Royal Society and Dyson agree - government must invest in research

09 March 2010

The UK will face decades of slow economic decline unless it invests heavily in research - one of the country’s few genuine areas of economic competitive advantage, according to a report published today by the Royal Society.

The report, The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity, warns that the UK’s current advantage is in danger of being wiped out by the US, China, India, France and Germany who have ramped up spending in science to boost their economies.

Welcoming the report, Dr Wendy Piatt, Director General of the Russell Group, said: “We strongly support the Royal Society’s call to put science and innovation at the heart of a strategy for long-term economic growth.

“Whatever the short-term spending problems facing the next government, it is surely right to create a long-term framework to build on the investment of the past decade which has paid off so well in terms of innovation based on internationally respected research and highly-skilled people. As the report argues, it would be ‘disastrous if...there was a withdrawal of support for our world-class universities’ or the incentives to encourage commercialisation and knowledge exchange,” she said.

The Royal Society report comes as the entrepreneur Sir James Dyson urged the UK to use its ingenuity and creativity to keep up with growing international competition. In a report for the Conservative Party, he recommended: “To remain internationally competitive, government needs to get serious about engineering and science – in its commitment to research, delivering skills and backing significant infrastructure projects. High tech exports create real wealth and will help us recover from our deficit.”

Sir Martin Taylor, chair of the Royal Society report's advisory group, said: "As France announces a new € 35 billion investment in the knowledge economy, the UK cuts university budgets by £600 million, with the threat of more to come. History shows us that new technologies drive economic development – look at the industrial and digital revolutions. The UK has been in the top two of the scientific premier league for the last 350 years. It would seem obvious that politicians would recognise the need to invest in this competitive advantage rather than cutting funds."

The report highlights last year's announcement of a $21 billion boost for science in the US and recent claims from American scientists that they will steal our finest minds if UK investment slips. The report also draws attention to a recent €35 billion investment in the 'knowledge economy' by France, a commitment from the German government to increase their federal budget for education and research by €12 billion by 2013 and the year on year increase of 20% in China's science spending over the last decade.

Lord Waldegrave, former science minister and current provost of Eton College commented: "Times are tough at the moment but that is exactly when you need to invest in the future and focus spending where you already have an advantage. Science is one of the jewels in our crown but it yields its dividends over decades. Investment in science cannot be turned on and off on a political whim - we must have a long-term investment. If we cut science now, just as the benefits of nearly twenty years of consistent policy are really beginning to bear fruit, we will seriously damage our economic prospects."

On the BBC Today programme Lord Waldegrave revealed that when he left government as chief secretary to the Treasury in 1997, he had left a note for the incoming Labour minister Alistair Darling urging him to protect the security services and science. (Read the transcript of the interview between John Humphrys and Lord Waldegrave and Lord Sainsbury.)

The report busts the familiar myth that the UK is good at science but bad at exploiting its results. It highlights the emergence of an innovation economy in the UK with universities becoming fledgling economic powerhouses. Patents granted to UK universities have increased by 136% between 2000 and 2008 and university spin outs employed 14,000 people in 2007/08 and had a turnover of £1.1 billion. While the report also cites examples of science driving successful sectors of the economy such as pharmaceuticals, business R&D is picked out as a weakness for the UK. In 2007 British companies spent 1.14% of GDP on R&D while in the US the figure was 1.9% and in Germany 1.8%.

Speaking at the launch of the report Lord Sainsbury the former science minister and member of the advisory group said: "In the last twenty years our universities have risen to the challenge of commercialising their research and figures now show that the record of our world-class universities is close to that of top American universities, with high-tech clusters growing strongly at not only Cambridge and Oxford but also in Manchester, Southampton, Surrey and York.

"We cannot compete with countries such as China and India on the basis of low wages, and science and innovation must, therefore, be the basis of the strategy for growth which we need to have as we go into a tough period of fiscal consolidation."

The full Royal Society report can be downloaded at http://royalsociety.org/the-scientific-century.

BBC Today interview with Waldegrave and Sainsbury

Dyson report - Ingenious Britain