The Integrated Review: locked into an ambitious domestic strategy

The Integrated Review 2021 differs from its predecessors. Preceding national security strategies were ‘UK as usual’ based. They made no heroic assumptions, explicit or implicit, about the future character or performance of the UK economy or about national ambitions. The UK was pitched as a well-connected, active, loyal and law-abiding ally which sought to defend and uphold the liberal democratic order. The detail of the strategies, which were conventional in character, flowed from these premises with an increasingly heavy emphasis in recent years on the internal security of the UK: counter terrorism, cyber security and national resilience. Priorities were set – and to a large extent budgets allocated – according to threat perceptions which were tiered in the likelihood and impact of the risks to the UK that they represented.

The Integrated Review: A Different Approach

IR21 is a different kettle of fish. The Review is about a grand strategy based on a vision of a UK playing a different role in the world. It contains a more thoughtful analysis of the international context than its predecessors but despite the darkening scene painted, its tone is upbeat, pitched at taking advantage of opportunities at least as much as at defending against threats. None of the existing security obligations in the Euro Atlantic area – still seen as the UK’s main theatre of defence operations – are ditched but several new security related roles are added to the agenda in the name of Global Britain: most obviously the tilt to the Indo Pacific but also championing free and fair trade; taking on a central role in combatting climate change and a more active stance in sustaining open societies, protecting human rights, championing bio diversity and upholding global norms. The strategy lacks the priority-setting which characterised the risk-based approach of previous Reviews: this will presumably emerge separately (as the result of Ministerial horse trading?) in the budget allocations of the next spending round. It is also only a framework document with eight other strategies or reviews still forthcoming from government. The proposed Comprehensive National Resilience strategy for example, is a major undertaking in its own right.

Another striking and novel feature of the IR is the way in which it is posited on the emergence of the UK by 2030 as a Science and Tech superpower which will have established a leading edge in critical enabling technologies like AI and Quantum, which are also dual use. Thus, economic and domestic policy generally are both unspoken, but integral, elements in a Review which advertises itself as integrating Security, Defence, Development and Foreign policy. Sectors like Space for instance are avowedly civilian as well as military in scope. There is, in effect, a double integration of first, the elements comprising international policy and, secondly, between them and domestic policy. The two combined in effect constitute a national strategy. Thus

The Review and the Plan for Growth

In March 2021 the government published ‘Build Back Better: Our Plan for Growth’. To the dismay of quite a lot of the business community it replaced the “scrapped” Industrial Strategy and Advisory Council of Mrs May’s government which had assumed a close relationship with the EU single market. The preoccupation with a longstanding problem of the low productivity of the UK economy and the focus on skills, training and innovation is a lineal inheritance nevertheless, and the technologies selected for development – networks and data, cyber, bio sciences are fundamentally the same. There is more emphasis on Climate Change with accelerated targets with ‘levelling up’ being a driver of the location of investment. The agenda is both broad and very demanding.

The Plan for Growth legitimately takes pride in the renown of British science, much buoyed up by recent extraordinary successes in vaccination development and genome sequencing, and points to our mature venture capital market, but at the same time it admits that, despite these two long-standing attributes, UK technology companies still find financing scale-up hard with the result that commercialisation and long-term profit from technology exploitation often go elsewhere.

UK total investment in R&D is significantly lower than in peer economies and is only planned to reach today’s European average of 2.4% per annum in 2027, just three years before the goal of becoming a tech super-power is meant to be achieved. More than 50% of the 2.4 % is expected to come from the private sector, which will have to raise its recent levels of investment for the target to be reached. Like the Integrated Review, the Plan for Growth is essentially a framework document with big headline investment target of £14.9 billion, but for which the detailed strategies and budget allocations for different sectors have yet to emerge.

The Plan for Growth is honest about the gaps in UK performance. They mean that we start from a lower industrial base than our competitors and that plugging them, which will involve significant behavioural change across society, is a formidable task which needs long-term planning, political commitment and consistency of policy as well as attention to detail – and funding.

Low carbon hydrogen as a source of clean energy, for example, featured in the Prime Minister’s Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution of November 2020. Eight months’ later the government’s strategy for hydrogen is overdue. Compared with France or Germany, where options with significant funding are already selected for exploitation, in the UK, hydrogen remains under-funded and under-publicised thus far. Slow policy-making between departments with different targets is sacrificing potential. Until the government gets its act together, there is unlikely to be extensive private investment in an energy source for which public investment is an essential element in creating the market.

Conclusion

The government is certainly not wrong to be ambitious about its technology strategy; on the contrary, and putting the new Technology Office at the centre of government is welcome. But

Partnership with the private sector will be crucial and the public need to be co-opted to join the domestic and global endeavour. COVID has led to an appetite for change in the country – indeed, a demand for it. But the government needs to be realistic in its messaging about the scope of the agenda and the timescales and costs involved since public disillusionment would undermine what has to be a national project if the IR’s (grand) strategic vision and resultant policies are to succeed.

Baroness Neville-Jones is a politician and former senior member of the Diplomatic Service. She was Minister of State for Security and Counter-Terrorism in the Home Office (2010-11) and a member of the National Security Council. She is also a former Special Representative to Business on Cyber Security, former Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and former Chair of QinetiQ.

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