Member Article

Government needs to go further and faster to encourage take up of R&D tax credits

London-based Innovation funding consultancy Leyton UK has welcomed the increase in R&D tax credit claims, announced last week by HMRC, but urged the Government to go further and faster to increase awareness.

R&D tax credits are a tax relief designed to encourage greater R&D spending, leading in turn to greater investment in innovation. They work by either reducing a company’s liability to corporation tax or by making a payment to the company.

The announcement by HMRC has revealed that there have been 48,635 R&D tax credit claims for 2017-18, of which 42,075 are in the SME R&D scheme, corresponding to £31.3bn of R&D expenditure. This is expected to rise and HMRC has now revealed that claims for the last complete year, 2016/17 indicate an overall increase of 20% from 2015-16. The increase was primarily driven by a rise in the number of SME claims, which totalled 45,045 in 2016-17, an increase of 22% from 2015-16.

Leyton highlights that the take up of claims from sector to sector and across the country varies. The Government has an ambitious target of 2.4% investment in R&D overall by 2027. The most recent ONS figures however revealed the UK’s investment to be just 1.69% of national GDP, well below the European average of 2.07%. This suggests far bigger increases in R&D investment will be required to come close to meeting this ambition. The need to focus on investment in innovation is clear and Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised to ‘double down’ on R&D investment in a recent speech at the Manchester Science and Industry Museum.

According to Leyton UK MD William Garvey: “The R&D tax incentive has become well established in the UK and we are seeing an encouraging take up as businesses realise the full scope of what they can claim. However if the Government wants to realise its goal to ‘double down on R&D’ there needs to be better education and communication for SMEs as we have found awareness of the scheme varies from sector to sector and across the country. We would also suggest further financial incentive. The UK is blessed with a combination of creativity and technical brilliance that are the foundations for success in the future. To support innovation post-Brexit, Government will need to continue to invest.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Leyton UK .