Hi Dom,
I think this is technically true, but it's possibly a bit misleading!
Sure, the MOD is the biggest line item on the SET Statistics and so it's arguably the largest single (public) funder of science and tech, but that relies on the rather strange way the rest of the public-funded research base is chopped up... eg 'health research', which would seem to me a more rational category than looking at spend per government department, is funded by DoH, MRC, BBSRC, probably some from other research councils, universities through REF-associated funds, etc. So just because that happens to be divided into pieces by the bureaucracy, it looks less important than defence, when £0.9bn from DoH and £0.7bn from MRC already outstrip the MOD R&D budget!
The other factor is that for reasons I've not been able to get anyone to satisfactorily explain, the MOD R&D budget has been plummeting: it was well over £3bn in 2002 and it's just £1.3bn in 2012. See http://scienceogram.org/blog/2014/01/government-departments-slash-research/ for a recent look at those numbers.
The other Scienceogram post relevant to this is http://scienceogram.org/blog/2013/09/set-statistics-government-departments-research/ though we explicitly excluded the MOD because we couldn't work out what was happening with their budget!
This is why I really want to see spending divided up by socioeconomic goal rather than department, because statistics expressed that way are much more meaningful.
And then, looking at the numbers per capita and with relevant comparators makes this both more meaningful and more scandalous: even MOD's large R&D budget is only about £20/person/year in the UK, as compared to the £600/person/year we spend on defence as a whole!
Hope that helps!
Andrew
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