Liverpool mayor writes to Andy Burnham over Daresbury cuts
Liverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotheram – a close ally of Andy Burnham – has written to the Prime Minister along with the chair of Cheshire and Warrington combined authority Louise Gittins concerning the future of Daresbury Laboratory.
The letter warns that the laboratory “continues to face closure” and that such an event would have “major negative consequences for the wider North West science and innovation ecosystem.”
This follows the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) budget reprioritisation, which included a reduction in spending on accelerator and technology support by £8m each year – including mothballing the CLARA facility at Daresbury – and a reduction on compute spending by £10m a year, which will also affect the laboratory’s budget.
Local Labour MP Andrew Cooper recently raised the impact of STFC cuts on Daresbury, suggesting that UKRI was favouring facilities in the south of England over the north. The letter from Steve Rotheram and Louise Gittins does not go that far, but does highlight northwest England’s share of R&D spend:
“Our region already receives a relatively small share of public research and development investment compared with the size of our economy, the strength of our universities and industries, and the enormous potential we have to contribute more to national growth.”
The Prime Minister is asked to pause the proposed STFC changes and undertake a “thorough assessment of their economic and regional impact, with meaningful input from the places and organisations affected.”
Mayors elsewhere
Last week also saw other regional leaders share their views on devolution and innovation with the Commons business committee, as part of the committee’s scrutiny of the industrial strategy.
York and North Yorkshire mayor David Skaith told the committee that support for innovative businesses was currently “slightly fragmented”:
“If you look at the Innovate UK support as an example, there is a lot of great support there around the early stage of business development and that start-up type element. However, we are finding that a lot of that then drops off quite quickly before it becomes a very commercialised element.”
However, he added that the issue is “not necessarily always about devolving more funding,” but more generally about making sure that levers are available to support innovative firms throughout their lifecycle, rather than just the start-up phase.
West Midlands mayor Richard Parker, however, argued that there was a good case for programmes like DRIVE35 to be devolved to the regional level, saying that the model was “too narrow” and that money was not being spent. He suggested that Jaguar Land Rover would be pushing the Treasury to reform the automotive sector innovation support programme.
In a subsequent session with BIST ministers, the committee asked about trade-offs between industrial strategy and the principle of “devolution by default”. Industrial strategy minister Blair McDougall argued that the government needed to have a “national view” of certain sectors – such as automotive – but that funding could be devolved within that model.
Kalada Bruce-Jaja, the civil servant within BIST leading on the industrial sector, highlighted the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund as an example of how R&D funding can be effectively devolved.
Committee chair Liam Byrne suggested that essentially what the government was saying was that processes to devolve innovation funding were already in place. In reply, McDougall confirmed that the department was committed to further devolution of late-stage innovation funding, and was currently “studying” the issue. He promised to update the committee in writing on how that might work.