Three tech issues facing the UK’s next Prime Minister
A tumultuous couple of years in the UK, so what do we need this summer? A break. What are we getting instead? A leadership battle. Hooray! And, better still, it’s a leadership battle that only around 180,000 Conservative party members can actually vote in. That’s about 0.2% of the population. Double hooray!
The incoming Prime Minister will have a lot on his or her ever-expanding in-tray, but tech should be near the top of the pile.
Who’s in the running?
So, we’re now down to two candidates for the top job. In the blue corner: the UK’s former Chancellor, Rishi Sunak. In the bluer corner: our Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss.
Sunak is seen as the more pro-tech. He established the £1.1 billion Future Fund which took stakes in over 150 start-ups to help them weather the COVID storm and he’s been the most vocal about his support for innovation in this campaign. But, it’s Truss who increasingly looks set to win the race to №10. During her time in Cabinet, she did launch a digital trade strategy and set up the Taskforce on Women-Led High-Growth Enterprises. However, she’s been quieter than Sunak on the tech front in recent weeks.
What’s in the in-tray when it comes to tech?
Online Safety
The Online Safety Bill is the UK government’s landmark legislative move to force tech companies to protect people from harmful content online and hold them to account if they don’t. Billed as a ‘world-first’ law of this kind, it aims to place the ‘duty of care’ with the tech firm in terms of monitoring and removing such content. For those who don’t comply, it could mean fines of up to £18m or 10% of global turnover.
The essence of the Bill was first cooked up in a green paper in 2017 and has gone through various iterations and hit various roadblocks in the years since. Roadblocks including how we define ‘harmful’, if it is unduly heavy-handed on small businesses and whether the Bill actually strengthens the power of Big Tech to control what we say online.
So far, Sunak has pledged to prioritise this legislation in the autumn and Truss agrees on the need to protect young people from harmful content. But both seem to have also found common ground on the idea that it could ‘infringe free speech’.
Could we be facing months of more amendments to a set of laws that have already been years in the making? If the UK wants to meet its (somewhat lofty) aim of becoming the “safest place to be online” then the next Prime Minister needs to move decisively.
Listings
The UK has a good track record at growing start-ups. 85 new tech unicorns emerged in Europe in 2021 and 41 of these were from this country. But once they get to a certain size, a considerable number are still choosing to list in other cities rather than London. And that’s before we get to the issue of attracting international companies to float here.
Reviews from Lord Hill and former Worldpay boss Ron Kalifa have got the ball rolling on market reforms, but it hasn’t stopped London-based venture capital firm GP Bullhound from listing in Amsterdam or British chip giant Arm from flirting with floating in New York. These are the types of companies that the UK has to convince to IPO here — and foster the right market conditions to do so — if it is to even begin to entice high-profile firms from overseas. A growing tech ecosystem also needs to mature.
AI and future technologies
The government wants the UK to become a “sci-tech superpower” by 2030 and lead globally in the development of AI, quantum and other future technologies. Great! But a recent report from the Lords’ Science and Tech Committee says it lacks an overarching plan on how to get there. Oh.
We’ve recently seen the announcement of our largest ever R&D budget worth £39.8 billion over the next three years with an aim of hitting 2.4% of GDP by 2027. But in 2021 alone, Google spent £26.1 billion in this area. That’s over 12% of its annual revenue. You’ve probably noticed that Google is a ‘tech’ company, but shouldn’t we be shifting to become a ‘tech’ country? These are, after all, the technologies which will be underpinning our future economy and reshaping our future job market.
We also have to look at how we’re making the leap from R&D to commercially viable technology. If we consider patents as an indicator of innovation, the UK lags considerably behind Germany and South Korea when it comes to converting R&D spend into successful outcomes (according to Social Market Foundation research).
The government needs to foster more collaboration between private and public institutions and generally encourage greater risk-taking (and failure-making) when it comes to innovation. Ensuring the new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) — based on DARPA in the US — has a strong remit would be a good place to start.
Three issues the next Prime Minister must address if the ambition is to chip away at the US and China’s global tech dominance. Yet there’s still plenty we haven’t touched on. Downing Street adviser Jimmy McLoughlin wrote for The Times on the need for digital reskilling and greater support for entrepreneurs and the dominance of Big Tech will also continue to cause big headaches.
The government is quite vocal about becoming a “sci-tech superpower”, but that means superpowering the prominence of technology within all aspects of decision-making in Westminster. And that starts with whoever walks through the door of №10 in September.
