Source · Select Committees · Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Recommendation 7
7
Acknowledged
While the most cutting-edge science may be best carried out in established centres of excellence,...
Conclusion
While the most cutting-edge science may be best carried out in established centres of excellence, as Lord Vallance put it, there are centres of excellence across the country, in Cardiff, Durham, Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Newcastle – amongst others. Traditional innovation hubs like London, Oxford and Cambridge are limited in physical space, housing costs and facilities, which other locations can offer in abundance and often at lower cost. Utilising their potential has the additional benefit of supporting greater regional economic growth. (Conclusion, Paragraph 30)
Government response summary AI-generated
The government partially agrees with the principle of tracking regional R&D impact, stating it is strengthening transparency by publishing regional data and an Innovation Clusters Map with future annual updates, and will continue to refine data over time.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government · verbatim extract
Acknowledged
The government agrees with this recommendation and is already acting on it. We agree that collaboration between universities in the Greater South East and institutions across the UK can support spin-outs to scale and drive regional growth. We also agree with the Committee that the Cambridge-Manchester partnership demonstrates how this can work in practice. Through Research England, £4.8 million is being provided over three years to support this partnership. The university-led collaboration is testing new approaches to place-to-place innovation working, sharing commercialisation expertise and supporting start-ups and scale-ups to attract investment and create high-value jobs. DSIT and UKRI will continue to work closely with this partnership, gathering learnings that could be used to build other cross-regional partnerships. UKRI funding programmes provide routes for universities to identify and develop similar collaborative opportunities. Funding streams such as the Research England Development (RED) and Connecting Capability Fund (CCF) support joint commercialisation capability, while sector-led networks such as TenU and SETSquared help spread effective commercialisation practice across institutions. While support is available, we do not seek to direct specific institution partnerships from the centre. Instead, UKRI works to ensure that funding frameworks and programmes create the environment for universities across the UK to build partnerships to support spin-out growth and wider innovation-led development. For example, the Universities of Oxford and Liverpool have recently launched their own partnership because of the complementarities they identified between their innovation capabilities and relevant local authorities’ collaborative ambitions. Over the next year we will particularly focus on how further partnerships could be used to harness the strengths of other universities in the Northern Growth Corridor. Where these can help deliver our Northern Growth Strategy, we will work with universities to support their development.
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