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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with reference to the ONS data on Gross domestic expenditure on research and development published on 22 November 2022, if his Department will make an estimate of total research and development investment as a proportion of GDP for the time period covered by this data.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is an independent body, and this update is part of a wider programme of work to improve economic statistics and data capture. Its 22 November 2022 release estimated that £59.7bn was invested in UK R&D in 2019, increasing to £61.8bn in 2020. The ONS has not published R&D as a percentage of GDP, to make clear that they have not yet incorporated the improvements to the measurement of R&D in the business and higher education sectors into the calculations of GDP.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) understands the complexity and timelines involved in feeding the R&D changes through to GDP as part of National Accounts and looks forward to this calculation in due course. If the ONS had made the calculation, BEIS believes it would have produced a figure between 2.6% and 2.7% of GDP for 2019 and between 2.9% and 3.0% for 2020.