I work in an public sector science role that is 'adjacent' to the university sector, but not part of it. Naturally I collaborate with University based researchers a great deal and many of them visit us to use our facilities and conduct their experiments. Needless to say, the situation the universities face is of great interest to us. It seems almost certain a number of universities will go down the pan, but what a few of us fear is early career researchers - junior lecturers and research fellows who will probably get the boot. Some of my collaborators have had the 'suggestion' that they aim to bring in say £1m or so** in research grants / industrial money, or else!! The more senior, professorial staff in our field will easily be able to attract this level of funding, junior academics, less so. I feel for the undergraduates as well, as, for me, going to university was my ticket out of my grim hometown and I would be gutted for others to be denied this opportunity, forced to watch some poorly delivered Zoom lecture - and to be fair my university based friends aren't keen on this either. It should also not escape the government's attention that healthy universities have helped in the regeneration and reinvention of some of our regional cities, so if they value their 'levelling up' agenda they better watch themselves.
At some stage our government is going to have to make some choices about where we go as a country. Clearly 2m of social distancing is impractical and as others have pointed out expecting young people to follow these ludicrous 'social bubble' ideas is a non-starter and is an example of badly made rules and behavioural micromanagement that, frankly, a lot of the population is starting to ignore. What are the government thinking? I suspect they are very in hock to a group of, frankly, weird mathematical modellers (go and read some of their papers) who have some eccentric and unworkable ideas - and we seem much further down this rabbit hole than most of Europe.
At my employer, we are going through considerable 'mental gymnastics' to try and figure out how we 'science' with 2m spacing, lots of shared equipment and a concerned management. I want to bang my head into a wall, repeatedly.
**This is to make up for the loss of the lucrative Chinese student market and the number of home /EU students deferring...