Labour fleshes out R&D funding

The government has fleshed out details of how it plans to spend £55bn on research and development (R&D) out of the £86bn committed as part of the 2025 Spending Review. The funding, spread over the next five years, is a key pillar in Labour’s industrial strategy to grow the economy and improve people’s lives.

Earlier this year, in its 2025 Spending Review, the government announced that £22.6bn per year of funding would be allocated to research and development by 2029‑30, in support of its modern Industrial Strategy.

Labour’s Modern Industrial Strategy, announced in June, is underpinned by this commitment, which amounts to £86bn investment into UK R&D, targeted towards the eight sectors with the highest growth potential, leveraging private investment in cutting-edge research, technologies and commercial applications – tech and digital is one of those sectors. Labour’s goal is to make the UK the leading European hub to create, invest in and scale fast-growing digital and technology businesses.

Earlier this year, the National Audit Committee highlighted several inadequacies in the way UKRI, the UK’s national funding agency for science and research, operates including fraud prevention. The agency is now being tasked with delivering more than £38bn by 2029, including nearly £10bn in 2029/30 alone. 

The Advanced Research + Invention Agency (Aria) will see its funding more than double from £220m a year to £400m a year by 2029-30. Some of this will be used by Aria to support its work looking into how robots can potentially help meet the growing need for adult social care.

The Met Office will receive more than £1.4bn to support its work in climate science. Other areas of funding include over £900m for National Academies, £550m for the National Measurement System, and £240m for the AI Safety Institute.

Announcing the new funding during a visit to IBM’s London office, science and technology secretary Liz Kendall said: “Backing our best and brightest researchers and innovators is essential. They are making the impossible possible, from health to clean energy and beyond. Their ideas will create tomorrow’s industries, boosting growth and transforming public services now and in the future. By investing in their work, we are backing the long-term success of the UK, by paving the way for breakthroughs that will help us all to live and work better.”

The visit to IBM was used to illustrate how private investment is supporting the strength of the UK’s public offer on R&D in areas such as quantum and robotics. For every £1 of public R&D funding in the tech and digital sector, the government said there is £3 of private R&D investment.

IBM is also working in partnership with publicly funded researchers through UKRI’s £21m Hartree Centre, to bring AI and supercomputing to bear to discover new medicines and breakthroughs in clean energy. It is also among the companies offering quantum computing resources via the National Quantum Computing Centre, which will benefit from the 10-year government funding commitment.

By investing in R&D now, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said the government was “putting a down-payment on Britain’s future”, which it claimed would deliver dividends for decades to come and put money in people’s pockets.