Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to encourage universities and research institutions to conduct plant-based research to improve food security.

The UK’s main public funders of food-related research are working together through the Global Food Security programme to meet the challenge of providing the world’s growing population with access to safe, affordable and nutritious food, all of the time and in ways the planet can sustain into the future.

Government policy on research funding is governed by the Haldane principle. The principle states that decisions on individual research proposals are best taken by researchers themselves and therefore competitive funding for science research is allocated by the UK Research Councils on the basis of the scientific quality of the proposals.

We are increasing research and development investment by £4.7 billion over the period 2017-18 to 2020-21. This equates to an extra £2 billion per year by 2020-21 and is an increase of around 20% to total government R&D spending, more than any increase in any parliament since 1979. This R&D investment funding is additional to the protection of science resource funding that was announced at the spending review in autumn 2015.