What Government support is available for research and innovation?

Anne Barrett looks at how the Government is communicating its support for research and innovation

As a science policy intern, I have spent a lot of time over the last three months getting to grips with the Government’s recent commitments to research and innovation. It certainly seems as though the Government is making a lot of noise about maintaining the UK’s position as a global research and innovation leader.

In 2017 the Prime Minister announced the goal to increase total investment in R&D to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. This R&D investment contains both public and private investment. Given that the R&D investment has been 1.7% of GDP for the past few years, reaching this target will involve pumping huge sums into the scientific community, providing huge opportunity. When the Industrial Strategy was published, the Government reiterated their commitment to research and innovation by adding the target of investment in R&D reaching 3% of GDP in the long term.

Private investment will be key to reaching these targets, in 2016 this was more than double public investment. The Government needs to illustrate why the UK is an attractive place to invest in R&D. A number of different mechanisms already exist to support research and innovation. On top of direct financial support these include tax relief, networking and partnership opportunities, and market access advice, among others.

Whilst much is being done to support those across the academic, industry and business landscapes in their research and innovation, the Government could do a lot more to communicate the support available. This was a point that came up in recent CaSE roundtables with HM Treasury and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. Details of available support exist in disparate web pages across Government websites that don’t link to each other. Unless you know what you are looking for a lot will be missed. It is not enough to just create these support mechanisms; the researchers, innovators and businesses they are meant for need to know about them, and be able to navigate the full spectrum of support easily. An R&D-intensive business interested in starting up, growing or investing in the UK should be able to clearly find what the UK has to offer. This information should be easily available, it shouldn’t require hours on Google or the recommendation of a scheme from a peer.

CaSE believes that the Government should create a digital ‘shop window’ that showcases in one place the many different incentives, funding, and initiatives for UK research and innovation support. This is not just a communications challenge, but also should spur functional improvement and join up across different parts of national and local government systems, messages, portals and opportunities. This one link could then be easily shared to direct people to the array of support available.

To illustrate the point, below is a table of web pages with details of Government support for research and innovation. These were pulled together with some existing knowledge and a few hours on Google, but this is most likely just a small selection of those in the Government ether. If you know of any more tweet @sciencecampaign to let us know!

Anne Barrett is a final year PhD student at the University of Manchester. She has taken time out from her PhD to do a three-month policy internship at the Academy of Medical Sciences.