Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Innovation, growth and the regions, HC 538
Tuesday 10 June 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 10 June 2025.
Members present: Chi Onwurah (Chair); Emily Darlington; George Freeman; Dr Allison Gardner; Kit Malthouse; Steve Race; Dr Lauren Sullivan; Adam Thompson; Martin Wrigley.
Questions 275 - 388
Witnesses
I: Professor Dame Jessica Corner, Executive Chair, Research England, UK Research and Innovation; and Dean Cook, Executive Director, Place and Global, Innovate UK, UK Research and Innovation.
II: The Lord Vallance of Balham KCB, Minister for Science, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology; Holly Yates, Director for Science, Research and Innovation, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology; and Oliver St John, Deputy Director of Innovation Ecosystem, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Professor Dame Jessica Corner and Dean Cook.
Q275 Chair: Welcome to our final session in the Select Committee’s inquiry into the regions, innovation and growth. I am very pleased to welcome representatives from Research England and Innovate UK today. I ask each of you to introduce yourself as you answer my first question.
As part of our inquiry, we have heard evidence from researchers, from academics, from businesspeople, from universities, from local authorities and from regional leaders. Yesterday, I was at Manchester Metropolitan University with the Engineering Professors Council, and last week, I was in Oxford. There was general consensus that we need to do more to capitalise on the innovation potential of our regions and thus contribute to growth, the Government’s No. 1 mission. Can you tell me whether you agree with that, and what you are doing to achieve it?
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: Thank you very much. I am Jessica Corner, executive chair of Research England, one of the nine councils of UKRI, which funds all universities in England to do all the various things that they do in research and innovation. For the purposes of today, I also lead on the UKRI investment strategy for places.
In relation to your question, yes, I very much agree that it is a really important agenda. We think about how we are looking to support growth across the whole of the UK—in all parts of the UK—and all the different elements of how we should take that agenda forward. It is obviously a complex matter needing many different interventions from all sorts of parties, not just from the research funding agency. It is a long-term job, something that we need to do for the long term; it is not something that we can just make happen tomorrow.
As you say, when visiting universities, which I do all the time as well, it is extraordinary how they are poised to act in this space in a very important way. I am sure that my colleague, Dean, will talk about the business side of it.
Q276 Chair: Before I pass on to Dean Cook, if you will forgive me, you say it is a long-term job, but it is also a job that we have been trying to do for a long time. I have two questions. What are you doing specifically to address the disparities in innovation growth across the regions? Do you think there is some kind of trade-off between having a high impact innovation system and supporting a regional innovation system? Do you measure specifically? Research England funds REFs and KEFs. There are a number of programmes. Do you specifically measure how that funding is regionally distributed?
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: Yes. It is a very important question. Over the last two-plus years, UKRI has been looking in particular at how our funding is distributed because of that very question. There is a relationship between research and development and innovation funding and activity on the ground. How our funding is distributed is an important component of that.
In the past, yes, it was heavily focused on the golden triangle, or the greater south-east, as it was measured. We very proactively looked at how we could think about assisting the wider distribution of that funding. Over the last three years, the spending review period that has just come to an end, we worked to develop a better way of accounting for that spend. It was very difficult to know definitively where it went and whether we had a baseline by which to measure that. We have done a lot of work to develop a very good baseline that we can now use, and we have three years’ worth of data based on that. It tells us that funding has shifted, actually, from the traditional architecture to outside the greater south-east. In 2021, 47% of funding was going outside the greater south-east; in 2022-23 that had changed to 50%.
We are beginning to see a shift. That comes from a number of different ways of working on the agenda through dedicated programmes, which we will no doubt talk about. They are designed to look at how you can develop innovation and growth in a place context. It also comes through the various means by which we distribute our usual funding, to be more conscious of the fact that where that funding goes is quite important and that we should think about that while we are making our competitive funding work. There is a long-term agenda about where you put facilities, where you build up talent and how you do that in the long term. We also need to think about that. It is a kind of capacity-building approach.
Q277 Chair: I am sure we will have further questions for more detail on the specifics of the programme, but I am interested to hear that you have data on how the funding is distributed. We have not been able to find that for the different programmes, so I expect you will share that with us.
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: Absolutely. It is published, so we can absolutely share it. If anything else would be useful, we can look to see what we can do.
Q278 Chair: Thank you. Dean Cook, may I put the same question to you?
Dean Cook: It is a pleasure to be here, Committee. I am Dean Cook, the executive director of place and global at Innovate UK. All our support to regions and nations sits with my teams and our international programmes.
I have been very hands-on involved in the design, implementation and leadership of our cluster support programmes. By background, I am a biologist and bio-scientist, and always at the interface of industry, science and policy. The place agenda is quite personal to me. As a young Government scientist in my mid-20s I was relocated to North Yorkshire to be part of a bio-science cluster. It has a lot of resonance with me as an individual.
In terms of what we have been doing, our funding outside the greater south-east has typically sat around the 60% of our total budget mark. There have been years when it was slightly under and years when it was slightly over. In the last Parliament spending review period we worked really hard to increase that. At last year of analysis, that funding is now at 67% outside the greater south-east. To put it in context, in ONS data—whether you are looking at measures such as business expenditure on R&D or the number of businesses claiming tax credit as a proxy—about 40% of innovation-active businesses sit outside the greater south-east. On how well we are doing, you could argue that we are probably doing very well to move the needle of the investment.
How have we been doing that? I am sure you have questions to ask around some of the cluster support programmes that we have been delivering. For Innovate, that has been working with Research England on Strength in Places, the recent innovation accelerator pilot, our launchpads. More importantly, it is about how we have been building deep relationships with places. We have launched nine local action plans in places all across the UK—I have an example of one here, for the Tees Valley—and there are more to come. That is really important in joining up the triple helix of local leadership and national leadership from a public sector perspective, business base and universities.
The key message is that if we want to drive more investment outside the greater south-east, we need to get more businesses to innovate. That is where we have been working in partnership with local leadership to join up our support. Innovate provides the business support that is there locally and makes sure that we collectively support businesses on that journey.
Q279 Chair: Thank you. I have the same question to you. Do you measure how much of each of your programmes, or calls, goes to regions outside the greater south-east?
Dean Cook: We have the data to analyse it. We tend to do that on a case-by-case basis. Of course, we have the usual evaluations where we look at various aspects, including the place dimension.
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: Do you have a whole portfolio analysis?
Dean Cook: No, we don’t, not to hand, but we have the data to make the analysis, if that makes sense.
Q280 Chair: Yes. We look forward to working with you perhaps to determine what analysis would be most useful to us. What you are saying to us is that you feel you are providing greater support to regions than is reflected in the number of innovation-active businesses in those regions. We have heard about the challenges for businesses of applying for Innovate UK grants. We have also heard some very good recommendations about it. Do you take action to give greater support to businesses in the regions in applying for those grants?
Dean Cook: Yes. We have our network of over 400 business growth advisers who are regionally located and connected to growth hubs and other local actors. There is on-the-ground regional support for businesses applying for our programmes. It is not just about how we support the businesses to understand the opportunity. It is also about how we simplify how we do business. When Tom was before the Committee, he talked about the simplification agenda that he is leading in Innovate UK. We are doing all we can to make the whole system more agile and easier to navigate.
Q281 Martin Wrigley: Very briefly on that topic, I was talking to my local Federation of Small Businesses representative yesterday. She was comparing the resources available in the Devon growth hub and for the Devon business growth advisers to where she previously was, in Manchester. It was chalk and cheese. If that is the route that you are taking, how do you address that difference in those resources? If I have it right, I think she was saying there was one business growth adviser for Devon—just one.
Dean Cook: In the local growth hub?
Martin Wrigley: Yes, just one. For Devon, just one.
Dean Cook: You make a very good point, but we should recognise that the growth hubs are not the single source of support to businesses in a local area. We also work with the university base, which has well-established tech transfer offices and support services as well.
Chair: We would be interested in seeing the numbers for the growth hubs and support across the country. I assume it is public, but I cannot say how many there are in the north-east. Martin knows how many are in Devon.
Martin Wrigley: There’s only one.
Q282 Adam Thompson: Good morning, both. It is good to see you. I have a couple of questions for Dean. You just mentioned that Tom recently took over at Innovate UK. We spoke to Tom recently on the Committee. Whenever you get a change in leadership, there is always a change of direction in some way. How are you ensuring that under-represented regions will be fully considered as we move through this programme change?
Dean Cook: How we support places will be baked into how we lay down the new strategy. Tom has only just finished his seventh week.
Q283 Chair: He told us he would hit the ground running.
Dean Cook: He certainly has. One of his priorities has been to get round all the Catapult centres. As you know, they have a very strong regional footprint across the UK. In that tour, he has visited 12 cities to date. As he goes out visiting the Catapults, he is also getting a really good feel for local capabilities. The action plans that I referred to are in a firm commitment we have in the English devolution White Paper, and will be a firm strand of our forward strategy when we publish it later this year.
Q284 Adam Thompson: One of the things Tom raised with us was that one of his priorities was reducing the amount of bureaucracy that a lot of the firms applying for Innovate grants have to go through. In your opinion, what is a reasonable amount of bureaucracy for these firms to go through versus what we should be getting rid of?
Dean Cook: Absolutely. As you are aware, at the end of the day we are custodians of public money. We have a duty to the taxpayer to make sure we do things like due diligence to prevent fraud or to make sure that we comply with things like the subsidy control regime. We are doing all we can to streamline things.
Tom comes to an organisation where there has already been an overhaul of our operations. In the last two years, we have reduced our cycle times from initiating the competition to making the funding by about 32%. There is now embedded a regime of continuous improvement. There is lots for Tom to build on, but it is one of his key objectives for the organisation.
Q285 Adam Thompson: What is he doing, and what are you doing, working directly with the innovators, to understand the current failings in the system and to move forward to a new, correct level of bureaucracy, as it were?
Dean Cook: We are always listening to our innovators. We continuously get feedback on our systems, and we run roundtables. You will be aware that last year we did a lot on how we support female founders. We went out and did a lot of consultation around that. It is a continual process.
Adam Thompson: Thanks, Dean.
Q286 Steve Race: We talk about bureaucracy, but bureaucracy in service of what? Some of the criticism we have heard previously is that Innovate UK is meant to be very fast and to support probably riskier businesses on the edge of invention and research, bringing that research forward and making sure it is commercialised in the future and innovated.
What is the point of Innovate UK from your perspective, and what is it going to be in the future? Some people said that it is now very slow moving and is like any other grant-funding organisation and not worth engaging with, and that they would rather go elsewhere. That is opposed to what Innovate UK was supposed to be, which was to be much faster moving and supportive of the sorts of really interesting new areas where we want to be at the forefront in the UK.
Dean Cook: That is a great question. Innovate UK was the Technology Strategy Board when I joined 11 years ago. It was a very different organisation. It was smaller, leaner and more agile. We have grown considerably over the last 10 or 11 years. One of Tom’s priorities as we go into our strategy refresh is to look at the breadth of what we do, and to focus on the programmes of greatest impact. We are now entering the phase where we have grown up as an organisation. We have gone from start-up to a medium/large business, but we now need to have a look at how we focus on the path ahead.
The other thing I want to say is that we are engaged in the Government agenda to do more to get businesses to scale faster and easier. We are looking at how we use our business networks, and at how we work with others, such as British Business Bank, to have more of a concierge service around those businesses, so that we can wrap our arms around the businesses of highest potential and take them to the right support when they need it. You will see that in May we launched our business catalyst pilot, which is an illustration of how we are moving forward with our products and services.
Q287 Adam Thompson: I have one more question. When Tom was here, he told us about the lack of impact metrics that Innovate uses, and broadly about concerns with transparency in places. Why doesn’t Innovate at present communicate exactly how it measures impact and how it allocates money?
Dean Cook: The answer to that is that we have to get better at how we communicate. As with all large Government programmes, all our programmes go through formal evaluations. Part of the problem is that there is always a lag. Innovation is a long-term game. It takes several years to see those impacts flow through. We have evaluation data that we publish, and we recently introduced our impact metrics framework so that we track the emerging impacts from our programmes in real time. To your point, we have to get better at communicating that.
Q288 Adam Thompson: Thank you, Dean. This is the final question from me. On that latter point about your new impact metrics, when do you envisage being able to publish that information?
Dean Cook: At programme level, we have that available in real time. Back to my answer, we just have to get better at communicating that and being transparent with that.
Q289 Chair: The information is available in real time, but are you saying that it is not easily visualised?
Dean Cook: I will give you an example. There is a caveat, which is that when you look at impact metrics in real time, it is emerging data. That data always needs validating in a proper Treasury-compliant evaluation. To date in the innovation accelerator programme that we are running, I can tell you now that we have already exceeded the target we set ourselves for private sector co-investment. We have £1.40 for every £1 spent in that programme. We know that we have already delivered at least 250 additional jobs through that intervention. We have that emerging data for all of our programmes, but it is important that when you go big with your communication and publication, it is properly validated data, hence the importance of doing a proper evaluation.
Q290 Chair: But is the data easily accessible? For example, it seems that you are talking about communicating that data, but could I design an app to go on to the Innovate UK website and look at the data in a way that I wanted to, for example? Do you have an open app interface?
Dean Cook: We don’t have an open app data interface to that, but it is a great idea, Chair, and we will take that idea back.
Q291 Dr Sullivan: I want to pick up on some of the things you were saying, Dean. Do you publish any data yearly?
Dean Cook: Everything we fund is transparent and published in real time. We have our data transparency release. It is a huge spreadsheet, and you can look at every funding award going back to 2007. You can interrogate that funding award and filter it by sector focus. It can be interrogated by postcode analysis. That data has always been available.
Q292 Chair: On the availability, we have agreed that you are going to have an app—
Dean Cook: But the point being that our awards have been transparent and available for a long time. The impact data is available when we publish the evaluation.
Q293 Dr Sullivan: Which is? After the end of the project?
Dean Cook: It depends on the programme. To take the innovator accelerator programme as an example, the first evaluation report will be available in 2027. That gives sufficient time for the impacts to work their way through and for them to be properly measurable.
Q294 Dr Sullivan: Interesting. Thank you. It is interesting because we are dealing with prevention and how you measure prevention and impacts. From a council perspective, you have to give it every year. It is just interesting. Thank you for clarifying that.
My next question is to Jessica. It is again on the transparency theme. When are we expecting to see a national spin-out registry available? What impact do you think that will have?
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: That is a great question because we have just launched the first, we think, register of spin-outs in the world. In the last two weeks, we have now launched a register of all spin-outs, going back to 2013, created from universities. Today—it was embargoed until today—the first analysis of the data from that spin-out register is being published. Research England funds a centre in Cambridge, and the register of spin-outs is a national statistic, owned and run by HESA, the Higher Education Statistics Agency[1]. It is a three-way partnership between Research England, the Cambridge Centre for Commercialisation and Innovation and Research England to say, how can we use this data now? It is very exciting. It now tracks 1,600 spin-out companies that have been formed over that period.
As we analyse the data as we go forward and it gets more sophisticated, we are beginning to see what we can do with it. What are the things that happen? What are the outcomes for those spin-out companies? What might have assisted them on the way? What investment is going into them; and what sectors do they come from? It is a really important resource, so today is a very exciting day.
One of the things it tells us, which will be in the report today, is that what has been going on over that time is that spin-out companies were largely generated by the very top research-intensive universities—Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and UCL. What we can see over time is that a wider group of universities are now doing it; there are more being created and they are going on to success. You can see that it is a factor of the R&D investment in those settings. There is a direct relationship between how much R&D investment there is and the spin-out companies that emerge from it. That is not perhaps surprising, other than that the process by which we support them to get established and develop is an important element. We will increasingly understand what is going to make those outcomes. It is an exciting day.
Q295 Dr Sullivan: I think in one of your earlier answers you said at the beginning that you were not sure where the money went, but I may have misheard. We definitely know where the money went.
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: In terms of spin-out companies, do you mean?
Dr Sullivan: Yes.
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: We definitely know where research and development money has gone. We know it well for universities. That is very well tracked. There is then the venture capital investment that those companies secure, which is what they need to do in order to become viable in the future and to generate into the commercial space and become live, proper companies from intellectual property or technologies that have been invented. This register will allow us to track what inputs or resources they secure from those private sources, and where that is coming from. It will begin to give us a really important picture, whereas before we have not had a systematic and comprehensive way of understanding.
Q296 Chair: Can we clarify that? In Lord Jim O’Neill’s review of spin-outs and start-ups that he presented to the Labour party in opposition, he recommended a spin-out dashboard. The Government, in opposition, accepted that recommendation. Is this the dashboard that we have been promised?
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: The next step is the dashboard.
Q297 Chair: The next step?
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: The next step. If you go into it, it is a list of companies by number really. It needs a more sophisticated approach. It is just like the earlier conversation; you have to do something with it to make the insights available to everybody, but that is our plan and we aim to do that. Hopefully, it is not too far away.
Q298 Dr Sullivan: Briefly, on the Research England funding review, you mentioned universities, which are a fantastic powerhouse across the United Kingdom. They are facing a tough time at the moment. How is the burden of reporting back some of these things being reviewed in line with their research objectives?
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: Research England distributes funding to 134 universities through two main mechanisms. One is quality-rated research funding—all the curiosity-driven side—which is unhypothecated. It is a strategic fund that goes to universities, and they determine what they do with it. The burdens of reporting on that are very low, other than that every seven or so years they participate in the research excellence framework. That is a big exercise, but it is only every seven years, and it is for a lot of money that is distributed. It makes sure that we are assessing it and are able to account for public money that way.
Higher education innovation funding, which is about £280 million a year, goes out to 110 universities. They report statistics each year through the higher education business and community interaction survey collected via HESA. We recreate that data into a dashboard of how universities are performing. It is an accountability framework, and the data is returned under that mechanism. If we did not have that we would not be able to track performance. The way we work is relatively light touch, but yes, universities are under pressure. There is no doubt about that.
Q299 Dr Sullivan: Are we going to be looking in this review at how we are not so much getting away from the golden triangle but making sure that we invest in the regions?
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: The strategic review of institutional research funding is looking at the mechanisms by which we fund. In the large £2.4 billion a year that is distributed from Research England, we do it in various strands, some of which are ringfenced to encourage universities to do participatory research with their communities and policy support research. They are quite small sums of money, some of which recognise the amount of PhD student supervision they do. It is a direct count of how much of that activity, and it reflects that. Another bit is around how much charity research is being done by institutions, because there is a low cost recovery on charity funding for research. That helps to top it up a bit. Again, it is a factor of how much they are doing.
We look at all those different strands, including the main bit which is driven by the research excellence framework, and say, “Is that the right way to do it and should we look at it differently?” We have not specifically been asked to look at how it is distributed by region, but we look at that, and we are interested in that. It is part of the geographical spend report that I described at the beginning. We certainly know that after the last research excellence framework in 2021 it increased the distribution of that funding outside the greater south-east, so it has had an input. It accounted for a third of the distribution change effect that I described earlier, but it follows excellence as assessed through that method. We were fortunate over that time to have a rising budget to enable us to distribute it in that way. The question is, what will happen in the next period and how will that go forward?
Q300 Steve Race: Dean, one of your roles is to ensure equitable opportunities for business and innovators across all regions. How do you think you are doing on that?
Dean Cook: You can always do more. There is a good story to tell. As I said, the important thing is that we increase the absorptive capacity of the business base in a place to leverage the excellence that we have in the universities. We need to have more innovators wanting to innovate. They also need to be aware of the opportunity for support and the right time to come to the support. One of the programmes we have run over the last seven or eight years has been our Innovate Local programme, which is where we take a roadshow of the support from Innovate UK with some of the advisers and run surgeries. We run that in partnership with the place and the place leadership. We put that alongside the local business support that is also available. There is communication and awareness raising and then programmes like the launchpad programme.
What you do not want to do is lower the bar. If we are to get impact from what we fund, we need to make sure that there is still a degree of national competition. With the launchpad programme we take a package of our products and our services to a place for the benefit of the businesses in that place. You have a cohort of local businesses competing with each other. You are lowering the bar, giving them experience of applying for funding, with the intent of having more of those businesses coming into our national programmes. In the launchpad programmes that we have run over the last couple of years, 50% of the businesses that applied were new to Innovate UK. What we are doing is opening a funnel of businesses at local level applying for our funding.
I spoke earlier about the need to support more of those businesses to growth. Through our local business growth advisers we support about 10,000 businesses, with about 6,000 of them earmarked as high potential growth companies. You are then taking them up through national support. I hope that makes sense.
Q301 Steve Race: We have had various people from across the country before the Committee over the course of this inquiry. There is still a general sense that there is a big inequality in where you operate. It still feels to a lot of people that a lot of money and a lot of opportunities are still in the golden triangle of London and the south-east.
Dean Cook: Yes.
Q302 Chair: You talk about lowering the bar when you go to the regions. Just to make it clear, you do not see it as reflecting regional strengths and opportunities. Your language betrays a national bias, I would say.
Dean Cook: I will come on to that, because I think it is all about perception. We have data on success rates region to region, and in the last year of analysis the average success rate is 23%. Most places in the UK cluster around 23%.
Q303 Steve Race: Success rate for what?
Dean Cook: Just general: an average success rate in terms of applying and being able to—
Q304 Steve Race: Applying to you and getting a funding grant.
Dean Cook: Exactly. London and the greater south-east consistently come out—there is always a tail to the data—as lowest success rates. Places like Northern Ireland and West Midlands always come out highest. The data tells you that there is no bias in the system against regions outside the greater south-east.
Martin Wrigley: That is a false statement. You are confusing the number of people applying and the success rate, and unless you have both you cannot make that statement.
Q305 Chair: Together with how much money is being spent in the different programmes. We would push back on the categorical statement that there is no bias in the system.
This is London Tech Week. Innovate UK is a partner in that. How many other tech weeks do you run, around the country?
Dean Cook: We support the various venturefests around the country. We always support Birmingham Tech Week and the Scotland CAN DO event.
Q306 Chair: There are a couple.
Dean Cook: Yes.
Q307 Emily Darlington: I appreciate we skipped over the Catapult, but I want to bring it into the discussion, because there is an interesting distribution of Catapults and we have had a lot of discussion in the Committee about different ones and their strengths. When we heard about the Fraunhofers, they were always associated with the university, but in advanced manufacturing, or the Catapults based in Milton Keynes, they are not necessarily anchored by institutions. Do you see a role for the Catapults in driving that kind of exploitation of innovation in regions whose local institutions may not necessarily have the research strengths? Is that something you are looking at in terms of the Catapults and pushing innovation out to the regions? Do you see a role for Catapults in that?
Dean Cook: Absolutely. There are two ways of looking at that. One is that, where we have Catapults located in business clusters, we need, without diluting their national mission, to make sure that they provide as much support as possible to anchor the business clusters. Where we don’t have a Catapult in a region, we are working to look at ways to make the network more accessible to SMEs, wherever they sit across the UK. In some instances, we have initiatives where we set up Catapult offices as points of entry to the network support. I was in Northern Ireland recently, where the digital Catapult has an office presence. It has just expanded that out through a new digital twin. That not only promotes the support that the digital Catapult provides, but acts as an access point to the wider support.
Q308 Emily Darlington: Do you see a link, with respect to where the Catapults are located? What comes first—the chicken or the egg? Does the Catapult locate where there is already activity, or does the activity locate where the Catapult is based?
Dean Cook: There is probably a mixed model, but most of the Catapults were deliberately set up in areas of cluster strength. I think of the compound semiconductor Catapult in south Wales, the offshore renewable energy Catapult in Blyth and Glasgow, the advanced manufacturing Catapult in Sheffield, and so on. There is a link between area strength and Catapult location.
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: The conversation about this area is really important, but it is just one of the pieces of the jigsaw—one element. It is important to say what the overall strategy is. Building up clusters, which have to be there in emergence in order to do that, rather than an empty space, is definitely the way to go; and how to do that over time.
From the point of view of UKRI as a whole, we are interested in how we link the various ways we invest in places, so that you get the coalition of different investments, layering on top of each other—talent that is being developed, or a Catapult. I am responsible for thinking about the innovation ecosystems that sit around universities, and how we invest in them to build accelerator spaces, build on the higher education innovation funding that helps work with small businesses, and link across and pass companies on to Innovate’s business investment. It is about how you do all that.
You could say that there is a question of debate on what comes first. Is it the investment or is it having something already there that you try to accelerate and push on? I think our approach is the latter rather than the former. We do not have enough resources to invest literally across every place in the UK, so choices will have to be made about where we are likely to make the most effective investment intervention. I hope that in the future we will do that in a more joined-up and strategic way.
Chair: And a more transparent way. I think the Committee recognises that choices have to be made, and that resources are short, but we need to understand who is making those decisions and what the biases are, or are not. We have only a few more minutes. Steve, do you want to come in? Then there is a question from Allison.
Q309 Steve Race: Just a quick question, Dean, to follow up on something you said about place leadership. How would you define place leadership, and what works best?
Dean Cook: It is a triple helix. You have to have good local leadership in the public sector, and that needs to be joined up to national leadership; you need good research leadership and you need good business leadership. All our capacity-building programmes are ultimately about supporting the development of those ecosystems. Around the UK we have ecosystems at varying levels of maturity. We have had a considered approach, where programmes are tailored to different places at different levels of maturity.
Q310 Steve Race: Whenever we talk to civil servants in other public sector funding bodies in particular, they tend to reference mayors quite significantly. I suppose this question is twofold. Do mayors work well; do you like working with them and why? What about the areas that do not have mayors?
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: It is a great opportunity to talk about the programme that was announced over the weekend—the local innovation partnerships fund, which builds on the work that Innovate has been doing with innovation accelerators, and the Strength in Places programme. We have learned a lot from those, and there is now a model where we intend to work in a close partnership with mayoral strategic authorities, when there is an identified sum of money and they can work with UKRI to identify the family of projects that will work well to build growth in their setting, aligned to the local growth plan. It is a very exciting moment, when we can really move, having learned masses, into a space where we do much more co-creation. We are looking forward to building the business case for that, and getting on with it from the autumn.
Dean Cook: This is really important: it is about the join-up and connectivity. We—Innovate UK and UKRI—cannot do this by ourselves, and I would argue that places cannot do it by themselves. It is about how we join up that ecosystem, so a lot of the work is about building connectivity.
Q311 Chair: There is also recognition that each ecosystem is different. How do you reflect that? You talk about different levels of maturity, but there are differences that may not be reflected in a certain level of maturity, so how do you understand the places you will work with?
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: It will be about partnerships with those places and asking them to create a forum—a number have already established them—with an innovation board, where the parties come around the table and look at it strategically together; that is, business, university and authority. They have a plan and we can work with that on an investment model. We would like them to bring private sector investment alongside that, and their own resources and skills development plans, really putting things together to reflect, as you say, what those localities see as their opportunity and strength. That will be a great way to go forward.
Chair: Thank you. We have a couple of minutes.
Q312 Dr Gardner: On the question that Steve asked about making sure the focus is not just on mayoral strategic authorities, I stress that a significant part of the country—about 50%—is non-mayoral and is several years away from achieving that. Stoke and north Staffs, and Staffordshire, which is my patch, is one of those. You got me thinking when you talked about the triple helix. We have two universities and good local authorities, and the business sector is strong. There is great potential for growth, but we also need massive investment in infrastructure to enable that growth to develop. Professor Cordwell said the same. Do you feel that there is too narrow a focus on initiatives and on funding an organisation such as yours, and not enough focus on broader questions of local infrastructure and environment?
Professor Dame Jessica Corner: I completely agree; it is all very important. These things do not work in isolation. Obviously, we are the national research and innovation organisation, so that is our focus, but where those needs are clear we would be very much part of having conversations on how we align and take things forward. Again, this is about local partnership to identify those things.
To go back to the new fund that I referred to, a strand of that will be open to a broader sort of competition, to ask for great projects to come forward, recognising that not all geographies are in the mayoral authority formula. There will be that opportunity. Does that also give the opportunity to build capacity in the sort of location that you are talking about, to get more ready to do this in future?
Chair: We have to leave it there, because we are over-running. Thank you very much for the time you have spent, and for your answers. I know that there are some follow-up questions on data and access to information, on which I am sure you will get back to us.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Lord Vallance, Holly Yates and Oliver St John.
Q313 Chair: Welcome to this final session of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee inquiry on innovation, growth and the regions. We are pleased to welcome Lord Vallance, the Minister for Science, to the session. Do you consider, Lord Vallance, that achieving a more regionally balanced research and innovation landscape is one of your responsibilities?
Lord Vallance: Yes. We are clear that innovation is something that should be present in many places across the country. I am pleased that we already see a shift in UKRI funding, so that more than 50% is now outside the greater south-east. If we look at Innovate funding, 67% is outside the greater south-east. There is a directional move, which I think is important. In the last three years, the increase in funding outside the greater south-east is 27% across the UKRI portfolio. I think that things are happening in the right direction. We have a new scheme.
Q314 Chair: That is an increase in funding at a time when science funding generally was growing. It is not a 27% increase in the proportion that goes—
Lord Vallance: It is. The 27% is an increase from the baseline outside the greater south-east, so it is an increase of what was there.
Q315 Chair: Yes. Funding was increasing across the board.
Lord Vallance: But the percentage increase has gone up as well.
Q316 Chair: By a much smaller amount, I think.
Lord Vallance: By a smaller amount.
Q317 Chair: By three percentage points.
Lord Vallance: For UKRI overall, and a much higher percentage for Innovate.
Q318 Chair: Does it concern you that business investment in research and development is more evenly distributed than public investment, so that, for example, only 50% of R&D investment in London is business investment, but in the midlands it is 80%, which suggests that business is finding great places to invest but public investment is not following that?
Lord Vallance: If you look at other public investment, such as the British Business Bank, something like 86% is outside London. Some of the public funding is very much the same as business. It depends a bit on which bit you are looking at. I am not sure that I would expect to see an exact overlap between those figures, and we see certain types of funding more prominent in certain places. Are we concerned to try to increase it? As I said in starting my answer, yes. Do I think it should overlap exactly with what business does? Probably not.
Q319 Chair: Thank you for that. When you say that you are concerned to increase it, can we be clear? You have spoken to us about three pillars of investment: curiosity-driven research, applied research, and business support. Are you looking to increase the proportion in each of those pillars?
Lord Vallance: I think the proportion will increase in each of those pillars. There are obviously different things in them. The second is about R&D designed to answer more immediate Government priorities and societal imperatives, and is obviously different from the first one—curiosity-driven research, for which the principle should be assessment of excellence. Obviously, that will go where excellence pops up. It pops up in some places in individuals or in small groups, and in other places it is a concentrated activity. I absolutely do not think that we should spread any of this funding evenly like jam across the place. That would be a very bad outcome.
Q320 Chair: Yes, I think the Committee recognises that, but excellence tends to pop up where it has popped up before and where it has been invested in significantly before, and it tends to go to the same people it went to before. Can you say a little about how you are looking to drive new centres of excellence, for example? How are the strengths of different regions considered in your research, innovation and industrial policy?
Lord Vallance: In the industrial strategy, which will come out shortly, there is a clear focus on regional aspects. We have also put in place the local innovation partnerships fund, which is designed to try to get more money directly into the hands of local leaders for innovation. The idea behind that is that as more devolution occurs it should be possible to get more out in that way. We have started with a programme that works with strategic mayoral authorities where there is evidence already of innovation and growth plans that have been implemented. A second scheme, linked to it, will provide smaller amounts of money to get other regions up to the ability to use that. We are definitely pushing to make that happen.
Q321 Chair: That is the local innovation partnerships, which build on innovation accelerators, but when it comes to research, curiosity-driven and applied research, how are the strengths in the different regions considered in your approach to funding?
Lord Vallance: They are considered as part of an assessment of excellence in those areas, and there are some very good examples where that has worked. In your constituency, the work of Doug Turnbull and others on mitochondrial disease is an absolutely brilliant example where funding has gone in and he has been world-class and competitive. Lots of things have happened, and it became the centre for that. We see other examples. I visited a centre in Birmingham that was dealing with membranes, which is world-class and got money through the Research Ventures Catalyst fund. In Exeter I visited a group working on metamaterials. There are lots of places where there is excellence. It is wrong to think that excellence is present only in some places. It is present right the way around the country. It is just in much higher concentration in some places, and it is in very specialist concentration in other places. That is an important point. What there is not is a thin veneer of excellence in every place.
Q322 Chair: Yes, we can agree with you there. The point that I am trying to make is that excellence tends to grow where there is already investment in excellence, and the current system rewards those who have already been rewarded. The money goes to the same places in more or less the same quantities. It is about driving new areas of excellence. What I am trying to understand is how you support new areas with the potential to be excellent in curiosity-driven research.
Lord Vallance: There are quite a lot of examples where UKRI has given funding to try to get things off the ground. It often starts with a person or two doing something exceptional. Then there is a mechanism to come in and support that. That is what happened, I think, with the mitochondrial work in Newcastle. It is what happens in most of these places. It builds off people. When you start in research you do not need huge sums of money. You need enough, and enough freedom, to do the things that really matter. Those are often the people who are doing something completely outside the mainstream, and starting something that most people would not be doing. They then develop. We have lots of systems to support them, and to provide the infrastructure and funding that are needed.
There is also the distribution of some of the great infrastructures that are definitely not based in the south-east. They are based around the country and they also provide a source of excellence, which gets picked up in universities. I think that it is difficult to try to target the curiosity-driven thing, and say that we are going to put a proportion in different places.
Chair: That is not what I am saying. We are trying to get at whether there is, in research funding, a preponderance to send money where money has already been sent, and whether you are funding the same people or groups at the same places. We certainly know, and we heard evidence, that there is significantly higher science infrastructure funding in London and the south-east than in, say, Newcastle or the midlands. The figures on that were very stark.
It would be good to move on now.
Q323 George Freeman: Thanks, Chair. It is good to see you, Patrick. Thanks for coming back.
A quick question on that one. Back in the levelling-up days, as the then Minister of Science in BEIS, I was proud to set out a quite bold target for a significant increase in funding outside the golden triangle. Has that target survived the transfer of the portfolio from BEIS to DSIT? Did it carry through, or did it go in the reorganisation?
Lord Vallance: The target that was set was a 40% increase in the funding that existed outside the greater south-east. We are now at a 27% increase, so on track for 40%.
Q324 George Freeman: Fantastic. Great to hear.
Lord Vallance: That is UKRI funding.
Q325 George Freeman: UKRI. Not DSIT?
Lord Vallance: Well, it is not every other Department. We have less good data for other Departments. That is something we are working on as DSIT. One of the advantages of DSIT is that it is the Department with cross-government accountability to try to look at these things, and we are trying to get the data from other Departments.
Q326 Chair: We are grateful to you for sending better data on science spend outside DSIT. It is the first time that the Committee has been provided with that. You talked about a 27% increase in funding outside London and the south-east. What was the overall increase in the science budget over the same period? Perhaps you can send us that.
Lord Vallance: We will send it to you. We definitely have those figures.
Q327 George Freeman: Yesterday I attended the Public Accounts Committee, on examination of UKRI, and you will not be surprised to know that data about how much private investment is coming in off the back of the £20 billion, and which Departments, and geographically, is completely key. On that, you said something very interesting the other day; you may not be aware how interesting. When I was in your role I discovered that everything you say becomes very interesting to those listening. It was about the importance, in this global race for science and technology sovereignty and competition, to think in three buckets: the blue sky, the national strategic sovereign mission, whether that is semiconductors or quantum encryption, and the industrial growth piece. I want to encourage you to share your thoughts on what it will mean, as the CSR lands, for the £20-odd billion across Government, the DSIT budget and the UKRI budget. It is an important point, which, by the way, I completely agree with. I just wonder what you think it will mean for the system.
Lord Vallance: The first thing is that I want to see those three buckets used for all the R&D spend across Government, so that we have a clear idea of what is happening right the way across. At the moment, if we look at UKRI, there is about 50% in the first bucket, 20% or so in the second and 30% or so in the third. That is the historical view. I am not 100% comfortable that those data are completely accurate, because it depends on definitions. From the spending review tomorrow, I want, when we do our allocations, to think very hard about the proportions we want. We are not going to be able to shift it instantly, but we need to get to a position where we are clear about why we have the amounts we have in each bucket, and about the return on investment that is expected.
The return on investment for curiosity-driven research is potentially huge, but when it will occur is potentially unknown. It is pointless asking what the impact in the next five years will be, because the honest answer for most of it is that you don’t know. But you do know that, if we get it right, it will be crucial for the UK in 20 or 30 years’ time. It is right that public money goes, to a major extent, into that bucket, because that is the thing that nobody else will fund.
For the second and third bucket, we should have at least 3:1 private to public, and we should expect significant returns on investment. I want to get to a position of transparency about how much we are putting in each bucket and why, because that is a choice, and a way of measuring the return, and the private sector crowding in, in each of those buckets. That will help us all understand what we are achieving with the money we have. After all, it is a large sum of money.
Q328 George Freeman: Hear, hear to that. You won’t be surprised to know that when I asked the same question yesterday at the Public Accounts Committee, UKRI said, “We do it all.” It is an exciting moment, with a new Minister, a new permanent secretary at DSIT, a new CEO of UKRI and a new CEO of Innovate. It is an unusual moment to align everyone around these priorities. How confident are you that UKRI, which has come a long way in digitalisation and modernisation, is gripping the challenge of the three pillars? Traditionally, it has been an academic funding body, hasn’t it?
Lord Vallance: Yes. I have total confidence that Ian Chapman is going to grip it completely, and that he gets it. UKRI has made some movements towards doing this. It is not easy and, you are right, it emerged from a very academic funding system to become more focused on those three things. The reason I want those things is not that I believe they are rigid buckets with no movement between them, but because, conceptually, it helps us to understand whether the funding envelope is properly allocated.
Q329 George Freeman: Hear, hear to that. This is my last question on this thread. In life sciences, as you and I know well, the biggest single budget across the ecosystem is NIHR, which is a Department of Health budget. When I was Minister for Life Sciences I had responsibility for it. Since then, the MRC budget has dropped, because of the UKRI top-slice, to about £600 million or £700 million. I think NIHR is now nearly £2 billion a year. It is a significant sum. How do you see that NIHR DH budgetary function coming in under this very powerful and compelling three-pillar model?
Lord Vallance: I don’t know exactly their budget; it is one point something—
George Freeman: I might have exaggerated a bit.
Lord Vallance: It is not quite as high as £2 billion. I have already had the discussion with them, that I would like them to use the same structure. Of course, I cannot force everyone to use the same structure, but I think it is one we would want. I would guess that if you looked at the NIHR budget you would see much more in bucket 2, because that is a lot of what it does—it is more on the sorts of things the health system needs—and some in bucket 3, for sure, because some of the companies get started there, and some in bucket 1. I suspect bucket 2 would be their predominant funding bucket. The advantage of that is that we can look at the whole system and ask whether we are appropriately covering all the things we mean to cover.
Q330 George Freeman: Thanks. I suppose my question is about governance. I was lucky enough to be a Minister at the Department of Health for NIHR and MRC. In this architecture, is it through the Science and Technology cabinet? What is the mechanism for this laudable strategic focus to apply to a Department where you are not a Minister?
Lord Vallance: DSIT has a cross-government accountability for science, so it is perfectly legitimate to be dealing with all these things. There is, as you know, a Cabinet Committee on science and tech.
Q331 Emily Darlington: Who does the NIHR sit under?
Lord Vallance: DHSC.
Emily Darlington: But which Minister?
Lord Vallance: It sits under Gillian Merron.
Emily Darlington: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Chair: It would be interesting to look at the regional distribution of that funding as well, and maybe we can ask them the question. Kit, do you want to come in quickly before I go on?
Q332 Kit Malthouse: Yes, I just want to bring you back, Patrick—nice to see you again—to this regional issue. To clarify what you are saying, you are essentially moving away from a kind of pork barrel, where each of these regions shall have a share that keeps all their MPs happy, to a way—
Chair: That was never the model.
Kit Malthouse: We just said there is an ambition. I was never quite keen on this. Why should it suddenly be 40% outside London and the south-east if the science is not there? What you are saying to us is that the money should, effectively, follow the science and the scientists.
Lord Vallance: I absolutely believe that for the first of those buckets that is the case. For the others, it is easier to think about how you might put some targets on things regionally, particularly as it links to the industrial strategy and where that links. The 40%, to be clear, is an increase from the baseline. The current situation is that just under 50% of the total goes to the greater south-east and just over 50% to the rest.
Q333 Kit Malthouse: But if there is nothing appearing in Carlisle, it is not going to get any money just for the sake of it.
Lord Vallance: If there is nothing there, it is not going to get curiosity-driven research funding, and should not.
Chair: That was never the case—
Q334 Kit Malthouse: Sorry, Chair, can I finish my question before you interrupt? Thanks. We are following the science on the first bucket, but on the other buckets, what will you be following? Is what you said jam for everybody?
Lord Vallance: No, it is not jam for everybody. We have to make choices about where these things go. In the second bucket, it is linked to industrial strategy. Where there are opportunities to have clusters of industrial activity and it would be appropriate, they will likely be able to use the R&D money very well to bolster those clusters and develop economic return and societal benefit. In the third bucket, which is on start-ups, scale-ups and R&D-intensive industries, for the very reason that the Chair said, where a lot of the companies are spread more widely, that will be spread widely where the companies are. You are not going to give money for a scale-up in a region where there are no companies to scale up.
Q335 Kit Malthouse: We have explored in the past the conflict in this notion. Governments always talk about regional policy, and have done pretty much for my entire lifetime, but none of them has really managed to crack it. On the conflict of that against this notion of, as you have just said, clusters of excellence, is your strategy to say, “We’ve got a series of world-beating clusters that we think are international champions—effectively, Oxford, Cambridge, London, and for life sciences a bit elsewhere. Notwithstanding this overall objective to try to spread wealth, we are going to make sure that we invest adequately in them first”? Where does retaining our position rank alongside the other objectives?
Lord Vallance: Retaining our position and enhancing our position is very important, and there are some significant clusters right the way around the UK. Look at what is happening in Glasgow, particularly around Strathclyde, with enormous strengths in certain areas like photonics, semiconductors and so on. You see clusters in south Wales on semiconductors. There are clusters all around the UK that we need to support.
It is the case, in my view, that we should also build on the great strengths we have. You mentioned the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor. Any country in the world would, frankly, give its eyeteeth to have that—that notion that we have truly world-class universities along that corridor with untapped full potential. We have tapped part of it. Could we untap all of it? We probably could, and that is what we are going to try to do. Similarly, you see that in Manchester and Liverpool. There are areas in the north-east where you have that. There are certainly areas around Glasgow. We need to make sure those things are properly supported.
That is not instead of saying, “We also need to see that we have the opportunity for excellence to pop up,” because, if you look at any history of where great discoveries have come from, very often it is one or two people who started doing something rather unexpected in a place that was not one of the major ones. Many of them end up moving to one of the major centres at some point, but they often start elsewhere, and many of the companies are based elsewhere.
Chair: To be clear, the 40% increase in funding outside London and the south-east is at a time of doubling of science spends overall, so it is not a pork barrel increase in funding for the regions.
Q336 Adam Thompson: This builds nicely on some of the points that Kit was making. We have just been talking about Oxbridge generally and its world-class nature. That is really important. Looking broadly at the funding distribution and potential bias in the system, Oxford’s contribution to UK GDP between 2001 and 2021, two decades, remained steady at about 0.9%. How do we get more economic benefit from these investments, including local benefit, from this innovation project?
Lord Vallance: If you just take that region to start off with, Cambridge, one way or another, has been home to something like 120 Nobel prize winners, so it is definitely doing well on that side of things. It now has a very fast growing start-up scene, and it is attracting some big companies to Cambridge as a result. You can see that really making a difference.
The gap that we are going to see, if we don’t get this right, is that we will have lots of start-ups and we won’t scale them. It is an urgent issue. Ten years ago, if we were not scaling the rather smaller number of start-ups that we had, obviously the lost opportunity gap was smaller. We now have a big opportunity gap there, and that is why we need to make sure that some of the regions and clusters that we are talking about are properly enabled not only to start up companies but to scale them and to provide wealth and better opportunities for everybody, not only in those regions, which we absolutely need to do, but to make sure that then goes elsewhere. If you look at some of the examples, we already see partnerships in Cambridge, Manchester, Oxford and Birmingham. They are developing formal partnerships to try to move these things out and to get greater growth across other regions. It is a priority to get these things right. I do not know how accurate these sorts of figures are, but it has been estimated that the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor could add £75 billion to the economy. Let’s shoot for that.
Q337 Adam Thompson: Excellent. That scale-up point is really important. We have had that raised to us by lots of people over the past few months. The focus on Oxford and Cambridge is positive, but do you think there is a risk that we let that focus bias our funding decisions in the future? I am not getting at the opposite of what Kit just said. I am not saying that we should be sending lots of money to areas where they have no science, but is there a risk that putting Oxford and Cambridge too much on a pedestal biases our funding decisions?
Lord Vallance: Yes, of course it must be a risk. It is not as though Oxford and Cambridge have ever been anything other than in the spotlight for the science funding that we are talking about. Where funding is needed for that particular growth corridor is around things like transport, infrastructure, grid connections, making sure that there is an appropriate ability for those who live there to benefit from the advances, and that we have join-up with affordable housing and scale-up facilities. It is those types of things. We need to make sure we get that right across all the clusters. I want to use the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor, which the Chancellor asked me to lead on in trying to get these things sorted out, not because that is the only place; let’s start working at how we do this in a systematic way. It is happening elsewhere as well. We need to support where we have these clusters and make sure that they are delivering the full potential that they can deliver.
Q338 Adam Thompson: That is really good. Do you think there is scope for looking at the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor and that whole model, and using it to apply more focus on some of the other clusters elsewhere in the other regions?
Lord Vallance: Yes, I do. When I came into the role, that is one of the things I said I would take on if we could develop it as a way of thinking about how to do things across the country. One of the challenges, as you all know very well, is working right the way across Whitehall and getting Departments to join up; it is not easy. That is what we are trying to do in that particular example. We are putting together a digital planning tool where we can put all the things relating to all the Departments in one form of representation so that we can see what the consequences of a delay here or an advanced action there would be for economic growth and benefit. If we can do that, it is a useful thing to be able to apply in other places as well.
Q339 Chair: Can other regions look forward to a ministerial champion, as you champion the Oxford-Cambridge corridor?
Lord Vallance: I have no idea whether anyone looks forward to that, Chair.
Q340 Chair: I think they would.
Lord Vallance: I don’t know whether it needs a ministerial champion. I want to try to get this going in a way that is a model that you could reproduce. I don’t know whether it always needs a ministerial champion.
Q341 Chair: It does in this case.
Lord Vallance: To get it off the ground, it definitely does. It may, because working across Whitehall is inherently very difficult.
Q342 Dr Gardner: You mentioned scale-ups earlier. In some of your answers, I have become increasingly concerned. While I understand that you cannot spread the jam, I do not want to be in the situation where we see greater growth gaps in regional inequality. I sit in Stoke-on-Trent in North Staffordshire, where there are two universities. You also mentioned that scale-ups often have to move out elsewhere from where they started. This is a great risk. Lack of infrastructure is one of the great inhibitors to scale-ups staying where they were born.
Talking about cross-departmental, have you been speaking to the Secretaries of State for Transport and for Housing, Communities and Local Government—it could have a shorter name—to discuss the role of planning and infrastructure in developing the UK science base? I am going to throw into that the plans for AI growth zones. Have you been speaking to DESNZ about national grid connectivity as well?
Lord Vallance: The short answer is yes to both. It is absolutely right, and what I was trying to get at, that the infrastructure needed to enable not just the science, which obviously needs universities and other things, but the scale-up, which requires all sorts of other things, has to be, will be, and is part of the industrial strategy, to make sure that we get that right. On the AI growth zones, there was a very large expression of interest from right the way around the UK for those zones. We are in the process of deciding the first group. There will be a need to show that you have at least 500 megawatts-plus of power supply to do that. That of course means that things like rapid grid connections become important. The AI growth zones will be distributed around the country as well.
Q343 Dr Gardner: Do you really believe that the national grid connectivity can be delivered in a short period of time to deliver the huge data centres that are planned?
Lord Vallance: Yes, I do. That is why the AI Energy Council has been set up to try to link DESNZ and DSIT as we think about these things. Much of the delay in grid connection is the queue to get on it rather than the realities of whether you can connect quickly. I cannot really answer for DESNZ on this, but it is looking at ways of doing that. We can make faster grid connections, and we need to.
Q344 Emily Darlington: You will get lots of different views. You know my view on the OxCam arc and the opportunities for Milton Keynes in terms of jobs and support for our start-ups. The attraction of capital into that valley of death is so important—using the brands of Oxford and Cambridge and making sure that is spread across the corridor. That is not actually the question.
I want to pick up on something you said about Cambridge having so many Nobel prize winners. I absolutely agree with you. The history of our universities is amazing. Twenty years ago, we were No. 1 in terms of research papers. We are now third in the world. How are we getting ourselves back to No. 1 and being the absolute world leader in science?
Lord Vallance: We were probably No. 2 20 years ago, weren’t we? We were No. 1 per capita.
Emily Darlington: Yes.
Lord Vallance: We are still very good per capita. I do not know whether we are No. 1, but we are certainly right up there. The massive difference is China. It is not just China. We are now in a world where many countries are pretty good at science and tech. That definitely was not the case 20 years ago; it was us, a few other European countries, the US, Canada and so on. It is very different, so we cannot rest on our laurels, which is why it is so important that we continue to get significant funding, particularly into the sort of curiosity-driven area, which we are still really good at, and make sure that we do not slip back. We are going to be challenged. We are being challenged. China is now an absolute science superpower, not just in its ability to turn things into products but in the basic discovery research as well.
Q345 Emily Darlington: What is our strategy?
Lord Vallance: Our strategy is to make sure that we provide support. A very special feature of this country is our university sector. Our universities, with their research-intensive ability, are not like other countries’. They are not the only thing that we do. We have great research institutes that are important like the Crick, the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and others. The universities are important and special, because in many countries the universities do not undertake research in the way ours do. The big advantage of that and one thing that we must keep pushing on—it is recognised, by the way, by big companies—is that our undergraduates come through having been taught by research-active people. That is a very important start in the system.
We have a lot of things that we need to build on. It is why, frankly, I have spent, as you might imagine, the last few months arguing strongly that we need a decent settlement for science and tech in the spending review. I am very pleased that £86 billion has been allocated. That is fantastic news in a very tough spending round. It is recognition of how important it is to make sure that we not just maintain but improve our position. We are still a magnet for people to come and work in this country because of the historical base of science and our ability to do things that enable creativity and imagination.
Emily Darlington: I don’t want to take Steve’s questions in that area. You will get some questions on that.
Chair: We will come on to that.
Q346 Martin Wrigley: I came into this session today thinking about how we balance clusters and regions and investment in places. You have been talking about individuals coming up and sparking things and making things happen, which is a recognisable trait. I am interested in the processes and infrastructure that you have in place for recognising new clusters as they emerge, seeing the ones that rise and fail quickly, seeing the ones that grow, how you identify them, how you encourage them, where you see them, and what your plan is.
Lord Vallance: Increasingly, and thank you, George, for starting this off, we have a clusters map, so we know where things are happening across the UK. That is being redone at the moment. It will take a lens on sectors as well, and a lens on industrial strategy. That is a good baseline to be able to monitor that. We are also able to monitor of course, through the very early science, what is happening in UKRI funding and other funding. You start to see where groups are beginning to emerge as part of that.
There is a series of funding mechanisms that allow people to progress through with personal fellowships. Last year or the year before, the Royal Society was given a very big endowment, and the Royal Academy of Engineering was given a big endowment, to support fellowships in specific areas. There are a number of mechanisms. Something that is quite interesting is a relatively small amount of money, £40 million—not per project; £40 million spread across everybody—for allowing people to get their projects just that step further where suddenly you could start to see maybe a venture capital or a seed investor or maybe follow-on funding from UKRI. It is really early proof-of-concept funding. There is a number of mechanisms to do it.
We need to continue to train and to be better at training many of our up- and-coming scientists in entrepreneurial things as well, and there are a number of schemes coming through on that. There are reasonable mechanisms to pick up where there are hotspots of activity that you can then follow on with funding to try to grow them.
Q347 Chair: We are going to talk a little bit about technology diffusion and commercialisation. According to the Global Innovation Index, the UK ranks only 12th for knowledge diffusion and 31st for knowledge absorption, which I am sure you will agree is not really good enough. You were talking about the support for academics to become entrepreneurs. We heard evidence about the importance of supporting start-ups to be investor-ready, whether that is about training academics or bringing in the skills for commercial investment that will be harder to find outside London and the south-east because there is less throughput of deals. Do you have a responsibility for ensuring or supporting investor readiness for our start-ups and spin-outs across the country? Do you have a plan for that? Do you have an approach towards that?
Lord Vallance: It is a really important point, not least because it is investor readiness, and then it is the scale of initial funding. Although I have said, and many others will say, that the scale-up funding is where the big gap is at the moment, there is a relationship. If you under-capitalise at the beginning, it is very difficult to scale. We are not yet doing enough to get our students ready to be entrepreneurs. There is a much bigger increase in the number of start-ups that students are beginning to do. It has gone up, I think, about 30% over the past 10 years. There is a big increase in students wanting to do that. Yes, we have a responsibility for that. DFE, of course, has responsibility for the skills part of it. We work closely with them. On things like the proof-of-concept funding, it is exactly that sort of funding. It is the sort of funding that does not come easily on a grant and is not going to come from your seed investor, but you just need that to do some commercial work or some market research.
Q348 Chair: There is a mix of a few things there—entrepreneurship among students and academics. I am talking specifically about investor readiness of start-ups and spin-outs. We have technology readiness levels that are integrated into the work of the Department in funding. Do you look at investor readiness around the country and how you can support that?
Lord Vallance: I don’t think we have a specific map of that. Oliver may correct me if I am wrong.
Oliver St John: Innovate UK runs a business growth service that supports about 10,000 businesses around the country. That programme basically funds a range of business support experts all across the country based in regional hubs generally aligned with growth hubs.
Martin Wrigley: There is one in Devon. Just one.
Q349 Chair: We talked a bit about that in the last session. Can we be specific about investor readiness?
Oliver St John: Those experts are there to help businesses with things like investor readiness, and they work specifically with firms to do things like helping them interact with the British Business Bank and other forms of access to finance.
Lord Vallance: It is a very interesting question. Your link to TRLs is an interesting way to think of it. Do we have something equivalent to that? No, we do not. It is a very interesting idea, and we should go away and think about it. The other side to it, as you will be aware, is that many of the investors are very localised. I have a worry that we are not getting investors out to all the places that they need to get. There are two sides to this. What we are doing on the investor side is that there is a science and technology venture fund to get fellowships, and to get venture people more aware about the deeptech that is out there and where it is. We probably need to think a bit more about how to get those joined up.
Chair: Thank you very much for that response. The evidence we heard was that there was work talking to investors so that they understood better the opportunities around the country. It is absolutely critical—Northern Gritstone and others told us this—that those targets for investment should be investor-ready. You cannot ask people to get on a train and come somewhere and then find an investment target that isn’t ready for investment. That is as important as technology readiness.
Q350 Emily Darlington: Some of the feedback that we have had is the length of time and the red tape involved in accessing some of the funds. Some of them take up to 12 months to hear back. Have you heard similar feedback? Do you have concerns that those kinds of timescales mean that it is much easier to access funds from abroad, where you can get an answer in three months?
Lord Vallance: Yes, I have heard them, and, yes, it is an area that we need to keep working at. It is definitely true in getting to the bigger funding. I know it is true. It has been true for some of the BBB funding, and I know they are looking at it very hard to try to get that right. I am very pleased that they are also joining up with Innovate and the National Wealth Fund as a group to look at the pipeline as a whole. I am absolutely sure that Tom Adeyoola, as the new head of Innovate UK, will be looking hard at how to make this faster and better. I know he is also going to look at the question of whether the number of Innovate UK grants is a bit too broad and spread a bit too thin, and how we can get to more substantial funding of the right thing. They are areas that are being looked at, and it is recognised that there is more that can be done there.
Chair: Thank you very much. I am going to go to Adam now on investment and funding, and then we will move on to international and defence.
Q351 Adam Thompson: Yes, thank you, Chair. Looking into innovation and the research and development funding landscape broadly, there has been a 7.3% reduction in the UKRI budget. I understand it works out to about £669 million. Then there has been reallocation of funds elsewhere from the international science partnerships fund—£154.8 million. Are you considering reallocating funding from other areas within the Department to support UKRI?
Lord Vallance: It is not correct that the UKRI fund has gone down. What has happened is that there has been a move of things like the Faraday battery challenge from DSIT to DBT, and that money then comes back into UKRI. The headline number for DSIT looks like the UKRI allocation has gone down. It hasn’t. Similarly, the Innovate budget has gone up quite a lot because more of the other Departments are spending their R&D money through Innovate.
Q352 Adam Thompson: Thank you for clarifying, Lord Vallance. That is really useful. Moving forward, do we expect the budget to stay in a positive place? Are we expecting it to go up or remain where it is in real terms? What are your thoughts?
Lord Vallance: Are you asking me to pre-empt the spending review?
Adam Thompson: In so far as you can 24 hours before it comes out.
Q353 Chair: You have the overall envelope for the much-touted £80 billion over the next—
Lord Vallance: Eighty-six.
Chair: Eighty-six billion. Do you have some thoughts about the allocations for the different responsibilities?
Lord Vallance: The thing that I am determined to do—you may watch the flinching of my neighbours here—is fast allocation post-spending review to get this right. It is inevitable that individual research councils will go up and down over time. That is right. It does not mean that they are getting less on a downward trajectory forever. It may be that some goes down one time and up a bit the next. UKRI will get a good settlement out of the £86 billion. As I say, some of that will come back through other Departments. We should try to make it easier, but it is rather complicated because there is a DSIT bit and then the other Departments bit, and that gives the total budget.
Q354 Adam Thompson: Fair enough. That is clear, thank you. When you move forward to the rapid allocation that you talked about, how much are you doing to assess the regional focus of that funding?
Lord Vallance: Some of it is deliberately regional, like the local innovation partnerships fund. Some of it will be an allocation based on excellence. Some of it will be an allocation that is based clearly on the industrial strategy, which has a regional element. It will be a mix of things.
Q355 Chair: To clarify some of those figures, we have £500 million, which is the regional allocation for the innovation funding. Is that right?
Lord Vallance: It is a specific scheme. It is not the regional innovation funding. That is much bigger because it comes through Innovate and it has lots of other things. This is a specific programme to give money to strategic regional authorities to be able to spend themselves.
Q356 Chair: The £500 million is the devolved regional funding.
Lord Vallance: Yes.
Q357 Chair: What timeframe is that over?
Lord Vallance: That is over the spending review period.
Q358 Chair: That is the same spending review period where we have £86 billion in total. The amount that is being devolved is significantly less than 1%.
Lord Vallance: It is not right to view that on the proportion of the whole thing because it is a particular type of funding. It is not the curiosity-driven research. That is not being devolved as part of the local innovation partnerships fund.
Q359 Chair: If you look at the envelope, we talk about £86 billion, and that has been trailed heavily as how much we are spending. If you look at what is being devolved—I just want to clarify—it is less than 1%.
Lord Vallance: It is £500 million in that scheme, and then there are other local schemes. We still have the launchpad programme, the Strength in Places funding, which runs through to the end of next year and so on.
Q360 Chair: They are all national.
Lord Vallance: Yes, they are all national. You are right. That is the devolved spend in the way we are doing it.
Q361 Chair: It is a big leap forward. It is a change.
Oliver St John: It is worth clarifying it is not formally devolved.
Lord Vallance: It is devolved in the sense that the mayoral authorities can use it. It is not formally devolved. I imagine that means it is not just handed over. We know what we mean.
Q362 George Freeman: Can I ask about regional research infrastructure? I know you know how important Daresbury and those big, key pieces of infrastructure are for driving local economies as well as national assets. If we look at the research infrastructure budget over the whole of Government, it is £3 billion a year. UKRI’s research infrastructure budget is £481 million. Do you know how the rest of the £3 billion allocates by Department to your 50/30/20, or regionally? Do we have a sense?
Lord Vallance: For infrastructure?
George Freeman: Research infrastructure.
Lord Vallance: There was a map done of research infrastructure in 2018, or 2019. That is being redone now, and will be published later this year in November, to get a very clear idea of where the big bits of kit are. It is not every little bit of kit; it is the big things like the square kilometre array at Jodrell Bank, Daresbury, supercomputers and so on so that we know where they are.
Q363 George Freeman: I wanted to ask because it is an important part of the regional R&D levelling-up piece. In some areas, as when we did the quantum strategy, the National Quantum Computing Centre, for good reasons, was headquartered in the golden triangle. In some areas like eng bio, we were thinking about regional networks of bioreactors that could anchor quite serious clusters in Yorkshire or Teesside. In the industrial strategy, how much thinking have you been able to do about how we might use that regional footprint of infrastructure, and some of the old pharma sites like Charnwood sitting empty, to anchor major pieces of re-industrial R&D?
Lord Vallance: There is a much broader spread in the infrastructure, as you say. If you look at something like the Centre for Process Innovation and High Value Manufacturing Catapult, these things are not in the greater south-east, and they have big bits of kit that are important for local companies and national companies to go to. That will definitely be part of what we continue to do in the industrial strategy. It raises an important question. Not all infrastructure can be incremental, and there is a question about what we retire as infrastructure in order to be able to do the new things, which is something that is very live at the moment.
Q364 Steve Race: We will move on to some of the international aspects of research and innovation in the UK. First off, on cuts to ODA, we have had, as part of the UK being a centre of global research for a significant period, huge amounts of international partnership on some of the big global challenges of our time such as nutrition and climate change. What is your view of the impact on collaborative research from the cuts to ODA over the over the last four, five or six years? What is your analysis of the total loss to UK R&D from those ODA cuts?
Lord Vallance: I am a very strong supporter of the importance of ODA for R&D. It is important for a number of reasons. It is a capability-building tool for other countries. It is a skills-building tool. It is a long-term relationship-building activity. It is also relationship building in that many of the groups and people funded by those things become long-term allies to the UK and feel very warm towards the UK. There are many reasons, on top of the humanitarian side, that are important. It will be crucial, as we go through a period of decreased spend in that area, that we maintain the things that really matter. You cannot get away from it; there will be less funding, and therefore less of that than there was, and there will be consequences.
Q365 Steve Race: Is there a role for DSIT to step into that space as the FCDO withdraws? From what we understand from the Royal Society, and from what I understand, in what will be left in the ODA budget, there is not going to be that much for R&D collaboration at all. The Royal Society said that without ODA international collaborations are extraordinary difficult because it has to get grant funding here, a partner organisation elsewhere, and the global south has to get similar grant funding from elsewhere and then connect them. With ODA removed from that, it is very difficult. Is there a space for DSIT and some of the organisations?
Lord Vallance: We are very closely involved with this. We have had an ODA budget ourselves, which we spent in collaboration with the FCDO. I met the FCDO Minister not long ago to discuss how we can manage the retrenchment from ODA spend in a way that protects, where we can, the strong scientific relationships and what we want to try to achieve. We have another meeting coming up soon to make sure that we try to manage that as effectively as possible.
Q366 Steve Race: Great. That would be very welcome. Thank you for that answer. Regarding international students in the UK—researchers, undergraduates and others—from a university ecosystem point of view, given that universities are so important to our R&D landscape, changes that make our universities less competitive internationally are going to be quite difficult for our universities to absorb. We know that countries like Australia, Canada and others are increasingly competitive compared to our universities. We already have visa fees that are 17 times higher than those of many of our competitor nations for student researchers to come and work or study here. There is the proposed 9% levy on international students that came in the immigration White Paper. Has the Department done any analysis? Does it have any views on what the impacts of that will be, particularly on our ability to compete internationally for the best talent?
Lord Vallance: I just need to correct one thing; the 9% was in an appendix as a modelled example of one thing. It is not a proposal.
Steve Race: Right, okay.
Lord Vallance: I don’t know where that ends up, but it definitely was not a proposal. It was a modelled example in an appendix.
Steve Race: Okay.
Lord Vallance: You are quite right; overseas students have been an important source of talent for the UK, and will remain an important source of talent. There is a number of schemes in place to try to continue to attract them, including AI fellowships. It is also the case that our universities are under huge pressure for four main reasons: over-dependence on overseas student numbers—as they drop, that has presented a problem; student fees have gone up a bit, so that is beginning to help; full economic costing, which does not meet the total cost of the research that they do; and inflation. Those have all put pressure on universities, and universities that have become very dependent on overseas students are now finding a difficult situation, but I heard that the numbers are going up again in some places because, obviously, there are other places that are becoming less attractive for overseas students at the moment. It is a bit difficult to know which way that will go.
Overseas students are a key part of the success story, as indeed are overseas postdocs and others, for this country. I was very pleased with the immigration White Paper that, at the higher end of things like the global talent visa, there are things that are going to be easier and better to get people on board here. I heard just this morning from ARIA that they are able to get people through that system in two to six weeks without any problem. That is great. We will continue to monitor the overseas student situation.
Q367 Steve Race: You referenced obliquely other places around the world becoming less attractive either to international talent or for their national talent to stay in that country. We know that President Macron has been making personal calls to researchers in America to invite them to come over to France. That is a very French approach. What is our approach to taking advantage of the changing ecosystem around the world to make sure that we are at the forefront of attracting that talent as well? What effort are we putting in to get those great researchers here?
Lord Vallance: Quite a lot in three different domains. Researchers, universities and research institutes, and entrepreneurs and investors are all groups that we are looking at. It is London Tech Week this week, so there are quite a lot of discussions going on with people now, as you might imagine. There are three schemes that we put in place recently. One of them is still to be formally launched. The academies are using some of their endowments to get international fellowships. The Royal Society has put in £30 million. The Royal Academy of Engineering has put up to £20 million through its green future fellowship scheme. We have a Government-wide programme to try to attract people, which will be launched formally as soon as I can get a grid slot to do it. It has been fully developed for a while now.
Q368 Chair: Is that to attract people into Government positions, or is it to attract researchers?
Lord Vallance: No, it is to attract researchers and teams to the UK. I feel very strongly that the right people to attract high-talented people to the UK are not the Government; they are the universities and research institutes. They know who the right people are. I shudder at the thought of any of us trying to find the right people.
Q369 Chair: I just wanted to clarify that. Will you look at the regional dimension to that scheme as well?
Lord Vallance: Yes.
Chair: You will.
Lord Vallance: I have.
Chair: Excellent. Emily, let’s move on to defence.
Q370 Emily Darlington: Just before we do, I want to do a little plug for the science diplomacy that we are launching where we will be looking at ODA and very much looking at science as our soft power and the impact of the cuts. It would be very good to have a good, detailed submission back from you and the team at DSIT, following on from Steve’s questions, about how we fill some of these.
George Freeman: And the threats.
Emily Darlington: And particularly the threats within that and what we are doing to mitigate them.
We have had the strategic defence review. We have had the enormous increase in defence spending. We have huge opportunities for R&D within that given how technical defence has become, from cyber-security and satellites through to drones. What impact are you and DSIT able to have in directing that funding into investing in UK R&D and manufacturing in these very interesting and exciting areas that could also have non-defence applications?
Lord Vallance: Yes, and it always has. About £350 million already goes from UKRI to obvious defence spend. I would argue that there is much more money that goes into the dual-use area as well, which is increasingly across most domains where you get research funding. The new UK defence innovation organisation is already working very closely with DSIT so that we do that jointly to make sure that we get the right approach to thinking about innovation. The national security strategic investment fund, NSSIF, is part of DSIT, and that creates opportunities through venture co-funding to get companies started. There is an increasing join-up. What is happening now will be an even bigger spur to get joined up. It is a big opportunity.
Q371 Emily Darlington: Are you having influence in defence procurement views? Of course, that is one of the sticking blocks, and is what releases that valley of death funding for many of these great innovations in the UK.
Lord Vallance: The UK defence innovation organisation will also do procurement as part of that. We are linked into that. I have been pushing very hard on the general point about procurement. You are right; a contract or the sniff of a contract is worth more than a bit of push investment. The commercial innovation hub, which has been established in the Cabinet Office, and indeed the new Procurement Act are all about trying to make sure that Government can be a better customer of innovation and SMEs. Defence is an obvious place to get that right. If we do, it will have a very big effect on start-ups and scale-ups.
Q372 Chair: Across the country.
Lord Vallance: Across the country, yes.
Q373 Emily Darlington: Sovereignty is particularly obvious when it comes to defence R&D and procurement. How do you see that running through? Have you looked at what the impact could be on the wider science and innovation sector in the UK and on our GDP overall?
Lord Vallance: Of increased defence procurement?
Emily Darlington: Yes.
Lord Vallance: No, I can’t give you figures on that, but we are very interested in the potential for it. As I say, I have been interested in procurement as a pull-through for science and tech for a long time, and this is a really good opportunity to try to get that going.
Q374 Emily Darlington: The US has used DARPA as a way of doing that. One of the initial ideas of what was the Technology Strategy Board, and then Innovate UK, was to play more of a role like DARPA. Do you think it is ready to step into that space?
Lord Vallance: DARPA is directly linked to the Department of Defense. DARPA is not really acting as the procurement agency; it acts as the innovation agency linked to the procurement, and it does that very effectively. We need to make sure that we have that link-through to the UK defence innovation organisation, because that is going to be the link through to frontline procurement.
Q375 Emily Darlington: We won’t necessarily see any difference in terms of UKRI, or in particular Innovate UK, but we will see the difference in the defence innovation.
Lord Vallance: Yes, and Innovate will be very closely plugged in to UK defence innovation. That is where the procurement and the innovation link-through to frontline need is going to be.
Q376 Chair: Following on from that and the reference to sovereign capabilities, which is clearly critical in defence, the SDR talks about sovereign AI, as does the AI action plan, for that matter. What is sovereign AI, and do we have it?
Lord Vallance: I suppose the simplest definition is that it is the things that we think need to be onshored and domestically run in order to be competent in the AI space, and that are available. Sovereign AI would not be that we have a company that is in the UK but could be moved at any moment elsewhere. It would be: do we have the compute infrastructure needed to be able to run the models that we need to run? It could be: do we have the models that we want for Government use? Do we know how to get access to those?
Q377 Chair: Large language models, for example. Obviously, we do not have all.
Lord Vallance: Or narrow models that you might need.
Q378 Chair: So we do not have a large language model that is UK—
Lord Vallance: We do not currently have a domestic large language model. We might not need to develop it.
Q379 Chair: That may not be part of sovereign AI.
Lord Vallance: It may not be necessary because of the utility of the others, but you may want to have narrow models applied to certain uses that are important and that the UK wants to have. It is obviously about skills and talent in the UK. It is about the data centres in the UK. It is about enabling us to have an infrastructure that allows us to be at the cutting edge of AI.
Q380 Chair: If we don’t have it now, we will have it. Is that what you are saying?
Lord Vallance: There is a lot in development, and obviously there is a lot in the AI action plan that is part of the spending review as well.
Chair: Thanks. We are coming to the hard stop.
Q381 Steve Race: Can I clarify one thing from a previous question on the international students levy? I referenced a percentage, and that is a modelled percentage in the annexe. In terms of a levy overall, is that still a live proposal?
Lord Vallance: That also is a proposal. It is not a policy. It is for discussion and consultation. All those things that you rightly raised will be raised, and we will raise them.
Steve Race: Thank you very much. Perfect. Thank you, Chair.
Q382 George Freeman: I want to ask about biosecurity. Is any work being done on pathogen risks both as a military threat harnessed and as a global threat to human, animal and plant health? I remember asking if there was a biosecurity strategy, and I was told, “Yes, there is, Minister. There is a document.” Are we actively working with neighbours and partners on biosecurity?
Lord Vallance: Yes, there is a lot going on in that. There is a biosecurity group inside the Cabinet Office linking things across Government.
Q383 Kit Malthouse: On that, we have reduced our detection capability on water testing and all the rest of it for pathogens, right? Since covid, that has all reduced quite significantly, hasn’t it?
Lord Vallance: We have less testing than we had in covid, but we have different testing. UKHSA has in place a number of detection mechanisms, but the ubiquitous testing that was available then is not available, probably quite rightly.
Q384 Chair: Thank you very much for that, Kit. We have ranged around a wide range of issues, not surprisingly because we are so pleased to have you before us, Lord Vallance, and not everything has been directly connected to the inquiry into regions, innovation and growth. Coming back to that specifically, my sense from you—correct me if I am wrong—is that you are quite happy with the regional distribution of funding and resource and attention from your Department.
Lord Vallance: I am interested in regional success rather than regional funding as the only way to do that. In other words, I am more interested in the outcomes than the inputs.
Q385 Chair: Are you happy with the outcomes?
Lord Vallance: We have some good things in play, but I don’t think we are there yet.
Q386 Chair: You think there is more to be done within the Department.
Lord Vallance: Yes, for sure.
Q387 Chair: Where is your focus in terms of what more needs to be done?
Lord Vallance: The local innovation partnerships fund is a big start in that, and it will grow if it is successful. We have a very clear plan that Innovate is linking to BBB, and BBB is spending 80% or so outside London. We have focus, particularly in buckets 2 and 3, linked to the industrial strategy. I take the point about bucket 1. We need to keep looking to make sure it is not overly concentrated in some places, and is there to be able to support bright sparks wherever they are.
Q388 Chair: Great. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Lord Vallance. Thank you very much Holly Yates and Oliver St John as well for supporting the Minister.
Lord Vallance: We owe you just in words the local innovation partnerships fund as devolved funding and exactly what that means.
Chair: Yes, a sentence rather than a paragraph might be helpful. Thank you very much. We will follow up on the items that we have not been able to clarify here. Thank you very much for your contribution.