Before the Budget, is innovation what we need?

This week John Healey will deliver his first Budget, and we know it’s going to be tough. But with tough spending decisions, we need to look beyond the now, think longer term and look towards solving problems. That was the mood at the Innovation Nation summit in Manchester earlier this month, a small pre-Budget event organised by Gordon Brown. It gave me some food for thought and some Budget ideas. John, if you’re reading, read to the end!

I was lucky to be invited, and one of very few people in the room from construction. Then came the surprise. Andy Burnham’s attendance had been kept secret, and he walked in with no fanfare and took his seat as the next speaker.

We had just watched a short film of art, culture, inventions and innovations past and present, set to Oasis (of course!). What an inventive, creative nation we have been. The Prime Minister’s message was simple: Britain can be the world’s leading innovation nation, and as he put it, “we did it before, so why not?”

The big idea was place, with innovation clusters in every region, backed by money and decisions made locally. He announced three things on the day. Local innovation partnership funds will go to established mayors from 2028. There will be £1 billion over four years, with UKRI, for the clusters with the potential to be world leading. And he wants more collaboration between clusters, so strengths in one place connect with strengths in another. A growth fund in every area is coming too, with more detail at the Budget.

I left with a feeling I haven’t had for a while. Let’s do this. Innovation can sound like a tech word, but it’s problem solving, exploring the art of the possible, and that brings optimism. Isn’t that what architects do? At Bell Phillips, we’ve been exploring exactly this through our William Sutton Prize research, Towards a New Vernacular, looking at how biobased materials can become the norm for homes below 11 metres. We’re now putting that research into practice. The challenge is scale, and the appetite for risk.

Gordon Brown made the point that it wasn’t the “keep calm and carry on” posters that got Britain through the war. It was the feeling that we could all do something together, build something and solve the problem. That is what our sector needs now.

The sessions ran through the day, from AI and gaming to medicine and science, and one parallel stuck with me. Medicine has the same problem as construction: innovation in the labs doesn’t make it to the hospitals. I heard that only 37 per cent of new medicines are available in the UK, and just 16 per cent actually get used. This sounds very similar to the challenge with new materials in construction. It takes years for new materials and products to become mainstream, if ever! The system defaults to what’s been done before and is risk averse.

We are great at start-ups and new ideas in this country. What we have is a start-up trajectory problem. Good ideas get funded, then stall when it’s time to scale. We need to keep new companies here.

Procurement is one of the biggest levers we have to change that. Government funding should prioritise innovation, and public procurement should be where it leads, whether it is buying services or products. It’s the same challenge in our industry. Current public procurement too often stifles practice. It burns energy and money, favours the larger “safer” organisations and prevents small firms scaling up. Council housebuilding is a natural place to start: a public client, building at scale, able to set the brief for low carbon from day one. This could open the door for work like our biobased New Vernacular to scale.

Thinking longer term also means deciding how we want to live in twenty or thirty years, and building in resilience: homes that are warm and affordable to run, towns and cities that cope with heat and flooding, and materials and skills made here. And clusters only work where people want to live, which makes placemaking a design question as much as an economic one.

There have been very few leaks this year, unlike previous Budgets, so I’m writing my own little wish list. But if John Healey happens to pick up BD, here is what I’d like to see from the Budget and what follows it. Housing, infrastructure and good design sitting alongside science and tech in every local growth fund. Construction recognised and treated as an innovation sector. Council housebuilding backed to innovate, with the funding and confidence to use low-carbon materials and new products across hundreds of homes, not just one-off pilots. And with Jackdaw going ahead, why not use some of the revenues to accelerate low-carbon council housebuilding? Procurement that gives small firms and new products a fair route to scale, with low-carbon, home-grown construction and good jobs in the brief from day one. Architecture and construction need to be in the room where decisions are made, and it is up to us to make sure we are.

The outlook for the next year is going to be tough, but I like the roll-your-sleeves-up attitude I saw in Manchester. Innovation is in our tradition, and there is plenty to be hopeful about. Our sector needs to lead as well as tech. What we need now is the investment, ambition and confidence to deliver