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Labour’s Industrial Strategy
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1. Bolster the Life Sciences Council
and ensure its decisions are acted upon by having it
report directly into the Industrial Strategy
Council.
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2. Strengthen the Office for Life
Sciences, so that it is politically empowered to truly
drive delivery across government.
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3. Place life sciences and innovation
directly under the Health Secretary’s ministerial
responsibilities, representing a key priority for the
department of Health, alongside the Department for
Science, Innovation and Technology.
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Providing stability and certainty for innovation
by taking a long-term approach to public R&D
funding
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1. Create a more certain funding
environment and a more streamlined funding process, to
end Tory short-termism and attract long-term investment.
We will set 10-year budgets for key R&D institutions
such as UKRI.
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2. Cut red tape and introduce a system
of earned trust in place of retrospective and repetitive
reporting and audit by Government departments and
UKRI.
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3. Increase the number of spinouts
coming out of universities, and structure the innovation
funding system to ensure more of them successfully
scale-up.
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Harnessing data to improve services for patients
and power cutting-edge medical research
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1. Deliver on work underway to create
linked Secure Data Environments.
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2. Ensure proper federation of data
sets, with a single access point for researchers to use
data from all our genomic resources (UK Biobank, OFH,
GEL, NIHR Bioresource)
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3. Seize the opportunity NHS Federated
data platform offers, using this platform to improve the
way we use patient data in the NHS, in a safe and secure
way, as a means to deliver better treatment and
care.
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4. Drive inter-operability between
digital systems in the NHS and in care from the
bottom-up, by making the NHS App a one-stop shop for
health information.
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5. Ensure that there is a senior
official accountable for delivery across organisations
within DHSC, who will report to the Life Sciences Council
on progress each time it meets.
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Increasing access to finance
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1. Undertake a broader in-government
pensions review.
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2. Enable greater consolidation across
all pension and retirement saving schemes (DB, DC, and
LGPS) For DC schemes, Labour will give The Pensions
Regulator (TPR) new powers to bring about consolidation
where schemes fail to offer sufficient value for their
members
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3. Empower the British Business Bank
(BBB) with a more ambitious remit: A future Labour
government will look to empower the BBB with a more
ambitious remit focused on providing growth capital,
enabling regional development, and streamlining support
offerings for SMEs.
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4. Establish a British ‘Tibi’ scheme.
Labour will set up an opt-in scheme for DC funds to
invest a proportion of their assets into UK growth assets
– split between VC and small cap growth equity, and
infrastructure investment.
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Improving the business environment
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1. Maintain the current structure of
R&D tax credits over the next parliament, while
cracking down on fraudulent claims and those made in
error.
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2. Evaluate the impact of the R&D
tax credit scheme on a sector-by-sector basis, starting
with the Life Sciences industry.
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3. Labour is committed to maintaining
the patent box regime and protecting the Enterprise
Investment Scheme (EIS) and Venture Capital Trusts
(VCT).
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Modernising and unblocking the regulatory
regime
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1. Create a Regulatory Innovation
Office (RIO) to hold regulators accountable for driving
innovation where appropriate and for delays that are
holding back innovation. The RIO will bring together the
Regulation Executive and the secretariat for the
Regulatory Horizons Council and will:
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2. Set and monitor targets for
regulatory approval timelines, benchmarked against
international comparators.
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3. Provide strategic steers for what
activity regulators should be prioritising, drawing on
priorities from Labour’s industrial strategy.
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4. Support a beefed-up Regulatory
Horizons Council, with a new requirement for government
to respond to its reports within a set time period.
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Planning reform to support the life sciences
industry
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1. Bring laboratory clusters within the
scope of the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Regime
in England.
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2. Create new National Development
Management Policies tilting the scales in favour of new
lab space in our planning system for England.
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Skills
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1. Reform the Apprenticeships Levy into
a ‘Growth and Skills Levy’ so it can be used on the
greater range of training courses that businesses tell us
they need, so workers can gain new skills.
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2. Commit to long-term workforce
planning across the NHS and social care will review
training and look at creating new types of health and
care professionals that draw on a diverse skills mix,
including the skills staff need to support clinical
trials and recruit patients.
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Ensuring the NHS is supporting innovation to
improve health outcomes
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1. Develop a comprehensive innovation
and adoption strategy in England, working with industry,
patients and ICSs. Our strategy will align to the
existing Life Sciences Vision and focus the system on
harnessing innovation to improve outcomes.
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2. Labour also recognises that as a
universal, single payer system serving a diverse
population, the NHS has the potential to lead the world
in clinical trials to develop new life saving treatments
and technologies.
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3. Speed up recruitment: by making sure
that patients who are interested in participating in
research can be reached quickly and easily.
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4. Give more people the chance to
participate: wherever they live in Britain, rather than
having research opportunities concentrated on where the
big centres are, by identifying patients who would
benefit through NHS data and working with devolved
nations so patients can access clinical trials regardless
of which NHS they reside in.
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5. Improve the diversity of people who
participate: so we test treatments on populations that
better reflect the people who need them.
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IP/ Trade
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1. Publish a trade strategy which sets
out clear priorities for vital growth sectors like life
sciences.
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2. Give the Board of Trade a proper
purpose as an independent advisory agency, accountable to
the Secretary of State, advising on the impacts of
regulation on trade and horizon scanning for
opportunities
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3. Ensure reciprocal levels of IP
protection in countries with which the UK trades while
maintaining our continued support of the WTO’s Agreement
on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights
(TRIPS).
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4. Use bilateral and multilateral
negotiations as an opportunity to remove redundant or
duplicative requirements UK medicines face when accessing
markets overseas, and maximise opportunities presented by
our high regulatory standards to minimise regulatory
trade barriers.
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