Comment: Expertise we must not lose

Feb 28 2008 Liverpool Daily Post

NOW that most of the old manufacturing industries have bitten the dust, the knowledge economy has become all-important.

That is as true of the north-west region as it is of any other, which is why the current savage funding cuts at the Daresbury research campus, near Warrington, are so serious.

Yesterday, the matter reached the hallowed halls of Westminster when it was examined by a Commons committee, which is carrying out an inquiry into the future of Daresbury and other key science sites.

Here it was revealed that the UK’s top scientists warned there was "no altern- ative" to closing the troubled Daresbury research campus. The secret closure pro- posal was revealed in documents obtain- ed by the innovation, universities and skills committee on the impact of £80m cuts to the campus’s three laboratories.

Around 350 of its 500 staff will be axed by April next year, with the decommis- sioning of the flagship Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) project claiming 150 jobs.

Since the storm broke, science min- ister Ian Pearson has repeatedly insisted Daresbury has a bright future as a world- class centre for cutting-edge science.

But the documents revealed at yester- day's meeting show that the committee’s own science experts gave a very different verdict in meetings last November.

The matter has now become so serious that last week, the Daily Post revealed that leading scientists at Daresbury’s Cockcroft Institute – a national centre for accelerator science – were threaten- ing to quit and return to the US unless the government quickly guaranteed its future.

There is some glimmer of hope, in that Professor Keith Mason, chief executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), said yesterday there were new projects in the pipeline. He also predicted that, in five years’ time, Daresbury would be "a shiny success story, with thousands more jobs."

This offers some reassurance as the north-west region cannot afford to lose such centres of expertise as those at Daresbury.