Speeches by Dixon.

“Sorry—I may be ignorant—but figure 12 in the NAO Report shows that the vast majority has come through debt and not equity being raised. At some point, as customers we are paying for that debt.”

“But that was only in the past. The regulators looked at the entity that was delivering the service. In the case of Yorkshire Water, there are nine other companies, all of whose purpose is nothing other than to leverage debt and then leverage costs against that. That is surely not good value for money for bill payers.”

“When I sat down with Yorkshire Water’s CFO Paul Inman and my own customer bill, I asked why 12% of my bill was for making improvements and 24% was for borrowing return to investors. It seemed I was paying double for the Kelda holding companies’ investors than I was for actually making improvements. Perhaps I can ask Jo…”

“We have covered quite a lot about two of the three buckets: the curiosity-driven basic research and the research that is aligned to Government ambition on the missions. The third area is around investment to support innovative businesses. In the pre-panel, we heard quite a lot about some of the challenges around invest…”

“Is there any interest from other Government Departments? You mentioned that a lot of money is spent on R&D, and given out in grants, that does not come directly from UKRI. In health, the NIHR is obviously a huge funder. Are the platforms that you are developing going to be taken up so that there will be the ability, in…”

“Will that be reflected in the metrics to show how many businesses are scaling up—metrics around getting businesses out of their early R&D stage and into being sustainable businesses?”

“How do you work with DBT to make sure that the wider investment ecosystem will take the hopefully more investment-ready businesses that will come out of what UKRI described, so that they scale up and we grow UK plc in terms of both money and jobs?”

“So the long-term ambition would be to have that £20 billion.”

“Good morning. I should probably declare that I sat as an adviser on the UKRI healthy ageing challenge fund, which completed in 2024 and oversaw £98 million of grants, mainly through the Innovate UK-type of work. You have both outlined a number of areas for which UKRI is responsible. If you were to do a SWOT analysis, w…”

“We have received some evidence that highlights the issue of a narrowing of focus, in this case on to the Government’s missions, as opposed to having responsive or open calls that would allow more researcher-led applications. Is that what you meant by “focused”?”

“Professor Boyle, do you agree that UKRI strikes that balance? Are there other areas of weakness? We have evidence that it might be a bit bureaucratic, and slow to make decisions.”

“Is there anything else you want to raise on strengths and weaknesses?”

“Professor Boyle, I think you touched on this earlier in response to the Chair’s questions when discussing Innovate UK and scaling and growing commercially. Do you think that UKRI is strategic enough in how it is using its funding to achieve that? From what you were saying before, you have talked about the business link…”

“So in a sense, once there is clarity, rather than making them compete, it is more about making an investment decision.”

“That is true about skills and capacity, because at the moment there are bits in every university, and we have loads of catapults scattered around. There is quite a lot of that in-support infrastructure to make commercialisation possible, which again seems a bit fragmented—would you agree?”

“Would you like to add anything, Sir David?”

“I will mention again my conflict of interest, I suppose, but also the insights that I gained by being on the advisory board of one of the challenge funds on healthy ageing, which is linked to the last Government’s original industrial strategy. There was an evaluation, and part of the advisory group’s role was to help U…”

“Can I get back to the lessons learned? It was very helpful to hear those reflections, because you came to the Committee for the report on the industrial strategy challenge funds back in, which came out in April 2021. I think you were looking then at some £1.2 billion of innovation, but there was a general lack of clari…”

“Can I double check that it will not only have the very narrow economic growth impact measures, but recognise that, for some of the missions, we are looking for social as well as economic impact?”

“I am delighted because the healthy ageing challenge, given social care commissioning and local authorities, was an absolute disaster for any of these small businesses coming through. They just did not have a customer and there was not an outcomes-based commissioner at the other end who could adopt the technologies. Tha…”