The plan’s a political lightning rod and would be critiqued as socialist
Westlake 14, Executive Director of Policy and Research @ NESTA (Stian, “Some thoughts on The Entrepreneurial State,” NESTA, https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/some-thoughts-on-the-entrepreneurial-state/)//BB
What’s more, recouping innovation spending from companies that make direct use of publicly funded research would be a tough political sell. It helps to think through how this would look: the government would be charging a special levy on businesses like ARM, Rolls-Royce or GSK, while exempting Tesco, Provident Financial and Betfair, all in the name of promoting innovation. Whether or not the money went to fund further research, it would be, as civil servants like to say, a presentational nightmare, and the government would be accused of privileging low-R&D companies over high-R&D ones, exacerbated many of the widely-voiced critiques of the UK’s economy.