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John Major and his science minister, William Waldegrave, both insisted last week that they are committed to science, even though government spending on research is falling.

‘We need good science to help build our future prosperity,’ Major told members of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee. ‘We must sustain our strong base of excellence in science, engineering and technology.’ Industry must also invest in research in order to innovate, he said.

This was the Prime Minister’s first home speech on science since coming to power three years ago. He repeated the contention he made last year in Japan that Britain has undervalued science in the past. ‘In the future, we must guard against that,’ he said. Despite the squeeze on public spending, Major said he expected funding for the universities and the research councils to rise in real terms next year. ‘And science will remain a high priority in future.’

Waldegrave repeated this promise later the same day in the House of Commons, during a debate called to lay the legal foundations for the three new research councils which come into being in April.

But Michael Meacher, the Labour spokesman on science, questioned the commitment of a government whose own figures show that its overall spending on research – including spending by government departments, universities and research councils – will fall from £5.6 billion in 1992 to £5.2 billion in 1995. ‘It is one of the great tragedies of the recession that government departments have responded to the general call for spending cuts by targeting their research budgets,’ said Meacher.

Cuts in departmental funding for research also place an extra burden on the research councils, said John Mulvey of the pressure group Save British Science. ‘Councils are now having to pick up research that has been ditched by the Department of Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food,’ he said.

Waldegrave outlined the allocation of funds to the research councils (see Chart), and a range of schemes that will be paid for by a special fund of £15 million that will be available to research councils this year. Half of this is new money, and the remainder has been squeezed out of the councils in ‘efficiency savings’ by their new director-general, John Cadogan.

Among the science minister’s schemes is a new type of award called a ROPA, a Realising Our Potential Award, named after the government’s White Paper on science. The £3.5 million set aside for ROPAs will be used to top up grants awarded by companies to academics for strategic research. These awards will bypass the conventional peer review process. ‘We shall take industry’s recognition of the researcher as an indicator of his or her quality,’ said Waldegrave.

He also intends to allow companies to award CASE studentships, which are designed to allow students to study for PhDs partly within a company. In the past, only universities had the right to award these joint studentships. Waldegrave promised extra money for genome research, immunology, and chemistry – areas considered important by industry.

The moral, said Cadogan, is to ‘go get connected with industry’.