Research and Development Funding

Chris Skidmore Excerpts

Wednesday 17th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con) [V]]

I begin by putting on record my thanks to the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) for having secured today’s important debate. I am also delighted that it comes a day after the Prime Minister announced in the integrated review the Government’s renewed commitment to spend 2.4% of GDP on R&D by 2027. It is a familiar figure, which I know the R&D policy community has spent a long time debating.

I was a Science Minister for two years and set out my own road map to 2.4%. I made a series of four speeches that looked at the importance of investing in people, in international partnerships, in private R&D investment and in emerging technologies in order to meet the target. The broad theme of those speeches—the hon. Gentleman rightly referred to this—was the importance of doubling not only public but private investment and seeking an entire change in the culture of how we do R&D in this country in order to hit 2.4%, given that other countries are now racing ahead of us. Germany is near 3%, South Korea is at 4.5% and Israel is at 4.9%. We will fall behind in the global race unless we raise our ambitions higher still.

I stand by the words of those speeches that I made in 2019, but what has changed since then is time: we have too few years to achieve 2.4%. As the hon. Gentleman stated, we are standing still at 1.8% of GDP being spent on R&D. There are just 2,115 days until 2027. We have only 302 weeks—or just a little over 50,000 hours—to go, if we are to reach that target.

Reaching the target is not just about investment, important though that is—I will talk about that in a moment. It is also about providing certainty for the future; and with certainty comes the need for advance planning in order to allow for the lead-in times, which are lengthy for R&D investment. That is why, when we were preparing to leave the European Union, the Government announced the underwrite in August 2016 and then the underwrite extension—the guarantee—so that in-flight applications to Horizon 2020 and projects already taking place in Horizon 2020, would still receive money for the duration of the projects. Communication is absolutely vital when it comes to demonstrating long-term certainty for the R&D community.

On certainty and commitment, there were big-ticket items that I needed to fight for as the Science Minister, one of those was association into Horizon Europe in order to ensure that British science stayed on the road. That was why I also worked hard to commit to an increase in the UK contribution to the European Space Agency, increasing the subscription to a record level in 2019, and also to secure the first real-terms increase in QR—quality-related research funding—for more than a decade. Those were essential big-ticket items that we needed in order to enhance stability for the sector.

When it came to Horizon, many people told me that that simply would not be possible to do. I think that sometimes the R&D policy community can see things in a bit of a glass-half-empty way, mourning for yesteryear, when what we really need is to work together towards a positive vision for the future.

The manifesto commitment made by the Government saw R&D investment publicly increase from £9 billion to £19 billion. That was a huge amount—one of the most significant increases in a generation. Since then, the Chancellor’s Budget last year increased the investment to £22 billion, so my assumption was that the Horizon subscription would come from that increase of £3 billion—the difference in what was being spent as a result of the Budget.

I recognise that we have difficulties over the current ODA R&D money that needs to be secured. Although we need certainty, it is right that we now look afresh at new structures and new funds in order to ensure that we can enhance our international research capabilities. I think that sometimes the global challenges research fund and the Newton fund were a square peg to fit a round hole when it came to justifying ODA spend—not necessarily when it came to actually fighting for what is right when it comes to R&D spend. I would look at the agility fund and the discovery fund set out in the Smith and Reid review for answers here.

On funding in general, however, we need to move away from the diverse plethora of pots—there are too many people competing for too small budgets—and replace them with the UK equivalent of Horizon Europe. A multi-annual framework for the R&D budget would help us to reach 2.4% by 2027.