Research, Innovation and Knowledge Transfer Archives

Thank you for completing this survey to enable an EPC response to this House of Lords inquiry. Please do use the save and resume later function to save your work if necessary. This page is available to members of the EPC Board and RIKT committee only. The survey highlights 6 questions. You can find further detail on the questions and sub-questions here.

We welcome concrete, actionable, policy recommendations for Government. Opinions are welcome, as are quantitative evidence, insights, and analysis.

Scaling UK science and technology

Translating excellent basic science and technology into global companies has long been recognised as a problem for the UK. Many policy initiatives have tried to address this.

1. What are the key barriers that the Government must address to fix this? What specific policies need to change? Why have previous attempts not succeeded?

Strategic priorities for UK science and technology in a changing world

2. How should the UK's science and technology strategy respond to ongoing major changes in the economic, geopolitical, and technological landscape?[5] What challenges and opportunities now face the UK's science and technology sector? What policy actions would you prioritise?

Financing investment in UK science and technology

The UK research and innovation landscape

3. Is the UK’s research and innovation landscape well-structured to support science and technology commercialisation, economic impact, and strategic advantage for the UK?

Private sector investors, companies, and capital markets

4. How can the Government encourage more private-sector investment in R&D, and in R&D intensive companies, including technology start-ups and scale-ups, in the UK? What are the major factors behind the exodus of capital and companies to the US, and is there anything that the UK can do to prevent this? We would welcome case studies from entrepreneurs or investors who have moved abroad, setting out their reasons for doing so.

Public sector late-stage investors; the National Wealth Fund

5. Are the current major public sector investment vehicles, such as the National Wealth Fund, British Business Bank, and British Patient Capital, sufficiently resourced––in terms of capital, as well as scientific, technological, and financial expertise––to make meaningful scale-up investments in UK science and technology companies? Do they have the mandate to do this? If not, what changes or reforms would you propose?

Government policy levers to support scale-up of science and technology

The Government has set out many policy actions in the Science and Technology Framework and elsewhere that it hopes will support the UK’s science and technology sector and scale-up.

6. Are these measures working? Do they address the right problems? What additional policy levers exist for the Government to support scale-up?

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