The Photonics Leadership Group has released five future government policy actions that are critical to support the continued growth of the UK Photonics industry. Industry call on the new government to prioritise action in these areas to ensure UK photonics continues to thrive and deliver growth three times greater than the overall economy.
1. Increase Confidence in Investment:
Accelerate the next Spending Review to provide certainty to departmental budgets. Protect innovation support alongside support for fundamental science to enable to UK to make more of its global science leadership.
2. Tax Credits:
Enhance tax credit delivery. Removing incentives for HMRC to negotiate down tax credits companies are due and targeting a 30 day period to pay tax credits in line with the government’s own targets for paying invoices from SMEs.
- Protect and expand capital equipment tax reliefs to support manufacturing scale-up in the UK, including 100% full expensing of capital.
3. Skills:
Photonics creates high gross value added (GVA) jobs, at over 200% of the UK average GVA per employee. To continue to expand production and applications, the industry requires a growing skilled workforce, which needs a pipeline of incoming talent, requiring:
- A review of careers education for 16-18 years olds to ensure that career advisory professional are aware and communicating the opportunities, impact and prospects for career options in modern manufacturing design and innovation in the UK;
- Support the develop of a skills training matrix between educators and industry to highlight required and missing skills now and anticipated in the future;
- Streamline and accelerate the visa sponsoring process for STEM skills at all levels reducing the time SMEs take to fill positions where UK candidates cannot be found.
4. Future Proof Resilience:
Support photonics companies to develop solutions for quantum and AI technologies, reducing the risks and providing incentives to invest in markets of vital importance to the UK but where scale and timing remain highly uncertain.
- Proceed at pace with the recommendations of the UK semiconductor infrastructure feasibility review. Providing support at scale for compound semiconductors and integrated silicon photonics where the UK has a leading innovation lead and globally competitive position on which to build.
5. Balance Innovation Support:
Instruct government agencies to balance support between challenge focused initiatives and maturing underpinning technologies in photonics, acoustics, fluids and electronics that are vital to supporting progress in all society challenges and enable solutions to be realised with maximum UK supply chain content.
- Dedicated support for innovation projects derisking advances in photonics that will have impact across multiple end applications e.g. integrated photonics.
- Enhance capex support in grant funding from UKRI agencies to support development of advanced automation by reimbursing 100% of hardware equipment costs used within projects to demonstrate new/updated manufacturing processes.
- Prioritise incentives to accelerate deployment of the latest production equipment across whole of UK manufacturing. Intrinsically digital and clean, wider adoption of photonics production techniques is essential to the deployment of AI, digital manufacturing and emission reduction. The UK is currently falling behind its competitors in adoption, jeopardising our future manufacturing competitiveness.
- Update the UKs Advanced Manufacturing Plan and scope of Made Smarter to explicitly include machine vision; 3d printing; laser machining, joining and cleaning.
- Develop a National Strategy for future modern manufacturing facilities and investment in the UK. Covering the planning, incentivisation and derisking the hi-tech manufacturing infrastructure required by UK businesses of tomorrow.
