Next week, voters in the United Kingdom will head to the ballot box in a general election that polls predict will result in the Labour party, led by Keir Starmer, winning a comfortable majority over current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives.

Scientists are hoping for a return to stability after more than a decade of upheaval. “It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster,” says Kieron Flanagan, a science-policy researcher at the University of Manchester, UK.

Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, UK researchers have had to cope with the continued fallout from the 2008 financial crash, Brexit, an overhaul of the funding system and several different science ministers. They are also facing huge funding shortfalls for universities.

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One major change was the creation of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in 2018, which merged several research councils into one overarching organization. Although this shake-up produced challenges, researchers also benefited from a sharp focus on science and research by Boris Johnson’s government, which pledged to turn the country into a “science superpower”.

“As a community we’ve enjoyed this period in the political sun,” says James Wilsdon, a science-policy researcher at University College London. By contrast, many aspects of the Labour manifesto that could affect scientists are “vague”, says Flanagan.

Ahead of the vote on 4 July, Nature looks at how a potential change in leadership could affect UK research. Both the Labour and Conservative parties were approached for comment on this article.

Visas and migration

One of the most talked-about issues throughout the election campaign is immigration. Scientists are among those who have been critical of the recent restrictions on UK visas the Conservatives introduced.

In January, the government banned most international students from bringing their families to the country and increased the salary threshold for skilled worker visas by 48% to £38,700 (US$49,000). Scientists have voiced fears that these measures are making the country increasingly unattractive to overseas researchers who want to work or study in the United Kingdom. The number of international applicants to UK universities dropped by 44% between January and March compared with the same period in 2023, compounding the funding issues the institutions have, because they are bound by a limit to the tuition fees they can charge domestic students that was imposed in 2017. “The universities are on their knees,” says Flanagan.

“It’s extremely important that whoever forms the next government understands that our ability to recruit international students at all stages matters colossally,” says Vivienne Stern, chief executive of the London-based advocacy group Universities UK. “They put about £5 billion a year into the research system.”

The Conservatives stand by the tougher policies in their manifesto, and say they will “go further” if elected. “We will increase all visa fees and remove the student discount to the Immigration Health Surcharge,” the manifesto states, referring to the roughly £1,000 annual fee paid by UK migrants for access to public-health services.

Labour’s manifesto does not go into detail on their plans for migration and visa rules, although the party says it would “reform the points-based immigration system so that it is fair and properly managed”. At a hustings event held at The Royal Society in London on 19 June, Labour’s shadow science minister, Chi Onwurah, said that the party hasn’t said it would cut visa costs from the current fee of £490 per student application.

Research funding

Another crucial issue for scientists is funding. Public spending on research and development (R&D) in the United Kingdom rose considerably from around £13 billion in 2011 to £16 billion in 2022. The Conservatives have said they want to increase this to £22 billion by 2026. The country spent around 2.9% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on R&D in 2021 (the latest year for which data are available), which is higher than the 1.6% spent in 2010, but still lower than that of many other nations. “We want to see the UK lead, in percentage terms, the GDP spend on R&D,” says Beth Thompson, chief strategy officer at biomedical funding charity Wellcome in London. Currently, “the US leads at about 3.5% of GDP”.

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Labour’s manifesto doesn’t feature a detailed budget or a specific funding pledge for science, but it says the party wants to “scrap short funding cycles for key R&D institutions in favour of ten-year budgets”. That would be a welcome change, says Stern. “We’ve been arguing for that stability.” But it is not entirely clear “what Labour means when it talks about ten-year funding cycles”, she notes. “There hasn’t been a huge amount of detail.”

At the Royal Society hustings, Onwurah said that the key institutions would include, for example, the UKRI, and that Labour would devise a full list if elected. She added that the aim was to create “an environment of confidence and earned trust rather than box ticking”.

Post-Brexit progress

Neither party mentions potential scientific associations with the European Union. After voting to leave the bloc in 2016, the United Kingdom was barred from accessing funds from the EU’s €100 billion (US$107 billion) Horizon Europe programme. Following years of strained negotiations, the country finally re-associated with Horizon late last year.

Re-establishing that association was “really, really positive”, says Daniel Rathbone, deputy executive director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering in London. “It did take a long time to get there, but it was the right outcome in the end. It will take some time to fully get back to the levels of participation that we saw before, but there’s lots of work being done.”

Labour’s manifesto does mention a plan to promote substantial economic growth to “rebuild Britain”, and that effort could benefit greatly from science and research, says Stern. “If you’ve got a government who’s single overarching mission is growth, we have got a colossal opportunity to contribute to that,” she says. “The challenge for us is to make sure that the contribution R&D makes right across the spectrum is understood.”

Chasing net zero

Last year, Rishi Sunak rowed back on several of the government’s green targets, moving the deadline for selling new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035 and delaying the phase-out of gas boilers by the same amount.

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The United Kingdom is legally bound to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 under a law it passed in 2019. Labour says it will create a new publicly owned company, Great British Energy, to “drive forward investment in clean, home-grown energy production”. It wants to “double onshore wind, triple solar power, and quadruple offshore wind by 2030”.

The Conservatives say they are “committed to delivering net zero by 2050” and would treble offshore wind power. But they would also “prevent the prospect of blackouts with new gas power stations”. Both parties say they will invest in carbon-capture technologies and scale up nuclear-power production.

AI research

The growing artificial intelligence (AI) sector is likely to be an issue for any future government. Both Labour and Conservative parties have committed to boosting the country’s involvement in AI, which looks set to have wide-ranging implications for science and regulation. The Conservatives say they would “continue investing over £1.5 billion in large-scale compute clusters, assembling the raw processing power so we can take advantage of the potential of AI and support research into its safe and responsible use”.

Labour says it would “ensure our industrial strategy supports the development of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) sector” and remove “planning barriers to new data centres” to overcome local opposition to their construction. The party also says it would address ethical and regulatory concerns around AI, ensuring “the safe development and use of AI models by introducing binding regulation on the handful of companies developing the most powerful AI models”.