London

British science figures high among the beneficiaries of a spending spree announced this week by Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Over the next three years, spending on science will average 7% more than this year in real terms, say Whitehall sources.

The figures include a £1 billion ($1.5 billion) investment in buildings, laboratories and equipment announced last week (Nature 406, 113; 2000). But even without this money, £230 million of which comes from the Wellcome Trust, overall spending on research councils and the rest of Britain's ‘science base’ will be over 4% more than the previous year in each of the next three years.

Although the precise allocation of the money will not be known until October, £250 million of the increase has been earmarked for research into the advanced computing applications, known as ‘the grid’, and medicines based on data from the human genome.

The extra money “is clearly very encouraging”, says Richard Joyner, dean of research at Nottingham Trent University and chairman of the pressure group Save British Science. But he warns that if university funding continues to decline, there is a danger of an imbalance between the money for new infrastructure and that available to run it.

In his speech, Brown said that in addition to a real increase of 5.4% in the science budget next year, extra resources will be allocated to university-based innovation schemes.