The organisation that funds UK science research plans to stop paying for Jodrell Bank Observatory and its network of radio telescopes from March 2028. Unless someone else steps in with money, all scientific work at Jodrell Bank would stop on 1 April 2028, BBC News reported on July 27, 2026. The University of Manchester, which runs the site, confirmed on its StaffNet portal that current funding for the telescope network will end in March 2028 while stressing that Jodrell Bank remains open for now.

The decision comes from a money crisis at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, or STFC, the government body that pays for physics and astronomy in the UK. The STFC says it needs to save £162 million by 2030. The reasons include rising electricity bills, higher staff costs, and unfavourable exchange rates that make international projects like CERN (the particle physics lab in Switzerland) more expensive. According to Research Professional News, the total budget shortfall at STFC over four years could reach £684 million. The Guardian also reported this figure on July 28, 2026.

Jodrell Bank is the most famous site affected, but the cuts are happening everywhere. The UK is pulling out completely of the Event Horizon Telescope, the global project that produced the first ever picture of a black hole. UK involvement in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will drop 20 percent, and the same cut applies to an observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Work on the Bison solar observation network will fall by 40 percent. The Clara facility in Cheshire, which tests new particle accelerator technology, is being shut down and stored. The budget for Boulby mine, the UK's only deep underground science facility, is being cut by 40 percent. The Guardian

Two major facilities in Oxfordshire, the Diamond synchrotron (a machine that speeds up particles to produce bright light for experiments) and the Isis neutron source, face cuts but will stay open. But there is no money set aside for the LHCb experiment on the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest particle accelerator. According to The Guardian, the gap could shut the experiment down early, leaving about 80 percent of its expected data uncollected.

The e-Merlin network is a group of seven telescopes spread across 217 kilometres of the UK, all connected to Jodrell Bank's Lovell Telescope. It has been funded by an STFC grant of £6,573,354 for 2023 to 2026, awarded to the University of Manchester and Professor Richard Battye in January 2023. That grant is now in its final year. The Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics had set a deadline of Friday 23 January 2026 for PhD student funding applications, a process now overshadowed by the funding cliff 14 months later.

The timing matters because Jodrell Bank also hosts the global headquarters of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory, or SKAO, a huge international project to build the next generation of radio telescopes. UKRI's Infrastructure Fund has invested in SKAO to secure the UK's role as the host country and to support the construction phase. The SKAO headquarters is separate from the e-Merlin network and the observatory's own research, but because they share the same site, money problems at Jodrell Bank affect both the UK's own astronomy work and its international commitments. Locally, Goostrey Parish Council's clerk raised the funding issue for discussion in a report dated 17 July 2026, and council minutes from the 2026 Annual Parish Meeting note that Jodrell Bank gets no money from Cheshire East Council and will need to find alternative funding in 2026/27.

Astronomers have reacted strongly. According to The Guardian, researchers called the announcement "devastating," "shocking," and "disastrous."

What makes this different from past budget squeezes is how wide the cuts go. The STFC is not just trimming small programmes. It is leaving international projects entirely, shutting down national facilities, and potentially ending a major experiment before it finishes collecting data. The pressures behind these choices, like energy prices, exchange rates, and staff costs, are not unique to STFC. But they hit especially hard because STFC's budget is dominated by large, fixed payments for international collaborations and expensive facilities. The £684 million four-year shortfall reported by Research Professional News suggests the gap between what STFC has been given and what it has promised to pay is built into the system, not a temporary blip. Without extra money from the Treasury, the choices STFC is making now, closing Jodrell Bank, leaving the Event Horizon Telescope, cutting LHCb, follow from numbers that will not fix themselves.

For Jodrell Bank, the time between now and March 2028 is short. Any new funding would need to cover not just running costs but the research programme that gives the facility its purpose. The University of Manchester's public message, that the site is open and looking for alternatives, is a holding pattern rather than a rescue plan. Whether philanthropic donors, the university itself, or international partners can fill the gap in time is the question the scientific community now faces.