Insight 6

Change the doctrine, not just the storytelling

All panellists agreed: now is the time for a step-change in how the UK approaches life sciences.

George Freeman proposed a fundamental change in doctrine: the UK should back winners.

We’re still stuck in this Treasury dogma—only fund where there’s demonstrable market failure. That’s not how you build an innovation economy.”

Ellie Junod echoed the point.

Stepping in when failures happen, rather than helping growth, is not going to turn the dial. The UK needs to be open for business. Make itself a really great place for pharmaceutical companies, bioscience companies, and biotechs to set up. We’re globally competing. It's a small island. We're doing really well, but we need to make the UK a more commercially friendly environment. Some of the feedback we have from our tenants is that the funding support can look fantastic, but is layered with so much paperwork that SMEs have to employ consultants to take them through all the various rounds in order to get that funding in two years’ time. If you're a small biotech, you don't have the time or the money to get the funding that you really need. And two years is too late for these companies.”

The 2023 announcement that pharma giant AstraZeneca chose low-tax Ireland over the UK, where it already has substantial manufacturing facilities, for a new £320m factory was described by George Freeman as a “massive warning.” AZ’s chief executive said it had wanted to build the site in north-west England, but the "discouraging" tax rate meant it chose Dublin instead.

George Freeman also welcomed a debate about whether UKRI, the national funding agency for research and innovation in the UK, is configured correctly. UKRI invests in science and research across the country, with a budget exceeding £6 billion. It brings together the seven medical Research Councils, Innovate UK, and Research England to support various aspects of research and innovation:

It’s become a 3,000-person bureaucracy – the very thing they all promised us it would not become. We need fewer forms, more partnerships.”

The year 2025 already seems set to be remembered as one of unprecedented turmoil and resets in international trade relations between the United States and other nations, marked by tariffs, haggling over trade deals and more restrictive border arrangements. Given that the U.S is generally considered to have the largest and most dominant life science sector globally, leading on research, investment, and the number of top life science companies, the panel debated whether the upheaval presented any opportunities for the UK.

Ellie Junod highlighted the cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in the United States.

There are academics looking to Europe as a safe haven as their academic access funding gets slashed.”

Laura Citron spoke of the UK’s new found political stability from a London perspective.

We have a relatively new government which is focused on growth, and we have established good and growing trade links with some of the major global economies. That's all really positive. We're seeing very significant growth in international student numbers - for example, where students coming out of the U.S or diverting from the U.S. We're seeing renewed interest from investors who are diverting from U.S. And the UK and London does look like a good bet.” But she warned – “there's a real danger that we can drink our Kool Aid on the silver linings here. The silver linings are great, but there's a great big cloud. Let's be very clear: a global recession is net bad for the UK, even if it is relatively less bad for us than it sits for other places. The rolling back of globalisation, which is what we're currently seeing, is net a bad thing for London as an outward trading global city, and for UK as a medium sized outward trading global economy.”