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 Office for National Statistics dataset entitled Business enterprise research and development, UK, published on 22 November 2022, whether his Department has made an assessment of the impact of that dataset’s aggregation of regions into single figures on the ability of his Department to evaluate the impact of (a) local and (b) regional research and development investment; and if he will take steps to ensure the ONS provides more detailed 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. The ONS published estimates of country and regional breakdown of expenditure on R&D in the UK by sector of performance for 2018, 2019 and 2020 in table 4 of their Gross Expenditure on R&D release on 22 November 2022, with business enterprise R&D shown separately and with English regions aggregated into three groups.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is in contact with the ONS and they intend to publish further detailed data on regional spend in due course.