Digital and Technologies Sector Plan

I am repeating the following written ministerial statement made today in the other place by my noble Friend, the Minister of State for Science, Innovation, Research and Nuclear, Lord Vallance of Balham.

I am pleased to update the House on the publication of the “Digital and Technologies Sector Plan: Year One Update”. In June 2025, we published the sector plan—the UK’s first long-term plan to back the sectors and technologies of the future—as part of the Government’s modern industrial strategy. We set out a clear, ambitious, 10-year vision: to make the UK one of the top three places in the world to create, invest in and scale up a fast-growing technology business by 2035. We are working to secure the UK’s first trillion-dollar technology company.

The implementation update we are publishing today sets out our progress in delivering on the commitments set out in our sector plan, and where we have expanded our ambition, across the following areas:

Unlocking economy-wide measures to boost digital and technologies growth. The Government are providing end-to-end support for our sector’s innovative, high growth companies across the UK to underpin the UK’s growth, security and sovereignty. We have announced record public investment in R&D to back frontier technologies at the earliest stage, including committing nearly £4 billion of funding until 2029-30 through UK Research and Innovation. We have launched TechFirst, which has already reached over 100,000 young people, to grow our domestic skills pipeline for our six frontier technologies. We have expanded the British Business Bank’s mandate, with a new activist focus on scale-ups to back British deep tech champions, such as its recent £100 million investment in the UK based spinout, Oxford Quantum Circuits. We have introduced tax reforms to encourage frontier technology companies to start, scale and stay in the UK. And we are delivering world-class infrastructure, including the telecoms infrastructure that is fundamental to our digital economy.

Supporting our frontier technologies. The Government are taking an active and strategic approach to grow the UK’s technological capabilities. Earlier this year, we expanded and extended the engineering biology mission awards with £20 million of funding and delivered our third engineering biology accelerator programme in collaboration with Science Creates. We have launched Sovereign AI, a new sovereign venture fund which will invest £500 million to scale AI companies in the UK. This week we published the AI hardware plan to back British companies developing the chips and semiconductor technologies behind AI and invest in the scientists, engineers and technicians needed to turn new ideas into products and good jobs in the UK. We have published the cyber growth action plan to boost the UK cyber-security industry and we are scaling the national security strategic investment fund to invest in strategic dual-use science and technology companies. Expanding on our sector plan commitments, we announced up to £2 billion to establish the UK as a world-leader in quantum, including skills and talent, research, and a world-first commitment to procure large scale quantum computers in the early 2030s.