Blocking investment in infrastructure is hindering country’s research advantage, says author of influential essay
Legislation blocking investment in UK infrastructure is preventing the country from fully capitalising on its R&D strengths, according to the co-author of an essay making waves across Westminster.
The essay, titled Foundations, argues that the UK’s investment shortfall can mainly be attributed to planning and other regulations preventing the growth of productive economic clusters, thereby causing “decades of relative stagnation”.
“Research is one of the UK’s biggest strengths…But our de facto ban on investment in housing, infrastructure and energy is preventing the country from fully capitalising on this advantage,” said Ben Southwood, who co-authored the essay with Sam Bowman and Samuel Hughes.
Alongside Bowman, Southwood is founding editor of the magazine Works in Progress, which focuses on “new ideas to improve the world”. He spoke to Research Professional News about what the planning restrictions they see at the heart of economic problems for the UK have meant for R&D.
In the essay, the authors say “the most important economic fact about modern Britain…[is] that it is difficult to build almost anything”. They believe this is preventing investment and increasing energy costs, and ultimately that this “lowers our productivity, incomes, and tax revenues”.
Laboratory shortages
Evidence of planning infrastructure restrictions hitting R&D can be seen in laboratory shortages in the UK, highlighted by Reuters last year.
These concerns have prompted UK science secretary Peter Kyle to promise a Regulatory Innovation Office in the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology with an ambitious aim to fast-track laboratory applications.
Southwood said this can be seen in Cambridge, a UK research hotspot. “Lab space in central Cambridge is even more expensive than residential space in many cases, which is rare around the country—giving a sense of how severe the shortage is,” he said.
More evidence for planning regulations affecting research can be seen in dropped plans for the Varsity Line, a planned railway linking Oxford and Cambridge, proposed to improve research collaboration.
“Reopening the Varsity Line, and building an Oxford-Cambridge expressway, are clearly good things to do,” Southwood said. “But as Foundations argues, we will not get these things in a well-planned way, or in good time, through the current infrastructure planning system.”
A ‘broken’ system?
He went on to tout the merits of the country’s university system, saying it is second only to the US, “which is understandable given their GDP is seven or eight times larger than ours”, he added.
When questioned on this view, given the essay referred to the UK’s higher education system as “broken”, Southwood explained: “We meant that students pursue degrees that cost them more than they add to their skills and earnings, and that the system is on such an unsound financial footing that it has to continually sell low-value master’s degrees. Clearly, it is also outstanding in many ways.”
David Lawrence, co-director of think tank UK Day One, an organisation dedicated to boosting UK growth and progress by transforming scientific ideas into “implementation-ready policies” echoed some of Southwood’s points.
“The UK actually does quite well at investing in R&D and performs similarly to its peers on this metric,” he told RPN. “Where the UK really lags is in infrastructure, housing and energy.”
Lawrence pointed out that in the long run, “R&D is essential for productivity growth, but this does not mean that a lack of R&D is the main driver of the UK’s current economic ills”.
Land and energy
“We seem to struggle to make the most of our world-leading frontier discovery in the wider economy,” he said.
“We need to get much better at the fundamentals—housing, energy, infrastructure, talent. Fixing these will allow better diffusion of productivity gains, and more investments at the frontier too.”
He cited an example: “In AI, where there are huge potential productivity gains, the biggest constraint on the UK’s AI infrastructure is probably land and energy for data centres.”
Planning reform support
Lawrence and UK Day One recently released a survey of 44 pro-growth economists, which showed broad support for the new government’s prioritisation of planning reform. Respondents caveated that the impact on growth will depend on building housing and infrastructure in or near existing areas of high productivity, particularly cities, according to the published findings.
In a similar vein, Lawrence said he believes the biggest research agglomeration in the UK, the Oxford-Cambridge-London “triangle”, should be allowed to expand.
“Researchers, labs and departments face high housing and energy costs, making the UK less competitive on the world stage. Improving our highly skilled visa regime would help with this too”, he said.
Like Southwood, he also said the country’s university funding model was “broken”. He added: “Some of our survey respondents drew a distinction between the research functions of universities, which are indeed world-leading, and the university funding model, which is broken.
“The latter needs to be fixed to ensure that the UK can continue to lead in research.”