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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how much the Government has spent on R&D in each of the last five years.

The Government has increased spending on R&D in the last five years.

Table 3 of the ONS statistical bulletin “UK Government expenditure on science, engineering and technology 2016” gives the following figures for total UK Government net expenditure on R&D, including indicative UK contributions to EU R&D, of

We have an ambition to raise total public and private R&D expenditure to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. As a first step to reaching the 2.4% target, we announced in the 2016 Autumn Statement, and expanded in the 2017 Budget, an additional of £7 billion for R&D over 5 years from 2017-18 to 2021-22 as part of the National Productivity Investment Fund.

We expect to see 2017 data next March.