As the Guardian has found, funding cuts will lead to the situation when scientists would be forced to share laboratories more often soon. Besides they will have to find money for basic equipment themselves. More info you can find in scientist's essays
Nowadays the up to date equipment is concentrated in the best universities and some government centres. Senior academics said such fierce cuts to hardware and facilities budgets caused the problems of having access to the facilities which will undoubtedly have a serious effect upon scientific research in the UK.
The greatest difficulties are expected at middle-ranking universities. The lack of money to replace the ageing lab equipment puts research and teaching at such cash-strapped institutions in danger.
The impact of the cuts arose after David Willetts, the science minister, announced the refusal of the government to fund four projects that research councils claimed are of the top priority, namely, a national supercomputing service for developing drugs and modelling climate change; a computer science centre at the Daresbury research and innovation campus in Cheshire; redevelopment of the Institute for Animal Health; and upgrades to facilities at the Rothera research station in Antarctica.
Last year the government decreased capital budgets at research councils by half and in 4 years this will equal to several hundred million pounds. Universities hope that tuition fees will help them to recoup the costs for teaching equipment. However, universities should create consortiums in order to share better research tools.
