Government unveils £650 million life science funding

By Peter Davison

1 June 2023

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Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has announced a £650 million funding package for the UK’s life sciences ecosystem – including an update on the long-awaited East West Rail route, the new railway line improving connections between the science powerhouses Oxford and Cambridge.

The multi-faceted Life Sci for Growth package brings together 10 different policies including £121 million to improve commercial clinical trials to bring new medicines to patients faster, up to £48 million of new money for scientific innovation to prepare for any future health emergencies, £154 million to increase the capacity of the UK’s biological data bank further aiding scientific discoveries that help human health, and up to £250 million to incentivise pension schemes to invest in the UK's most promising science and tech firms.

The package also includes plans to relaunch the Academic Health Science Network as Health Innovation Networks to boost innovation by bringing together the NHS, local communities, charities, academia and industry to share best practice.

It also lays out changes to planning rules to free up lab space and updates a route for East West Rail (EWR), the new railway line, to improve connections between UK science powerhouses Oxford and Cambridge, bringing more investment to the region.

Life Sciences is one of the UK’s most successful sectors, worth over £94 billion to the UK economy in 2021, a nine per cent increase on the year before.

As a key industry driving UK growth the Chancellor has identified it as a focus for government, ensuring regulation aids innovation, government funding is targeted at vital projects and investment is diverse.

This also helps to deliver the Science and Technology framework through reforming regulation, boosting investment and driving up talent and skills.

"Our Life Sciences sector employs over 280,000 people, makes £94 billion for the UK each year and produced the world’s first covid vaccine," said the chancellor.

"These are businesses that are growing our economy while having much wider benefits for our health – and this multi-million pound investment will help them go even further."

By Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country.

An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts.

Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.