My Lords, the UK’s national quantum programme has seeded a world-leading emerging sector. The Government are increasing investment from £1 billion in the last decade to £1 billion over the next four years. This funding will accelerate deployment of quantum sensors, networks and computers, turning the UK’s research excellence into industrial impact. It will also build the skills base, infrastructure and international partnerships necessary to cement the UK’s leadership position in what are game-changing technologies.
My Lords, the UK has an extraordinary opportunity when it comes to quantum: a potential 7% increase in productivity by 2045. That is some £212 billion. Does the Minister agree that the Government need to go further and faster in skills; in accepting all the recommendations of last year’s quantum taskforce; in scaling, to make bigger bets right across the quantum stack; and in driving demand, with government as an efficient, effective first customer—in short, being bolder and going deeper? The benefits to the UK economy can be measured in the billions.
The short answer is yes, and noble Lords will hear more about that shortly. All those things are critical. We have a good skills programme. There was a good report in July last year to deal with that. We are looking at options, including the use of procurement to make sure that this technology is pulled through.
My Lords, with the leading position that the UK has in quantum computing, what plans do the Government have for translational research, particularly in the areas of drug discovery, pharmaco- kinetics, next generation imaging and compute power, which will be needed to deliver on artificial general intelligence?
The noble Lord asks an important question. Quantum computers will be best for quantum problems. Drug discovery is a quantum problem, so it is exactly the sort of area for which this will be useful. We have five hubs specifically looking at both basic science and translation: a biomedical sensing hub dealing with imaging and other areas, including blood testing; a sensing, imaging and timing hub in Birmingham; an integrated network hub in Edinburgh; a quantum computing hub in Oxford; and a hub on position, navigation and timing. These are all about pulling the technology through in due course.
My Lords, given the worrying flow of some UK quantum companies taking money from or moving abroad, particularly to the US, in search of additional funding, is my noble friend the Minister confident that we are doing enough to map where in the UK the expertise is? It is important to us for national security, apart from anything else, that we have our own sovereign capability. Are we mapping it as well as we can and do we have an early warning system, such that we can intervene when some of these newly developing companies are thinking of going abroad, so that we can give them the support, funding or whatever else they need to stay in the UK, where we need them to grow?
My noble friend asks an important question. There is no doubt that UK quantum companies look pretty attractive at the moment. We have a good idea of where those companies are, what their skills are and what is going on across the quantum space, but I believe there is a need to have all the levers in place to make sure that these companies stay in the UK. Yes, that is about funding, but also about regulation, procurement and giving the signals that can leverage the investment that these companies will need, as many of them are getting up to very significant valuations.
My Lords, quantum technology clearly has profound implications for our future national security, including for the secure communications on which we all rely and for potential future threats to cryptography. How are the Government working to ensure the alignment of the national quantum strategy with our cyber and national security strategies? What assessment have the Government made of the UK’s sovereign capability in key parts of the quantum supply chain?
There are two important parts to that question. First, it is necessary to make sure that all existing data go through into post-quantum cryptography—in other words, into things that cannot be broken by quantum computers. That process is being led by the National Cyber Security Centre, which is working with businesses and trying to get them into place to have that ready, but it is not a short-term project. It will take quite a long time to get all that done. Secondly, the race is on to make sure that we are at the very forefront of getting a working, scaled quantum computer, because that is what will give us an advantage in all these areas. We work very closely with the security agencies across all this.
Will the Minister acknowledge that our theoretical physicist community, which is powerful and underpins so much of the sensible things the Minister has been saying, is feeling considerable anxiety at the moment because of the scale of the cuts proposed by UKRI to the Science and Technology Facilities Council? Will he urge UKRI to publish an impact assessment of its proposals?
I absolutely acknowledge the concern of a particular branch of physics—particle physics and astronomy—which has historically been placed under the Science and Technology Facilities Council. That is a bit of an odd situation, because it means its funding is traded off against facilities. That is exactly what is being looked at, at the moment. My number one priority for UKRI is to protect and grow investigator-led, curiosity-driven research, because that is the very thing that will give us the advantage in 10, 20 or 30 years. There is a very clear instruction that we are going to protect that. At the moment, UKRI is looking at the impacts of potential changes to funding, but no decisions have been made on that yet. I recognise the problem.
My Lords, quantum technology is possibly, indeed probably, the most disruptive and transformational technology yet invented by mankind. Thankfully, with our world-leading science base, the UK already has the second-highest number of start-ups working in this sector. Thankfully too, we definitely have a considered embryonic national strategy, which the Minister has outlined. Nevertheless, is it not inevitable —we can see it happening already—that the UK will soon be outspent by the US, China and the EU? Do we not need continuously to recalibrate our strategy?
The noble Lord is right. About 11% of all companies in the world in quantum are in the UK. We are second in investment, but this is a race, others are spending huge amounts of money here and many of our companies look pretty attractive. That is why we have a series of programmes, not just funding at the front end to keep grant funding and other support but thinking about how we get pull-through into procurement. That is what will keep these companies here, allow them to grow here and allow them to have the export opportunities. I look at this on a daily basis. This is a critical technology, a big growth opportunity for the UK and one where we have years of advance progress putting us at the leading edge. Over the past 60 years or so, as a country we have not done well at making sure we scale and keep companies and new technologies. We must do everything we can to achieve this in quantum.