Happy New Year 2023

UK Science & Technology companies face a difficult year ahead, says MARIA KITT, TAX DIRECTOR, TAX INSIGHT UK, with many  lags and quirks still buried deep in global supply chains; workforce and overhead cost issues making the economy a challenging place for us. Our wish for 2023 is for the UK Government to recognise the importance of the many ‘small and medium’ tech entrepreneurs and protect the valuable tax and grant incentives needed to reach full commercialisation of R &D. The NY Message from the R & D Society Chair comments…………

Message from Iain Simpson (Chairman, R&D Society) Jan 01 2023.

Prime Minister Sunak’s recent CBI presentation focussed on the importance of innovation in supporting economic growth and the 3 areas of focus that he considered critical to a successful innovation strategy.  The Prime Minister concluded, “Innovation matters. It matters because it creates more jobs, higher wages, and better opportunities for people. It matters because it improves our schools and NHS. And, over the long-term, by boosting growth and creating more productive public services…innovation is how we will cut taxes for people and businesses”.  We share his vision, offer our support to put it into practice and will be watching closely for signs

of progress. Secondly it was great to see Gordon Sanghera, CEO of Oxford Nanopore be honoured with a CBE for services to the Technology Sector.  Oxford Nanopore is a success story for the university spinout model – the company has been more than 15 years in the making but now employs around 900 staff and in 2021 generated revenues in excess of £130M.  The company has developed a new generation of DNA/RNA sequencing technology that is key to the genomic revolution and has applications in industrial and defence markets as well as the more obvious value in healthcare. We offer our congratulations to Gordon and the Nanopore team. Finally in Sunak’s speech he notes “Turning million-pound businesses into billion-pound businesses and turning billion-pound businesses into ten-billion-pound companies…will create good well-paying jobs for the British people”.  Our wish for 2023 is that government policy pays more attention to this part of the growth cycle (just where success stories such as ONP and Cambridge based medical robotics company CMR currently are) rather than obsessing with the UK as a “Science Superpower” and BlueSky missions such as ARPA that take many years to succeed at a time when the concerns of UK population are much more near term.