Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with reference to the keynote speech made by the Minister for Science, Research and Innovation at Onward UK on 11 January 2023, which post-Brexit freedoms in procurement and regulation he plans to use to grow innovation clusters and support research and development.
Answered by George Freeman
Leaving the EU gives us the opportunity to create our own regulations that can help to drive transparency, prosperity and growth. The Government’s Procurement Bill takes up that opportunity to create the flexibility to facilitate public sector buyers procuring innovative new products and services. In addition to this the third round of the Regulators' Pioneer fund is funding projects that will help to keep the UK at the forefront of regulation and support R&D.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with reference to the keynote speech made by the Minister for Science, Research and Innovation at Onward UK on 11 January 2023, when the Government plans to publish details of an alternative to Horizon UK.
Answered by George Freeman
If the UK does not associate to Horizon Europe, the Government will be ready with a comprehensive alternative, including a suite of transitional measures and longer-term programmes, funded from the budget set aside for association to European programmes.
As stated in my speech at Onward UK on 11 Jan 2023, these programmes will enable the UK to meet its global Science Superpower and Innovation Nation ambitions. Details of the transitional measures have already been published, and the Department will publish more detailed proposals on the longer-term programmes in due course.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how many Scientific Institutes his Department funds; and if he will list them.
Answered by George Freeman
BEIS directly funds or has contracts with a number of Scientific Institutes such as: National Physical Laboratory, Laboratory of the Government Chemist, National Engineering Laboratory, Met Office, UK Atomic Energy Authority and the National Nuclear Laboratory.
UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) also directly funds a number of research institutes, a list of which can be found here: https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/before-you-apply/check-if-you-are-eligible-for-research-and-innovation-funding/eligible-research-institutes/. Public funding for R&D via UKRI also supports higher education providers to establish their own research institutes which generally operate independently from government.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, for what reasons (a) ARIA can and (b) Rosaline Franklin Institute cannot carry forward funding across financial years.
Answered by George Freeman
Funding arrangements for public bodies are set based on the operational strategy and objectives of each organisation.
The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) has been established to exclusively focus on projects with potential to produce transformative technological change, or a paradigm-shift in an area of science. To achieve these objectives, ARIA has been designed to operate with unique financial flexibility and operational freedom.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with reference to the keynote speech made by the Minister for Science, Research and Innovation at Onward UK on 11 Jan 2023, what steps he plans to take to make clusters referenced test beds.
Answered by George Freeman
The third round of the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund (RPF) will invest £12m in projects which encourage experimentation and innovation in regulation. For example, Milton Keynes City Council is using RPF funding to prove, test, trial and demonstrate new drone-based services that operate alongside robotics delivery services and self-driving passenger shuttles. The project plans to establish a testbed to allow ongoing experimentation and create a blueprint for wider adoption and deployment. Officials are looking at a number of such areas where we may have potential to scale-up innovative regulatory testbeds. RPF-funded projects will help to keep the UK at the forefront of regulation through testbeds and other forms of regulatory innovation.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with reference to the keynote speech made by the Minister for Science, Research and Innovation at Onward UK on 11 January 2023, whether his Department plans to announce a stretch target for R&D as a proportion of GDP.
Answered by George Freeman
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is an independent body, and this update is part of a wider programme of work to improve economic statistics. Its 22 November 2022 release estimated that £59.7bn was invested in UK R&D in 2019, increasing to £61.8bn in 2020. The ONS has not published estimate of R&D as a percentage of GDP. This is because they have not yet incorporated the improvements to the measurement of R&D in the business and higher education sectors into the calculations of GDP.
BEIS understands the complexity and time required in feeding the updated R&D changes through to GDP as part of National Accounts and looks forward to this calculation in due course. If the ONS had made the calculation, BEIS believes it would have produced a figure between 2.6% and 2.7% of GDP for 2019 and between 2.9% and 3.0% for 2020.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether his Department has taken recent steps to (a) support and (b) increase horizontal innovation between publicly funded organisations and institutions.
Answered by George Freeman
The new Government Office for Technology Transfer, located within BEIS, has been working with number of public sector bodies to unlock the potential of public sector knowledge assets that will deliver value to the UK economy and society.
The Government’s commitment to increasing public expenditure on R&D to £20 billion per annum by 2024/2025 will help to build on the vibrant mix of publicly funded institutions which work closely together to drive innovation.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with reference to the speech by the Minister for Science, Research and Innovation on 11 January 2023 entitled Science Superpower: the UK’s Global Science Strategy beyond Horizon Europe, for what reasons his Department estimates that 2.8 per cent of the economy was spent on research and development; what year this estimate was for; and if he will make a statement.
Answered by George Freeman
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is an independent body, and this update is part of a wider programme of work to improve economic statistics. Its 22 November 2022 release estimated that £59.7bn was invested in UK R&D in 2019, increasing to £61.8bn in 2020. The ONS has not published estimate of R&D as a percentage of GDP. This is because they have not yet incorporated the improvements to the measurement of R&D in the business and higher education sectors into the calculations of GDP.
BEIS understands the complexity and time required in feeding the updated R&D changes through to GDP as part of National Accounts and looks forward to this calculation in due course. If the ONS had made the calculation, BEIS believes it would have produced a figure between 2.6% and 2.7% of GDP for 2019 and between 2.9% and 3.0% for 2020.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with reference to the keynote speech made by the Minister for Science, Research and Innovation at Onward UK on 11 January 2023, where the 30 clusters of unique R&D strength are; and if his Department will publish the location and specialist strength of those clusters.
Answered by George Freeman
There are clusters of innovation across the UK, from the Newcastle digital cluster to the compound semiconductor cluster in South Wales. BEIS is working closely with other departments and partner organisations such as UKRI to map these and ensure we have as rigorously evidenced and current a list as possible. This includes commissioning research that will use innovative data science techniques to map firms performing R&D and innovation in the UK and explain how they cluster. We will publish this in a report and interactive tool later this year, which will help investors understand opportunities to support our strengths.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether his Department is taking steps to help prevent intellectual property (a) theft and (b) infringement by (i) artificial intelligence and (ii) other products and software with machine learning capabilities.
Answered by George Freeman
The Government takes the infringement of intellectual property rights seriously, and as the lead agency the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) recognises the importance of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning both for their potential infringing uses, as well as the tools they may provide to assist in the enforcement of IP rights.
To better understand this emerging area of technology, the IPO has commissioned and will shortly publish a report examining whether and how AI can be used to track and trace Intellectual Property infringing goods, as well as assessing the resulting money flows and the potential use of AI by those infringing IPR.