Leader: Science caught in funding trap

Funding for research has seldom been easy to come by in the UK, but it appeared, over the past year, that the outlook was improving significantly.

First, the Chancellor's ten-year plan for science promised to bring the research budget to £5 billion by 2007-08, a rise of 100 per cent since Labour came to power. Meanwhile, the European Commission proposed to do the same for the Seventh Framework Programme, making research a top priority for the European Union. Now, for different reasons, both are in doubt.

In the case of the framework programme, the problems are largely political.

Research is just one victim of the broader stand-off over the EU budget.

That will be resolved eventually, but the €68 billion (£45 billion) proposed investment in research is now a pipe dream. The serious issue is whether a more modest programme will be agreed in time to sustain projects in 2007: the hiatus in planning may be more damaging than any eventual cut.

The big increases in Government expenditure on science planned for the next two years are not in doubt, but Treasury officials are less sanguine about the prospects for the next spending review. Unless industry invests much larger sums than now seems likely, there is little prospect of fulfilling Gordon Brown's pledge to hit the international target of 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product going into research and development.

Ministers will blame short-sighted policies in the private sector, but last year's (pre-election) triumphalism now looks misleadingly overoptimistic.

If the promised increases in science spending do not materialise, the whole of the Chancellor's thesis on the knowledge economy as the engine of UK prosperity will begin to unravel. It was not unreasonable to expect the private sector to be an active partner in a potentially lucrative investment programme, particularly after the failure of many big firms to maintain their own research and development activities over the past decade. But this is too soon to be credible as a reaction to industry's commitment; cutbacks at such an early stage will be interpreted as economic pressures leading to just the type of short-termism that Treasury policy is supposed to have left behind.

Equally alarming for higher education as a whole are the implications for next year's spending settlement more generally. If the favoured area of science is to be reined in, what chance is there for parts of the public sector where there have been no commitments? Mr Brown's guarantee that top-up fee income will be additional to current spending levels may be a flimsy defence, but it is the best that higher education has.