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Digital and Technology Policy: National Sovereignty

My Lords, I start by disappointing the noble Lord, Lord Holmes: there will be no biopic about me, but Oxford University is currently building a “Baroness Bee” chatbot that might help my productivity. I apologise for the cost of the hardback book, but let me say that I have donated one to the Library; that is the importance of culture and sharing in our communities.

I am very often met with a level of surprise at the sophistication of this House on this subject. There are a lot of people inside and outside the technology sector who do not quite believe that there is such a depth of knowledge and passion—I mean that in the best possible way—on this subject. Today’s debate is indicative of that.

A number of noble Lords used the words “full stack”—we do not have enough capacity to do the full stack. Then I realised that I had written it down as “full-fat” sovereignty. I think we can all agree that we are not going to have full-fat sovereignty, but there were so many ideas in today’s debate that it adds up to a strategy. I say to the Minister, with deepest respect, that the list that she was asked to give us is a series of activities. Some of them are very important and some are very welcome, but it is not yet a strategy.

Across the House, there were only two disagreements. The first was on whether “Take back control” was a good slogan. I think we can leave that to one side. The other was on whether we should have open-weight models and regulation, or just open-weight models. We can probably walk forward on the basis that there is cross-party agreement that we desperately need an urgent strategy. Whether these responsibilities sit within DSIT or another department is ultimately a machinery of government question, but it cannot be the case that we wait for a strategy on sovereign tech. I absolutely agree with those who say that it goes beyond AI to all kinds of technology. Without a strategy, we cannot put into practice all the brilliant ideas that noble Lords have put forward today. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions.