Saturday, June 27, 2009

Ouch

This looks like pretty serious news for the Hadley Centre - a 25% cut in their funding. It seems to be effective immediately, with the MoD reneging on their existing 3 year deal. No doubt there is a desperate scramble underway to pick up funds from alternative source.

It's a shame, as the HC had always seemed to be one of the more secure and stable research centres in the UK (ref previous posts 1, 2, 3). If history is a guide, there will follow several years of budgetary struggles, low morale, reduced productivity, drawn-out redundancy processes and some of the best staff will give up on the place and find something else to do.

Incidentally, there seems to be some huge "stimulus fund" sloshing around in Japan right now, to the tune of $50m annual funding per project, but I think we didn't bother to apply because there wasn't any way we could find the necessary scientists to spend the money on...

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