UK “growth survey” finds support for increased public spending on R&D

The Centre for British Progress think tank has published the results of its 2026 UK Growth Survey, gauging opinion on how the government can best incentivise growth.

The survey is based on responses from only 103 economists and economic policy researchers working in academia and elsewhere, but previous editions have been seen as influential in policy circles despite the small sample size.

As in previous years, planning reform and energy infrastructure are among the main recommendations – but increased government investment in R&D was also widely viewed as a pro-growth policy option, ranked fourth highest by respondents overall.

(This year the think tank also decided to ask the same questions to various large language models to compare their answers to those from human experts. For R&D, Claude Fable 5.1, Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT-6 Astra were almost unanimous in suggesting a more than ten per cent increase in government spending, whereas Grok 4.6 answered in favour of a below ten per cent increase.)

Asked whether the government should invest more in higher education to boost growth, the respondents were more equivocal, with 37 per cent suggesting that spending be reduced, and only 23 per cent in favour of increased investment.

As for the government’s priorities over the coming year should be, the third most popular response was to focus on developing the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor, after planning reform and speeding up nuclear energy generation.

The Centre for British Progress’ most high-profile intervention in the UK research system came in 2024 – under its previous identity as UK Day One – when it published a paper calling for the Research Excellence Framework to be abolished and replaced with a block grant system proportional to external research income.