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 (a) encourage domestic investment and (b) raise productivity in the manufacturing sector.

Through our Industrial Strategy, we will make sure that we are using all the tools we have to boost local growth, encouraging domestic investment and productivity.

We need credible long-term strategies to help local economies, which is what local industrial strategies will do. Based on rigorous analysis, they will identify local strengths, future opportunities and the action needed in each area to boost productivity and competiveness.

We will increase the National Productivity Investment Fund from £8 billion to £31billion and extending it to 2022-23. We are launching an action plan to unlock over £20 billion of patient capital investment to finance growth in innovative firms over 10 years. As part of this, we will establish a new £2.5 billion Investment Fund in the British Business Bank. We are increasing R&D tax credits for large businesses from 11% to 12% from January 2018, as part of the drive to increase R&D investment to 2.4% by 2027.

We will invest a further £725m in a second wave of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund across the UK to respond to some of the greatest global challenges and opportunities and support sector productivity. We are also continuing to support the High Value Manufacturing Catapults, which we have invested £300 million over the past 5 years, to support commercialisation of the innovation of new technologies that will be crucial to UK manufacturing success.

The new Industrial Strategy Council will be tasked with taking a long term view and will be responsible for putting the right evaluation and reporting structures in place to assess the progress of our Industrial Strategy.