£250 million needed in Spending Review to tackle recruitment and retention crisis

Save British Science today published a report showing that £250 million per year is needed to tackle the market failure in university researchers in science and engineering.

“Universities are routinely experiencing difficulties attracting and retaining the best researchers in a globally competitive environment,” said Professor Richard Joyner, Chairman of SBS, “and while new money has been made available in recent years for infrastructure and research projects, the salaries of university scientists have stood still for decades.”

“Our report presents a reasonable proposal for scientists’ pay, and costs it at £250 million per year, which is less than 3% of the Government’s current annual investment in scientific research and development”.

The report is based on discussions of a symposium held last month, at which representatives of the universities, government, charity sector and industry discussed in detail the problems of recruiting and retaining first class researchers in British universities, and compared a variety of proposals to see which was most reasonable in terms of attracting the best people into UK science. It deals with university researchers in science, engineering and technology, but not the arts and humanities, or clinical subjects and medicine.

“The report draws together a huge variety of different starting points into a single coherent package,” said Dr Peter Cotgreave, Director of SBS. “It presents a well-argued case, and shows that the total amount of money needed to deal with this problem is not unreasonable.”

“With all the new infrastructure we are getting, British science has the potential to deliver substantial benefits for the British taxpayer,” said Richard Joyner, “but unless we tackle the problems of recruiting and retaining the best researchers, we are in danger of not getting the maximum value out of the investment we have already made.”.

The report is available at
http://www.savebritishscience.org.uk/texts/documents/2004/SBS0407.pdf

ENDS