Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:17 pm on 2 March 2021.
I don't think the Member gives a rounded account of the success of the Welsh research sector. The success it has had in drawing down funding from Horizon 2020 is entirely beyond what you would expect of a research community of the size we have here in Wales, and through European funds more generally, we have invested hundreds of millions of pounds in research capacity here in Wales. Part of that in recent years has been improving the capacity of the sector to draw down funding from UK research councils, and we have research examples here in Wales where the draw-down from the research councils on a UK basis has been increasing in Wales. But, as well as drawing down more funding, it is the impact of the research that we can be particularly proud of, because Welsh research is highly impactful. In the research citation indices that universities use, Welsh research has an impact 75 per cent above the global average and 12 per cent above the UK average, and Wales's share of the top 5 per cent of the most highly cited publications is twice the global average. These figures were very persuasively set out by our chief scientific adviser Professor Peter Halligan when he and I were involved in opening a new research institute at Swansea University last Friday—an institute I know the Member will be interested in, the successor to the Morgan Academy. The sense of ambition there at the university to draw further funding to continue to provide impactful research says to me that the sector continues to be in robust health here in Wales.