Technology Sovereignty

Julia Lopez Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West (Dame Chi Onwurah) on securing such an important debate. It is so well attended, and it is a shame that it is not longer; I commend everyone for their two-minute raps. In the context, I will plug tomorrow’s Conservative-led debate on Government support for UK tech, which will be an opportunity to speak about some of the concerns that have been expressed on a cross-party basis about the direction of tech policy.

We all come to this place with experiences that shape our thinking on these critical tech issues. Members have probably never heard this before, but the hon. Lady is a former telecoms engineer—[Laughter.] She brought her expertise to Ofcom and is now a distinguished Select Committee Chairman. The hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) brings his experience as a computer engineer, and the hon. Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) his experience as a “crusty old” physics teacher. He talked about quantum, and one question that I have in relation to today’s launch of the policy on digital identities is whether a quantum-proof system is being built.

I come to this debate as a former Cabinet Office and telecoms and digital infrastructure Minister. During my tenure, the Government in which I served faced three supply chain crises that permanently changed how I think about resilience: Brexit, covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Each forced us to confront uncomfortable truths about where we source from, whom we can trust and what risks we carry when we fail to think strategically about our dependencies.

I also think of my experiences on a trip to China in 2018 as a new Back Bencher visiting Huawei’s Shenzhen lab. I later found myself as the Minister overseeing the removal of high-risk vendors from the 5G core, and I saw how an earlier decision not to scrutinise those providing critical infrastructure came at real economic cost as well as security cost. Security risk and economic risk are deeply intertwined and will become ever more so as more of our economy moves online. In the space of a week, those Gulf economies that have been expanding voraciously into the digital sphere have found three AWS data centres under attack—a deliberate strategy by Iran to cripple critical digital infrastructure and, in so doing, mete out economic pain and chaos.

Those experiences shape how I think about technological sovereignty. We have to be clear about what we mean by that. It does not mean autarky, complete self-reliance, or pretending that Britain can or should build every piece of technology ourselves. That is not realistic or, actually, risk free. It is not about stopping important tech companies investing here and bringing expertise. I see it instead as being about resilience and influence. It means understanding the risks that we are carrying in the tech stack that we increasingly rely on; mitigating those risks; and ensuring that we do not steadily reduce our leverage by ceding power to companies or countries whose influence over those systems may ultimately exceed our own.

We are seeing this play out in the cloud, where I think we need to be pursuing a dual strategy whereby, alongside the hyperscalers, we start to expand our edge capacity, with smaller data centres and a more pluralistic market, using competition policy and thinking strategically about procurement. We need to think about it in terms of the components that power modern computing. How do we make ourselves an indispensable part of any critical supply chain in the way Taiwan and the Netherlands have done in relation to chips?

We need to think about the concerns in relation to Chinese tech in energy policy. I think that as we move further into the renewables space, we are building in quite a lot of risk there. We have heard today about critical minerals, and I have talked about high-risk vendors in telecoms. Dependency on China and dependency on America are not equivalent risks. None the less, I worry that, having learned the lesson about Chinese technology, the Government now appear content to place an extraordinarily high level of dependence on American hyperscalers instead. Of course the US is our closest ally and has enormous expertise that in many respects we cannot match—we cannot do so in every field—but sensible allies hedge their risks. That is especially relevant when we think about some of its cloud rules, which have been mentioned today.

The Government are pursuing an odd strategy here. We are upping our dependency on the US while reducing our reliability and credibility as a partner. Similarly, while inviting circular investments in mega data centres, entering into data partnerships with AI firms and blowing ever larger balloons of fantasy out of the US-UK tech partnership—something that has been picked up today, but also in The Guardian this week—the Government are actually making it harder for UK tech firms to grow, because of Government procurement rules, high taxes, crippling energy costs, wealth taxes and all the rest of it.

I appreciate that we are very short of time—I am getting a little nod to shuffle along—but my worry is that the Government thus far have not had a strategy for tech sovereignty and are heightening our dependence on US hyperscalers. I would be very grateful if the Minister could address those concerns, which I think are shared across the House.