My hon. Friend is absolutely right to be proud of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. I have visited it on more than one occasion. One of the fundamental proposals that we have made is to increase R and D investment in the UK. If he will listen a little further, he will hear exactly what we have proposed to ensure that the UK remains a world leader in that particular area of research.
With just 0.9% of the world’s population and 3.2% of the world’s R and D spending, we produce 16% of the world’s most cited papers and hold more than 10% of the world’s patents. We have produced 80 Nobel laureates. We have four of the world’s top six universities—I will, if I may, boast that one of them is in my constituency—and we attract more inward investment for research than any other part of Europe. However, it is not enough to be proud of the exceptional impact of our research base; we must also be mindful of the pivotal role that it plays in the goals that we have set ourselves as a nation.
As a Committee, we welcomed the Chancellor’s statement protecting the science budget in real terms, increasing the annual capital budget to £1.1 billion and maintaining the innovation budget at flat cash—albeit with £165 million becoming loans. We are also grateful to the Business Secretary, who gave evidence to the Committee in January, for reassuring us that not only would the ring fence for the science budget remain, but no additional organisations, programmes or spending lines could be added to that budget.
Although we welcomed that assurance, we would like to see those allocations for ourselves. The Business Secretary assured us that those allocations would be finalised in mid-February; it is now March and I am told that the negotiations are still ongoing. Will the Minister please tell the House what the hold-up is, and exactly when those allocations will be made public? We are concerned that as excellent as our research base is, commercialisation, though improving, remains sub-optimal. Crucially, despite the recent spending settlement, UK investment in R and D is internationally low at a time when our competitors are increasing R and D investment.
At 1.7% of GDP, the UK remains 12th among 28 member states for R and D investment; in 2013, Germany invested about 3%, China about 2%, and Israel and Korea about 4.2%. There is a reason why all our competitors are increasing their R and D while we lag behind. It is that R and D investment is proven to increase productivity and innovation growth. Science and innovation spending is not a subsidy, but a strategic investment that creates jobs, increases productivity and attracts inward investment.