UK Chancellor George Osborne has announced £222 million for Big Data, graphene, cell therapy and doctoral training in his 2014 budget.
Delivering the budget in the House of Commons on 19 March, Osborne announced a five-year £42m fund to establish an Alan Turing Institute for Big Data research. The investment should help the UK “out-compete, outsmart and outdo the rest of the world” in the field, he said.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has said that the institute will be a national research centre—although the exact location is yet to be decided—and it will work on ways of collecting, organising and analysing Big Data.
The centre could also provide strategic oversight and leadership and help the UK influence international research agendas, according to BIS. It is expected to bring together industry and academia and to work with other e-infrastructure and Big Data research centres, such as the Open Data Institute and the Catapult network.
The budget also includes £74m to be invested by the Technology Strategy Board over five years to expand its Catapult network.
Of this, £55m will go to creating a cell-therapy manufacturing centre, which will be part of the existing Cell Therapy Catapult and will enable large-scale manufacturing of cell therapies for late-stage clinical trials.
The remaining £19m will go towards exploiting potential applications of graphene, with £14m for a graphene applications innovation centre as part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and £5m for a Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre in Manchester.
The chancellor also revealed that the government is to provide £106m over five years to establish 20 more Centres for Doctoral Training. The money will be invested through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, with further funding expected from universities and industry. BIS said the cash should provide training for around 750 more postgraduates.
The budget document also says that the government is investigating ways to increase participation in postgraduate studies and will present its ideas in the 2014 autumn statement.
A spokeswoman for BIS has confirmed that none of the £222m sum announced in the budget will come from any previously announced funding pots, or from the £1.1-billion science capital fund.
Lesley Yellowlees, president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, welcomed the additional funding but warned that the UK “continues to lag behind the international competition when it comes to government investment in science”. She added: “More than individual funding for ‘announceable’ projects, we need a long-term funding pipeline and a strategy for investment in research.”
Meanwhile, Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, said that "this government has shown consistent support for science".
The budget also revealed that the government will improve tax relief for small and medium-sized companies. The rate of R&D tax credit payable to loss-making small businesses will increase from 11 to 14.5 per cent from April. HM Revenue and Customs said the aim was to encourage small companies and start-ups to invest in R&D.
The chancellor also highlighted the importance of apprenticeships and training, announcing £85m in both 2014-15 and 2015-16 for more than 100,000 grants to employers to hire apprentices.
He added that as of 1 April, the government will exclude R&D allowances from rules that aim to prevent loss buying—where companies pass the potential to gain access to corporation tax relief to unconnected third parties
The budget said that departments remain ahead of their consolidation targets and are forecast to underspend by £7m in 2013-14. It contained the revised departmental expenditure limits as announced in the 2010 and 2013 spending reviews and adjusted for decisions outlined in this budget.
BIS’s estimated 2013-14 budget was £14.8bn, with a planned budget of £13.8bn in 2014-15 and £13.2bn in 2015-16. Meanwhile, the health budget is still planned to grow every year, from £105.6bn in 2013-14 to £110.4bn in 2015-16. However, the year 2014-15 was predicted to be £109.8bn in the 2013 budget, and is now planned at £108.3bn in the 2014 budget. The budget for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is planned to drop from £1.8bn in 2013-14 to £1.6bn in 2015-16.