Simon Kendler (also on bsky simonzev.bsky.social)

Jodrell Bank is the most visible causality of UKRI’s short sighted ‘vision’ for science, but as you’ll see below, there are many other valuable UK facilities and collaborations at risk. We became aware of the problem in the autumn of last year. It is not a result of the overall funding settlement for science after the spending review, which was quite generous I would say in the circumstances. Neither as far as we can tell is it a direct decision by ministers (all of whom have now gone in any case). Rather the problems appears to have been caused by senior management at UKRI focusing on short term economic ‘impact’ (whatever that means) rather than doing their job as custodians of the foundations of science. What must happen now is that the new ministerial team make the time (and space ;-)) to review the upcoming catastrophe, and instruct UKRI to do their job and focus on making Britain the best place in the world to do science, now and in the future.