I agree with all that Peter Lawrence says in this article.

I have had very good people in my Department who repeatedly write excellent grants that are clearly fundable and get high scores, but which "just miss out" when the funding cut is made. This makes the process akin to a lottery. Having chaired a funding committee for several years some time ago, I know that it is pretty easy to sort out the very good and the very bad grants (i.e. at the extremes of the distribution) but discriminating between the ones in the middle is very difficult (as in all rank-ordering exercises of this nature). The process is open to unintended bias dependent on the particular field of research (some fields score better than others), personalities on the funding committee (again some of whom score higher than others), and the occasional plausible but ill-informed referees' comment (often given by a very willing individual doing their very best to give an accurate appraisal but who is possibly not a true expert in the field: I am sure I have written these in the past!). I am not in any way criticising the committees and panels, who do a very difficult job with great commitment, but the system itself is badly flawed.

One of the disastrous consequences of the UK system is that great science that should be funded might miss out simply because it was in a stiff grants round, there being very limited to no opportunity for re-submission in this system.

It is also the case that the amounts of time and resource spent on peer review, even in the systems with the lightest of touch, often are not justified in terms of the benefit of weeding out the occasional poor proposal. It is all disproportionate.

We MUST do something inventive about all of this to try to ensure that talented scientists spend most of their time doing good science rather than applying for grants, and that we offer sensible options to young scientists starting out. (I won't go on to moan about all the other bureaucracy and box-ticking that we increasingly have to do!)