Where will the £1bn for world-leading clusters come from?
Andy Burnham’s speech to the Innovation Nation Summit earlier this month pledged £1bn through UKRI for world-leading clusters.
Since then, the question of how these funds would be taken from in UKRI’s existing spending review settlement has become a pressing one. MPs from the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee pressed science minister Chris McDonald for further detail at a hearing today.
The minister confirmed that it would come from a “reprioritisation of activity within UKRI” – BIST director general Alexandra Jones then added that the details of how this would be achieved were currently being worked through.
She went on to imply that it would involve thinking about how existing commitments in “bucket two” (government and social priorities) and “bucket three” (innovative companies) could genuinely be directed to world-class clusters. McDonald also said that the £1bn was “clearly” not going to come from discovery research, or bucket one.
The committee was told that the £1bn would be managed centrally by UKRI rather than formally devolved, but would be distributed in collaboration with local areas. Former science minister George Freeman asked whether areas with mayors would have priority, and was told that this would not be the case – the important thing would be to identify which clusters were genuinely nationally and internationally significant. The minister recognised that there would be winners and losers:
“If you’re sat in a place in the country, you may think the thing that you are looking at looks like a nationally or internationally significant cluster, and when you zoom out, it doesn’t.”
On the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund – the expedited devolution of which was another commitment in Burnham’s speech – the committee was keen to explore to what extent this would be ringfenced for innovation, or whether mayors would be able to spend it on other priorities instead.
Jones said that discussions about mechanisms were ongoing, but the intention was that it would be ringfenced:
“Those are exactly the conversations we’re having about how do we ensure that local areas are able to invest in innovation in a way that’s complementary to the things they’re doing on transport and the things they’re doing on housing. But we ensure that money is invested in innovation. That’s an ongoing conversation about the precise way we do that.”
The earlier part of the hearing saw McDonald and other government representatives probed on the rationale for abolishing the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The science minister argued that the recent machinery of government changes would address a “long-standing issue in the British science and innovation space,” namely the application and commercialisation of research.
MPs also asked to what extent the new department’s budget would be trimmed to fund defence spending commitments, as business secretary Jonathan Reynolds intimated last week. Alexandra Jones said that the machinery of government changes had not changed the R&D budget nor how UKRI’s funding was allocated – but recognised that “all departments are contributing towards defence, and we’re working through the details of that.”