Budget 2021: 5Live caller slams government 'waste and corruption'
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It comes as the Government had originally pledged to boost R&D investment to £22billion a year by 2024/2025 to Brexit voters – but now that has been pushed back by two years. The Government also made a commitment to double spending from 0.7 percent of GDP to 2.4 percent, but announced at the budget that it will only boost this to 1.1 percent. Labour has hit out at the Government, saying that it would do more to make Britain a “science superpower,” one of Mr Johnson’s own phrases.
Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk, Labour’s Shadow Science Minister Chi Onwurah said: “Labour’s ambition and commitment, and Keir Starmer at the Labour conference spoke very strongly about making the UK a green, digital and science superpower, is boosting long term science sector public spending by three percent and not chopping and changing targets.
“We are doing more. Our plans would meet the post-Brexit ambition of being a science superpower whereas the Government’s plans are off-track.”
The Shadow Minister then proceeded to slam Mr Sunak for not talking about international collaboration as a means of boosting the UK science sector.
Ms Onwurah added: “He said that if we’re not part of Horizon then the money will go into the general science spend, but there was nothing about international collaboration, working with other partners outside of a Europe perhaps.
“But [Labour] we would build a post-Brexit science superpower.”
Horizon Europe is the £80billion EU funding programme for research and innovation.
Until the UK resolves its issues with the Northern Ireland protocol, Britain has been denied any involvement from the key project that will boost the EU’s competitiveness and growth in the science arena.
Ms Onwurah told Express.co.uk that the Government needs to do much better if it is to have any chance at making our science sector competitive, and claimed Labour’s plans would make the country better off.
She said: “We would get much better at building private sector investment across our country, not simply investing in the southeast so we would be investing in regions as engines of growth in science.
“We would also be investing in digital infrastructure.
“There was supposed to be £5billion for digital infrastructure but they’re only going to spend £1.2billion by 2025.
“So again, they’ve reigned back on Boris Johnson’s commitments, and there’s a real possibility they won’t even meet those targets.”
“It’s really hard to take the Government seriously on science.”
The Government was warned last week that backtracking on their R&D funding pledges could have “disastrous” consequences.
Speaking at the Science and Technology Committee, Sir Adrian Smith, Chief Executive of the Alan Turing Institute and President of the Royal Society, added: “There is going to be a signal sent at the end of the spending review.
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“The nature, the tone and the content of that signal is fundamentally important for the science community.
“If we don’t have a clear signal that the funding is going to come in behind the rhetoric and the aspiration, we’re not going to get that leverage of private investment.”
Ms Onwurah warned Express.co.uk about the severe consequences of the funding cut.
She said: “In his actual speech he said that every pound invested by the public sector in science attracted at least two pounds from the private sector.
“So if he even uses his own calculations that means we’re going to be losing out £8billion in private sector investment that the public sector investment would have brought in.
“That’s a huge loss in terms of science spending as well as reduced Government spending.”
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