Is the UK becoming uninvestable? Another big pharma firm, doctors its plans.

Live from the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service.

I'm Stuart Clarkson. Good morning.

What we'll start in the UK today, where a pharmaceutical giant has scrapped plans worth more than a billion dollars to expand its operations there.

US company Merck, known as MSD in Europe, had planned to build a life sciences hub in London,

but has pulled out blaming a lack of UK government support.

Richard Torbitt is Chief Executive of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry.

It's an incredible blow, but it really needs to be a wake-up call.

The UK really has the potential to be winning more billion-pound R&D investments,

and instead of that, we're losing it.

So we really need to understand why, and we really need to try and put this right

so that we can continue to grow for the future.

I genuinely think that there is an access to medicines

problem. Increasingly, we're seeing medicines not being economically viable to launch here. So

if you look at the medicines that have been approved in the European Medicines Agency,

35% of those are not available in England, which is a pretty stark statistic, really.

Well, MSD is the latest pharmaceutical company to cut investment in the UK.

This is after AstraZeneca scrapped a $600 million expansion of its vaccine manufacturing site

earlier this year.

Venture capitalists, Sir Nigel Wilson, says the UK has a problem.

There's an interesting backstory here, which is there's a UK company called Verona Farmer,

which was A.M listed and then delisted in 2020, went on the NASDAQ, and has been taken over by

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