Chi Onwurah

Economic growth is the first priority of this government. To deliver on this, one of our first steps after taking office was to announce that we were resuming Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations with: the Gulf Cooperation Council, India, Israel, South Korea, Switzerland, and Turkey.

Having carefully reviewed our negotiation objectives we have now started talks with some of these key partners. We will not sacrifice quality for speed and will only agree deals that are mutually beneficial.

Depending on the capacity they require, large energy users can connect to either the low-voltage distribution network or the high-voltage transmission network. The networks are owned by private companies that are solely responsible for ensuring the delivery of connections and regulated independently by Ofgem. The distribution network is owned and operated by six Distribution Network Operators across Great Britain. The transmission network is owned by three Transmission Owners and operated by the National Energy System Operator.

Ministers have discussed with Ofgem the need to drive higher standards of service for energy customers.

Ofgem requires suppliers to ensure that payments are set to avoid building up excessive credit balances, including taking regular meter readings. Excess credit balances should be refunded promptly, upon request.

Direct debit payments are designed to be flat across the year, meaning that energy accounts tend to build up a credit balance over the summer, when energy use low, with the reverse occurring over the winter months.

The total value of the spend requests considered for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology and its Arm’s Length Bodies against the Digital Assurance Gateway as at the date of answering question 18934 was £98.2m. Consideration against the Gateway has been incorporated into a pre-existing weekly liaison meeting between Integrated Corporate Services and the Central Digital and Data Office and is dealt with via short discussions.

Contracts awarded for the activities in scope for Question 18934 as at the time of providing this response include Microsoft, Convergence/Extreme, Objective, IBM, Dextrous Web/Thoughtworks, Kerv, AWS and IBL.

Northumberland County Council expect this project to deliver over 1,600 direct jobs, including 1,200 long-term construction jobs, and over 2,700 indirect and induced jobs over the course of the development.

Building on our experience of delivering the UK-wide Strength in Places Fund, Innovation Accelerators and Launchpads programmes, we will develop a new local innovation funding programme that will bolster high potential clusters across the UK, including in non-Mayoral Strategic Authorities. We will work with areas that choose not to adopt the mayoral model, to increase innovation activity in regions both with and without devolution.

Universities are central to generating local economic growth. As magnets for talent and investment and anchors for clusters, they create centres of research and innovation excellence across the country. Enabling partnership working between local government, universities and businesses will be at the heart of our future regional innovation funding programme.

Enabling partnership working between local government, universities and businesses will be at the heart of our future regional innovation funding programme.

We are developing a new local innovation funding programme to support high potential innovation clusters across the country, with delivery timelines subject to the outcome of the next phase of the Spending Review.

Our new programme will build on our experience of delivering initiatives such as the Innovation Accelerator pilots. At Budget, we announced these would be extended into 2025/26, delivering funding and bespoke support to bolster high-potential innovation clusters in Greater Manchester, Glasgow City Region, and the West Midlands.

UKRI’s leadership and staff routinely engage with stakeholders across the UK. Additionally, UKRI has several teams focussed on regional engagement, including:

• Innovate UK’s place engagement team, including a Director, Deputy Director and ten full time manager positions at Innovate UK, who work with around 400 regionally-organised business growth advisers.
• EPSRC has a team of eight regional managers.
• Research England has a team of five engagement leads.
• Members of staff focused on the investment delivery of place programmes, such as the Strength in Places Fund and Innovation Accelerators.

Our ambition through the innovation commitments announced in the English Devolution White Paper is to generate innovation-led growth across the country, and help places make stronger contributions to a thriving national innovation ecosystem. Through UK Research and Innovation, we will support more local leaders, working in partnership with businesses and universities, to unlock their regions’ innovation potential.

The Spending Review settlement set out the overall R&D budget for my department, which is £13.9 billion for 2025/26. Further details of how this funding will be allocated will be announced in due course, and the next phase of the spending review will confirm multi-year budgets for innovation funding.

Official Development Assistance (ODA) spend, by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) on research and development (R&D) is as follows:

Due to the Machinery of Government change, and reporting of previous years’ spend alongside spend now reported under the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, disaggregated data for solely DSIT’s share pre-2019 is not currently available.

Both GCRF and the Newton Fund will come to a natural close by 31^st March 2025. The Government will allocate future ODA to Departments as part of its standard Spending Review process.

The Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing, Access, and Growth (VPAG) Investment Programme is enabled by circa £400m of funding from scheme members over 5 years.

Approximately 75% of total Investment Programme funding will boost commercial clinical trials across the UK, including through the new Commercial Research Delivery Centres (CRDCs).

The CRCDs are a public-private investment which include funding from the VPAG Investment Programme and £71m additional funding in England from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

In June 2024, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology published updated guidance on the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), available to all staff via the intranet. The guidance provides a clear framework on the principles of the duty, compliance expectations, and conducting equality impact assessments. Staff were encouraged to use this resource to support their work.

In addition, a PSED training video was included in the Policy Foundation Programme, run on DSIT's behalf by the Integrated Corporate Services. The first cohort took place on 18th November 2024.

The Government incentivises university-business interactions through funding for UKRI programmes. Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF), provided through Research England is the largest source of knowledge exchange funding to English universities, providing £280 million annually to support engagement with a range of partners, including businesses. HEIF includes a £20 million contribution specifically for university-business collaboration and commercialisation. Innovate UK’s Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs)programme links businesses with technical experts in UK universities. Currently, around 800 businesses, 100 knowledge bases (universities and other research organisations) and over 800 graduates are involved in KTPs.

The Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard (ATRS) establishes a standardised way for public sector organisations to publish information about how and why they are using algorithmic tools. The ATRS is mandatory for government departments and arm’s-length bodies (ALBs), for algorithmic tools which have a significant influence on a decision-making process with public effect, or directly interact with the general public.

DSIT supports startups and innovation across the UK, including through the UK’s innovation agency - Innovate UK. Over the last two years, Innovate UK has awarded £5.2 billion funding to more than 7,000 businesses across the UK.

Innovate UK published the State of Innovation 2024 report on 6 December. This draws on data from over 2,000 UK businesses, to provide a view of businesses’ innovation activities, challenges and plans for the year ahead.

The report does not specifically assess housing costs and cost of living, but assesses trends in barriers to innovation, including the cost of doing business, which will include these areas.

No. GOTT works with government departments and Arm’s Length Bodies to accelerate government’s innovations towards the market, through guidance, direct practical expert support, grant funding for specific opportunities, and access to networks.

The moratorium on government IT procurement decisions over £1m (now known as the Digital Assurance Gateway) is still in place. The Integrated Corporate Services Digital Assurance Team and Central Digital and Data Office have considered 11 spend requests for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology and its Arm’s Length Bodies against the gateway criteria since it was introduced on 14 August 2024, and none were rejected.

The Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation is responsible for Innovation across the Missions, including the Growth Mission. However, a wide range of DSIT’s policy areas support businesses and contribute to innovation-led growth, and therefore all Ministers will have an interest. A full list of Ministerial responsibilities is at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-ministers-and-responsibilities.

Everyone who works with government has a duty of confidentiality and a responsibility to safeguard any government information or data that they access or share, and all government departments are required to meet a range of mandatory security standards. The ‘Government Security Classifications Policy’ and ‘Guidance 1.1: Working at OFFICIAL’ set a range of baseline security behaviours and controls for all civil servants to follow on how to process OFFICIAL information securely, wherever it is collected, stored, processed or shared across HMG (electronically, in hardcopy or verbally) and with the wider public sector and external partners. Government departments and other public sector organisations are responsible for ensuring civil servants understand their duties and responsibilities.

Departments have Knowledge and Information Management professionals, and Digital and Data professionals, to help configure access permissions and other protections within their cloud based systems, such as within Microsoft 365.

Microsoft has produced various pieces of guidance for the UK government, in partnership with the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), Government Security Group and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). These have been created to support government organisations that use Microsoft 365. They outline how to configure the Microsoft 365 platform to enable a secure and interoperable experience for civil servants operating at the OFFICIAL tier.

The Generative AI Framework provides general guidance for civil servants using AI tools. The government is, in addition, currently evaluating Microsoft 365 Copilot via a formal experiment, the findings of which will feed into future guidance for civil servants. Training has been supplied centrally to increase the efficacy of Microsoft 365 Copilot alongside material on Civil service Learn on generative AI to raise awareness of benefits, limitations and risks of Generative AI tools, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft's agreement with its Public Sector customers ensures enhanced privacy assurance on Microsoft 365 Copilot, including a commitment that end-user prompts are not used to train external large language models.

There is a commitment in the response to the landscape review to investigate a sustainable source of funding for PSREs who undertake UKRI research funded at less than full economic cost.

Work is in the scoping phase and we are continuing to explore ways to improve the landscape and ease of collaboration across the sector, including for PSREs.

In June 2024, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology published updated guidance on the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), available to all staff via the intranet. The guidance provides a clear framework on the principles of the duty, compliance expectations, and conducting equality impact assessments. Staff were encouraged to use this resource to support their work.

In addition, a PSED training video was included in the Policy Foundation Programme, run on DSIT's behalf by the Integrated Shared Services. The first cohort took place on 18th November 2024.

The budget for the Government Office for Technology Transfer in financial year 2025-26 has not yet been set. Having now reached agreement with HM Treasury on an overall funding envelope for 2025-26, a business planning exercise is progressing to set budgets within the Department and for its supporting agencies and public bodies.

Ofcom reports that a 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speed connection is needed to support video calls and a consistent connection to the internet, and our expectation is that this would support remote working. Most networks in the UK, including those delivered by Project Gigabit, offer much higher performance.

The mobile signal strength thresholds Ofcom set for the Shared Rural Network are based on Ofcom’s assessment of what constitutes “good” mobile coverage which has been in place for several years and which broadly equates to successfully making a 90 second call and getting a download speed of at least 2Mbit/s. Whether this is sufficient to support remote working will depend on a number of factors, including the nature of the work being undertaken and the level of congestion on the network. We have asked Ofcom to keep under review what constitutes good 4G and 5G connectivity.

In response to my letter to their Chief Executive, Ofcom is considering how to incorporate different signal strength thresholds in its reporting on the availability of mobile networks.

Ofcom’s approach to testing compliance is available on Ofcom’s website. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/coverage-and-speeds/cellular-coverage/

It involves a combination of desk-based assessment against the mobile network operators (MNO) coverage predictions and drive testing in a sample of locations across the UK.

Ofcom uses scanners installed in vehicles to capture a range of information including mobile signal strength across the UK’s road network. This provides signal strength measurement samples for each MNO across different regions and terrains. This data is then used for comparison at an aggregated level with the coverage predictions the MNOs supply to Ofcom.

The Shared Rural Network is delivering good 4G outdoor coverage across rural parts of the UK. For 4G networks, Ofcom defines good coverage based on the minimum signal strength required to deliver a 95% probability of making a 90-second telephone call successfully completed, and of getting a download speed of at least 2Mbit/s.

DSIT is committed to increasing diversity in the research workforce. We are supporting the pipeline of diverse talent, for example through the CREST Awards and the UKRI funded STEM Ambassador programme. We are supporting UKRI’s EDI Strategy to ensure that those with the best research ideas can access research funding regardless of their backgrounds.

We are improving understanding of the issues through a second edition of the UK-wide Research and Innovation Workforce Survey in July this year. UKRI also publishes diversity data and commissions high-quality research evidence that informs policy and practice in the R&D system, e.g. through its EDI Caucus.