Written evidence submitted by Mr Tony Nordberg (IGR0042)

1. “Your reason for submitting evidence.”

I am a retired Engineer with experience in industrial research and development. My reason for submitting evidence is the apparent difficulties that the policy of subsidising the ‘innovation ecology’ has with improving large-scale social and economic growth per head.

Firstly, the days are now gone when the UK had large industrial companies whose boards took strategic decisions and directed innovative investments for and on behalf of their UK shareholders, debtholders, customers and employees, thereby benefiting the population at large. Now, investment decisions are largely made by offshore boards serving offshore interests, and any funding in UK-based innovation is both partial and highly specialised. To fill the gaps, the government has stepped in to provide development finance in response to lobbying mainly from academia and civil engineering, but the government innovation funding process is also partial and does not necessarily cover the actual needs of the UK population.

2, “Is the £20.4 billion research and development budget delivering value for money and economic growth? …”

The government funded innovation ecosystem is currently dominated by specialised patron/client relationships that both propose, decide and direct who and what gets discussed and funded. The result is that more generally useful innovative system-level thinking is crowded out. In addition, the mechanism of competitive bidding is both expensive for bidders and can be distorted by decisions to eliminate losers who have the least capacity to cause upset, rather than choose those offering benefits to the wider population. One way of countering this monopsonistic tendency is to conduct funding decisions on an open basis, with 'juries' of laymen and public coverage. Unlike the very similar defence funding process, civil innovation funding can be made entirely open with all bidders having their submissions made public.

3. “... and what metrics should be used to evaluate its effectiveness?”

Given the urgent need for economic growth, a small portion of the government funded R&D effort could be aimed at potential ‘Moonshots’ as defined by the Council for Science & Technology (CST) who also provide criteria for evaluating such projects;

1)       Excite and inspire the public, academia, and industry.

2)       Help solve an important societal issue.

3)       Ground-breaking.

4)       Involve technology that is at a stage to make a breakthrough feasible.

5)       Specific, well defined, a clear timeframe and a measure of success.

6)       Take advantage of areas where the UK can be a World Leader.

7)       Has the prospect of generating significant additional benefits.

However the difficulty is with item 1) where the current innovative funding system militates against generating practical public interest and apparently favours lobbying and propaganda from vested interests. A case in point is the National Infrastructure Commission who after years of lobbying for rail investments such as HS2 has recently announced to the Transport Select Committee that the car is in fact more popular than rail and so the government ought to spend more on roads.

4. “How are funding bodies such as UKRI and ARIA contributing to the UK’s innovation ecosystem and delivering the government’s growth missions?”

ARIA claims to support innovations that are 'too interdisciplinary' for the focused specialisations supported by UKRI. However, there is no sign yet that ARIA is willing to entertain such proposals that pose no original academic science challenges.

Rather, it is proposed that a separate ‘Moonshot’ set of competitions are funded by a small portion of the £20.4 billion research budget to address a series of open challenges to issues that inhibit social and economic growth across the UK. While such competitions attract entrants, the majority are ‘losers’ and their contributions remain unknown to the public at large and so are effectively a waste of time and effort. Instead of a restricted set of ‘winners’, the ten, twenty or so best entries could be given a small prize to offset their entry costs and their submissions published for all to see.

5. A Transport Moonshot?

One example of a Moonshot challenge not reliant on scientific ‘breakthroughs’ stems from the assumption that collective social and economic growth is largely determined by increasing the daily door-to-door radius of opportunities for individuals and goods, and hence on increasing transport speeds. For example, past UK innovations of the canals, railways and turnpike systems all gave progressively faster speeds that then engendered massive social and economic growth. Our current fastest transport mode is the private vehicle-public road system which is now slowing due to road capacity not meeting rising demand. As it is politically impossible to build more road capacity on the scale required, policies are instead aimed at rationing road-use in one way or another including the promotion of highly expensive electric-vehicles to appeal to the environmentalist lobbies. These policies represent a backward step, especially for those with no access to a car that DfT recently reported as four times less likely to be employed, and twice as unlikely to engage in social activities.

However, it is possible to consider a system using current technologies to provide an additional cheaper door-to-door transport mode with doubled speeds that will result in huge growth of opportunities in all regions of the UK, together with effectively zero emissions and importantly with minimal environmental impact.

The concept is to take a leaf from the cycleway policy and instal a network of separate elevated ~1m-wide single-lane high-speed toll-routes shadowing existing rail and major road margins for specialised lightweight electric cars. Junctions with the ordinary road network at typical parish intervals will only require short-range batteries to cover the start and end stages of door-to-door journeys, as power for traction and recharge will be picked up on these routes and will be under autonomous control, thus freeing the occupants to enjoy the experience or to engage in other activities. Such a system would also offload traffic and reduce congestion from the ordinary roads.

6. Political acceptance

Hitherto, transport infrastructure projects have been imposed on a top-down basis and environmental drawbacks are the main reason for considerable local resistance. The resulting ‘Vogons vs Nimbys’ conflicts between local ad-hoc organisations and layers of government have led to delays and increasing costs. Instead, an inversion of the planning process is proposed by using ‘Digital Twin’ route planning simulations at the parish level as a means of gaining positive acceptance from individual property owners along the proposed routes, followed by local governments and national-level ministries and their agencies. Such digital twin simulations can be expanded to provide the basis for business modelling to de-risk the investment in building and operating the routes and the specialised cars for sale or lease.

7. Summary

Our current government-funded innovation ecology is dominated by existing interest-groups following their specialisations which may well deliver new opportunities for growth in the longer term, yet more basic developments at the system-level not requiring original scientific research are less attractive. One example is given by an additional transport mode that would deliver a fundamental improvement to the human need to increase employment opportunities and hence growth and also meets the stated objectives of the DfT and the supporting objectives of the BEIS, MHCLG, DEFRA, and the DCMS.

I hope the Committee finds this submission of practical interest, and I also hope they send it to the relevant ministries to ask their agencies to assess the technical, economic and political practicalities in the first instance.

20 January 2025