Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what steps his Department is taking to support small and medium-sized (a) biotechnology and (b) pharmaceutical companies to conduct clinical trials in the UK.

The Department for Business and Trade is committed to making the UK an outstanding place for life sciences companies to start and scale. The Office for Life Sciences has a target to see more scale-up finance raised by life sciences businesses in the UK than anywhere else in Europe. A dedicated stream of work is being delivered to support small and medium-sized biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.

The Department of Health and Social Care and Department of Science, Innovation and Technology are developing tailored approaches for SMEs in parallel, to ensure that they can access the UK’s research infrastructure effectively.