Health Innovation West of England welcomes the government’s ambitious new Life Sciences Sector Plan, setting out a ten-year strategy to accelerate health innovation, improve patient outcomes, and support a stronger, prevention-focused NHS.
Developed alongside the 10 Year Health Plan and Industrial Strategy, we are committed to playing a central and active role in realising this Plan’s vision: to make the UK a global leader in life sciences, delivering sustainable economic growth and significantly enhancing healthcare for everyone.
The Plan sets out a coordinated, long-term vision to ensure that UK scientific excellence translates into real-world impact, with more patients benefitting from earlier diagnosis, faster access to treatment, and new technologies that support more personalised and preventative care.
Life sciences is already a major contributor to the UK economy, employing over 300,000 people and contributing around £100 billion annually. The Sector Plan aims to build on this strength by addressing longstanding barriers to innovation adoption, improving data infrastructure, and making the UK a more attractive environment for clinical trials, investment, and manufacturing.
The Health Innovation Network’s recent report, Defining the Size of the Health Innovation Prize, delivered by Frontier Economics, shows that scaling health innovation could unlock a further £278 billion in economic value each year by improving population health, workforce productivity, and investment potential.
Natasha Swinscoe, Chief Executive of Health Innovation West of England, said: “We are extremely excited by the scope and ambition of the government’s new Life Sciences Sector Plan. Not only does it set out a clear vision of what we want to achieve, but it also provides a detailed and comprehensive road map of how we intend to get there, including a key role for the Health Innovation Networks.
“We are uniquely positioned as the bridge between innovation and healthcare delivery, helping to bring ground-breaking discoveries ‘from lab bench to bedside.’ The Plan explicitly acknowledges and strengthens our mandate, stating that we Health Innovation Networks will be ‘empowered… to drive innovation and investment at scale by strengthening support’. This underscores our ongoing commitment to fostering partnerships between innovators and the health system to develop, test, commercialise, and scale solutions that address the NHS’s most pressing challenges.”
The Plan sets clear targets for the Health Innovation Network to leverage substantial investment. Building on our track record of leveraging £2.6 billion to date, we are now tasked with facilitating at least £400 million of investment through support to companies each year. This investment is crucial for creating high-value jobs nationwide, with a target of at least 1,000 jobs safeguarded or created annually through our support.
Richard Stubbs, Chair of the Health Innovation Network, said: “The UK is now in a race to the top to become a global powerhouse for the life sciences sector. To achieve this, we will need to go further to find, test and implement health innovations at pace and at scale. It is right that place-based innovation capacity and capabilities have been identified in the Life Science Sector Plan as a key enabler for the sector.
“The Health Innovation Network is proud of the impact that we deliver with our partners in the NHS, academia and industry – from SMEs to multinationals – to improve patient outcomes, release capacity in the NHS to cut waiting lists and to drive economic growth, all priorities that are rightly recognised in this plan. The contribution the life sciences sector has to improve the health and wealth of the country is more evident now than ever.
“Through working locally with our vibrant life science sector, our health innovators and our NHS staff, we will deliver real change on the ground that has a national impact, and that supports the bold ambitions set out in the Life Sciences Sector Plan.”
Read the full Life Sciences Sector Plan.
Posted on July 16, 2025
