Science is a national priority that will be exempted from any Government spending cuts required by the recession, Gordon Brown pledged yesterday.

He said that Britain's future was so dependent on science and technology that its budget would be ring-fenced until 2014 to safeguard long-term investment against short-term pressures.

Making his his first speech on science since becoming Prime Minister, he said that the downturn was an opportunity to “rebalance” the British economy away from financial services in favour of high technology, which would be critical to jobs and prosperity.

He also announced an initiative to help people with a background in science who lose their jobs in the recession to retrain as science teachers, and a target to double the number of schoolchildren who take three separate sciences at GCSE.

“The economic role of science will be of even more importance than before,” Mr Brown said, in the Romanes lecture at Oxford University. “Some say that now is not the time to invest but the bottom line is that the downturn is no time to slow down our investment in science. We will not allow science to become a victim of the recession but, rather, focus on developing it as a key element of our path to recovery.”

The ring-fence will protect increases in the science budget announced in the 2007 spending review, by which public funding for research will grow to almost £6 billion by 2011. Mr Brown has also promised to boost investment at least in line with economic growth until 2014.

The speech allayed growing concern in the research community that its budget would be raided to fund the bank bailouts and other short-term demands of the credit crunch.

Many scientists noted that Mr Brown failed to promise an injection of fresh science funds to match President Obama's stimulus package, which includes $21 billion (£15 billion) in one-off grants for research. The US investment has prompted fears of a brain drain to better-funded laboratories and businesses across the Atlantic.

Lord Rees of Ludlow, president of the Royal Society, said: “Maintaining current investment is a good place to start but we must also look to see where we can put more money in to capitalise on our world-leading science in areas such as energy. If we fail to deliver extra investment in the areas where we have a strong competitive advantage, other countries will overtake us and reap the long-term economic benefits.”

Nick Dusic, director of the Campaign for Science & Engineering, said: “The Prime Minister... needed to go further today in his commitments because other countries are raising the bar by making science and engineering central to their economic recovery.

“Just maintaining current spending commitments will mean that we are losing ground against countries, like the US, that are giving science a huge boost within their stimulus packages.”

Under Mr Brown's teaching initiative, the Training and Development Agency for Schools will offer people with appropriate skills who are made redundant personalised support to retrain as science and maths teachers.

He announced a guarantee that 90 per cent of state secondary schools would offer separate GCSEs in chemistry, biology and physics by 2014, compared with 32 per cent at present. The aim is to double the numbers taking three sciences to more than 100,000 a year.

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