City must make sure Tories keep promises
WHILE it may have gone unnoticed, lurking in the fine print of the Conservatives’ triumphant election manifesto was a commitment to double the UK’s spending on research and development.
While this was unlikely to come up much on the doorsteps, it could be a big deal for Manchester and Britain.
Despite being one of the most entrepreneurial economies in the world, the UK has fallen behind other countries when it comes to our investment in ‘R&D,’ with the British government investing 40 per cent less than more high-tech countries like Germany or South Korea.
So it’s about time the government started spending to help us keep up, and now Manchester needs to speak up if it’s to get a fair share of this investment.
While the city has been home to the inventors of world-changing technologies, from the railway line to the computer, we still lag behind much of the rest of the country when it comes to tech investment.
Only 49 tech start-ups based in Manchester have announced new funding this year, compared to 82 in Cambridge and an astounding 1,169 in London, according to data from the research website Crunchbase.
And things haven’t been improving.
A recent report from the thinktank Demos ranked Manchester at 20th in the UK as a place to live and start a business, falling behind smaller towns like Leicester and Aberdeen.
Of course it’s not all bad news. The Hut Group, one of the largest private technology companies in the UK, has recently announced it is investing tens of millions of pounds into jobs and offices in its new headquarters at Manchester Airport, and the Northern Powerhouse group has been working to secure similar deals going forward.
Manchester has a huge amount to build on. As recently as 2013, south Manchester was home to one of the UK’s largest pharmaceutical companies in Astra Zeneca, before they moved much of their research jobs to Cambridge. Government didn’t do enough to act then, but reversing trends like this is not impossible.
For Manchester to continue to be a great place to live and work, we need more investment in cuttingedge technology and some bold ideas on how to use it. If we can hold the new Tory government to it’s promises, we might just have a chance at that. James Wise, via email