To: Prof. Jordan Nash, Chair of PPAN

CC:
John Womersley
Sheila Rowan
Jenny Thomas
Mike Bode
Bob Warwick

Dear Jordan,

We are writing to you as chair of PPAN regarding the outcome of the  
recent STFC prioritization exercise. We recognize the tough decisions  
PPAN had to make given your decreasing budget over the next 3 years,  
but seek clarification on a number of issues where our initial FUAP  
advice appears to be different from your outcome. These include:

* Cuts to the studentships, fellowships and grants. In our FUAP  
report, we ranked the maintenance of these items as our top critical  
priority and in person, we have continued to stress their importance.  
We echo the request in the recent joint statement from all the AP  
chairs that PPAN and Science Board revisit this decision immediately  
and try to mitigate the effect of such cuts to the next generation of  
UK scientists. In particular please review the removal of the entire  
PDF round this year. In our opinion, this is a very negative message  
to send especially in these tough times of youth unemployment.

* The withdrawal from LOFAR which was highlighted by FUAP as one of  
our "Crown Jewels" over the next 5 years and was also "high priority"  
in the GBFR report. LOFAR addresses two of the four FUAP science  
themes (First Light, Extreme Astrophysics) and is a very cost- 
effective (for the UK) pathfinder to the SKA. At the Dec 18th briefing  
meeting with John Womersley, there was some confusion over whether  
FUAP could undertake an investigation of the decision to not support  
LOFAR and we request your advice on this. We believe the radio  
astronomy community would be open to sharing their constrained  
resources to partially support LOFAR.

* The withdrawal from XMM-Newton, which was also highlighted by FUAP  
as one of our "Crown Jewels" over the next 5 years. XMM will be vital  
to addressing questions in Extreme Astrophysics and represents one of  
the most successful ESA missions ever flown. ESA has given top  
priority to continued support of XMM in the coming years and we are  
thus puzzled that this is not reflected in your decision, particularly  
given the vital core roles of the UK in data processing and instrument  
calibration. Continued support for XMM seems very cost-effective and  
we seek clarification if this withdrawal also includes UK scientists  
seeking exploitation funds via grants, studentships and fellowships?

* We note that the UK has no access to future CMB experiments after  
Planck. Given the success of CMB research over the last decade in  
providing us with the cosmological standard model, we feel this could  
be disastrous for our standing in the worldwide cosmology community.  
We urge PPAN to look at this area of research asap as we fear it is  
barely sustainable now.

* Access to telescopes in the northern Hemisphere. As discussed by  
John Womersley at the Dec 18th briefing, it is noticeable that the UK  
will potentially loose all telescopes in the north by 2012. This is  
against the advice of FUAP, NUAP and the GBFR. We seek your advice on  
how to deal with this outcome and stress that three of the FUAP  
science themes require access to the whole sky (Galaxies, Extreme  
Astrophysics, First Light). Not having such access will significantly  
damage our exploitation of highly ranked (and supported) facilities  
such as GAIA, Advanced-LIGO and Swift.

We hope PPAN can provide a clear steer on these issues as John  
Womersley indicated on Dec 18th that some "fiddling" was possible. We  
do appreciate the impossible position you were placed in with a  
decreasing budget, but feel that some of the above issues are so  
important they are worth revisiting even in these tough financial  
circumstances. We are eager to help and ready to provide informed  
input (with public consultation if needed) over the coming month.

Yours sincerely

Sarah Bridle
Anthony Challinor
Chris Conselice
Shude Mao
Rob Fender
Bob Nichol (chair)
Paul O'Brien