Category: Technology

  • Chris Philp – 2021 Speech at the AI Summit

    Chris Philp – 2021 Speech at the AI Summit

    The speech made by Chris Philp, the Minister of State at the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on 22 September 2021.

    Good morning and thank you for inviting me to the AI summit.

    This is the first event I have spoken at since being appointed as Minister with responsibility for Technology last week. As one of very few MPs or Ministers to have a science background, having studied Physics at Oxford, I have always taken an interest in the intersection between technology and business. In fact, when I was 21 I co-founded a distribution business that we later floated on AIM and, two takeovers later, is now part of Tesco. That business was substantially tech enabled. It used predictive stock ordering to reduce inventory to minimal levels while enabling next day delivery at high fulfilment rates. You would consider what we did then extremely rudimentary, but back in the year 2000 we felt quite pleased with what we did. So anyway, I’m very happy to be here with you today.

    I’m especially happy to be here because the UK’s tech industry as a whole is an extraordinary success story. We saw figures earlier this week that in the first half of 2021 1,400 private UK tech firms collectively raised £13.5 billion, by far the highest in Europe – and over double the amount raised in second-placed Germany.

    So the UK is in an admirable position, with a rich legacy of spearheading many of the greatest leaps in AI over the decades; we have advanced scholarships at universities and research centres across the country; and, in London, the most vibrant startup scene outside of San Francisco – with companies like Deepmind, Benevolent AI and Improbable pushing the envelope of what’s possible in AI in their respective fields.

    The UK saw 20 tech firms reach Unicorn status in the first half of this year, including Tractable and Zego. We have ten privately owned tech firms valued at over $10 billion. And in your field, Exscientia, which uses AI to discover new drugs, raised nearly a quarter of a billion dollars this year. From Alan Turing to Demis Hassabis, the UK has always led.

    The Government is completely committed to maintaining and building the UK’s leading tech position, including in AI. The UK is the clear European leader in AI and third globally behind only the USA and China – and I know we can catch them up. So let me say today: we want AI innovators to locate and scale up in the UK. We want you to succeed in the UK. We want the UK to lead the world in this field. It is a critical national priority.

    It is critical because AI is a profound technology. It is the future. Your field has the potential to – in fact it will – infuse every aspect of our personal and business lives in ways we cannot currently imagine. As Andrew Ng has argued, AI will fulfil a similar role in the coming century to the one that electricity and then regular computing played in the last century – a meta-enabler which underpins activity in a huge range of fields, including those without initially obvious applicability.

    So it’s important for Government to engage with technology, which of course includes AI technologies, because of how inextricably linked they are with each and every one of our lives – something the pandemic has made clear.

    And this AI Summit is timely, because as many of you will have seen, and as the Secretary of State trailed on Monday, the Government has launched its ambitious National AI Strategy today.

    For the first time, the Government has set out its strategic vision for how we remain a pre-eminent AI nation. Building on the investments we’ve made through the AI Sector Deal and since, and the kinds of successes we’ve seen this week in terms of our startups, we want to ensure the UK remains an AI superpower for years and decades to come.

    A number of important steps have already been taken. In the last seven years the Government has invested £2.3 billion supporting AI. This has included a quarter of a billion pounds to develop the use of AI in the NHS, the same amount again for the Centre for Connected and Autonomous vehicles and £100 million to fund 1,000 AI PhDs. The British Business Bank has already invested £372 million in UK AI companies. And this is just the start.

    Undoubtedly the investments we’ve made to date have kept us at the forefront of AI – only behind the USA and China – far ahead of the chasing pack of other countries. But we have more to do to keep and build our position.

    Many of you who have had a glimpse of the AI Strategy will see how neatly it links up with other Government Strategies.

    It wouldn’t have been possible without the independent AI Council, who pivoted their expertise first to helping Government understand the potential for AI to help with the initial crisis during the pandemic, and then to setting out their vision for how AI could help us rebuild our economy. I thank them for their work.

    It wouldn’t have been possible without detailed analysis, consultation and collaboration across the whole of Government.

    And it wouldn’t have been possible without the help of many of you. In fact, since the publication of the AI Council’s Roadmap, the Office for AI – who led on developing the Strategy – has spoken to literally hundreds of organisations and individuals to capture the collective vision of the ecosystem.

    So what’s in the Strategy?

    Let me tell you: this is an ambitious and inclusive strategy. It aims to build on our leadership in delivering responsible AI, to point to how we drive growth across every sector while ensuring that the benefits and the opportunities are spread across society.

    The Strategy is structured around three pillars:

    Investing in and planning for the long term needs of the AI ecosystem to continue our leadership as a science and AI superpower;
    Supporting the transition to an AI-enabled economy, capturing the benefits of innovation in the UK, and ensuring AI benefits all sectors and regions;

    Ensuring the UK gets the national and international governance of AI technologies right to encourage innovation, investment, and protect the public and our fundamental values.

    But just as this Strategy is being published, we want you to know we’re serious about delivering it.

    That’s why we commit to delivering from day 1:

    We’ll support our future skills and diversity needs through Turing Fellowships, Centres for Doctoral Training and Postgraduate Industrial Masters and Conversion Courses and visa routes – such as the Global Talent visa and the High Potential Individual Route and the Scale-Up route to make sure the brightest and the best can come here easily; Support the National Centre for Computing Education to ensure programmes for children in AI are accessible and reach the widest demographic; Publish a report into the UK’s future computation capacity needs to support AI research, development and commercialisation. Continue to support academic R&D into AI and its commercialisation and work to ensure better access to the big data needed to support AI projects.

    We’ll also support the Levelling Up agenda by launching a joint Office for AI & UKRI programme aimed at developing AI in sectors beyond London and the South East; Launch a Defence AI Strategy later this year and the new Defence AI Centre through the Ministry of Defence; Work with teams across government to identify where using AI can provide a catalytic contribution to strategic challenges, and consider how Innovation Missions can include AI capabilities to promote ambitious mission-based cooperation.

    And finally we’ll: Pilot an AI Standards Hub to coordinate UK engagement in AI standardisation globally – so UK startups and data scientists can feed into their development; Undertake an analysis of algorithmic transparency with a view to publishing a cross-government standard; and Update guidance on AI ethics and safety in the public sector.

    One of the most crucial areas we will work on is setting out our pro-innovation policy position on how we’ll get AI governance and regulation right, within the next few months. So far we’ve been pragmatic in delivering guidance for the public sector, working with the World Economic Forum, Alan Turing Institute, ICO and others, but this work will be a wider vision that gives greater clarity to businesses about how we think AI should benefit society. We will seek to give certainty, support innovation and deployment, reassure the public and set a standard that could be adopted globally. We will seek to keep regulatory intervention to a minimum, generally seeking to use existing structures and to approach the issue with the permissive mindset that we want to make AI innovation easy and straightforward, while avoiding any public harm where there is evidence it exists.

    We’ll also be looking at how we continue to support the most advanced research in AI – whether in a university, a startup or large company. We’ll launch a UKRI National AI Research & Innovation Programme to support the transformation of the UK’s capability in AI and better coordinate and join up their activities;

    Finally, we’ll examine, together with employers and providers, what skills are needed to enable employees to use AI in a business setting, and work with the Department for Education to explore how skills provision can meet those needs.

    The conversations that Government has had with the tech and AI ecosystem haven’t ended, and indeed this Strategy isn’t the end of the conversation on AI, as you have now heard. It’s the beginning of a new conversation. It started with the AI review and Sector Deal, and has continued with the AI Council and all of you as we developed the Strategy.

    Now, our strategic vision is set out, and we’ll continue to engage with you as we work hard to implement and deliver it.

    To finish: I’ll echo a sentiment I touched on earlier – AI is a truly transformative technology, with the power to not only help us to recover as a country economically, but the potential to dramatically improve lives and livelihoods across the UK, and make us a global leader in tackling the biggest challenges humanity faces. To make us a true AI and science superpower.

    And to echo my colleague, the Secretary of State in the foreword of the Strategy, AI is here now. It is improving our lives now. We want to make sure the UK can lead the world in ensuring AI works for people and delivers on its potential. And with this Strategy, I believe we can do that.

    Enjoy the AI summit!

  • Matt Warman – 2021 Comments on Digital Identities

    Matt Warman – 2021 Comments on Digital Identities

    The comments made by Matt Warman, the Digital Infrastructure Minister, on 2 August 2021.

    Whether someone wants to prove who they are when starting a job, moving house or shopping online, they ought to have the tools to do so quickly and securely.

    We are developing a new digital identity framework so people can confidently verify themselves using modern technology and organisations have the clarity they need to provide these services.

    This will make life easier and safer for people right across the country and lay the building blocks of our future digital economy.

  • Jo Stevens – 2021 Comments on the Government’s Technology Announcement

    Jo Stevens – 2021 Comments on the Government’s Technology Announcement

    The comments made by Jo Stevens, the Shadow Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, on 2 August 2021.

    The Conservatives are keeping the UK in the digital slow lane with their broken promises on the gigabit rollout, shifting their targets again and again.

    Conservative dither and delay is harming our digital infrastructure and our economy.

  • John Heddle – 1985 Speech on Public Telephone Boxes

    John Heddle – 1985 Speech on Public Telephone Boxes

    The speech made by John Heddle, the then Conservative MP for Mid-Staffordshire, on 15 November 1985.

    I am grateful for the opportunity to raise a subject which affects the constituencies of all hon. Members. The Order Paper gives the title of the debate as “public call box services”, but really I wish to discuss the condition and unworkability of public phone boxes.

    I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry for attending to hear what I have to say. He serves his west midlands constituency of Coventry, South-West as hard and effectively as I try to serve mine.

    Incidents of vandalism and unworkability of telephone boxes, even in rural Mid-Staffordshire, which encompasses a cathedral city and two small residential towns, are horrifyingly high. Between one in two and two in three public phone boxes on housing estates, in town centres and in villages do not work. The main causes are sheer, wanton vandalism and mindless, senseless hooliganism.

    Throughout the nation, there are 76,500 red telephone boxes. They are part of our national scene, yet, despite the fact that British Telecom provides a magnificent service to its customers and makes a welcome and healthy profit for its subscribers and shareholders, the public telephone service makes a loss of £77·4 million. Part of that loss must be attributable to the fact that the service is not adequately monitored.

    There are 10,600 public phone boxes in London. Last year, there were on average 5,000 acts of vandalism to public phone boxes each month and the cost of repairing phone boxes in London was £1 million. A survey carried out for the Daily Mail earlier this year showed that only 37 of 100 London phone boxes worked. In Newcastle, nine of 25 boxes worked, in Glasgow and Liverpool 10 of 25 boxes were in operation and even in Birmingham only 14 of the 25 phone boxes inspected—56 per cent.—were in operation.

    My anxiety is for people who live on housing estates and cannot afford private telephones. I think particularly of elderly people to whom the public phone box down the road may be a lifeline.

    When television came into our lives a few years ago, we used to see a picture of the mast at Sutton Coldfield round which we saw the sign:
    “Nation shall speak … unto nation.”

    For my elderly constituents, the public phone box enables family to speak unto family.

    How will an elderly person who wants to contact a doctor late at night be persuaded to go out and make an urgent call, perhaps even a 999 call? The chances are that such a person would not find a phone box that worked. Even if he or she did, the light would probably be smashed, the glass would probably be broken and the door would probably be off its hinges. If, by chance, the prospective caller does not know the number that he wants to dial, the chance of finding a directory in the phone box will be about one in a thousand.

    I know that British Telecom has done its best to encourage the public to take a responsible attitude. I shall quote from a magazine which Sir George Jefferson’s own office sent me today. It sets out the initiative which British Telecom has introduced, which is known as “Watch a box”. One passage reads:

    “The Chairman, Sir George Jefferson, took the initiative when he decided to check out a payphone on his way to work each day—now everyone wants to join in. The entire management board in BTL North West has elected to watch a box, while in BTL South West staff at all levels are taking part in a scheme run in conjunction with their area newspaper Connection.

    Whether they are walking the dog or travelling to and from work, staff have been asked, through the newspaper, to drop in and check out a payphone.

    If the payphone is not working, has been damaged or the notices or lighting are defective, then they can ring in on a special number to report the problem.”

    I do not think that that goes to the heart of the problem. There must be a partnership between local offices of British Telecom, local councils and local police forces. The telephone boxes should be inspected regularly and monitored at irregular times of the day and night with a view to trying to catch the vandals red-handed in the red telephone boxes. When caught, they should be brought to account in the courts. The fines meted out to them by the justices should be realistic and should dissuade them from ever embarking on a career of vandalism which might lead to worse crime in future.

    I ask my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State to use his influence with his ministerial colleagues. I suggest that he urges his ministerial colleagues in the Home Office to issue a directive to magistrates to ensure that when the vandals are caught the fines meted out to them by the magistrate bear a direct relationship to the cost of making good the wanton damage. The fine should be two, four or five times the cost of making good the damage. That will go some way to reducing the horrendous deficit of £77·4 million which the public part of British Telecom has to bear.

    It is no good British Telecom saying, “We have the problem under control.” I shall quote from an article which appeared in British Business on 2 August. Part of it read:

    “British Telecom claim that their new telephone kiosks will improve the situation. They point out that during 1984 there were more than 5,000 cases of damage to payphones every month in London alone, affecting almost half of London’s 10,650 payphone boxes, costing £1 million a year to repair. The new payphones are apparently much less vulnerable to vandalism. The extra degree of lighting will be a deterrent to vandals who are discouraged by high visibility.”

    I do not believe that to be so. A vandal will vandalise light or dark, day or night. The article continues:

    “The open-plan design and robust materials—stainless steel or anodised aluminium—will be difficult to damage.”

    If he is so minded, a vandal will damage. Even if he does not damage the telephone system itself, he will inflict damage on the casing or the red boxes.

    There is the idea that we should do away with the red boxes, which are so much part of our national life. Instead, we shall see installed a sort of Cape Canaveral cone into which my elderly constituents, for example, can make their calls after struggling down the street at the dead of night or in the heart of winter. The cones will not provide the shelter that the red boxes afford.

    I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for being in his place to answer the debate. I hope that he will take on board some of my comments, which I hope also will be considered to be constructive. If he does, I believe that his constituents and mine will be eternally grateful.

  • Jeremy Quin – 2021 Comments on UK Space Command

    Jeremy Quin – 2021 Comments on UK Space Command

    The comments made by Jeremy Quin, the Minister for Defence Procurement, on 30 July 2021.

    As our adversaries advance their space capabilities, it is vital we invest in space to ensure we maintain a battle-winning advantage across this fast-evolving operational domain.

    The stand-up of Space Command is an exciting and important step in our commitment to operate in space effectively.

  • Matt Warman – 2021 Statement on Digital Identity

    Matt Warman – 2021 Statement on Digital Identity

    The statement made by Matt Warman, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, in the House of Commons on 19 July 2021.

    I am pleased to inform the House that the Government are today publishing a public consultation on enabling legislation to strengthen digital identity use for the whole economy.

    More and more people, in all walks of life, are using products and services online. People expect these transactions to be simple, quick, safe and personalised. However, people in the UK often still have to use a combination of paper documents issued by Government, local authorities and the private sector—and a mixture of offline and online routes—when opening a bank account, claiming benefits, starting a new job or applying for a school place. And these steps often need repeating for each new transaction.

    Voluntary online authentication, identity and eligibility solutions can increase security, ease of use and accessibility. They are central to transforming the delivery and efficiency of public services and people’s ability to operate confidently in an increasingly digital economy.

    The Government are committed to realising the benefits of digital identity technologies without creating ID cards. We have committed to put in place the necessary framework and tools so that digital identity solutions enhance privacy, transparency, confidence and inclusion, and that users are able to control their data, in line with the principles published in the 2019 call for evidence response.

    In our response to the call for evidence, we committed to enabling businesses and individuals across the economy to use digital identities securely and with more confidence. This is only achievable by putting in place a legal framework and regulatory infrastructure.

    The consultation DCMS is publishing today follows up on that commitment. It sits alongside the UK digital identity and attributes trust framework, which was published as a first draft in February 2021, opening the way for legislation. Digital identity legislation is needed to underpin a governance framework in law, to enable Government to allow checks by industry against data it holds, and to create confidence in the validity of digital identities. We have worked extensively with industry, civil society, and academia to get to this point.

    The consultation sets out our plans to create a digital identity governance framework. Creating a governance system which can build trust in digital identities is vital. This trust will drive innovation and growth in the UK economy and good governance will ensure that the digital identity and attribute principles are upheld.

    We are also consulting on our intention to create a permissive legal power for Government-held attributes to be checked safely and securely by non-public sector organisations for eligibility, identity, and validation purposes. This will allow digital identities in the UK to be built on a greater range of trusted datasets and ultimately provide people with a choice of how they use this data to prove their identity.

    Finally, we are proposing to establish in law that digital identities and digital attributes can be as valid as physical forms of identification or traditional identity documents. This builds on our commitment to enable the use of digital identities in as many areas as possible and to build confidence in their validity.

    Further details can be found in the consultation, available here:

    https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/digital-identity-and-attributes-consultation.

    A copy of the consultation will also be placed in the Libraries of both Houses.

  • Seema Malhotra – 2021 Comments on Gigafactories

    Seema Malhotra – 2021 Comments on Gigafactories

    The comments made by Seema Malhotra, the Shadow Business and Consumers Minister, on 16 July 2021.

    To boost our automotive manufacturing industry, Labour would be part-financing the creation of three new battery development plants by 2025.

    The UK has a world leading, competitive automotive industry that means we could win the global race in electric vehicle development. But a strong domestic battery supply chain is key to retaining that competitive edge and the SMMT has warned the Government that the UK is falling behind our competitors.

    This government has driven manufacturing into decline, and failed to invest in the jobs we need. As we recover from the pandemic, Labour has a plan to get our economy firing on all cylinders again with a plan to buy, make and sell more in Britain, so that we build the industries and skills of the future we need.

  • Amanda Solloway – 2021 Comments on the Research Compact

    Amanda Solloway – 2021 Comments on the Research Compact

    The comments made by Amanda Solloway, the Science Minister, on 13 July 2021.

    This pandemic has demonstrated the urgent need for governments to work together to tackle our common challenges. From genomic sequencing to vaccines, our scientists and researchers have achieved far more working across borders than they would have been able to alone.

    I’m pleased that today’s Ministerial and the G7 Research Compact set the foundations for even more effective collaboration in the years ahead.

  • Jo Stevens – 2021 Comments on Racism on Social Media

    Jo Stevens – 2021 Comments on Racism on Social Media

    The comments made by Jo Stevens, the Shadow Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, on 12 July 2021.

    The horrific racist abuse of the England penalty-takers had a disappointing inevitability to it.

    Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have the means to stop this hatred on their platforms and yet they decide to do nothing.

    Meanwhile the Government’s long-promised Online Safety Bill has yet again been delayed with progress unlikely to get underway until after the summer.

    No one should have to put up with this abuse online, social media companies’ self-regulation has to end and instead we need tough new laws.

    The Prime Minister has previously done no more than turned a blind eye to racism against our players. Warm words and gigantic England flags are no substitute for using the power he has, to make it stop.

  • Boris Johnson – 2021 Article on Science

    Boris Johnson – 2021 Article on Science

    The article written by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, on 21 June 2021. The article was published in the Daily Telegraph and republished by the Cabinet Office.

    I cannot think of a time in the last 100 years when the entire population of this country has been so deeply and so obviously indebted to science – and to scientists.

    Had it not been for our scientists, we would not now be able to enjoy the most basic human freedoms: hugging relatives, meeting friends, playing football, going to the pub; or at least not without the risk of spreading a lethal disease.

    It is thanks to the vaccine roll-out that literally every person and every family in this country has an immediate future that is happier, more prosperous, more full of hope and opportunity, and if you think I am belabouring this point, it is because it needs belabouring.

    We have spent too long in a state of semi-detachment from science, as though it was something intimidating and remote from our lives. Too many people in our country lack training in science and technology, too many children think STEM subjects are not for them.

    Most glaringly of all, this country has failed for decades to invest enough in scientific research, and that strategic error has been compounded by the decisions of the UK private sector.

    It is a wretched fact that British firms are currently investing a fraction of the OECD average on research; and though the speed of the discovery of Oxford AstraZeneca was little short of miraculous, it was also something of a miracle that it took place here at all. Before Covid, the UK domestic vaccine industry had almost perished out of benign neglect.

    Had a couple of investment decisions gone the other way, this country might not have possessed the skills or practical capability to make vast batches of the vaccine that has been so indispensable to our success.

    So this is the moment to learn this stark lesson of the pandemic – our daily dependence on high-quality scientific research. It is also the moment to abandon any notion that government can be strategically indifferent, or treat research as a matter of abstract academic speculation.

    I am not suggesting that government should try to exercise scientific judgment, or impose some dogma on the scientific world – like the deranged genetic theories of Stalinist Russia.

    On the contrary, it is because we want to support high science, and to foster research that may or may not lead nowhere, that we are setting up the high-risk high reward ARIA agency, on the lines of DARPA in the US. We need to intensify the search for the unknown unknowns.

    And then there are the known unknowns, the nuts we know we need to crack, for the sake of our health and happiness. If the covid experience has taught us anything, it is that government does have a role in making demands, in explicitly framing the challenges we hope that science can meet.

    If we don’t, there are others who will. We made no particular effort to develop 5G, for instance, and we have paid a price. For the first time since the second world war, the largest western democracies were left behind in the race for a major new communications technology. It is a mistake that has proved expensive to rectify, and we don’t want to make another one like it.

    So we are investing unprecedented sums, increasing government spending to £22 billion for scientific research of all kinds; and we need to use those billions of state spending to leverage in the many more billions of the markets.

    One way to encourage those private sector investments is to give the market players the confidence that they are backing national priorities – so that public and private sector come together to deliver the breakthroughs, like the covid vaccine, that can transform our lives and economic prospects.

    To shape those priorities I will be chairing a new National Science and Technology Council, with Sir Patrick Vallance as my National Technology Adviser, so that together we can give the scientific world – in academia and across commercial laboratories – a sense of where we think we need to go.

    Some imperatives are already obvious. We need science urgently to accelerate the solutions that will help us to tackle climate change. We need progress on efficient power storage, hydrogen manufacture, net zero aviation, and other knotty problems raised in our ten point plan. We have a huge challenge to meet net zero by 2050, and not much time. But the vaccine programme has shown that when the pressure is on, humanity can produce feats of Manhattan Project-like speed, as the research of decades is compressed into months. It will be the job of the new National Science and Technology Council to signal the challenges – perhaps even to specify the breakthroughs required – and we hope that science, both public and commercial, will respond.

    We will be thinking about medical imperatives, such as tackling dementia or using new gene therapies to cure the hitherto incurable.

    We will be thinking about the new threats and opportunities in cyber, in space, and in the field of AI. We will of course be hoping that British science will play a leading role in fixing the problems of the world, providing everything from cheaper pharmaceuticals to drought-resistant crops.

    We will pursue these missions not just because each breakthrough could be a boon for humanity, but also because we want to see the expansion of scientifically-led start-ups and scale-ups, and a growth that goes beyond the golden triangle of Oxford-London-Cambridge and across the whole country.

    We want the UK to regain its status as a science superpower, and in so doing to level up. The UK has so many of the necessary ingredients: the academic base (four of the world’s top ten universities), a culture of innovation, the amazing data resource of the NHS, the capital markets.

    What we are offering now is record funding combined with the strongest possible political support and backing for science and a clear indication of where government sees greatest need.

    Of course we must generously fund pure science. We must allow for serendipity. You cannot plot or plan every breakthrough. But you can certainly set out to restore Britain’s place as a scientific superpower – while simultaneously driving economic prosperity and addressing the great challenges we face – and that is the plan of the government.