Three quick wins.
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Mostly I agree with other UK science and technology policy people. The UK is very good at science and technology, despite the government not funding it all that well and making it harder than it could be for foreign talent to come and work here. If we funded science and technology somewhat better and made immigration of very talented people and their families easier, we could expect to do even better. The last government did quite well on both counts, but there’s lots more room for improvement.
Eyebrows get raised a bit when I suggest that if we want to start capturing more of the value of our science and technology excellence, so that it translates even better into domestic prosperity, we should change how we fund it a bit. We should focus more tightly on the sectors where our industry is strong, in the places where that industry is strong, and using research institutes outside of universities if they have a better record of transferring knowledge to industry. Since this means that most of our most powerful universities would get a smaller share of the UK’s public research money it is a bit controversial. It would probably mean fewer Nobel Prizes too.
But my most disliked opinion is that the success of the Greater South East of England in science and technology is much more a product of accumulated UK government preference than a reason why the UK government should show it preference today. This means that I think that the industrial strategy our government has so successfully employed to make Oxford, Cambridge, and London so innovative and productive could be deployed elsewhere.
We could invest more of our science and technology budget in our largest cities away from London and take advantage of their strong industrial base, much cheaper housing, and greater desire to accommodate the private sector growth that public sector investment would generate. We would almost all be better off if we did. And, this is the bit lots of people really hate, I think it would be good for our prosperity to reduce public funding of science and technology in London and Oxford to fund this if we’re unwilling to increase overall public spending substantially.
We should expect similar success with an innovation-led growth strategy in a few of our big English cities to what we’ve seen in South East England and what we see around the world in cities like Pittsburgh, Munich, Berlin, and Copenhagen. If you’re looking for lots more details and more reasons why I think this, I suggest a report I wrote with Richard Jones for Nesta, the Missing £4 billion, which I won’t repeat here.
Making the changes to how science and technology is funded in Britain we suggest in that report would take huge political will over decades to deliver significant returns. Germany did it following reunification and is today much richer than Britain. We could achieve the same.
We could decide that it was a mistake to put ARIA, The Alan Turing Institute, The British Library, The Open Data Institute, The Digital Catapult, and The Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute — to name just the first half a dozen of many recently created central-government funded “national” organisations promoting UK excellence in data, digital, and AI — in the same single city. But even if we decided it was a mistake, we would probably balk at the cost and disruption of now moving organisations which have combined with other UK government industrial strategy to very successfully focus their emerging economy sectors of interest in London.
So what about starting much smaller? What could a new government do now to send a message that more of the UK is important for science and technology, especially in the fields I just mentioned of data, digital, and AI, than just London and the Greater South East?
Here’s three things,
1. Run the Manchester Prize for AI in Manchester.
Last year the UK government set up The Manchester Prize. The UK government will give £1m plus ten runners up prizes of £100,000 to teams best meeting their AI challenge. And the goal is to do it every year for the next ten years. So £20m overall, plus the overhead of running the prize. That’s quite a lot of money.
The prize is named after Manchester, presumably because that’s where the world’s first electronic computer was built with the help of the famous Alan Turing.
The first year of the Manchester Prize was run by Challenge Works, a London-based spinout of the London-based UK government funded UK national innovation agency, Nesta. It would send a brilliant message about the UK government’s commitment to prosperity and AI across more of the UK if the second through tenth year of the Manchester Prize were run from another of the UK’s large cities. I suggest Manchester.
2. Build the British Library North in Leeds.
It is unlikely that The British Library will ever leave London, not least because the UK government funded redevelopment of the Kings Cross area that it catalysed in the late 1990s and early 2000s has been a huge success. But as it has been hinting at for decades, and speaking about much more loudly in the past five years, it would like to do more outside of London. Its primary plan to do so is still to open a similar hub as it has in London in Leeds.
Leeds City Council has master-planned around the arrival of the British Library (and HS2 and NPR, both since cancelled) for a while and the city’s Innovation Arc proposals are anchored on it.
With enough political ambition and a fraction of the money that the British Library in London cost, the UK government could accelerate growth plans in Leeds and cement a North English base for similar benefit to the British Library in London.
3. Run the Department for Transport’s Third Data Science in Transport Conference somewhere else.
Next month the UK government’s Department for Transport will run its second Data Science in Transport Conference in London. This is an excellent and interesting event that shows that the UK government is keen to stimulate ideas in this field and hopefully implement them in the future. It would be great if a third such conference could be held somewhere else.
With North English and Midlands cities widely agreed to be held back by some of the worst transport systems for cities their size in the world, and with them all rebuilding public transport planning capability following decades of central-government-enforced deregulation, they would seem the obvious candidates to host such a conference. Whether Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham, Sheffield or somewhere else, there’s a huge opportunity to do better on this.
So why not?
As the CTO and a founder of one of the UK’s fastest growing AI companies I see the push that my own government is giving companies like mine to leave our economically struggling cities and move to our overheating capital. I do not begrudge the success of companies in the Greater South East of England, but it is bad for Britain that it so often comes not through victory in a free market, but rather thanks to direct and indirect support from my own government.
The three things I propose quickly here seem obvious ways to reduce in a very small way the inefficient subsidies that our capital enjoys. But even though they are very small asks, I know that they will probably be considered too ambitious.
Too many people in Britain, including many of our country's biggest advocates and boosters think that London and the Greater South East of England are our last chance to be world-leading. As our weight in the world has declined, from the leading power 150 years ago to our current position, they calculate that by focusing most of our national investment in growth in a single place, conveniently precisely where they live, we can secure a single point of relevance in the world, and via that point illuminate the whole country.
This is not a completely unreasonable position. Perhaps if I lived in London or Oxford or Cambridge I would share that view. I would of course be wise enough, as are most of those who hold the view, to never speak it.
But I left Cambridge a few months after my birth and I really think that we can do better up here. Britain’s former industrial heartlands, especially those at the core of our national population and population density — circumscribed by Birmingham, Leicester, Liverpool, and Leeds — can be the third city of Europe as they are on paper today. Some form of the Northern Powerhouse and Midlands Engine should be the equal of their thriving post-industrial equivalents in Germany, Italy, and the USA. We will need similar help to prosper as London, Oxford, and Cambridge have received for decades. I am confident we could repay wise investment many times over and contribute to returning Britain to its historical position as the richest big country in the world.