For this reason we made available 1 billion additional funds in the Comprehensive Spending Review to enhance the Science and Engineering Base, which was linked in a unique partnership with the Wellcome Trust providing a further 400m. However, the tax payer expects to see that this funding is well spent - used on the highest quality programmes, and the outcomes fully exploited. The Funding Councils provide the basic infrastructure support on which the other research projects depend, and their funds are distributed on the basis of research quality. This is determined through the five yearly Research Assessment Exercise, and I have been pleased to note the improvements resulting from the consultation exercise on the assessment criteria. We also need a change in entrepreneurial culture to enable the UK to exploit its strong Science and Engineering Base.
Cultural change is required both within universities and commercial firms.
To stimulate the former, the CSR provided resources for new initiatives such as University Challenge and Science Enterprise Challenge. We are not neglecting business. We are putting in place measures to encourage investment in early stage, high technology, companies through a new Venture Capital Challenge run jointly with the private sector, with 20 million of pump-priming from Government and incentives to promote corporate venturing. But probably our biggest economic challenge of all is to master the new information technologies and maximise the potential of computers, the Internet and Electronic Commerce. Britain has only half the proportion of US Internet users.