Jonathan Reynolds: some of the R&D budget could be spent “in a better way” at the local level
Last week business secretary Jonathan Reynolds hinted to Parliament that some of what had been DSIT’s budget would need to be reprofiled for defence spending. This week, MPs were keen to find out what the new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Technology’s budget actually was, following machinery of government changes – and how much of it might end up being devolved.
At a scrutiny session with the Commons business committee – the select committee for Reynolds’ newly enlarged department – the Secretary of State said that details of the department’s budget were still not fully settled following machinery of government changes, but that it would be in the order of £17bn (including UKRI).
Asked what proportion of that funding might end up being devolved when the Rewiring the State white paper is published, Reynolds declined to hazard a prediction. But he said that he definitely thought some part of the R&D budget could be spent at a local level “in a better way.”
Committee chair Liam Byrne began the hearing by asking whether the absorption of research and innovation technology into BIST would be an opportunity to better align science and technology spending with the industrial strategy. Reynolds intimated that in his opinion both DSIT and UKRI had responded well to the industrial strategy even before the departmental reshuffle, and that UKRI’s industrial strategy-aligned buckets two and three represented a sensible configuration of R&D allocations:
“The spend split for UKRI’s budget, which is broadly a third on what we might call curiosity, knowledge-led research, and two-thirds more applied to the priorities of the industrial strategy… I think that is right.”
Saying that the industrial strategy would be used by government as a “tool for reindustrialisation”, he also committed to putting the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council on a statutory footing, established in legislation, when parliamentary time allowed.
The business secretary also highlighted that one of his new department’s four objectives would be to put science, innovation and technology at the heart of growth – and that BIST was “ideally placed” to ensure that the economic benefits of brilliant ideas were retained in the UK.