COMMENT For me, there were six big takeaways from the Creating a Scientific Superpower conference held last week with EG at the QEII Conference Centre in London.
We must build on our superpower status in life sciences
We should be proud of the crown jewels of UK science and technology, using our superpower status to create the superpower businesses of the future.
Life sciences contributed £88.9bn to the UK economy in 2021, with a further £26.2bn coming from its services and supply chains. The sector is responsible for 268,000 jobs. There is more than £20m of global capital lining up to invest in UK life sciences.
The current Nasdaq market wobbles are doing very little to damage investor confidence in the underlying strength, fundamentals and long-term potential of the life sciences sector.
We need labs, labs and more labs
When opening the conference, my colleague Max Bryan told of a biotech company leaving Cambridge and the UK for the US because it cannot find the space it needs here. After a 300% increase in demand for labs since the beginning of the pandemic, there now isn’t a single lab in Cambridge or Oxford available to move into today. Not one.
There is now a woeful lack of supply, with demand for wet and dry labs hitting 1.7m sq ft at the end of last year. It will be higher still by the summer. We need more labs. And then more.
But it must also be the right type of space. Our Life Sciences 2030 report, launched last week, found that 30% of life sciences companies interviewed by YouGov expected to be searching for more specialised space in the coming decade as technologies such as AI, robotics and automation change the way research is carried out and accelerates the manufacturing potential of personalised treatments.
Our planning system must prioritise innovation
International investors and occupiers understand that we have a complex planning system, but it is woefully under-resourced and as a result is far too slow.
Bidwells’ Radical Capital report, launched last year, suggested a number of policy ideas that would support good economic growth in the UK. The creation of a new innovation use class was a central idea.
After the conference, I am more convinced than ever that it’s a useful tool. Let’s carve out a definition that allows local authorities to create policies that prioritise the science and tech sector. Flexibility is good but it doesn’t help local leaders to propose what is important economically. Let’s be bold and back the innovators.
We must grow our clusters
We heard time and time again how the cross-fertilisation of research, talent and innovation is where the magic happens.
Our own recent research, undertaken with YouGov, of large R&D businesses across a range of sectors, but particularly life science and tech, where emerging convergence will accelerate, found that a central cluster location with easy access to leading research and the associated ability to attract internationally renowned talent was key.
So, let’s build on the strengths of our world-beating clusters, at scale, and feel the benefits we see delivered around the world.
Investing in research will have a multiplier effect
There is a strong argument for the government to forward-invest in innovation. Academic research finds that “mission-orientated innovation spending” can have bigger and longer-term economic benefits than other forms of investment. What’s more, we must remember that our successful clusters are part of a wider ecosystem, connected economically to other specialist clusters and companies across the country.
AstraZeneca employs 4,000 people in the Cambridgeshire region and 42,000 across its UK supply chains. If the government is committed to levelling up, these multiplier effects serve as a strong reason why we must invest in innovation now.
Government must show up to support us
The conference was fascinating and inspiring. But we were a stone’s throw from Westminster, so if there was one disappointment it was the lack of government representation.
If only they had taken the time to listen to the UK innovators, our university attendees and some of the world’s biggest investors and commercial landlords, they might have a better handle on the scale of the opportunity at hand.
Our challenge now is overcoming the political optics of investing in a region that is already successful. Perhaps this was the reason that no government officials chose to attend, despite their interest.
If we are to build the life sciences equivalent of semiconductor giant Arm in the UK, we need the land and buildings to do it. It would be a crying shame if our researchers, academics and entrepreneurs developed the next world-changing idea here but then found that there wasn’t a single building in which to make it happen because of a lack of joined-up thinking from our political leaders.
Mike Derbyshire is head of planning at Bidwells
