Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether he plans to focus on expanding the economy through the (a) technology, (b) manufacturing or (c) exports sectors; and if he will make a statement.

The Chancellor has been clear that raising productivity is the only way to expand the economy in the long term. Doing so will mean encouraging growth in the manufacturing sector, boosting the adoption of technology and enabling more British firms to export. That’s why we increased the National Productivity Investment Fund to £37bn at Budget 2018, and have announced a wide range of productivity enhancing measures at previous fiscal events. Most recently this has included £81 million for a new extreme photonics centre in Oxfordshire, £45 million for the European Bioinformatics Institute, and £79 million for a new supercomputer to be hosted at Edinburgh University.