Spring Budget 2023: winners and losers

Birds are chirping, daffodils are blooming, and pictures of a red briefcase are splattered across the newspapers. It's Budget season once again. But what might this year's Budget mean for innovation in the UK? 

It was announced last year there will be significantly less R&D tax relief for SMEs from 1 April 2023, requiring many smaller companies to rethink their business plans. We now know that this will be mitigated somewhat for qualifying SMEs who spend 40% or more of their total expenditure on R&D, who will be able to claim a tax credit worth £27 for every £100 they spend. 

There was good news for those working in the AI space, with the announcement of the £1m Manchester Prize for "the person or team that does the most ground-breaking British AI research". In conjunction with this, the Chancellor also announced plans to invest heavily in quantum technologies, with a total of £2.5 billion in research and innovation funding available. A further £900m of funding has been allocated to developing exascale computing capabilities  (computing systems that can perform more than 10^18 floating point operations per second), as recommended in last week's Independent Review of The Future of Compute.

Intriguingly, the Budget Speech also mentions plans to "work at pace with the Intellectual Property Office to provide clarity on IP rules so Generative AI companies can access the material they need". Could this hint at changes to the copyright exceptions available for text and data mining, soon after the Government abandoned proposals to do just that? Hopefully, the promised clarity will come soon.