Professor John Krebs, the co-author of a Lords report on the Government’s global ambitions for science and technology, said despite the laudatory rhetoric, there was no clear strategy as to how the ambition could be realised. superpower’ and reasons to doubt that I will succeed. Speaking at a briefing on the report, Science and Technology Superpower: More Than a Slogan?, Lord Krebs said he feared ministers could quietly abandon or reduce the funding commitments needed to meet the target. Meanwhile, the creation of the new National Science and Technology Council and the Office of Science and Technology Strategy – on top of existing bodies such as Research and Innovation UK – threatened to make bureaucracy even worse, he said. “The government’s plan to become a science superpower is great, but right now it feels like starting a marathon with your shoelaces tied together and no signs telling you how to get to the finish line,” Krebs said. . “There is a danger that the UK will become a bureaucratic superpower rather than a scientific superpower.” The Cabinet Office said last year that cutting-edge science and technology were “essential” to the country’s prosperity in the digital age and stated its ambition to make the UK a “science and technology superpower” by 2030. The aim it is based on a pledge to boost research and development funding to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. This requires reversing a trend that saw funding fall from 1.84% of GDP to 1.74% between 1985 and 2019. Lady Brown, the chair of the Lords committee, said that while the government had “high ambitions” for science and technology, the inquiry found a “plurality of strategies” across different sectors with little connection between them. Meanwhile, many official bodies had unclear or overlapping responsibilities and it was often unclear who was responsible for what. More than a dozen strategies and initiatives linked to research and innovation were launched in the life sciences alone between 2017 and 2021, the survey heard, leading to what Krebs called a “confused landscape” and suspicions that the government may be better at drafting new strategies rather than delivering them. The report urges the government to be specific about what it wants to achieve and publish a clear implementation plan with measurable targets. It calls for closer cooperation with business to achieve the 2.4% of GDP target and the urgent appointment of a new science minister at cabinet level. The position has been vacant since George Freeman resigned early last month. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST Peers continue to criticize the UK’s approach to international science collaborations, with huge cuts to overseas aid and failure to join the £80bn Horizon Europe program because of a row over Brexit in Northern Ireland. “To cut ourselves off from the larger international cooperative program is an extremely incompetent thing to do,” Krebs said. The UK got a lot more money out of the previous Horizon program than it put in. Tory leadership candidates Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have been “essentially silent” on science and technology, Krebs said, raising further doubts about the government’s commitment to the superpower goal. “This report, and its conclusions and recommendations, should be on the next prime minister’s desk as soon as he or she takes the job,” he said. “What worries me — although it’s not something the committee looked at — is the emphasis on tax cuts, some of those pledges to increase spending on science might be dropped or quietly rolled back.”
