The Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Healey, will present the Autumn Budget 2026 to Parliament on 28 October. Ahead of this anticipated event, AIRTO – the Association of Innovation, Research & Technology Organisations – has put forward a representation to the His Majesty’s Treasury setting out how the UK’s Innovation, Research and Technology (IRT) sector can turn breakthrough ideas into market realities that drive growth, productivity and national resilience. It identifies the principal policy levers required to accelerate technology translation, commercialisation and adoption, crowd in private investment, strengthen regional innovation capacity and ensure that more UK-originated innovation scales up and remains in the here.
AIRTO’s ‘asks’ for government are summarised as follows:
- Sustain and grow real-terms public funding in research, development and innovation, linked to measurable economic and industrial outcomes.
- Accelerate deployment of UKRI’s budget for business scale-up, commercialisation and technology adoption.
- Reduce regulatory barriers for innovative businesses across the key ‘IS6’ technology areas for UK growth (Advanced manufacturing, Clean energy industries, Creative industries, Defence, Life sciences, and Digital technologies).
- Use public procurement more strategically to create markets for UK innovation, support business growth and increase private investment.
AIRTO is putting forward a range of proactive proposals aimed at boosting innovation-led growth, including:
- Establish a recapitalisation fund of £100 million per annum for independent non-profit distributing RTOs and other eligible non shareholder owned IRT organisations to support innovation infrastructure.
- Create a Venturing Fund for the independent RTO sector of £200 million.
- Invest in the technical, commercial and procurement skills required across government and the wider innovation workforce.
- Provide support for global collaborations for UK-based innovation intensive businesses, academia and IRT sector organisations, including via European programmes.
Read the full submission here.
About AIRTO
AIRTO is the Association of Innovation, Research and Technology Organisations. Its membership comprises approximately sixty of the principal organisations operating in the UK’s innovation, research and technology (IRT) sector. The IRT sector has a combined turnover of £6.9Bn, employing over 57,000 scientific and technical staff (equivalent to the academic staffing of the Russell Group of universities) and, for comparison, it is significantly larger than the network of Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany both in size and scope of activities. The sector contributes £34Bn to UK GDP. AIRTO’s members work at the interface between academia and industry, for both private and public sector clients in the UK and overseas. Members cover a very wide range of industries from for example, agriculture and food, pharma and bio, energy generation and distribution, manufacturing and the built environment. They may be industry specific or have cross-sectorial expertise. Members include Independence Research and Technology Organisations, Catapult Centres, Public Research Establishments, National Laboratories, university Technology Transfer Offices and privately held innovation organisations.
