I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that intervention, and he makes a point that I will come back to and reflect on shortly.

The drop in our publicly funded research to 0.5% of GDP takes that research to its lowest point for more than 20 years. The latest figures, published by UNESCO in March, put the UK’s publicly funded research at 0.48% of GDP, which is well below the EU average of 0.67%, the OECD average of 0.71% and the G8 average of 0.77%.