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- I beg to move,That this House has considered technology sovereignty.It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. We are four years into the Ukraine war and 10 days into the latest Iran-Israel-US conflict. At the start of this year, the US seized the President of Venezuela. A few weeks later, President Trump was demanding Greenland from Denmark. The world has never felt more insecure and unsecure.For the first time since I was elected as an MP, global insecurity is an issue on the doorstep in Newcastle. As if that were not enough, we are also undergoing two technology revolutions: one in data and the other in AI automation. Add to that the geopolitical restructuring across different dimensions—Europe and the US, the global south and Russia/China, Europe and Russia, and Iran and the Gulf states—and a green industrial revolution that is driving competition for knowledge, resources, land and people. Is it any wonder that people are feeling insecure?In the face of those challenges, we must be honest with our constituents about what we can and cannot control, and about the implications for our industrial, civil and defence policy. Technology sovereignty is a key part of that and a placeholder for larger fears. Too often, people feel that big tech is controlling, not empowering, their lives. Techno-feudalism and techno-serfdom may not be commonly discussed in the pubs and playgrounds of Newcastle, but they are a fear that many have.The previous Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hove and Portslade (Peter Kyle), said that big tech needs to be treated as a state, not as companies. If so, who are their citizens? Us? We certainly did not elect them, so are we just their serfs? What should the relationship be between those companies and states?Technology sovereignty matters, but what is it? The current Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology told the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee:“Sovereign capability is about ensuring the UK has what it needs to become a global leader in AI.”The Digital Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray), told the Committee:“Sovereignty is a huge issue that we always discuss. Security, safety and resilience are all parts of that, and the digital spending controls that DSIT puts in on behalf of Government, which examines individual contracts on that basis, very much examines these issues as well.”He also said:“It is about building those capabilities and supply chains here.”
- My hon. Friend has advanced a very powerful vision of the global events affecting the country right now. When I talk to defence tech companies, I see that they reach the point of scaling up, but they are unable to access finance. Does my hon. Friend agree that this Government should support defence tech companies to scale up, so that we can have true sovereign capability, as opposed to letting them fly off to America?
- I very much agree with my hon. Friend. He is absolutely right, and that support should take the form of access to investment, but also procurement and procurement decisions, which I will discuss in more detail.The Digital Minister also told the Committee:“There is no single internationally recognised definition of digital sovereignty”and:“DSIT is working to develop a comprehensive definition that can be used across the UK”.We have not received an update, but yesterday, the Government launched the AI sovereignty unit with £500 million, so it is to be hoped that we know what we are spending our money on.
- Will the hon. Lady give way?
- I cannot help but give way to the hon. Member.
- The hon. Lady is terribly kind and it is always a pleasure to come to a debate that she has secured. Recent studies indicate that AI-powered tools have already been used in phishing, ransomware, and social engineering attacks, making breaches faster, more targeted and harder to detect. The National Cyber Security Centre has repeatedly warned that the sophistication and scale of cyber-threats are increasing, and that AI could amplify those risks exponentially. Does the hon. Lady therefore agree that we have a critical gap in investment, expertise and the co-ordinated strategy in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to defend against AI-enabled attacks? The Government must focus on being able to combat those in future—does she agree?
- I certainly agree that we need to be able to defend ourselves against AI attacks.
- I thank the hon. Lady and Chair of my Select Committee for giving way. Does she agree that a definition of sovereign tech is something that a foreign power could not switch off, so that the systems on which we rely could not be pulled out from under our feet, much as the Microsoft ones were for the International Criminal Court?
- My fellow member of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee makes a very important point about the definition of sovereignty. I do not want to get too bogged down in the actual definition, but I agree that control matters, and I will say a little more about that.I will raise the definition of digital sovereignty cited in the House of Commons Library briefing, which accompanies this debate, which is“the agency and capacity of any organisation to make intelligent, informed choices to shape its digital future by design.”On that basis, choosing between Amazon Web Services and Microsoft for our data centre is technology sovereignty. I also think that if British sovereignty depends on our leaders’ ability to make intelligent choices, they spent a lot of our history not having sovereignty.The Library definition came from a global consultancy called Public Digital. Emily Middleton, the interim director for digital transformation in DSIT, was previously a partner at Public Digital. It rules out digital independence and says that our goal should be intelligent dependence. Can the Minister say whether he is aiming for intelligent dependence?The definition I like best, however, is that sovereignty is whatever a sovereign power says it is—that is what sovereignty means. The UK has extraordinary technological human capital resources, particularly in AI, where we are probably third in the world, but also in clean energy, quantum synthetic biology and much more. Our human capital means that we are not just any mid-sized country; we can aim higher than intelligent dependence. Elon Musk chose to turn off Ukraine’s Starlink capacity at a critical time in Ukraine’s defence of its sovereignty against Putin’s illegal aggression. None of us wants the UK to be in such a position of dependence.
- The hon. Lady mentions Britain’s extraordinary human capital. In my role as my party’s Europe spokesperson, of late I have been speaking to very large international defence firms, which thrive in the UK intellectual environment. They have great links with universities, but they say to me that they are increasingly looking to move some of the start-ups that have been created in the UK into Europe, so that they can assemble rapidly the kinds of teams that they need to take those initial ideas and scale them up. Does she agree that having a closer working relationship with our European partners and colleagues, allowing that freedom of movement to return, could be an enormous benefit—counterintuitively perhaps—to our sovereign capacity?
- The level of interest shows just what an important issue this is. I will come on to discuss some aspects of collaboration as it relates to sovereignty, but I observe that the last time our sovereignty as a mid-sized power was seriously debated was during Brexit, and the slogan “Take back control” reflected the sense that too much sovereignty had been ceded to the European Union without an honest debate with the British people. As a member of the Labour party, I know that we are stronger together and that that can require some loss of autonomy to deliver results, which actually make people more secure, but that must not be done without an honest debate.Let us look at the four specific sovereignty challenges, the first of which is critical infrastructure and cloud data dependency. The Competition and Markets Authority found that cloud services in Britain are dominated by AWS at 40% to 50%, and Microsoft at 30%. Crown Hosting is meant to be our sovereign hosting capability, but it only hosts 4% of Government legacy services. Both Amazon Web Services and Oracle claim to offer a sovereign cloud—they do say to deal with the difficult part in the title!The second issue I want to look at is the hot topic of AI. There is no Brit large language model but there is the ambition to transform our public services and industry through AI. The AI opportunities action plan repeatedly references sovereign AI and sovereign compute without defining them. The major AI companies Google, Anthropic, OpenEye, Microsoft and DeepSeek are all headquartered abroad. DeepMind formed Google’s AI capability and was founded right here in the UK before being bought. What capability does the UK now have in AI? What minimum capability does the Minister think we need? How do we respond to the EU Cloud and AI Development Act, which may exclude UK companies?
- My hon. Friend is making an important point. When it comes to AI, an enormous amount of investment is needed. There are many discussions at the moment about the impact of that huge investment in AI. It is very difficult for a smaller country such as the UK to compete in that regard. Does she agree that we need to work with like-minded countries on these issues, including those in the EU? Does she agree that we need to make sure that this is one of the key topics when President Macron visits the UK later this year?
- I agree with my right hon. Friend that we certainly need to work with like-minded countries.The third area is cyber-security and data governance. Some argue that we are already at war in the cyber-sphere. Last year’s strategic defence review emphasised cyber and electromagnetic domains, and established a new UK cyber and electromagnetic command to enhance that, with £1 billion in new funding for homeland air missile defence and cyber-security initiatives. Should these be British suppliers? Should they be European? Should they be exclusively NATO suppliers?On data governance, the foreign direct product rule allows the United States to restrict access to advanced computing chips and AI-related software. By adding UK companies to the entity list, the US can immediately cut them off from cloud services, software and AI tools, while the Cloud and Patriot Acts expand data access powers to compel US companies to hand over data even if held overseas—that is, in the UK. Has the Minister discussed those powers with Microsoft, AWS and Palantir?Fourthly and finally, we have the UK’s reliance on global supply chains. Critical minerals are an obvious example, but because I am a bit of a geek I want to mention the common information models that enable the things in the internet of things to talk to each other. By 2030, there will be 6 billion CIM connections globally. China controls 70% of the market, creating a huge possibility for the disruption of everything from traffic systems to energy grid operations.That is a really quick canter through just a few of the technology sovereignty issues. I want to look at two specific examples in more detail. First, the NHS has the largest and most comprehensive longitudinal and structured patient level datasets in the world. I support the push for digital integration as we transition the NHS from analogue to digital, with interoperability and standardisation bringing faster access and better analytics, yet a growing share of NHS data flows through US companies.
- My hon. Friend is making an important speech on an important topic. She is right to talk about how the US and China dominate on technological sovereignty, and part of the reason it is very difficult for the UK to compete with them is, of course, the scale of those countries. Does she agree that the way we can compete is by co-operating with reform in Europe, and that we should view our strategy not in terms of how the UK can outcompete Europe but in terms of how Europe, with the UK at its heart, can outcompete the US and China?
- It is an important question. I am not in a position to choose our allies, but I agree in principle that we should be working with the European Union. I do not think it should be a choice between the European Union and the US, though they may make that the choice. I certainly think that we should be working with our European allies in order to form a large market for secure and ethical technology, which is in the interests of everyone.Finally, we need to monitor the future sovereignty implications of current research, so that that can influence our investment and mergers and acquisitions policy, and so that key technologies and companies are not easily allowed to go abroad.This debate has attracted a large amount of interest, so I have tried to be as brief as possible. I have asked the Minister many questions; if he cannot answer them all, he can write to me. In summary, we need to understand what we can own, control or lead on ourselves, what we can access that is in the hands of allies we trust, and how we can manage the things we must get from those we do not trust. We must always remember that how we develop and deploy our human capital will be critical to our ability to achieve any kind of technological sovereignty. I urge the Minister to be honest about where we are. We do not want to sleepwalk into technological serfdom and/or some kind of techxit—a technology Brexit.
- Several hon. Members rose—
- Order. Please stay standing if you want to speak. We are very tight on time, because I hope to take the wind-ups at eight minutes past 5. If we have a rough time limit of two minutes, everyone will get in. I call Daniel Zeichner.
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