Hammond talks up £1.6bn for R&D but new cash in short supply

Budget 2018: Chancellor Philip Hammond has announced £1.6 billion of investments in R&D, but only £55 million of this is new money.

Hammond told the House of Commons on 29 October that there would be “£1.6bn of new investments to support our modern industrial strategy, from nuclear fusion to quantum computing”.

But a Treasury spokesperson later clarified that of this sum, the only new money is £35m for a new national quantum computing centre and an additional £20m in 2019-20 to allow the UK Atomic Energy Authority, which manages the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, to accelerate work on fusion technologies.