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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what proportion of the latest round of funding from the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund will be allocated to projects in Scotland; and how much private investment will be leveraged for those projects.

The UK Research Partnership Investment Fund is a competitive research capital programme to support strategic research and development collaborations between universities, businesses and charities. It is managed by Research England, working with counterparts from devolved funding bodies, and only supports large scale infrastructure projects which are built on demonstrable research excellence, value for money, and can generate at least double in private co-investment.

Since 2012 over £900m of science and research capital has been committed from the Fund to 54 projects which have secured an initial commitment of over £2bn in private investment. No projects were awarded to universities in Scotland from the latest round. In the first 5 rounds, £58.98m was committed to 5 projects in Scotland which collectively secured over £121m of private co-investment. This represents 6.5% of total funding allocated and 5.5% of the initial private co-investment.