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10 DOWNING STREET - Press Notice
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New Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to lead
fight against recession and build now for future prosperity
The Government has today created a new Department for
Business, Innovation and Skills whose key role will be to build
Britain's capabilities to compete in the global economy. The
Department will be created by merging BERR and DIUS.
This will create a single department committed to building
Britain's future economic strengths. To compete in a global
economy and create the jobs of the future Britain requires a
regulatory environment that encourages enterprise, skilled
people, innovation, and world-class science and research. The
merger of BERR and DIUS brings together the parts of the
government with key expertise in these areas.
It combines BERR's strengths in shaping the enterprise
environment, analysing the strengths and needs of the various
parts of British industry, building strategies for industrial
strength and expertise in better regulation with DIUS's expertise
in maintaining world class universities, expanding access to
higher education, investing in the UK's science base and
shaping skills policy and innovation through bodies such as the
Technology Strategy Board.
It also puts the UK's Further Education system and universities
closer to the heart of governm ent thinking about building now
for the upturn.
Telephone 020 7930 4433
www.number-10.gov.uk
The new department is the institutional realisation of the
approach to promoting UK competitiveness and productivity as
set out in the New Industries, New Jobs paper of April 2009,
produced jointly by BERR and DIUS.
The new department will:
• Advocate the needs of business across government,
especially of UK small businesses;
• Promote an enterprise environment that is good for
business and good for consumers;
• Design tailored policies for sectors of the UK economy
that represent key future strengths and where government
policy can add to the dynamics of the market;
• Assess the changing skills needs of the UK economy,
especially the intermediate and high skills vital in a global
economy and design policies to meets them through public
and privately funded life long training;
• Invest in the development of a higher education system
committed to widening participation, equipping people
with the skills and knowledge to compete in a global
economy and securing and enhancing Britain's
existing world class research base;
• Continue to invest in the UK's world class science base
and develop strategies for commercialising more of that
science;
• Continue to invest in skills through the Further Education
system to help people through the downturn and to prepare
Britain for the future;
• Deliver on the government's ambitious objectives to
expand the number of apprenticeships;
• Encourage innovation in the UK;
• Defend a sound regulatory environment that encourages
enterprise and skills;
• Collaborate with the RDAs in building economic growth
in the English regions;
Work with the EU in shaping European regulation and
European policies that affect the openness of the single
market and the competitiveness of European and British
companies;
Continue to work to expand UK exports and encourage
inward investment to the UK.

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