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British science needs an extra £12 million from the government now to stave off immediate damage to research. The House of Lords science select committee reached this conclusion only days after Kenneth Clarke, the Cabinet minister responsible for science, told the committee that there was no crisis in science funding.

The chairman of the committee, Lord Flowers, said he was especially worried by the decision of the Science and Engineering Research Council to halve grants for new research. ‘If that is not a crisis, I do not know what is,’ he says.

In a hard-hitting report on the current state of science, the cross-party committee said government ministers should shoulder the blame for big decisions such as the closure of the Nuclear Structure Facility at Daresbury, Cheshire. And the committee accuses the government of making a real cut in science funding of 3.7 per cent since the Conservatives came to power in 1979.

The Lords say that the science budget for 1991/92 ‘falls far short of what is required to provide the basis for continuing development of the country’s science base’. They reveal that the government’s method of calculating the budget – which allowed ministers to claim that the budget represented level funding after allowing for inflation – took even the government’s own advisers, the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, by surprise.

In last week’s Budget, the Treasury increased its forecast for inflation from 6 to 7 per cent. This means that the science budget for 1991/92 now represents a cut even by the government’s own calculations.

Last Wednesday, Clarke told the Lords that there was no crisis in British science. Because of mistakes under its previous chairman, the SERC did face problems but there would be no extra money this year, he said. ‘I do not think we can bail them out.’ Four days later, the Lords concluded that ‘there is no fat left in the system to absorb or disguise the present crisis’. Problems are particularly acute for young researchers facing a 50 per cent cut in grants from the SERC. The Lords report urges a break with Treasury rules to allow an extra £12 million for grants to individual researchers in 1991/92.

The Lords condemn the closure of the NSF as incomprehensible. They say research councils are being asked to make decisions which are too big for them. Ministers should take responsibility for such decisions. The Lords recommend that the government changes the way it deals with the science budget so that the Cabinet committee on science and technology would consider the impact of the annual science budget before the budget is fixed.

But Clarke told the Lords that decisions about priorities in research were best left to the scientists. He said research councils just had to learn ‘the most important question of all is what are you not going to do’.

Clarke says the science budget has grown by 22 per cent in real terms since the Conservatives took office in 1979. But according to the Lords, total spending on research, including that distributed through universities, has fallen in real terms. They say the Treasury’s method of calculating the rate of inflation understates price rises in science and should have an extra 1 to 2 per cent a year added to it.

The Lords suspect the proposed transfer of £100 million a year of research funding from the Universities Funding Council to the ABRC is unworkable and say more work must be done before the scheme can be put into effect. They are baffled by the fact that the UFC and the ABRC no longer have any formal links. ‘That is a piece of total idiocy,’ says Flowers. He blamed it on the chairman of the UFC, Peter Swinnerton-Dyer.