, told FactCheck he was particularly concerned about the possible effect of immigration policy on the ability of top UK universities to attract top students from abroad.
There’s a dearth of hard evidence about this, but the latest stats from UCAS do show that the number of non-EU applicants fell last year for the first time in six years.
Science lobbyists will want to know whether the sudden drop means the most talented non-EU science students are no longer bringing their brains to Britain.
Looking at government spending as a whole, OECD statistics put direct funding of research and development at £5.987bn in 2010, down from £6.024bn in 2009, but those figures aren’t recent enough to tell us much about the effects of the spending review.
We do know that Britain is already in an unenviably mediocre position compared to other countries.
In 2010, Britain was spending 1.78 per cent of GDP on research and development. That was down from 1.84 per cent in 2009, less than the EU average and well behind France, Germany, the US, Denmark, Sweden and Japan.
It’s interesting to note that in all those countries, the private sector contributes more cash than the government. In Japan, 75 per cent of expenditure on research and development comes from industry. In Germany and the US it’s more than 60 per cent. In the UK it’s just 45 per cent.
So one secret to increasing Britain’s research spending could lie in encouraging business to take the lead rather than pumping more government money into the system.
The verdict
We’ll leave Mr Cameron in the middle of the FactCheckometer for this one. Fittingly, on the day that Einstein was proved right about one aspect of how the universe works, the Prime Minister was relatively truthful.
It’s true that the science budget didn’t get the big bang treatment in the spending review. But there’s plenty of dark matter in the way the government talks about research and development.
By Patrick Worrall
