I'd add some longer-term research with potential practical applications to the list.
For example, St Andrews university has a research team currently developing a new type of battery. It's not purely blue sky research - they have working prototypes. Compared to lithium-ion batteries, the battery they're working on should be much cheaper to make, use a smaller amount of relatively scarce materials, have a charge to weight ratio between 5 and 10 times higher and be able to be charged several times faster. It's the charge to weight ratio that's the key factor, because it makes high-capacity battery swapping at petrol stations practical, which is a huge step towards making electric cars practical. There's a huge market for the battery, which the team is developing with a budget of just £1.5M. A sum which is trifling for the government could speed up research by adding people and facilities to the project, thus generating some jobs immediately and improving the chances of the project creating a product significantly better than its competition, which could result in more jobs and a lot of profit in years to come.
The UK is still notorious for inventive ideas that are underfunded or unfunded and which people from other countries turn into profitable products. Government investment could change that. Many such ideas fail to make anything useful, but it's worth funding a lot of them because the ones that do result in something useful can more than recoup the research costs for all of them.
The central database scheme (the "ID card" scheme that actually has very little to do with ID cards) is likely to cost £15 Billion to set up and at least £500M a year to run, probably more. That money wasted on that could fund many hundreds of research projects, every one a potential goldmine.