In January this year, the UK Government published a Green Paper on “Building our Industrial Strategy” (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/611705/building-our-industrial-strategy-green-paper.pdf). In it is set an ‘open door’ challenge to industry to come to the Government with proposals to transform and upgrade their sector through ‘Sector Deals’. Businesses rather than the Government are being encouraged to identify what companies need in order to enhance their competitiveness as a sector.

This is not about the Government providing additional funding; rather, it is an open call to business to organise behind strong leadership, like the automotive and aerospace sectors, to address shared challenges and opportunities.

Government is looking for businesses to collaborate with other stakeholders, such as universities and local leaders to produce a clear proposal for boosting the productivity of their sector, setting out detailed plans to address challenges such as:

• delivering upgrades in productivity, including in supply chains;
• promoting competition and innovation;
• facilitating long term investment and coordination between suppliers and primes;
• accelerating growth across the value chain, including by identifying where the greatest value can be gained from technology development and investment;
• developing and growing the strengths of particular clusters;
• increasing exports; and looking at how we can use trade and investment deals to help the sector;
• commercialising research across sectors; and
• boosting skills and the number of high value, high productivity jobs.

To help provide evidence for the proposed Robotics Sector Deal, we would like to understand what activities are taking place in the UK that are in alignment with the existing RAS Strategy, and what new ones could be enabled by Government action. To this end we are reaching out to the UK RAS Community to collect this information. All you need to do is fill in this short survey.

When answering the questions, please endeavour to be specific and thorough. Your answers will not be publicly published, and will only be used to inform the proposed Sector Deal (and will therefore remain confidential between the RAS Special Interested Group Advisory Board and the Government).

Please feel free to give us more than one set of answers to this questionnaire. We will collate the answers and provide a high-level synthesis of them, rather than providing the details, so please don’t worry about overwhelming Government with detail!

If you are not familiar with the way we use the terms Asset, Skills, Coordination, Clusters and Challenges, then please have a quick look at the RAS UK Strategy here.

Thanks very much for your help. Your input is greatly valued and will contribute to something that will be of huge benefit to our sector, as well as the wider community.