The Centre for Long-Term Resilience contributed to the Industrial Strategy open consultation led by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT). We wanted to ensure that resilience in the life sciences sector would be actively considered by DBT when designing the strategy.
The key points we made:
- The life sciences (including pharmaceutical manufacturing) should be the UK Government’s top priority subsector. This is the only subsector which will ensure the country’s ability to respond to biological threats regardless of whether they are natural, accidental, or deliberate in origin.
- The UK Government should devise a life sciences resilience sub-strategy, as it has for semiconductors, batteries, and critical minerals. Life sciences underpin the UK’s biological security, yet are relatively neglected from a strategic resilience standpoint.
- The UK Government has a unique opportunity to use the implementation of the National Biosurveillance Network (NBN), a key deliverable of the 2023 Biological Security Strategy, to perfect its cross-departmental data sharing.
Our response covers a wide range of topics, from singly-sourced active pharmaceutical ingredients to leveraging pension funds to fostering a thriving bioeconomy. You can read the full response by clicking on the ‘Download’ button below.
If you would like to discuss our response in more detail, please get in touch with paul-enguerrand@longtermresilience.org
