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General election: Key Conservative manifesto tech policies

Conservative manifesto 2024
Image credit: Ink Drop / Shutterstock

A £2bn increase in public R&D spending, a new fund to invest in female entrepreneurs, and investments in advanced manufacturing are among the key tech policy commitments from the Conservative Party’s 2024 manifesto.

The Conservatives published its 2024 manifesto ahead of the general election on 4 July.

Here are the key tech policies from the Conservative Party manifesto the industry should know about.

R&D and SEIS

The Conservatives have pledged to increase public spending on R&D by £2bn – up to £22bn from £20bn – in the next Parliament.

The party said it will keep existing R&D tax relief in place and claimed that “recent changes worth £280m a year have simplified and improved R&D tax reliefs, including by bringing more SMEs into scope of the relief.”

In 2022, the government announced plans to cut R&D tax credits for startups in a bid to reduce fraud. In last year’s Autumn Statement, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt rowed back some of those changes by increasing the number of SMEs eligible for relief.

Similarly, the Conservative manifesto committed to keeping in place popular startup tax incentives including the Seed Enterprise Investment (SEIS) scheme and Venture Capital Trusts.

Invest In Women Fund

The manifesto highlighted the current disparity between investments in male and female-founded businesses. It claimed a Conservative government would “work with” state-owned investor British Business Bank (BBB) as well as private sector fund managers to launch a £250m “Invest In Women Fund”.

The Conservative Party also said it would continue to work to encourage more women and disabled entrepreneurs, pointing to previous government-commissioned initiatives such as the Lilac Review and the women-led high-growth enterprise taskforce.

Compute clusters

The importance of robust compute infrastructure has been significantly exacerbated by the rise of generative AI and the prime minister’s goal of securing a leading role in the space for the UK.

To that end, the Conservatives have pledged to invest “over £1.5bn in large-scale compute clusters”. The party said the investment would assemble the “raw processing power” required to “take advantage of the potential of AI”.

The £1.5bn figure was first announced by Jeremy Hunt in the last Autumn Statement, in which £500m was pledged in addition to the £1bn in the previous budget.

Advanced manufacturing

The Tories made a “£4.5bn commitment to secure strategic manufacturing sectors”, highlighting automotive, aerospace, life sciences and clean energy.

The Advanced Manufacturing Plan was published last November, laying out three priorities to lead in the development and deployment of new technologies.

The priorities were investing in the sector, cooperating internationally to strengthen the UK’s position in the global supply chain and reducing costs for UK manufacturers.

Catapult centres

The manifesto states that a Conservative government would “build on the success” of the UK’s nine specialist Catapult centres by distributing £1.6bn in funding across the country by 2028.

The nine organisations, which include Digital Catapult and the Connected Places Catapult, were set up by government research agency Innovate UK to promote business R&D.

Health tech

Supporting the health sector with new technologies was also promised in the manifesto. The Conservatives claimed it would invest £3.4bn into the tech capabilities of the National Health Service as part of its NHS Productivity Plan.

This investment would go towards making the NHS app a single centralised hub for accessing medical information and booking services, incorporating AI into medical practices and funding technology to speed up MRI and CT scans.

The health technology plan also included the implementation of a “medtech pathway” so that these technologies can be “rapidly adopted throughout the NHS”.

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