Announcing the UK's Budget yesterday (30 October), Rachel Reeves outlined the Labour Party’s investment plans for research and development (R&D) in life sciences. She also shared plans to increase spending for both day-to-day and longer-term goals of the NHS, as well as to roll out compensation for blood scandal victims.

The Chancellor promised up to £520m ($670m) for a new Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund and committed to maintaining current rates of R&D tax relief.

Responding to this, the UK Bioindustry Association (BIA) CEO Steve Bates said: “Today’s Budget rightly puts the life sciences sector at the heart of UK economic growth. In a tough fiscal environment, Chancellor Rachel Reeves recommitted to R&D tax credits at current rates for this parliament. It’s great to see the £520m Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund had its website open for business within an hour of the statement.

“Equally important is the commitment to protect core research funding for biotechnology and medical science.”

This commitment was addressed directly by Reeves. Presenting the budget, she told MPs: “To unlock growth industries, we will protect research and development with more than £20bn worth of funding. This includes £6.1bn to protect core research funding for areas like engineering, biotechnology and medical science, for Research England, other research councils and the national academies.”

In response, Dr Andrew Garrett, president of the Royal Statistical Society, said: “It is welcome news that headline R&D commitments continue as planned at £20bn, or so, for 2025.  This reflects the new Chancellor’s recognition that wise R&D spending enables economic growth and leads to well-paid jobs in the UK.”

Reeves is certainly hoping that life science R&D investment will result in growth, and she explained in her budget the seven key pillars of the government’s growth strategy. Sixth of the seven was “to drive innovation”, and Reeves asserted that plans to protect research funding would allow the country to “harness the full potential of the UK’s science base”.

Professor Andrew Morris, president of the Academy of Medical Sciences, commented: “It is encouraging that the Chancellor is providing much-needed stability for our research community by protecting core R&D budgets and we particularly welcome the real-terms increase in National Institute for Health Research investments, which are an important step towards delivering health research and innovations for patients across the UK.”

Alongside the commitment to R&D and innovation, Reeves addressed plans for the NHS, which she said had been “moving in the wrong direction”. To make the point, she told MPs that 100,000 infants had waited over six hours in A&E last year while 350,000 people spent a year waiting for mental health support.

In the budget, she promised that an additional £22.6bn would be spent in the day-to-day health budget over two years. Reeves also announced an additional £3.1bn increase to the capital investment budget for the NHS over the same period. This represents a 10.9% average annual rise, which Reeves said would be used “to address the backlog of repairs and upgrades across the NHS” and “to increase capacity for tens of thousands more procedures next year”.

Specifically, £1bn will be used for repairs and upgrades, while £1.5bn will be used to provide new beds, new surgical hubs and diagnostic centres and new capacity for more than a million additional diagnostic tests. Reeves sees these plans as “a downpayment” on the ten-year plan for the NHS, which is due by mid-next year.

On hopes that the R&D investment might work to enable Labour’s longed-for improvements in the NHS, Dr Anas Nader, NHS doctor and CEO of healthcare workforce initiative Patchwork Health, said: “We can't get the NHS onto a sustainable footing without technology, but widespread ‘tech fatigue’ across the health service will be a stumbling block.

“Staff are sick of new systems being introduced that either don't work or aren't interoperable – they create more problems than they solve. Today's investment is an opportunity to reset. This new capital must be invested in digital solutions which are fit-for-purpose and integrate with the wider realities of NHS work.”