Science and Britain’s future
By almost any measure, Britain in 2010 is one of the best places in the world to do science. Our research infrastructure is world class. Our scientific productivity is world class. There is almost no major scientific field in which Britain cannot hold its own. Government can claim the credit for funding a lot of this – but the dynamism and the leadership come from a new generation of vice chancellors and from the science community itself.
We should not have short memories about this. We should not forget the 1980s. The run-down labs. The brain drain. Over the last thirteen years unprecedented investment in the British research base has transformed it into one of Britain’s genuine world-class assets. Funding for research has doubled since 1997. Research budgets will rise next year to all time highs, even when pressure on public spending is tight.
We have to see this investment as an investment in our economic future. We need to be more confident in talking about the growth power in our science base. The aim is to make sure that the ideas that our researchers are constantly throwing up are being translated and applied commercially, wherever viable. That means getting the ideas out of the lab: tested, developed, capitalized, launched.
In many respects this is already happening. University spin-offs employed thousands of people and earned this country more than a billion pounds last year.
But the reality is that the list of British discoveries made in Britain but commercialized outside of the UK is still a depressingly long one. We do the science and others get the industry. But a science-driven recovery depends on keeping more of that commercialization in Britain.
We’ve made a number of changes over the last year which will help here, all of which recognize that there is an important role for public investment or government action in this space.
We’ve developed the patent box system which will provide tax relief for companies that exploit intellectual property in this country.
We’ve revived the British advanced apprenticeship to ensure that by 2012 we will be training 70000 every year, many of them to fill the vital technician roles that have long been identified as a critical skills gap in UK manufacturing.
Paul Drayson has done a brilliant job of creating the UK Innovation Investment Fund, which will invest in innovative high tech British companies. It has already achieved its first closing, exceeding its target of matching £1 of private funds for every £1 of public funding. It is already one of the biggest equity funds of its type in Europe and our ambition is to see it grow into a £1bn fund over its lifetime.
At the budget last week we doubled the life time threshold for tax relief for entrepreneurs to £2million.
Over recent years we have built up the basic skeleton of an industrial innovation infrastructure in the UK. We have the rapidly growing outreach of our universities into business, RDA investment in centres of excellence and the setting up and expansion of the Technology Strategy Board.
The creation of the Strategic Investment Fund in 2009 has allowed us to earmark almost a billion pounds for investment in British capabilities in cutting edge technologies like plastic electronics, composites, wave energy and industrial biotechnology. All areas where the costs of technology demonstration, especially for small companies, are too high for a single firm to pay.
And I’m very pleased to be able to announce today that the Government has approved, subject to tender, an investment worth £97.4 million for the Phase III development of Diamond at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire. Diamond is a giant machine called a Synchrotron which uses cutting-edge technology to generate brilliant beams of light, from infra-red to X-rays to examine the properties of materials at an atomic and molecular level. It is capable of studying a huge variety of samples from every discipline of scientific research.
Today’s funding boost, together with a £13.8 million contribution from the Wellcome Trust, will add 10 more beamlines. Once these are up and running, they could potentially benefit almost every aspect of our lives and lead to applications such as providing high resolution 3D images of biological samples which will further our knowledge of diseases and help develop new therapies for problems as diverse as Parkinson’s and hip replacements.
I am also delighted to announce a further investment in the UK scientific capability with the placing of a contract for a replacement for the Royal Research Ship Discovery; a £75 million project. This will replace her predecessor, who is nearly 50 old, with a ship capable of keeping the UK at the cutting edge of maritime science. This is vital if we are to understand, for example, the impact of climate change on the oceans, and monitor ocean circulation, acidification and biodiversity.
Last week we also announced that we are accepting the recommendations of the Hauser review that the UK should establish a new network of technology centres like the Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany in exciting areas such where Britain has untapped potential such as stem cells and regenerative medicine; future internet technologies; plastic electronics; software and technologies addressing renewable energy and climate change; satellite communications; fuel cells; advanced manufacturing; and composite materials.
Commercialising these technologies at critical early stages in their development could enable the UK to capture a significant proportion of global markets potentially worth billions of pounds.
This network of centres will partner researchers in bringing research to industry, venture capitalists and the supply chain. They will have predictable funding and a mission statement for long term growth. Over the next few months we will be determining the precise technology areas where a first generation of such centres should operate. We’ll need a name. So any thoughts welcome. But under this government - this will happen.
A year ago in our strategy paper New Industry New Jobs we argued that we needed to get better in thinking about where our competitive strengths really come from in Britain, especially in a global economy that forces us to compete on very high levels of sophistication and added value.
Partly they come from the discipline of the market. But partly they come out of the capabilities we invest in collectively: education, infrastructure, skills. And science. These are the things that underwrite our future innovation. They are the things that will attract others to innovate here.
The market values science when it sees commercial profit in science. That’s why we don’t leave the funding of scientific research solely to the market. But it is also why the role of government in helping ensure that good ideas reach that critical stage of commercial viability is so important.
In the last decade this government has done all of those things. In the last year since the publication of New Industry New Jobs it has redoubled its commitment. We have put science at the heart of our vision of the British economy. And at the heart of the recovery. And that’s exactly where it should be.
