Thread by James W. Phillips

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The UK needs a new national purpose. It should be to lead the world in harnessing the science and tech revolution for prosperity and leadership. I’m delighted to have been a part of a joint report on this by Sir Tony Blair, Lord Hague, and their teams.
institute.global/policy/new-national-purpose-innovation-can-power-future-britain
This includes @benedictcooney, Jess Northend, @Nitarshan, @lukeWStanley, @Tom_Westgarth15, and @jeegarkakkad
The leading article in today’s times says, “The report and its recommendations should be required reading in government, the City and beyond.”
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/4cdb4a40-b21f-11ed-8771-87233f7ef731?shareToken=0441950f75e4ed767c5dc5c1dd...
For international readers - Hague and Blair used to debate weekly as leaders of the two major parties when Tony Blair was prime minister. This report is somewhat like Obama and Romney issuing a joint report calling for a national focus on science and technology.
The status quo clearly isn’t working. The UK needs a radical change agenda supported on a bipartisan basis. UK productivity has been stagnant since 2008. Much of the country is now amongst the poorest in europe. We are missing out on new industries.
This report comes at a unique moment that will eclipse the industrial revolution in impact. Platform tech like AI and Synthetic Biology are rapidly maturing, whilst clean energy is remaking the world economy. We may be just a few years from artificial general intelligence.
This change should play to our historic strengths, but we are not acting with sufficient boldness.
The promise through concerted action is radically improved public services and prosperity. The risk of inaction is becoming globally irrelevant. This is arguably our default path.
Other nations recognise this tech opportunity and have boldly increased investment, including the trillion dollar US Inflation Reduction Act. China made Science and Technology the center of its recent 20th Congress and growth plans.
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03414-z
The UK is falling behind, and needs a radical whole of government, bipartisan effort to seize this opportunity and recover lost ground. The UK’s current trajectory is very poor.

In our report we identify 5 major areas of change, and make recommendations in each. Here are some highlights - there is much more in the full report.
#1 First, we need to reinvent the state. No modern western state was built with the needs of science and technology at its core. The COVID pandemic revealed major challenges, and the big successes like vaccines came from creating structures outside of normal processes.
We need to understand why the Vaccines Task Force worked so well, be critical of what failed elsewhere and use COVID19 as a learning opportunity. We make many recommendations here, including creating new kinds of technical expert minister to lead on programs.
The UK also needs to reform how it approaches public investment, including addressing challenges with the ‘policymaking by accountant’ approach and an audit culture from the Treasury. A system built for building hospitals and funding police isn’t working for R&D.
See for example arguments here
www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/16/the-big-idea-should-we-abolish-the-treasury
This part of the report is particularly well timed. Just yesterday this 'policymaking by accountant' led to £1.6billion of research investment being clawed back and vanishing.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64726522
The new department for science, innovation and technology is a very welcome step. But government also needs a central strategic brain, with an agenda driven from Number Ten across the whole of government. It should learn from the White House Office for Science and Tech Policy.
Without the power of Number Ten, a whole of government agenda cannot be driven. And it needs very regular PM engagement including with technically expert advisers. Blocks on progress can often only be solved by #10, and a radical agenda will require much change.
An example is procurement. Government as a buyer was crucial to SpaceX, but innovation is not central to procurement in the UK. We must change this, such that procurement weighs innovation highly, leveraging the hundreds of £billions in government procurement.
We should also create a bespoke agency to trial new tech in government - an advanced procurement agency. This would provide the role that the special forces play to DARPA programs - a buyer and tester of first resort for more exploratory, novel tech in public services.
We also need to embrace digital. The government is making good steps on this, but it needs to be much bolder. We outline key changes in the paper, including a digital ID system, leveraging our centralised system to use data as a competitive asset.
#2 In the second area , we need to view talent and skills as central to the UK’s future, and create the first AI literate citizenry. We need to bring technology into the classroom at pace, not view it as a threat.
We know from examples like Priya Lakhani’s CENTURY Tech that new possibilities exist using AI to accelerate learning. Yet this UK created technology is much more widely used abroad than in the UK. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH8dD2vrI2M
And we need to continue opening our borders to global talent, not back track. Visa processes need to become faster, broader, and be better advertised. To come to the UK and bring your skills to contribute to this national purpose should be low friction.
#3 - Third, we need to transform our approach to supporting public R&D. Globally, a reinvention of science and technology is underway. The UK led in creating the royal society, but has fallen behind in this innovation recently.
We can see the changes in the US here:
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/scientific-funding-is-broken-can-silicon-valley-fix-it/6212...
To begin this, the UK must markedly increase investment to be the leader in direct public R&D spend, taking on debt if necessary, viewing it as the highest value investment it can make alongside skills.
We can see from this plot how Public R&D and Private R&D investment closely correlate internationally - the UK must invest more.
Source - Jones/Forth 2020, NESTA
As we highlight - a crucial missing question in the current debate on R&D spend is: What is the cost of the lost opportunities from NOT investing? This does not factor into calculations at present.
Increased investment must be matched by a reform agenda. As former royal society president highlights, the UK is losing its edge. A culture of audit and micromanagement, as well as a terrible situation for junior researchers, is harming our prospects.
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-views-of-the-uk-2022-11-uk-universities-are-losing-their-...
As I highlighted in my remarks to UK Onward, the UK needs to orient its offer to global junior talent, and reform its approach to suit the new interdisciplinary, teams centric science that has emerged.

jameswphillips.substack.com/p/s-and-t-new-horizons-the-uks-global
Globally, research has become progressively gerontocratic. Ever more power is in the hands of the old paradigms, often employing dozens of jr ppl who produce the research, whilst too many senior figures put their names on papers they have little to do with. This must change.
This creates a major talent resource for the UK to draw on.
The UK also needs to adapt to funding teams over long time horizons with generous resources, rather than having a PI centric model where Pis apply for many short, small grants.
This is well covered by Peter Lawrence here
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1000197
The Uk must also invest in new institutions and models of science. The UK once led the world with the royal society and the cambridge laboratory of molecular biology. But today it is highly reliant on a single model of project grant academic funding.
ARIA is an excellent first step, as the first ARPA outside the US. it has the right freedoms, and the right leadership, but it has a tiny budget. ARIA’s budget is barely the size of a single DARPA office. It needs to be substantially boosted to be globally competitive.
But this should be matched with physical labs too. The 20th century also had multiple examples of transformational physical labs operating on fundamentally different principles, such as Bell Labs, PARC, and the early LMB.
These operated at the intersection of new technology and new ideas. As Eoin O’Sullivan and Rob Miller argue, and echoed by our number ten team, we need a network of new Lovelace DIsruptive Innovation Labs to pioneer new fields of research.
We explained the view we had in number ten here:

And @Rob__Miller miller and Eoin OSullivan here:
www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/uploads/Resources/Disruptive_Innovation_Laboratories_Whittle_Cambridge_3_Nov_20...
These would learn from more recent efforts too, such as Google DeepMind and Gerry Rubin’s Janelia, organised very differently to conventional research departments.
We should also expand the role of catapults to have a regional role in economic development, and learn from other metascience experiments. Through diversity of approach comes richer outcomes.
#4 - we need to remove barriers to entrepreneurs, increasing the amount of pension capital available, and reduce the amount of equity UK Universities take.
See, for example, the suggestions by @nathanbenaich here:
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/companies-born-in-our-universities-need-more-than-government-spin-w77wcsrk...
We should also reform planning, including with exemptions for top tech infrastructure. Years of planning delays and cripplingly low available land are an easily solvable problem if the political will exists.
#5 Finally, we need to view this agenda and our place in the world as one and the same - leadership through harnessing science and technology. We need to significantly upscale our international collaborations, both with the EU and more broadly.
Again, this is only a very small part of the recommendations of the paper. I encourage you to read it it and help to build support behind an agenda that I think is the only path not only for the UK, but also for any other developed nation that wants to thrive in the 21st century
Here is Tony Blair and William Hague’s piece:
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/william-hague-and-tony-blair-science-is-the-single-issue-all-our-dreams-de...
As my brother and I wrote in 2018, the UK should ‘lead the future by creating it’
jameswphillips.substack.com/p/s-and-t-2018-telegraph-article-phillipsphillips
And thanks again to the brilliant team behind this - it’s been a joy to work with them: they include @benedictcooney, Jess Northend, @Nitarshan, @lukeWStanley, @Tom_Westgarth15, and @jeegarkakkad
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