AI Opportunities Action Plan

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Thursday 5th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

As the noble Lord points out, there has been a decrease in PhD funding through UKRI from 2018 to 2022. The overall number of PhD students has not gone down, but the sources of funding have become more diversified. It is an important issue for the UK to be good and capable in the numbers of PhD students we have. Two new programmes are being developed as part of the AI opportunities plan: the AI fellowship programme and the AI scholarship programme. Both will be important to ensure that we have the skills we need to deliver on the plan. I take the point about the number of students who have gone from computer science into PhDs. That is an area that we need to look at and understand. As the noble Lord is aware, some of it is a classification question, in relation to EU students, but there is no doubt that we need to keep the number of students doing PhDs up.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, to follow on from the noble Lord’s point about skills, behind the flashiness and excitement of AI lie some boring things that have to be done. One of the big challenges to support an AI ecosystem in the UK is the byzantine procurement rules of government. Can the Minister tell us what he is doing to ensure that small and growing British-based AI companies have a crack at getting government contracts and therefore growing?

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

This is an area close to my heart. It is a crucial part of stimulating innovation right across the patch. Government procurement ought to be a way in which innovation companies get their first indication of a signal, in many cases, of a potential customer. A commercial innovation hub has been set up in the Cabinet Office, precisely to try to make it much easier to deal with SMEs and others, which has historically been extremely difficult to do from a government procurement perspective.