Higher education and science hit in UK’s budget forecast

Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer, has today, Wednesday 9 December, published his Pre-Budget Review.  As anticipated, the review introduces a number of cuts to help the UK’s economy recover from recession.

£5 billion worth of the cuts will be through cutting, what the Review calls, ‘lower-value or lower-priority programmes’, including a £600 million saving from higher education and science research budgets.

These savings are due to be made through “a combination of changes to student support within existing arrangements; efficiency savings and prioritization across universities, science and research; some switching of modes in study in higher education; and reductions in budgets that do not support student participation.”

Dr Beth Taylor, director of communications at the Institute of Physics, said, “The three pages of cuts listed in the PBR make for bleak reading but that is what most expected from this budget forecast for 2010.

“How savings across universities, science and research will be achieved is unclear.  To see the science base singled out as a ‘lower-value or lower-priority programme’, whatever the immediate pressures, is shortsighted. We need a highly skilled population to restructure our economy or we will be left lagging behind other countries that have taken a very different view of investment priorities.”