Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to help ensure UK capability for the manufacture of quantum (a) devices and (b) systems.

The National Quantum Technologies Programme, which is set to see £1 billion of public and private funding through its 10 year lifetime (2014-2024), is a collaboration between government, industry, and academia to drive the development of transformative research, products, and services in quantum. As part of this, UK Research and Innovation’s £173 million Commercialising Quantum Technologies Challenge (part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund) includes dedicated funding for projects to remove the obstacles to scale up and to support manufacturing and system or service development. UK academia and industry have been further supported by bodies such as the Compound Semiconductor Catapult and the National Physical Laboratory’s Quantum Metrology Institute to test and validate quantum technologies. In order to build on these existing initiatives, the UK Government is developing a national strategy to be published later this year.