Innovation and Research: Employment
(asked on 8th February 2023) - View Source
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, with reference to the ONS dataset on Business Enterprise Research and Development UK: 2021, published on 22 November 2022, what assessment he has made of the consequences for his policies of trends in research and development employment in the Services and Other product group; and if he will provide a further breakdown of research and development employment within this product group.
Table 5 of the ONS BERD release included figures for R&D employment in UK businesses by broad product group. This included the following estimates:
| 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 |
Services and Other (non-manufacturing): Total R&D employment | 417,000 | 437,000 | 451,000 | 554,000 |
Separately, Table 3 breaks down expenditure on Services R&D into seven product group
and Other R&D into four product groups; it is likely that patterns of employment within each group over time are correlated with patterns of expenditure. The ONS figures provide the current best estimate of R&D at the total UK level which have been validated against other available data. However, there is less data for validation and increased uncertainty in the estimates below the total BERD figures. The Government looks forward to further improvements from the ONS in how the BERD statistics are compiled in future releases.