Written evidence submitted by researchers from the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester (SDY0044)

1. This written evidence is submitted by a group of researchers from the University of Manchester with expertise in science diplomacy. Contributors are based within two internationally recognised research centres at the University: the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIOIR), a major centre for the study of science, technology and innovation policy and management; and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM), a major centre for research in the history of science and technology, medical humanities, and science communication.
2. Specifically, the submission has been written by: Kieron Flanagan (Professor of Science and Technology Policy, MIOIR); Simone Turchetti (Professor of History of Science and Technology, CHSTM); Alice Naisbitt (Research Associate in Science Policy, MIOIR); and Dr Gordon Barrett (Research Associate, CHSTM).
3. This submission represents the expert analysis and views of the contributors and does not represent the position of the University of Manchester.

To what extent is the UK considered a global leader in science and innovation and how does this contribute to its soft power on the global stage?

4. The UK is undoubtedly a global leader in science, with continued outsized influence on the global scientific literature (as proxied by citations) relative to its share of the global population[1] and despite the rise of China and the entry into the global science system of many more states.
5. The UK is also a leader in advanced training in STEM subjects, producing more STEM graduates in the 20-44 age range per capita than the US, India and China[2], with international students highly attracted to UK STEM degree programmes. As well as offering a significant subsidy to both the teaching of home students and the UK research effort (without which both activities would be much smaller) international students are also potential vectors of soft power as they return home and take on roles in science, industry, government or civil society. The UK has traditionally scored well in terms of share of current world leaders educated in a country other than their own[3].
6. Both international scientific collaboration and the mobility of students and researchers into the UK have historically been promoted by the UK as sources of ‘soft power’, not least through the work of the British Council.[4] However, the British Council is under threat due to its inability to repay a Covid-era loan to the government and ongoing cuts to its funding. The organisation warns it could cease to exist within a decade unless the government intervenes.[5] This comes despite the government's public commitment to soft power and the recent establishment of a 'Soft Power Council'.
7. With over 90 years of experience in cultural relations across more than 100 countries, the British Council has weathered numerous political challenges. To reduce its funding—or risk its collapse—at a time when Britain is seeking to expand its global influence through soft power appears to be a misstep.

How has this agenda been impacted by the current geopolitical environment, including the international activities of Russia and China?

8. In recent years, concerns have frequently been raised that the integrity of international research collaboration is threatened by state and non-state actors in ways that pose economic, strategic, and national security risks. In particular there is a growing concern that international research collaborations are used by bad-faith actors to seek to acquire academic research and expertise or interfere with academic discourse.[6] In response, governments, funders and research sector organisations are increasingly thinking about how to strike an appropriate balance between openness and research security in their international research collaborations.
9. At the same time, China now outproduces all other nations in volume of scholarly outputs and also shows significant capacity to produce world-class outputs[7]. The UK is the second most frequent partner for bilateral collaborative papers with China-based researchers after the US. China is also a significant source of foreign students, doctoral researchers and research visitors in the UK, directly and indirectly underpinning the strength of the system but also raising fears about the potential for knowledge leakage and intellectual property theft.
10. Analysis by Adams et al[8] suggests that UK-China co-authorship is significantly skewed towards the technology-relevant fields of materials, physics, engineering and computer science, and that UK strengths in these fields may now, in effect, be dependent on collaboration with China. In the past, China has looked to international collaboration as a route to strengthening its national research and innovation system but as that system has matured into a position of global leadership, there is some evidence that China-based scientists may be starting to look less to international collaboration.[9]
11. While it is important for the UK to remain vigilant about risks such as espionage and intellectual property theft (and it is worth noting that the UK has an increasingly mature system for research security based on strong partnerships between government and the research base), the greater risk to the UK lies in any chilling effect on collaboration of research security measures, and from any decoupling driven by geopolitical tensions. Moreover, over four decades or so the UK has built, as a deliberate policy choice and not simply through the unilateral action of universities, a public research system the strength and growth of which depends directly on a high level of international students. A UK science base that was decoupled from China in terms of collaborations, international students and mobility, would almost certainly be a much smaller and less effective science base.

How does science and technology innovation contribute to the UK’s national security?

12. The UK was among the first countries in the world to develop modern, recognisable ST&I policies. The initial impetus was the increasing fear of relative industrial decline from the end of the 19th century onwards, and especially after the First World War. A further factor was the experience of mobilising science and technology during the Second World War. And, of course, ST&I policy was heavily shaped by the context of Cold War-era competition[10]. Strength in science and technology was pursued both directly, as a source of military advantage, and indirectly, as underpinning the economic vitality of the UK. A strong science and technology base comprises the infrastructure and human capital which allows us to develop and apply technologies but, as importantly, to evaluate, absorb and apply scientific and technological knowledge developed elsewhere.

How effective is the UK Government’s strategy for positioning the UK as a global leader in science and technology and what role does the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) play in advancing this agenda?

13. The UK is a leading scientific power, as noted above, and has developed a sophisticated system to promote itself as such. DSIT has an important cross-governmental role of stewardship both with respect to the health of the science base as a whole but also specifically with respect to the international projection of UK scientific leadership, regardless of whether DSIT has direct responsibility for the specific mechanisms (such as the British Council) or not.
14. DSIT is a relatively new department created out of the merger of components taken from predecessor ministries. DSIT is under pressure, both internal to government and external, to see itself primarily as the ministry for AI. Ministers and officials must guard against the risk that an undue preoccupation with AI will distract DSIT from its fundamental responsibilities.

Does the UK need an International Science Strategy and what would it contain?
How well positioned is the government to link scientific and technological progress with enhanced global and UK security?

15. The UK needs to consider international dimensions as core to its overall science and technology policy stance, and specific policies and priorities for international activities (such as the Science and Technology Network, or participation in international collaborative programmes and facilities) should follow on from that. Governments always face the challenge of reconciling multiple and conflicting policy objectives, but UK science and technology strengths are particularly dependent on policies towards universities and students that come from outside DSIT. The UK can only sustain and strengthen its science base and the social, economic, security and soft power projection benefits it receives from it with a whole-of-government approach.

How can the impact of science diplomacy activities be measured, particularly in terms of enhancing national branding, fostering international influence, and contributing to conflict resolution?

16. The effectiveness and impacts of science diplomacy and soft power projection efforts are challenging to quantify. Soft power is often estimated through perception surveys, which can examine how perceptions vary from country to country or from one social group to another. Soft power is always about the potential for impact, and perception research or metrics of international links can only give a sense of that potential. But measuring the actual impact of the UK’s science and technology soft power in any specific case such as the resolution of a particular conflict is always going to be very challenging and can only really be done after the fact, through historical process tracing research.

To what extent are science and technology innovation activities supported through UK Official Development Assistance (ODA) spending?

17. ODA spending may support science, technology and innovation activities directly, through funding R&D, or less directly, through mechanisms like the provision of technical advice or through the procurement of goods and services from firms and organisations in the UK research and innovation ecosystem. From 2010 there was a decisive ‘international’ turn in UK science funding, with the creation first of the Newton Fund, and then of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), both of which simultaneously counted towards government targets on R&D and ODA spending as a percentage of GDP. This level of spending has since been scaled back with the larger scaling back of the GDP ODA commitment and the way this scaling back was implemented created short-term disruption to collaborations and, very likely, longer term reputational impacts.

How can the UK assess the value derived from its participation in international science collaborations in areas such as space initiatives, climate, particle physics, and vaccines development?

18. International research collaboration (IRC) has always been a feature of the modern scientific enterprise. However, indicators suggest that IRC has become increasingly intense over time and has become or is becoming the dominant mode of scientific knowledge production in many fields.
19. IRC may involve formal or informal collaborations between research groups, departments, research-performing organisations, or states. This may include joint research funding, sharing of scientific infrastructure, co-publication, overseas lab visits or presentations at international conferences.[11]
20. There are extrinsic drivers of IRC, stemming from state interest in science diplomacy and the projection of soft power, and from the interest of policymakers, funders and research leaders in increasing the productivity and quality of the research in their organisation, portfolio or national research system. The promotion of IRC, especially via joint funding initiatives or the development of inter-governmental research organisations (IGROs) such as CERN, has also been driven by a desire to share the costs and risks of research. At the level of researchers or research groups IRC may be motivated by the need or desire to access knowledge, expertise, methods, techniques, instruments, data, samples etc not available domestically. Researchers also have personal motives, not least the pursuit of funding.
21. UK participation in IGROs such as CERN has typically been driven by a desire to remain at the frontier of research in a capital-intensive field. By their nature, such collaborations are selective partnerships that tend not to include countries that are farther from the global leading edge and that lack the capacity to meet the subscription costs. Even where such nations have something else to bring to the table, such as the right location to host the IGRO or access to samples, questions remain about whether they are truly equal partners.
22. In contrast, collaborations in areas such as climate and vaccine development may be recognised as global challenges that intrinsically require global collaboration, and here capacity building in countries with less mature science systems is more likely to be seen as a valid goal.
23. In both kind of collaboration, the argument can be made that leading nations such as the UK have a global responsibility to help build research capacity and research infrastructure in less mature research systems so that more countries have equitable access to the fruits of the global scientific enterprise. Science diplomacy practitioners tend to promote a naïve view that all collaboration is always mutually beneficial and ‘win-win’[12], but collaborations that exclude or downgrade certain partners help to maintain asymmetries in science and technology[13] that can be considered to reinforce perceptions of a two tier global science system, not least in terms of infrastructural components such as research data.[14]

What are the benefits of bilateral agreements or global collaborations, such as CERN, for the UK economy and its innovation ecosystem?

24. Participation in IGROs such as CERN or ESA is typically on the basis of the juste retour principle – member states expect to receive a share of procurement contracts and domestic spending in rough proportion to their share of the subscription costs. The economic and innovation impacts of such spending will depend on the innovation level of the national economy and the nature of the spending (i.e. the economic and innovation impacts of procuring a single high-tech component will look different from procuring an ongoing supply of paper cups for the canteen).
25. Bilateral scientific agreements may or may not entail binding treaty commitments to a particular course of action. Aspirational bilateral science (and, more broadly, cultural) agreements are costless and an easy win in international relations. However, bilateral agreements with binding commitments to a particular plan of action, or that commit the parties to removing obstacles to greater collaboration – e.g. by simplifying immigration or funding procedures - are more likely to result in impacts.

How can the UK be made an attractive destination for global R&D investment, and how can the benefits of this investment be maximised locally and nationally?

26. The UK already is an attractive destination for global R&D investment, with a strong supply of advanced scientific human capital, excellent research infrastructure and very generous tax incentives for R&D for large companies by international standards.
27. Economic uncertainty, including Brexit uncertainty, and uncertainty about future visa policies, is likely to have been a dampening factor on the UK’s attractiveness, but a more important question for the UK is: how can it ensure it gains the maximum benefit from foreign direct investment in R&D?
28. Private R&D activity is theorised by economists to have spillover effects that transmit benefits beyond the private firm itself. But these benefits are by no means automatically captured. The UK needs to examine critically whether it is actually capturing spillover benefits from FDI R&D, and what might be done to strengthen the UK’s capacity to do so. Otherwise we risk becoming a subsidised offshore R&D laboratory for the benefit of global corporations.

How can the government ensure leading scientific researchers continue to view the UK as an attractive place to base themselves?

29. The UK public research system has proved attractive to international researchers, combining the dynamism of competitive grant funding with the ability of autonomous institutions to create research jobs outside the restrictions public or civil service structure. However, the attractiveness of the system depends on the health of the institutions that make it up, and a university sector with the widely-publicised threat of redundancies and even bankruptcies hanging over it can be confidently expected to present as a far less attractive destination in the future.
30. Migration is a complex event in the personal, family and social, as well as the professional life, of an individual scientist. The phenomenon of migration is not unique to scientists, and factors such as the availability, quality and security of job opportunities, salaries and incentives, visa and healthcare costs, pension portability, working conditions and broader issues around quality of working and personal/family life - are also relevant to the more general phenomenon of the international migration of highly skilled professionals.[15]

9th May 2025

6