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.

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.