Senior insider says ‘limbo’ at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory has hit morale and disrupted vital research
A shake-up of the government’s defence science powerhouse at Porton Down has severely damaged morale and harmed work on critical science that supports national security, a senior whistleblower has told the Guardian.
The whistleblower said they were raising concerns in the public interest that the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), based largely at Porton Down in Wiltshire, had been left in a paralysing limbo because of the changes.
They said staff morale and productivity had been affected by a programme to “delete” hundreds of jobs and require people to reapply for positions,hampering scientific research and potentially jeopardising safety.
The organisation, which is an arm’s-length body of the Ministry of Defence, is responsible for cutting-edge science and technology that aids the military and national security, working on incidents such as the Salisbury poisoning by Russian agents and countering the Covid pandemic. It has about 4,800 staff members.
The Ministry of Defence did not dispute that morale has been affected by its organisational changes but stressed that there have been no redundancies as a result of the job “deletions”.
The whistleblower’s claims that staff have been unsettled by the DSTL shake-up were backed by trade union sources and leaked data from the organisation’s staff surveys.
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