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 conducted an economic assessment of the value of early-phase research including the inward investment generated by early phase trials; and if he will make a statement.

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

The UK economy gets a high rate of return for our investment in Science – 20% per annum in perpetuity. 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.