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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what incentives his Department provides to the private sector to increase expenditure on research and development.

We are increasing public investment in 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.

We are creating the right environment to incentivise private sector investment in R&D. Innovate UK currently provides funding for research, development and demonstration projects and has funded over 11,000 projects to date, with over 8,000 unique organisations involved.Through Innovate UK, we have established a network of Catapult Centres to commercialise new and emerging technologies and Catapults are forecast to attract total public and private investment exceeding £1.6bn over their first five years of operation. R&D tax credits encourage greater R&D investment by business and in the year ending 31 March 2015 almost 21,000 companies used the R&D tax credits to claim a total amount of £2.45 billion, with R&D expenditure used to make these claims reaching £21.8 billion.

Science, Research and Innovation will be at the heart of our Industrial Strategy and this Government has bold ambitions to increase R&D and back industries of the future. Our commitment to reach R&D investment of 2.4% of GDP within ten years and 3% in the longer-term is part of this.