Plans by AstraZeneca, one of Britain’s most valuable public companies, to invest £650 million in the UK were welcomed amid a budget that was otherwise dubbed “unremarkable for business”.
The chancellor announced that the FTSE 100 pharmaceuticals group planned to invest the majority of the funds at its vaccines manufacturing site in Speke, Liverpool, and also to expand its presence at the biomedical campus in Cambridge where it recently built a £1.1 billion global research and development campus, dubbed the Disc.
Life sciences has been championed by Hunt as one of the country’s five key growth sectors and the Anglo-Swedish company’s investment was the most eye-catching announcement for business.
Jeremy Hunt vowed that the UK was “on track to become the world’s next Silicon Valley”