Research and innovation (R&I) investment will be essential to delivering economic growth.
Reassuringly, this is accepted by both the government and the opposition.
How such investment should be delivered, where the priorities should lay, and what might be done differently are yet to be clarified. Here are some requests for the next government.
A lack of long-term investment and planning in R&I, alongside reliance on cross-subsidisation from international student fees, means that we can no longer take universities’ R&I activities for granted. Without changes to our research funding system the UK is at risk of losing its strategic and economic edge. We need security of funding and more strategic use of existing funds.
Following planned increases in R&I funding to £20bn per year by 2024-25, a commitment to continuing to increase the proportion of GDP allocated to R&I is needed. Universities UK’s recently launched manifesto, Opportunity and Growth, called for an R&I commitment to match the most innovative and competitive economies around the world. To stall would lack ambition; the US R&I investment is already around 3.5 per cent of GDP. We also need to provide stability, by allocating R&I funding in 10-year funding cycles; this increased certainty would help secure private investment.
