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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Science
Ian Sample Science editor

‘Science superpower’ plan risks making UK bureaucracy superpower, says peer

Boris Johnson looks through a microscope in July 2022.
The Cabinet Office said last year that cutting-edge science and technology was ‘essential’ to prosperity in the digital age. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Britain’s plan to become a “science and technology superpower” is so lacking in focus and so full of new organisational structures that the country risks becoming a “bureaucracy superpower” instead, an influential crossbench peer has said.

Prof John Krebs, the co-author of a Lords report on the government’s global ambitions for science and technology, said despite laudable rhetoric, there was no clear strategy as to how the “superpower” ambition might be realised, and reasons to doubt it would succeed.

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