UK to unveil £1bn life sciences investment
Government keen to show Britain remains attractive despite Brexit
Hundreds of millions of pounds worth of fresh investment in UK life sciences will be unveiled next week as the government seeks to show that Britain remains attractive to global industry, despite the continuing political turmoil over Brexit.
The centrepiece is expected to be an announcement of further investment by UCB, a Belgium-based company that already has a significant presence in the UK.
Its commitment will form part of a new life sciences “sector deal” that is expected to include as much as £1bn of additional investment by the industry, according to one person briefed on the announcement.
It will come against the backdrop of Theresa May’s attempts to drum up business support for her Brexit agreement.
Next week is the last chance for the prime minister to win Parliamentary support for her plan, which will be the subject of a historic vote on December 11.
She is hoping that companies will lean on wavering Tory MPs by warning about the unpalatable impact of a no-deal Brexit for their industries.
A year ago the government announced its first life sciences deal. It showcased investments by two large pharmaceutical companies — MSD, the name by which Merck is known in the UK, and German company, Qiagen — amounting to more than £1bn and creating nearly 1,000 high-skilled jobs, along with a raft of smaller investments.
However ministers have been keen to keep up the momentum with a fresh series of announcements to counter suggestions that the UK has lost its allure for investors after another year of uncertainty over the post-Brexit environment.
Both publicly and privately, the leaders of some big pharma companies have warned ministers of the danger that the UK will lose out on investment, not simply due to Brexit uncertainty but also the slow take-up of innovative medicines by the National Health Service.
Writing in the Financial Times in June, the UK head of Pfizer, Erik Nordkamp, who has since been appointed president of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, said: “The UK pharmaceutical industry and the patients who rely on it are under serious threat from Brexit as well as from the flawed way medicines are developed, tested and made available to patients in the country.”
Headquartered in Brussels, UCB has a focus on neurology and immunology and employs about 650 people across the UK and Ireland, the majority of whom are scientists working in research and development. The UK is home to one of the company’s two global discovery research centres.
On its website the company, which had global revenue of €4.5bn in 2017, says it is a “top 5 investor in biopharmaceutical R&D in the UK” and is “proud to have over 100 collaborations with UK universities, charities and companies, covering over 200 projects”.
One person familiar with the company’s thinking suggested that other locations for its additional investment had been considered before it opted for the UK.
Speaking to the FT in February last year, Jean-Christophe Tellier, the company’s chief executive, described one of the strengths of the UK as “the ability to get this triangle between London, Cambridge, and Oxford. The ability to get together not only strong academic backgrounds and people, but also access to financing and access to very strong hospitals, key opinion leaders, clinicians.”
“The quality of the people has not changed …because suddenly Brexit happened,” he said.
UCB did not respond to requests for comment.