Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether he has made an estimate of the value of early-phase research to the UK economy in the last 12 months.

The Industrial Strategy White Paper sets out the central role of science in meeting the UK’s productivity challenge.

We get a high rate of return for our investment in Science – 20% per annum in perpetuity - and the UK research base is highly productive in terms of article and citation outputs per researcher and per pound spent on R&D. With only 0.9% of the global population, 4.1% of researchers, the UK accounts for 6.3% of research articles, 10.7% of citations and 15.2% of the most highly-cited research articles.

The UK has the largest independent multi-year rolling programme for evaluating the quality and impact of our investment in science through the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The 2014 REF, which reported in 2015, found that the quality of research from UK universities has improved significantly since 2008, consistent with other independent evidence. Just over three quarters of submissions were either ‘World Class’ or ‘Internationally Excellent’. Preparations for the next REF due in 2021 have already started.