David Willetts: Response to Nobel Prize
The University of Edinburgh’s Professor Peter Higgs has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics
Today the University of Edinburgh’s Professor Peter Higgs has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Commenting on this prestigious award David Willetts Minister for Universities and Science said:
I congratulate Professor Peter Higgs on his Nobel Prize. This is the 23rd Nobel Prize for Physics to come to the UK and continues a long tradition of scientific discovery.
We should also celebrate the efforts of the thousands of scientists and engineers all over the world who have worked on the Large Hadron Collider and who have participated in the long search for the Higgs Boson.
Our new Nobel Laureate thoroughly deserves his prize. It’s an incredible endorsement of the quality of UK science.
Notes for editors
- The government’s economic policy objective is to achieve ‘strong, sustainable and balanced growth that is more evenly shared across the country and between industries’. It set 4 ambitions in the ‘Plan for Growth’, published at Budget 2011:
- to create the most competitive tax system in the G20
- to make the UK the best place in Europe to start, finance and grow a business
- to encourage investment and exports as a route to a more balanced economy
- to create a more educated workforce that is the most flexible in Europe
Work is underway across government to achieve these ambitions, including progress on more than 250 measures as part of the Growth Review. Developing an Industrial Strategy gives new impetus to this work by providing businesses, investors and the public with more clarity about the long-term direction in which the government wants the economy to travel.