£300m secured for Harwell lab and office building plans

Harwell Science and Innovation Campus has secured £300m to expand and build out new laboratory, advanced manufacturing, and office space.The public-private partnership joint venture between Brookfield, the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority has secured the spending facility for the Oxfordshire campus expansion.Over the next two years, Harwell will use the extra funding to build 440,000 sq ft of new Laboratory and R&D buildings across the campus.This will include Tech Foundry, 220,000 sq ft of advanced manufacturing space, and the Linear Accelerator Building, a landmark laboratory complex for starting and scaling science organisations, alongside several other developments across the campus.Jim Stretton, CFO & COO at Harwell Campus, said: “The new finance facility will be transformative for the campus. There is a chronic shortage of high calibre lab and R&D space across Oxfordshire which is holding incredible companies back. The new developments this facility will fund will accelerate our ability to effectively support our thriving innovation ecosystem.”Harwell Campus is a 700-acre site and home to cutting-edge facilities such as the Diamond Light Source Synchrotron, the National Quantum Computing Centre and the Rosalind Franklin Institute.The UK government has invested over £3bn in scientific facilities at Harwell. The campus has close links to the University of Oxford and other leading universities across the UK. It is operated on a cluster basis, promoting collaboration across the Space, Health Tech, Energy Tech and Quantum Computing sectors.The announcement follows the ground-breaking in April on Moderna’s Innovation and Technology Centre, a facility for research, development and manufacturing of mRNA vaccines for respiratory conditions and diseases.