Economy: Productivity - Question

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 3:14 pm on 8 February 2017.

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Photo of Lord Prior of Brampton Lord Prior of Brampton Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) 3:14, 8 February 2017

The noble Lord makes a good point. The fact is that the productivity of our investment in research in British universities is incredibly high and the output of our top universities is fantastically high by any world standards. He will know as well as I do that we are now committed to raising an extra £2 billion a year in research by 2021, which is a very significant increase. He is also right that even after that increase we are still not investing as much on a per capita basis or on a percentage of GDP basis as some of our biggest competitors—Germany and the US, for example. So we are making good progress but the job is not yet done.