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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what support his Department is providing to help support local business clusters.

The Government is supporting clusters across the country through targeted measures such as the Strength in Places Fund and is trialling new approaches of working more closely with high potential places through £100 million of investment for Innovation Accelerators.

Innovate UK also recently invited proposals for a series of Health and Life Science Accelerators that will support the development of early-stage health and life science businesses across the UK. These accelerators will recruit both existing spinouts and new start-ups to test their ideas and develop new concepts. The programmes are expected to start between January 2023 and March 2025.