Government supplies £460m additional funding to new technologies
THE eight technology sectors which the Government hopes will secure future growth and prosperity for the UK have received a funding boost.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is allocating £460m to fund development in big data, space, robotics and autonomous systems, synthetic biology, regenerative medicine, agri-science, advanced materials and energy.
These eight sectors were highlighted by the Chancellor in a speech at the Royal Society.
The funding is being allocated as follows:
• £189m for big data and energy efficient computing to build on the research base’s capacity for analysing big data sets, in areas like earth observation and medical science
• £25m for the National Space Technology Programme for the development of commercial products and services using space technology and data from space-based systems
• £35m for centres of excellence in robotics and autonomous systems to be created in and around universities, innovation centres, science parks and enterprise sites to bring together the research base and industry
• £45m for new facilities and equipment for advanced materials research in areas such as advanced composites, high-performance alloys, low-energy electronics and telecommunications
• £30m to create dedicated R&D facilities to develop and test new grid scale storage technologies, helping the UK capitalise on its expertise in energy production, with aim of saving money and reducing the national carbon footprint
• £50m for vital upgrades to research equipment and laboratories
• £25m to develop the Advanced Metrology Laboratory at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, allowing scientists there to undertake leading edge research in measurement science
• £65m for world-leading research institutes, focussed around the development of Rothamsted Research Campus, Aberystwyth, Harwell Oxford and SciTech Daresbury.
These investments build on the £108m of Autumn Statement funding detailed in the Strategy for UK Life Sciences.
Universities Minister David Willetts said the UK had a particularly strong research sector and the additional funding would reinforce its position. He said the emphasis now was to concentrate of developing the technologies and exploiting them for commercial gain.
“Strong science and flexible markets is a good combination of policies. But it is not enough. It misses out crucial stuff in the middle – real decisions on backing key technologies on their journey from the lab to the marketplace. It is the missing third pillar to any successful high tech strategy,” he said.
“It is R&D and technology and engineering as distinct from pure science. It is our historic failure to back this which lies behind the familiar problems of the so-called ‘valley of death’ between scientific discoveries and commercial applications.”
