It is to be hoped that R&D budgets announced before the coronavirus will be adhered to after the virus has gone, says Professor Simon Marginson at Oxford University (pictured).

OECD figures state that pre-coronavirus UK expenditure on R&D, including spending by businesses, non-profits and others − was 1.71% of GDP, well below the OECD average of 2.4% (which is the UK government’s eventual target) and the EU’s 2%.

Well ahead of these averages were countries including South Korea (4.5%), Sweden (3.3%), Germany (3.1%) and the US (2.8%).

The UK’s Budget pledge to boost public expenditure on research to £22 billion by 2024-25 looked set to radically alter its position.

According to the documents from Rishy Sunak’s Budget, such a figure would push government expenditure on research to 0.8% of GDP (latest OECD data, for 2016, show the UK was at about 0.4%), “placing the UK among the top quarter of OECD nations – ahead of the USA, Japan, France and China” in terms of government investment.

It could quite conceivably also push the country beyond the 2.4% marker for overall research spending, although this would very much depend on how the government’s boost leverages investment from elsewhere, particularly the private sector.

For instance, nations such as the US, Germany and South Korea have their already higher public investment topped up significantly by the private sector. In 2016 (the latest year with comprehensive data), business-financed GERD was 3% of GDP in South Korea, 1.9% in Germany and 1.7% in the US. Meanwhile, in the UK it was 0.9%.

Projections from the UK’s Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) suggest that even with the previous Conservative election manifesto pledge to increase research spending to £18 billion, an additional £6 billion in private spending would have been leveraged by 2024-25.

Therefore, the government’s latest announcement that it was aiming for £22 billion rather than £18 billion could be so transformative that the UK easily exceeds 2.4 per cent overall, and well before the original plan to do this by 2027.

Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at Oxford, said there was a “real danger” that the crisis could completely change the environment around the UK’s plans and those of other countries too.

A silver lining for research amid such dire economic forecasts may be that its “vital importance” is being “underlined by this crisis”, Professor Marginson said.

“The crisis reminds everyone what a great humanist institution modern medicine is,” added Marinson, “people understand that medicine depends on scientific research, and epidemic diseases are brought under control only when research establishes a vaccine,” he said, adding that the crisis would “isolate and weaken” anti-science messages such as the “nutter fringe opposition to vaccination”.