Government seeks to salvage Pfizer site
pharmafile | February 2, 2011 | News story | Research and Development | Pfizer, Sandwich
Science minister David Willetts says the government will do all it can to maintain pharma research in Kent, after Pfizer announced it was closing its only UK R&D centre.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Willetts pledged that the government would look at the feasibility of using the “highly-trained staff” and the site at Sandwich to create a new science park of some kind.
Pfizer yesterday stunned the UK science community by announcing it would close the site by 2013, with the loss of around 2,400 jobs.
David Willetts envisaged that three or four medium-sized companies might be able to make use of the research facilities there. Asked whether the government would be prepared to offer incentives for this, Willetts said: “We’re up for it.”
The minister revealed that the government had “pressed Pfizer very hard” last month over the closure of the Sandwich site but denied the company’s decision suggested there was no confidence in the future of science in the UK. “That’s not what Pfizer are saying to us,” Willetts said, and pointed to the government’s new ‘patent box’ as evidence of the coalition’s commitment to research and development.
Richard Pike, chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry, was not so sanguine in an interview on the same programme. On the issue of whether pharma companies saw the UK as a good bet for R&D, he asked: “Have we got the circumstances right for the UK?”
Pike said that structural changes in the pharma industry worldwide, as well as possible skills shortages in the UK, might mean a rethink is required by government. “I’m not suggesting a knee-jerk reaction but a fuller understanding of what’s driving pharma companies to do what they’re doing,” Pike concluded.
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