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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of the scientific research consortia as a future funding model.

Research consortia foster research collaboration between diverse partners within countries and across international boundaries. Evidence shows that collaboration leads to better performance.

Collaboration and excellence reinforce each other:

• Within a single organisation or university, collaboration achieves 27% higher scholarly impact than no collaboration, however across organisations or in consortia within a country, collaborations achieve 45% higher impact, and international collaborations double the impact of scholarly output (99% higher), compared to no collaboration.
• The UK has received 21 of the 55 Nobel Prizes awarded between 2010 and 2020 and all of these (except for one in Literature) were shared with scientists from other nations

International R&D consortia lead to better economic outcomes:

• R&D investments have been found to generate twice as large returns internationally (250%) as they have domestically (121%) (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/roie.12404)
• A 1% increase in foreign R&D investment raises total factor productivity by twice as much as domestic R&D investment (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014292109000348)

Existing international funding vehicles such as the Newton and Global Challenges Research Fund build international consortia (bilateral consortia with Newton and multilateral through the Global Challenges Research Fund) to progress research on shared challenges.