Businesses: Technology

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2019 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Holmes of Richmond]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure the attraction of the United Kingdom as a place to establish and scale businesses based on artificial intelligence, FinTech and distributed ledger technology.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and declare my interests as set out in the register.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Henley) (Con)]

My Lords, we are creating an attractive environment, building the foundations and skills, data and ethics to allow businesses based on AI to start and scale. It is encouraging to note that inward investment to the UK AI sector increased by 17% last year—more than the whole of Europe combined.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond]

My Lords, there are obviously many factors involved, not least our excellent higher education institutions and our approach to immigration, to international students and to funding, to name just a few. Does my noble friend agree that we need to optimise all these factors and more if we are to realise this fantastic opportunity for companies to come here to start and scale in the UK?

[Lord Henley]

My noble friend is quite right to draw attention to our strengths, particularly those in the university sector; for example, he will know that on a league table based on research we have three of the top 10 universities, which certainly makes it attractive for businesses to come to this country and for businesses here to upscale their businesses in AI. He pointed to other factors as well, but I assure him that the Government are doing their bit with the AI sector deal, which is worth some £1 billion to the sector—half from the Government and half from the industry—and I hope that we will see yet further support for it.