More than 1,000 scientists and postgraduate students were barred from working in the UK last year on national security grounds, amid a major government crackdown on research collaborations with China.
Figures obtained by the Guardian reveal that a record 1,104 scientists and postgraduate students were rejected by Foreign Office vetting in 2022, up from 128 in 2020 and just 13 in 2016.
The sharp increase follows a hardening of the government’s stance on scientific ties with China, with warnings from MI5 of a growing espionage threat, major research centres being quietly shut down and accusations by a government minister that China’s leading genomics company had regularly sought to hack into the NHS’s genetic database.
Geopolitical tensions stepped up further this week, as the US, Australia and the UK announced a multi-decade, multibillion-dollar deal aimed at countering China’s military expansion in the Indo-Pacific. China said the Aukus plan to build a combined fleet of elite nuclear-powered submarines was “a path of error and danger”.
The Foreign Office declined to give a breakdown by nationality, but data supplied by leading universities including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College suggests that, at these institutions at least, Chinese academics account for a majority of those denied clearance.
Some have welcomed the policy shift, with one security expert saying the number of academics being barred is “commensurate with the threat”. But leading scientists say the scheme is leaving universities struggling to recruit the best talent from abroad.
Prof Sir Peter Mathieson, the principal and vice-chancellor of Edinburgh University said lengthy delays and the “blanket” fashion in which vetting was being applied meant the process was “becoming a roadblock”.
“Universities are very conscious of the need to understand and mitigate risk,” he said. “But research projects are being delayed, attempts to recruit staff are being delayed and we don’t think it’s in anybody’s interests for that to be the case. It’s a significant issue.”
The Foreign Office’s Academic Technology Approval Scheme (ATAS), introduced in 2007, requires those from countries subject to immigration control to apply for clearance to work on so-called dual-use research and other “sensitive” subjects.
In 2016, the year after the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, was taken on a tour of Manchester’s graphene institute during a state visit, just 13 of those who applied were rejected by the scheme. But as relations between China and the west have soured, with concerns over human rights in Hong Kong and the Xinjiang region, security has been ramped up. ATAS was expanded in 2020 to cover not just weapons of mass destruction, but also all advanced conventional military technologies – in practice, this covers much of physics, engineering and computer science – and further expanded in 2021 to cover researchers, as well as postgraduate students. In 2020, 128 scientists and students were rejected, rising to 951 in 2021.
Figures obtained through a freedom of information request show that last year 839 student and 265 researchers’ applications were rejected – 1,104 of the 50,000 who applied.
A majority of applicants are thought to be scientists seeking to move to the UK to take up offers of research degrees or fellowships. But the Guardian is also aware of researchers, including five Chinese scientists at Imperial college, who did not pass clearance despite having already held positions at UK universities for several years – and who may have had to leave the UK as a result.
Charles Parton, a China expert at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), said that a tightening of security was “encouraging in a sense”, but criticised the government’s failure to clearly articulate its broader policy objectives, including which areas of science are off-limits. “If there is a China strategy, nobody knows what it is,” he said. “Scientific collaboration with China is one of the most serious questions that needs addressing. Ultimately there would be no people being turned down if there was a clear definition of what we can cooperate on.”
Prof James Wilsdon, professor of research policy at UCL, said that while there were legitimate security concerns about strategically sensitive technologies and human rights, the “hard U-turn” that had occurred in the past two years was at odds with the government’s ambition to make the UK a “science superpower”.
“We’ve gone from announcing a new ‘golden era’ of bilateral relations with China to plunging our scientific links into the deep freeze,” he said.
Academic leaders say that, as applications have doubled in the past two years, lengthy delays are leaving scientists, students and research projects in limbo. A Russell Group survey of more than 1,450 students and staff found that, among those who responded, student application approvals took more than 10 weeks on average, with some reporting waits of more than six months.
A government spokesperson said: “We expanded the scope of the Academic Technology Approval Scheme in 2020, and again the following year. This meant a greater number of academics from overseas now have to be approved before working in the UK.
“This has significantly increased the number of applications we receive and therefore the number we turn down. The refusal rate remains low – around 2% of all applications. We make every effort to minimise delays to applicants’ studies with the majority of applications processed within 30 working days.”
