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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, pursuant to the Answer of 14 December 2020 to Question 124750 on Research: Finance, what the evidential basis is for the statement that £1 of public investment in R&D eventually leverages around £2 of additional private sector investment; and what the time period is of that evidence.

BEIS published “The relationship between public and private R&D funding” (BEIS Research Paper Number 2020/010) on 1 July 2020 at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/research-and-development-relationship-between-public-and-private-funding carried out by Oxford Economics Ltd

They estimated the monetary impact of the long-run leverage rate, suggesting that each £1 of public R&D eventually stimulates between £1.96 and £2.34 of private R&D

The study drew on OECD data for 41 countries from 1961 to 2017 with varying degrees of completeness