What the Life Sciences Sector Plan means for UK biotech
In this blog, Martin Turner, Director of Policy and External Affairs at BIA, reflects on the long-anticipated Life Sciences Sector Plan and what it means for scaling UK biotech. This is the first in a series of blogs that will be released in the coming weeks.
It’s been a very busy couple of weeks in the world of life sciences policy, with the Government publishing its Life Sciences Sector Plan and appointing our own Steve Bates as the new Executive Chair of the Office for Life Sciences (OLS) to help deliver it.
The Sector Plan has been long in the making. Securing life sciences as one of the eight priority sectors of the Government’s Modern Industrial Strategy was a significant win for BIA and our sector, and the result of consistent engagement with them during their time in opposition. Their pre-general election document, A Prescription for Growth, which we helped produce and launch, was the blueprint for what’s now been published. It shows the impact a united sector can have under a strong trade association.
The Plan was developed through a collaborative effort between government and industry. From December to March, we and our members inputted through task and finish groups, and since then have been involved in refining the priorities to where we are today (this BIA webinar provides an overview of our engagement).
The Plan has three core pillars:
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Enabling world-class R&D – to take advantage of, and build upon, the UK’s historic scientific strengths.
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Making the UK an outstanding place in which to start, grow, scale and invest – to ensure that brilliant ideas are built and scaled into multi-billion-pound companies in the UK, our manufacturing sector is supported to thrive, and that we drive Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).
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Driving health innovation and NHS reform – ensuring patients get rapid access to the most clinically and cost-effective new technologies, and enabling the shifts from sickness to prevention, hospital to community, and analogue to digital.
There are 33 actions the Government has committed to deliver across these pillars, with metrics and a Senior Responsible Officer (SRO) within Government or the NHS who will be held to account for their delivery. This is what sets this plan apart from previous strategies, which did not always have clear structures for delivering what was promised quickly enough.
For BIA, the most important element of the Plan is its focus on supporting scale-ups and anchoring activity, including manufacturing, in the UK.
Actions 13 and 14 fall on the British Business Bank, which has a tripled budget to support the industrial strategy priority sectors and a mandate to publish the very positive data they have on the financial returns our sector provides, which will help encourage in more private investment, including from pension funds. We’ve already held a roundtable with the Bank on how this enlarged budget can be delivered.
Action 23 is another critical one for us – the OLS will establish a dedicated support team for 10-20 high-potential UK companies to successfully scale, invest and stay in the UK. For too long, companies that aren’t household names have struggled to open doors within government and as a result have been tempted away by other more welcoming countries. That will now change. It was great to see scaling BIA member companies like OMass Therapeutics, Bicycle Therapeutics, and Oxford Nanopore included in the Government’s press release.
Other actions include creating a single point of access for researchers and innovators to access health data (Action 7), cutting bureaucracy and standardising contracts to reduce the set-up time for commercial interventional clinical trials (Action 3), delivering the £520 million Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund (LSIMF) (Action 19), and streamlining market entry by ensuring NICE processes are timely, agile and transparent (Action 26).
The whole document is essential reading for your summer holidays. It might not have the answer to every challenge our sector faces, and it certainly doesn’t address the significant problem of the NHS medicines rebate, which is impacting global players’ perception of the UK as a place to invest, but it is a statement of commitment by the UK Government and a solid framework for our industry to build on. BIA will certainly be taking that opportunity to work in partnership with Government to ensure the actions are delivered in full, and other challenges our members, large and small, face are addressed.