Projects at some of the UK’s most prestigious research labs will be scaled back following a review of government spending plans.

Research that could be affected includes the hunt for new cancer treatments, the design of better batteries and the search for what the Universe is really made of.

Funding for research into particle physics at Cern and astronomy projects is also affected, but the deep cuts initially feared have been averted.

The UK Research and Innovation Agency (UKRI) says it has to make savings of more than £160m over the next four years because costs for planned research have spiralled.

The government has increased overall R&D spending to record levels, rising to £22.6bn a year by 2029-30. UKRI’s share of that has risen from around £9bn to nearly £10bn over the same period.

But UKRI’s head, Prof Sir Ian Chapman, told BBC News the savings were needed because spending forecasts showed they could no longer afford to pay for the research increases they had planned for up to 2030.

“Our plan is to focus the UKRI investment where it makes the largest impact,” he said.

As well as being judged on scientific impact, the funding priorities have also taken into account the eventual impact on driving economic growth. Priority areas include artificial intelligence, where UKRI will spend £1.6bn, quantum technologies, which will receive around £1bn and £750m to build a national supercomputer.

“Overall, we will drive to be more entrepreneurial, to engage more with industry, to realize greater revenue and greater income into our program, which means there’s less pressure on the public purse,” Chapman said.

Britain’s national laboratories — the government-owned sites and expert teams that build and run the country’s big scientific machines — face the deepest squeeze.

The money for their scientific work is set to fall by well over half, though the overall budget for national labs and estates drops by less because a growing share is being swallowed by urgent repairs to ageing buildings.

Sue Ferns of the Prospect Tade Union which represents scientific and technical staff at the labs facing cuts described the move as a “hammer blow to UK science”.

“It is the product of a political choice. Public sector research facilities like those at Harwell, the Ryal Observatory Edinburgh, and Daresbury, now facing devastating cuts, act as catalysts to regional business ecosystems, and offer training and job opportunities to their local communities”.

At Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, the Accelerator Science and Technology Centre, which designs and builds the powerful machines that drive particle beams will see a budget cut of £8m a year by 2029.

The Scientific Computing Department, split between Daresbury and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire, crunches a quarter of the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider at Cern and its budget will fall by £10m a year, with reduced access to computing power.

And the Boulby Underground Laboratory, a deep in a mine near Saltburn on the North Yorkshire coast which conducts experiments to search for dark matter, the invisible material thought to make up most of the Universe, will have its budget cut by 40%.

Britain will remain in flagship international projects hunting for dark matter and will continue to be the second largest contributor to Cern through its subscription, which will be increased by 19% over four years.

A large proportion of the savings will also fall on the government’s so-called multidisciplinary research facilities used by researchers across the UK to answer basic scientific questions.

Overall, these will have their budgets cut by around 15% but will be given transition funding from a £100m pot to give them time to find commercial sources of income to make up the shortfall.

Three of these facilities are in Oxfordshire:

Diamond Light Source – a giant machine, half a kilometre around, that produces X-rays far brighter than the Sun to see the tiniest building blocks of matter. Its beam time could be cut by up to a fifth, and a planned upgrade is now in doubt.

ISIS Neutron and Muon Source – fires beams of tiny particles into materials to reveal how they work at the smallest scale. Under the plans, it will run for fewer hours, some of its instruments will shut, and its muon experiments will close altogether.

Central Laser Facility home to some of the most powerful lasers on Earth, used in medical imaging, cancer research and fundamental physics. Part of it — the arm that supports biology and chemistry research — will close.

The cutbacks in planned research have been criticised for being short-sighted and likely to hold back economic growth in the long term, according to Daniel Rathbone, Deputy Executive Director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering.

“In the long term these cuts are likely to have a much bigger economic and research impact than the level of savings realised in the short term. If we lose capability in any given area, it’s likely it will be very difficult to regain in a meaningful way”

Proposals made public in January indicated that the bulk of the savings would be made by cuts of up to 30% to particle physics experiments at Cern and astronomy research.

Following intense lobbying by the particle physics and astronomy community the savings have been reduced to just 2.7%.

But the specialist publication Research Professional News reports that there will still be significant cutbacks in research, because of the greater cost increases of undertaking particle physics and astronomy research.