House of Lords

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

Thursday 23 July 2026

11:00

Prayers—read by the Lord Bishop of Hereford.

Charities: Banking Services

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

Question

11:06

Asked by

[Lord Forbes of Newcastle]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the challenges faced by charities in accessing ethical and appropriate banking services; and what steps they are taking to ensure that voluntary organisations can obtain reliable, affordable and compliant banking provision.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Lemos) (Lab)]

Charities make vital contributions across the country. While the provision of banking services is ultimately a commercial decision for banks, the Government believe that it is essential that charities and voluntary organisations can access suitable banking services for their needs. The Government have worked closely with UK Finance to support non-profit groups’ access to finance, developing the interactive account finder tool hosted on its website. Smaller charities may also be eligible to use the current account switch service. I should also declare my interest: I was chair of the payments board at UK Finance for several years.

[Lord Forbes of Newcastle (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for his thoughtful and considered reply. Many charities face slow, complicated and burdensome processes to change registered trustees on their accounts. According to the Charity Commission, a growing number of charities, particularly but not exclusively those that are Muslim-led, are finding themselves debanked altogether. Does my noble friend the Minister accept that current money laundering rules and banks’ risk-avoidance practices are having unintended consequences for charities seeking ethical banking? Will His Majesty’s Government consider issuing clearer regulatory guidance for the banking sector to ensure that civil society organisations are treated proportionately, fairly and indiscriminately?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that easy, holiday-focused question on the last day of term. I also thank my noble friend Lord Pitt-Watson, who got to the Treasury job too late to take this Question. Mine’s a gin and tonic, David.

We recognise the concerns raised by charities about access to banking services. The UK’s anti-money laundering regime is designed to be risk-based and proportionate, and banks are expected to assess customers on that basis, rather than applying blanket approaches. We continue to engage with the banking sector, regulators and charities to understand these issues, and we will keep under review whether further guidance is needed to support fair and proportionate treatment of civil society organisations.

Just to share my empathy with my noble friend, the Charity Finance Group’s 2024 survey said that 92% of charities had experienced at least one banking difficulty in the previous two years. That number needs to come down.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, can the Minister address the issue of access for charities and others in rural areas? Two or three years ago, the Treasury issued a mandate that every resident should live within two or three miles of a bank branch. That has simply not happened. Can he address this as a matter of urgency?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I understand the point the noble Baroness is making; I live in south Devon, so I recognise the picture. We understand the importance to communities and high streets of access to banking services. The industry has committed to a rollout of 350 banking hubs by the end of this Parliament. Over 275 hubs have been announced so far, and more than 240 are already open. You can get a full list of hubs on the Cash Access UK website. If there is a particular place where there is no access to banking services, you can put in a petition, as it were, and it is obliged to look into it. This is an ongoing area of concern for the Government, and we have launched a review into access to banking services. I will happily talk more about that if noble Lords ask me.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, I faced some of the challenges raised by this Question when setting up a charity some 11 or 12 years ago. At the time, questions were asked by others in this place about the difficulties, and the answers given then were remarkably similar to the answer the Minister has just given. Nothing has improved over those 11 or 12 years, so there is clearly something wrong with the system which needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency. Can the Minister pass on to his colleague the requirement to act on this quickly?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

My Treasury officials will kill me for this answer, but I must say that I recognise the picture the noble and gallant Lord has painted. When I came to read the pack for this Question, I had a decided sense of déjà vu. I will pass that question on to my noble friend Lord Pitt-Watson and he will get straight back to the noble and gallant Lord.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, charities are subject to accountability to a range of regulatory bodies—the Charity Commission, the Fundraising Regulator and HMRC. In view of that, does the Minister agree that it is wrong that banks can unilaterally withdraw banking services and that there is no appeal?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

As the noble Baroness knows, debanking and access to banking services is an issue way beyond charities and it is really important. The Government recognise the importance of that, and that is why they have introduced new rules to require banks to give customers 90 days’ notice before closing accounts and to provide a clear explanation. The Government’s new rules will ensure more transparent and predictable access to banking, while still recognising that it is a commercial decision for a provider as to whom they provide services. But what I would say is that banks are big and rich, most charities are small and poor, and I am on the side of the little guy.

[Lord Altrincham (Con)]

We thank the noble Lord for standing in for the Minister at the end of term; I do appreciate that. A recent Charity Commission survey found that nearly one in five charities has experienced difficulties in opening a new bank account. This has been repeatedly discussed in your Lordships’ House, including throughout the passage of the current Financial Services and Markets Bill. How will the Government ensure that regulators apply their rules in a proportionate manner, taking account of the constraints under which charities operate that need access to banking services?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

The question of regulation is really important here, so I should set out the position clearly. Charities are protected by the FCA’s consumer duty up to £1 million turnover, and if they want to seek redress from the Financial Ombudsman Service, they can do so if they have turnover of less than £6 million. I would encourage charities, if they are really unhappy with their bank, to use the UK Finance “find a bank” tool—it is not called that, but you know what I mean—and the customer account switching service. The best tonic for poor service is competition.

[Baroness Gohir (CB)]

My Lords, earlier on, the Minister said that the assessment is risk-based, but a report by the Muslim Charities Forum shows that two-thirds of Muslim charities face banking issues. Are the Government suggesting that Muslim charities pose more of a risk, and why is that?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

No, I do not think that is what we are suggesting. We are suggesting that the banks must act proportionately and in a risk-based way. I think the noble Baroness knows that there are issues, not just in the Muslim community, of which charities must be vigilant, involving financial crime, money laundering and so on. We would not want to stop banks doing that, but of course we would strongly oppose any idea that that targets any specific community.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

Do charities that have a politically exposed person such as a Member of Parliament or, indeed, a Member of your Lordships’ House on the board as a trustee face additional complications in gaining banking services?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

That does not sound right to me. I do not know the answer to that question, but I will make sure my noble friend Lord Pitt-Watson writes to the noble Viscount.

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, I want to take up the issue of debanking, not just in the charity sector but in independent journalism. I do not know whether the Minister knows about the Canary, an independent journalism outlet that Lloyds Bank has debanked, meaning that it did not have access to substantial amounts of money to pay staff. Does the Minister think that fair and ethical in an open society where we value a free press?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I am not familiar with that case, but if it is as the noble Lord suggests—and I have no reason to doubt that—that is a serious concern, and I am sure the FCA would want to know more about it.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, the Question is about access to ethical banking. We are frequently told during Prayers in this House about the evils of the person who lends money on usury. Can the Minister have a stab at defining ethical banking?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I could read out a very long answer I have here, but I will not. The heart of the matter in relation to ethical banking goes back to this question of risk-based assessment. I know that a number of the banks that regard themselves as operating ethically would perhaps take a slightly different view on how they manage risk, but also on how they manage compliance. We want to be clear that the security of the banking system is an absolute priority.

I am over time. I wish all noble Lords a very happy summer holiday. I am off to Cornwall, and I will see you in the traffic jam on the A30.

National Youth Strategy

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

Question

11:17

Asked by

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what progress they have made regarding the implementation of the National Youth Strategy and associated funding programmes.

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, and The Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Twycross) (Lab)]

Youth Matters: Your National Youth Strategy is a 10-year cross-government plan backed by over £500 million in DCMS funding. We are moving forward with delivering it. We are mobilising our enrichment expansion programme and have launched a delivery partner competition for the Youth Matters fund. Eight Young Futures hubs are operational, and we announced a £10 million match-funded investment in partnership with the King’s Trust to increase access to trusted adults for young people.

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for that Answer and the work that she and her department are doing in this important area. Can she reassure the House that the Government fully appreciate the value of funding for national youth organisations such as police and fire cadets, the Jewish Lads’ and Girls’ Brigade, Scouts, Guides and so on? They create the local opportunities for safe, evidence-based enrichment programmes that are led by trusted adults, particularly at a time of rising waiting lists for these activities, and they have a proven ability to deliver in disadvantaged and faith-based communities.

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

Having seen at first hand the importance of the Fire Cadets when I was working for the Mayor of London, I know, and the department and the Secretary of State know, that uniformed youth organisations provide impactful opportunities for young people nationwide. We have provided over £24 million since 2022 to expand their provision. Following discussions with my noble friend at the beginning of the year—and proving the value of Oral Questions—we are currently providing £1.2 million in transitional funding to build their long-term sustainability and resilience. These organisations remain a valued part of the youth sector, and we will share eligibility criteria for future funding streams in due course.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, the Government have announced a policy. That is great, but we have had other policies in this area before. What guidance can we get so that the Government are tapping into those established organisations—we have heard about the uniformed officers, but there are also the national governing bodies in sports—which have an incentive to ensure that these things continue to run? What are the Government doing to ensure that those who are already in the field have a guarantee that for the next few years they will get extra help?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

As I said, we will publish the criteria in due course, but I assure the noble Lord that we worked with young people and sector experts in co-producing the strategy Youth Matters. Those voices from the sector were at the heart of how we created the strategy and they will be part of the conversation going forward.

[Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)]

Given that the uniformed groups, particularly the cadets, are a major force for good in this country and expose young people in disadvantaged communities to some of the most committed professional people on the planet, what reassurances can the Minister give us that the Government will look at the long-term financial viability of cadets based in the community and in schools? I declare my interest as chair of a cadet health check team and that yesterday my daughter became a serving member of the RAF.

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I congratulate the noble Lord on his daughter’s success in her career and wish her all the best for the future. We recognise the role that uniformed youth groups can play. That is why we are providing £1.2 million of transitional funding. We will publish criteria for future funding soon. We anticipate that these organisations will be eligible for our future funds. Like the noble Lord, we know how important the uniformed youth organisations are— and not just in an ethereal, theoretical sense. Up and down the country, the adults running some of these organisations are working with young people who need that trusted adult to take forward and mentor them.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, what steps is the Minister’s department taking to encourage arts organisations and the creative industries to work with not just schools but youth organisations and FE colleges?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I might need to come back to my noble friend with some of the detail. We are clear that, when we talk about arts everywhere for everyone, that is also within all parts of our infrastructure in the department. I look forward to having a longer conversation with my noble friend about that.

[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

I thank the Minister for her response and support both the questions that have been asked and this valuable work. My question is the other way around. Are His Majesty’s Government giving any thought to how common resources are offered to these valuable and diverse youth organisations—for example, in safeguarding or mental health provision among our teenage and young adult population?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I will have to write to the right reverend Prelate on this, but we are clear that having a rich breadth of activities is crucial to supporting young people’s mental health. As I alluded to in my response to the noble Lord, Lord Bailey, some of these organisations are working with children and young people who do not have a trusted adult elsewhere. Throughout the thread of our work, we are looking at how we can support young people in every way, but I will need to come back to the right reverend Prelate on those specifics.

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the Minister to her place and start by declaring an interest. Macclesfield is a long way from the sea, but we are very fortunate to have a wonderful sea cadet unit, TS Ardent. My two children had 10 years of fun and frolics on the water. By happy coincidence, the president of TS Ardent is the admiral and noble Lord, Lord West, who does a fantastic job and is very popular with the students and sea cadets. The previous Government set up the uniformed youth fund, which came to an end in March. In November 2024, the Department for Education also ended its £1.1 million grant to the cadet expansion programme. The national youth strategy highlights the Government’s ambition to expand in-school and community-based cadet forces by 30% by 2030, with £70 million of funding from the Ministry of Defence. Can the Minister confirm that this target and funding will remain in place despite the £5 billion black hole in the defence investment plan?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

If I was being ungenerous, I would refer to previous black holes that have been a matter of debate from this Bench. We are investing a significant amount of funding in and behind the strategy. We have over £400 million to improve access to enriching activities and youth work and for refurbishing or building up to 250 youth facilities. We have £22.5 million for a new programme to create brilliant enrichment offers in up to 400 schools. We are investing £15 million in youth workers, volunteers and other trusted adults. We are investing in rebuilding local youth services and establishing a network of 50 Young Futures hubs. We have £5 million to improve youth infrastructure at local and regional levels. That is before you even get to the funding coming through the dormant assets scheme. We are funding this. When you look at how important some of these activities are, including the sea cadets—my brothers were sea cadets in a landlocked county as well—you have to put the money behind it. We are doing that. The previous Government did not.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

Does the Minister agree that one of the most widening experiences for children is to experience other cultures and countries? One of the most effective things to broaden the minds of youngsters is therefore exchange visits with other countries—perhaps predominantly in Europe because it is closer, but with any country. What are the Government doing to expand the exchange visit programme?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I benefited from an exchange, although I admit that I hated my French exchange. We are supporting this in a number of ways—through Erasmus and exchange programmes. We are pushing the Erasmus scheme beyond the university route, which I am delighted that we are doing. Unlike my French exchange, I had a good experience when I was a student studying abroad. It not only enriches people’s studies but gives young people the opportunity to understand the importance of speaking languages—I answered a Question last week about minority languages in this country.

Jammu and Kashmir: Human Rights and Political Situation

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

Question

11:27

Asked by

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the human rights and political situation in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir; and what representations they have made to the government of Pakistan regarding recent restrictions on civil liberties and protests.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office, and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Lord Collins of Highbury) (Lab)]

My Lords, the United Kingdom monitors developments in Pakistan-administered Kashmir closely. We are concerned by reports of unrest, loss of life and injuries. We support freedom of assembly and expression and encourage peaceful dialogue. We understand that restrictions on communications have been especially concerning for British nationals and members of the diaspora who are seeking contact with friends and family. The United Kingdom currently advises against all but essential travel to the area.

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

I thank the Minister for his Answer and welcome the efforts to mediate. A number of individuals have tried to mediate between the action committee and the Governments of Kashmir and Pakistan, including the chair of the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation, Syed Qamar Raza. There has not yet been a resolution. As the Minister points out, the guidance from the Foreign Office is against non-essential travel, but I can tell him from my personal experience that a lot of people, probably in the thousands, will be travelling over the summer holiday period to visit family and friends. Will the Minister continue to lobby the Government of Pakistan to at least open internet access so that loved ones can maintain contact with each other—and, if possible, to lift some of the blockades in terms of lockdowns and the closure of shops and other essential facilities?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

We welcome the recent reports that dialogue is ongoing between the affected parties to find a resolution. It is good news. I reassure the noble Lord that, during Minister Falconer’s visit to Islamabad in June, he discussed the situation with his Pakistani counterparts, including Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi; and that we continue to monitor the situation and the impact on British nationals.

[Baroness Gohir (CB)]

My Lords, the regional elections will take place in Kashmir on 27 July; some will take place in August. What is the Government’s assessment of how free and fair these elections will be? Will they be monitoring them? I should declare that I run a Muslim charity; I did not declare this on the first Question when I asked about Muslim charities.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I reassure the noble Baroness that we regularly raise human rights concerns with the Government of Pakistan at the highest levels. Promoting human rights is a core part of the United Kingdom’s diplomatic engagement and programmes in Pakistan. We regularly raise our concerns with its Government at a senior level—I mentioned Minister Falconer’s visit in June. I reassure the noble Baroness that we maintain regular contact and that we are concerned. We want to ensure a peaceful resolution and dialogue, and we certainly support all efforts to maintain democratic accountability.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord on his return to the Foreign Office. The whole House thought that he was badly treated by the previous junta, so it is nice to see him back. The Government’s most significant challenge in their recent discussions with Pakistan was their disagreement over the deportation of Shabir Ahmed. Can the Minister update the House on progress in those discussions and what steps the Government will take if Pakistan refuses to allow Shabir Ahmed to be deported?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

First, I confess I take a whole-government approach: I am not in the FCDO at the moment but have some responsibility for government policy. I reassure the noble Lord that, in my new responsibilities at the Home Office, I will take his concerns seriously. We need to be clear about our determination to ensure that the individual to whom he refers is no longer in this country. The crimes he committed were appalling and we take this matter seriously. The dialogue between Pakistan and us is ongoing.

[Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)]

With no disrespect to the Minister, it is regrettable that we do not have a dedicated Foreign Office Minister in this House. I hope that that will be rectified, but I welcome him to his post. The situation in both Indian- and Pakistan-administered Kashmir has for ever been one of clashes, crackdowns and human rights abuse. Will the Government consider reviewing the update of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights 2019 report that highlighted all this, and press for a long-term solution?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord and I am sure, by the way, that we will have dedicated Ministers in this House. The Government are committed to that, but do not be disappointed when I get up to speak for the FCDO. As the noble Lord well knows, the United Kingdom’s long-standing position is that it is for India and Pakistan to find a lasting resolution on Kashmir that takes the wishes of the Kashmiri people into account. It is not for the United Kingdom to prescribe a solution or to act as a mediator; it is for those two countries to come to a solution that satisfies the people.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister mentioned the wider travel advisory for British nationals not to visit Pakistan, and the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, immediately replied that they would be visiting in their thousands anyway. Has the Foreign Office reviewed the meaning of travel advisories on a wider level? The country is regularly held to a kind of ransom by unsavoury regimes when their nationals—I say this in quotation marks—are taken hostage or held in unsavoury conditions. While I applaud the work of the consular service of the FCDO, I think the travel advisory system needs broader review.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I hear the noble Baroness, but the first priority of the FCDO is the safety of British nationals, which we ensure through regular consultation with our missions. Our advice is based on that principle, and our travel advice is reviewed regularly. Sometimes it is amended and it can be nuanced but, at the end of the day, it is up to individuals to consider that advice and take it seriously.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I am sure I am not the only Member of your Lordships’ House whose inbox has been filled by a significant number of cries of great concern about what is happening in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir. I note that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has put out a statement focusing on the individuals being detained solely for exercising their democratic and peaceful rights to free speech. Are the Government aware of any British nationals affected by that? It is obviously a concern; are the Government monitoring it closely?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

As I think I said in my initial Answer, we are monitoring the situation very carefully and we strongly support individuals’ rights of freedom of assembly and expression and peaceful political protest. We have consistently emphasised that any human rights violations should be fully investigated in line with international human rights law. Our overseas network continues to monitor these issues on an ongoing basis.

[Lord Hussain (LD)]

My Lords, I too am very concerned about the newly developing situation in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, with the standoff between the authorities and protesters on civil rights issues. I have family and friends living on both sides of the line of control. What is His Majesty’s Government’s assessment of the human rights situation on the Indian side of the LoC? According to Genocide Watch’s report of February 2026, Jammu and Kashmir is on the brink of genocide and eight of the 10 stages have already been passed. How seriously do His Majesty’s Government take these reports and what are they going to do to stop this potential genocide taking place in Indian-occupied Kashmir?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

The noble Lord knows from previous Answers to these Questions that we have been consistent about reports of violence. We express our condolences to families who have lost loved ones, but any allegations of mistreatment by the police and armed forces should be investigated thoroughly and transparently by the relevant authorities. We unequivocally condemn killings that have been carried out by militant groups in Kashmir and extend condolences for those killed, and we certainly convey those issues to all the relevant authorities.

Electricity Bills: VAT Removal

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

Question

11:38

Asked by

[Lord Leigh of Hurley]

To ask His Majesty’s Government how they intend to fund the proposed removal of VAT from electricity bills.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)]

My Lords, before I respond to the noble Lord’s Question, I just put on record my appreciation for the work that my noble friend Lord Livermore has done for both the Government and the Treasury in this House. I know that he will be missed at the Dispatch Box. I am sure that noble Lords also want to thank my noble friend Lord Stockwood, whom I have had the pleasure of supporting on the Financial Services and Markets Bill. I wish them both well for the future.

In response to the noble Lord’s Question, on Tuesday the Government announced immediate action to cut VAT on electricity bills to give millions of households breathing space on the cost of living. This measure is estimated to cost about £850 million in 2026-27, which will be funded by the cancellation of the digital ID programme, which was expected to cost £1.8 billion over three years. The effect of this change will ensure that we help those people who are most in need.

[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

My Lords, if I may add to those comments, I too will miss the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, on the Front Bench. We did not agree on everything, but he certainly knew his facts and had passion and commitment when he spoke. However, the Starmer Government’s pessimism fabricated a black hole; this Government’s hubristic approach is creating a black hole. We have no real details of how these giveaways will be funded. There is talk of a grant being turned into a loan. We do not know the covenant of that loan, or the interest on it and when it will be payable. Can the Minister assure us that during the summer there will not be any further unfunded giveaways but, rather, that these types of announcements will take place properly, in the Budget, as they are supposed to do, to allow for proper scrutiny by both Houses and, equally importantly, by the OBR?

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

The priority of this Government is the cost of living. We want to bring the cost of living down to give people breathing space over the coming years. The OBR stated that we were due to spend £1.8 billion over the next three years on digital ID, funded from within existing settlements through reprioritisation. We are still going to find that money from within existing budgets through reprioritisation, but we will now use it for other things. The amount of money is relatively small when you consider that the last Government, as my noble friend Lord Livermore would say, left this Government with a £22 billion black hole.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, may I take a moment to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Curran, and thank the outgoing noble Lord, Lord Whitehead? We look forward to his continuing contributions. We support this measure. As a day-one action, it is welcome—it will save about £40 off a typical fuel bill for about six months—but as a policy lever of government, it is costly and ineffective. What further action will the new Administration take to remove policy costs from electricity bills to help support further energy market reforms? They are the real policy levers we need so that we can make progress on reducing bills and continuing the energy transition.

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I echo the noble Earl’s comments about my noble friends Lady Curran and Lord Whitehead. I worked closely with them both. The issue of future help for the energy market et cetera is something we will have to wait for until we do the Budget next year. In the meantime, we will continue to help people with the cost of living. I want to point out the measures we have taken that will help people in the short term: we have frozen rail fares, cut energy bills by £150, cut VAT on electricity bills to zero and we are cutting business rates for 32,000 small venues, pubs and clubs. Obviously, that is not a silver bullet, but the intent is there to do everything we can to help people who are suffering.

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords, the last Conservative Government, in their dying days, made a number of high-profile announcements on carbon capture, usage and storage, nuclear financing and hydrogen production. However, when the Treasury carried out its initial spending audit, it found from the capital allocation maps that it did not possess the cash required to hit the legal and infrastructural targets and rollout timetables necessary to fulfil those commitments. Does the Minister agree with me that a little more self-reflection and humility on that side would not go amiss?

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I remind my noble friend that they left us with a black hole of £22 billion. Among other matters, there was £2.6 billion of new unfunded policy announcements, £6.4 billion for asylum and illegal migration, which was not funded, and £9.4 billion for pay awards, which was not funded. We need to find a few hundred million pounds to help the people most in need. I think that they should reflect on what they did in government.

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

My Lords—

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords—

[Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, we shall hear from the Cross Benches.

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

My Lords, any easing of the cost of living is to be welcomed. However, the Minister will be aware that the VAT reduction cannot be directly applied to Northern Ireland because of the rules of the Windsor Framework and the arrangements with the European Union. At best, we will have a situation in which a convoluted alternative route will have to be found, which clearly will lead at least to delays for consumers in Northern Ireland receiving any level of help. As this points to the need for a much deeper and longer-term solution, what action are the Government taking in the short term at least to get a derogation from the EU, so that Northern Ireland consumers can enjoy the same benefits as those in the rest of the United Kingdom?

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

We know the issues around VAT in Northern Ireland, for example on electricity bills. The Northern Ireland Executive will receive comparable funding to enable them to support NI households with the cost of living. We have taken into consideration all the issues around the Windsor Framework, and we will continue to help the people most in need who live in Northern Ireland.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, send my best wishes to the noble Lords, Lord Livermore and Lord Stockwood. I welcome the appointment of the noble Lord, Lord Pitt-Watson, and look forward to the more constructive approach favoured by the new Prime Minister. With 10-year yields above 5%, political and international instability is already increasing borrowing costs and placing the sustainability of the public finances under serious strain. Does the Minister recognise that unfunded spending commitments cannot simply be floated in the press or on podcasts without consequences? Markets react, investment and growth are discouraged, and working people ultimately pay the price, with increases in the cost of living.

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I echo the noble Baroness’s comments about my noble friend Lord Pitt-Watson, who will be the new Minister, taking over imminently—after this Question, I hope. The Government are well aware of the international situation we have in the Middle East and Ukraine; we know about the issues that we face. I do not believe the announcements being made are unfunded; we are finding the money to face up to the problems that ordinary people around the country are facing. I repeat the facts again: £9.4 billion of unfunded pay awards and £2.6 billion of new unfunded policy announcements by the last Government. What we are doing pales into insignificance compared to the debt they left the country in.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, is it not a fact that we may raise any funds we need by having further work done on VAT? Does the Minister welcome the review announced on 23 June to extend online marketplace VAT liability examinations? Perhaps we might also explore the growing amount of money being made by social media companies that are moving away from social media into auctioning and businesses such as that, where there is potential for tax to be raised. Perhaps we might have a debate in this House where we can invite all to participate, come up with ideas and examine those areas that need examining, so that we have some fairness in the tax system.

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that question. The future of VAT is a pressing issue, as is what we intend to do with those online entities that may be exempt from it. This is continuously under review, but I think we will need to wait for the Budget to see what changes we will have.

Prisoner Early Release Scheme

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

Private Notice Question

11:49

Asked by

[The Earl of Effingham]

To ask His Majesty’s Government, given reports that PC Andrew Harper’s killers may be eligible for early release, what assessment they have made of the prisoner early release scheme and; when will they set out whether any changes to the scheme will be implemented before the first tranche of releases in September.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

My Lords, before turning to the substance of the noble Earl’s Question, I first pay tribute to PC Andrew Harper and his family and friends, particularly his widow, Lissie, and his mother, Debbie, who have both spoken so movingly about his case in recent days. PC Harper dedicated his life to public service, putting himself in harm’s way to protect others and uphold the rule of law. His courage, commitment and professionalism exemplified the very best of policing.

This Government inherited a prison system days from collapse. In the light of concerns raised about the application of the Sentencing Act, the Prime Minister stated a couple of days ago that the release point changes would be looked at again to ensure that everything had been fully considered before the Government set out their position.

[The Earl of Effingham (Con)]

I thank the Minister for his response. Noble Lords on the Conservative Benches have been tabling and voting for amendments to secure exemptions from this early release scheme since November last year, amendments that were defeated by noble Lords on the Government and Liberal Democrat Benches. Why did it take PC Harper’s family going to the media this week for the Government to even consider the action that your Lordships’ House was urging them to take eight months ago?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

To be very clear, it is only right that the new Prime Minister has a look across the board at the Government’s policies. Nobody in your Lordships’ House will be in any doubt about the horrific murder of PC Andrew Harper. It is only right that the Prime Minister, along with the Lord Chancellor, looks at the scheme in place and its operation. It is the case that we faced a prison system on its knees, literally days from collapse—it was practically at 100% just before we came into office. That is why we not only passed the Sentencing Bill, so that in the long term we can reduce the demand for prison places by several thousand, but are building prison places at a rate that we have not seen since Labour was last in government. That is important. This is not the time be making political attacks. It is time to make sure that we get this policy right.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to listen to the Minister. Can I say how sorry I am that the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, is no longer a Minister in this Government? She displayed conspicuous ability, responsiveness to noble Lords who raised points and manifest integrity. It is a great shame that those qualities are not sufficient for the new Prime Minister; I very much regret that.

In relation to the early release scheme, will the Minister explain why prison numbers cannot be adequately reduced by the early release of those who are not subject to the most severe sentences—for example, those who are serving 10 years or less?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. I was remiss in not doing so earlier, but I join him in paying tribute to my colleague, my noble friend Lady Levitt, and, indeed, to my noble friend Lord Timpson, for all the hard work that they have done, particularly in the case of Lord Timpson on reforming not just the prison system but the probation system. We are investing a record amount of £700 million in the reform of the Probation Service and the technology it uses. That is just as important as dealing with those who we deem fit for release.

When we talk about releasing people who are on very short sentences, I understood that the Sentencing Act sought to cut the cycle of crime, whereby people went into prison for short sentences and all that did was teach them how to become better criminals, not better people. We need to make sure that, if people go to prison, they are in there for long enough and that it does a proper job of rehabilitation, making sure that, if they are on drugs or have an alcohol problem, that is centred. The main thing that prison should do is not only protect the public but cut the reoffending rates.

[Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)]

My Lords, I echo the sentiments of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. Andy Burnham uses the northern phrase that we have to “get it”. What is the point of getting it when you lose Ministers of the quality of the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, who clearly get it? These Benches are dismayed that they have lost their places, because they added so much value to the debate on this sensitive issue.

Does the Minister agree that, in a fully functional justice system, no victim or their loved ones should ever be told that the perpetrator is to be released earlier than expected? Now that the Government claim to have increased capacity in the Prison Service, will they take the opportunity to restore confidence among victims by correcting this unfairness?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. We are all about restoring public confidence in the criminal justice system. That includes, as I said, making good the sore lack of investment that we saw in our prison system. It is important to be clear that victims are at all times at the centre of our thoughts when it comes to the whole of this policy issue. Indeed, one of the reforms in the Sentencing Act is that victims are given a chance to inform licence conditions if a prisoner qualifies for release. That could cover a number of things, such as tagging, an exclusion zone or a non-contact scheme. The noble Lord is right that victims must always be at the absolute front and centre of our minds when it comes to this issue. But we need to make sure that we have enough space to take prisoners who should be in prison, and that when they are in prison it does the job of protecting the public and preventing reoffending.

[Lord Roe of West Wickham (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for the answers he has given so far. I think it is well recognised that housing and access to housing is one of the primary determinants of whether an individual reoffends, regardless of whether they are released early or within the course of a normal sentence. Can my noble friend reassure this House that, in reviewing the early release scheme, matters of housing have been taken into serious consideration around both the impact and the possibility of reoffending?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

My noble friend is right. One of the things that the Sentencing Act did was eradicate—I might even call it a travesty—Friday release, whereby people were released from prison with nowhere to go and no chance of having anywhere to go. When people say they have beaten a drug or alcohol problem in prison and want to put their life straight upon release, we have to make sure that they are given adequate access to housing so that they can get their lives set up, make progress and become a useful member of society. My noble friend is right on that.

[Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)]

My Lords—

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords—

[Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, we will hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, and then from the Conservative Benches.

[Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, as the daughter of a police officer who was the subject of an attempted murder attack by the IRA when I was a child, and as the wife of a retired police officer, I was absolutely appalled and dismayed when I heard the news that the killers of PC Harper were to be released. I implore the Minister and the Government to look at the experience of Northern Ireland and the early release of prisoners, not just the impact on prison spaces but the impact on victims and their families, the morale of the police service and, indeed, the undermining of the justice system entirely.

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the noble Baroness and the testimony that we have heard just now. We understand how difficult this is. I want to be very clear that more than 18,000 offenders will be unaffected by these reforms. We will, obviously, as part of these reforms, communicate openly with victims who have opted into the victim contact scheme. They have to be, as I have already said to your Lordships’ House, front and centre of our minds. The noble Baroness makes a valid point about learning from the experience of Northern Ireland, and I will make sure that it is fed back to colleagues.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister was entirely right to refer to the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, and the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, particularly in the context of this Question. On 1 July, I reminded the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, that

“there are 3,650 women in prison in England and Wales”

and that about 2,500 of those people—that is to say, 70% of the women’s prison population—

“are in custody for non-violent offences”.—[Official Report, 1/7/26; col. 1044.]

If the Government think it is better to release violent criminals and child sex offenders, rather than the non-violent cohort of women in prison, and fail to take the opportunity to free up prison places by reroling a woman’s prison into a prison for men, what the hell do they think they are doing?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I say to the noble and learned Lord that this is about ensuring that we have confidence in the whole of our criminal justice system, including the courts and the prison estate, but also the probation system. I have no doubt that, when the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor are looking at these reforms, these factors will be taken into account. The noble and learned Lord will know, as he is well versed in these matters and paid a lot of attention to the Sentencing Bill when it was going through your Lordships’ House, that there is a complex progression scheme to ensure that we are able to create the capacity that we need in our prison system. Without wanting to rise to any demotic, there are not a lot of easy options and there are more sophisticated responses to the problem that the simplistic one he posed.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, the early release scheme came from earned progression, the concept behind David Gauke’s proposals. Progression, of course, includes rehabilitation. The Minister has already mentioned the Probation Service. The noble Lord, Lord Timpson, was clear that there had to be time taken to expand the Probation Service, as you could not just appoint a whole lot of people off the streets and increase the numbers. Can the Minister reassure the House that the Probation Service will be well equipped to deal with the numbers being released from prison?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is correct, and I know that is why my noble friend Lord Timpson spent so much time focusing on probation, as well as the prison estate. That is why we are investing a record amount of £700 million in probation and associated activities. For instance, we are having the biggest expansion of tagging in history. We are already tagging at record levels and will be investing £100 million to expand our ability to monitor even more individuals in the community. That is not just a straight location tag; it could be a GPS tag that addresses an exclusion measure, or one that addresses drug or alcohol addiction. We are clear that offenders are going to be subject to strict conditions after their release. Indeed, the Probation Service will be given tough new powers, including restriction zones, to be used for the most serious offenders. We are trying to move at pace, but in a way that makes sure we do not create more problems for ourselves. That is why we are committed to this record investment in probation.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I join the Minister and support everything he said in relation to the family of PC Andrew Harper. I note what he said in response to my noble friend Lord Effingham. The Minister is keen to relate everything to the past, but this is about the future. I remind him that, during the passage of the Sentencing Bill in this House, the Government repeatedly assured us that the most serious offenders would not benefit from early release. Can the Minister explain how that assurance sits with the fact that two of PC Harper’s killers, convicted of the manslaughter of a police officer, received sentences that make them eligible for release at the halfway point under the scheme? Further, can he confirm that the Government do not consider those involved in the killing of police officers as among the most serious and heinous offenders?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

To answer that last point first, this Government, like the previous Government and like every Member of your Lordships’ House, certainly consider the murder of police officers, or anybody involved in protecting us—such as those in the emergency services who would run to danger when we might run away from it—as the most serious and heinous of offences. The noble Lord says that we are focusing purely on the past, but we are not. We are acting to avert a crisis in prison places. That is why we are delivering the largest expansion since the Victorian era, with 14,000 prison places to be in place by 2031. We have already delivered over 3,000 of those places, when only 500 were delivered over 14 years of the previous Government. We are doing what we have to do to address this crisis. Be in no doubt that those involved in serious crime will be treated with the same amount of passion and action as they would be by any Government. The most important thing is to have public confidence in the criminal justice system and in the safety of our streets. This Government will always act to ensure that.

Digital and Technology Policy: National Sovereignty

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

Motion to Take Note

12:06

Moved by

[Baroness Kidron]

That this House takes note of the impact of digital and technology policy on national sovereignty.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords taking part in this debate. I pay particular tribute to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford for his leadership in advocating for digital systems to reflect our ethics and values, who today makes his valedictory speech.

Anyone who has heard me speak about technology over the past 15 years could be forgiven for thinking that I do not much like it. Nothing could be further from the truth. I love what technology makes possible. I rely on it for my health; I use artificial intelligence every day; and I still marvel that I can speak face to face with people on the other side of the world as though they were in the room. My criticism has never been of what technology can do, but rather of the political and economic choices that we have allowed to shape its development.

Technology is not an independent force that arrives from nowhere. It reflects the interests, incentives and values of those who build it, finance it and control it. Technology now underpins every area of public and private life, so digital policy is no longer simply about innovation, information or efficiency. It is a constitutional issue that raises serious questions about sovereignty, including whether Governments retain the practical ability to govern in the interests of their own citizens. That is why I secured this debate. At heart, sovereignty is the capacity to choose. Sovereignty means that Parliament makes the laws, government governs, regulators regulate and courts enforce our law, and that Britain is free to pursue its national interest without coercion or dependence. Yet we have allowed that capacity to be eroded by the tech sector in four distinct ways.

First, we have surrendered political leverage: on copyright, where the Government put their proposed UK-US technology deal above our own copyright law— a deal that, incidentally, never materialised; on child safety, where, as the former Minister Jess Phillips observed, it took a year simply to persuade the Government just to threaten legislation, not to legislate; and on data protection, competition policy and consumer protection, and across government departments, where public lobbying and private pressure have urged officials not to upset the Americans.

That pressure is increasingly reinforced by an activist White House. We are threatened with sanctions for any policy that might impact on US tech. The US tech sector is uniquely concentrated in a small number of companies and beholden to the views of a small number of powerful funders who possess dual-class shares that give them total control. They tell us that Britain will be left behind, that innovation and growth depend on abandoning our own laws, or that complying with them is technically unfeasible. That is very hard to take from companies that promise immortality and colonies on Mars—the very same companies that insisted that age assurance, two-factor authentication and the right to be forgotten would break the internet. Backed by unprecedented wealth and unparalleled political access, they have exercised extraordinary influence over government policy.

Secondly, we have surrendered economic leverage. For years, we have tolerated economic arrangements that place British businesses at a structural disadvantage. Our high streets pay taxes that e-commerce does not, black taxis are subject to obligations while ride-hailing is not, hotels meet standards that short-term letting platforms do not—each is a transfer of wealth overseas. The Government have poured billions of pounds of public money into global technology companies, while British firms that employ people here, pay taxes here and invest here—and, importantly, train the next generation—struggle to gain a foothold in public procurement.

An investigation in last week’s London Review of Books describes how, after years of recruiting former officials and consultants with access to Ministers and senior decision-makers, Palantir secured its position at the heart of the NHS, culminating in a £330 million contract for its federated data platform. Many trusts either have chosen not to use it at all or regard it as inferior to cheaper alternatives. Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust warned that it would

“lose functionality rather than gain it”,

while NHS Greater Manchester said that its own system

“exceeds anything the FDP currently offers”.

The issue is not only quality or value of money but that, over time, the NHS will become bound to Palantir: it will continue to own its own data but will depend on Palantir’s software to use it. Similarly, the Ministry of Defence admits that replacing one of its Palantir systems

“would involve rebuild of the underlying data analytics architecture”.

That is not simply vendor lock-in; it is a strategic dependency at the heart of our national security. Choice exists in theory but increasingly disappears in practice. Palantir is not unique. Across Whitehall, the same pattern is emerging in cloud computing, enterprise software and artificial intelligence. Sovereignty is not simply the freedom to make a decision; it is the freedom to make a different decision in the future.

Thirdly, we have surrendered technological capability. Every procurement decision is also an investment decision. Buying technology elsewhere means investing in someone else’s industrial future rather than our own. I have spoken to sources in health, defence and policing, who all told me they had been forced to contract AWS because no UK cloud provider was considered financially secure. Yet when I asked whether the combined purchasing power of government could itself create financial resilience for a British provider, the answer was an unqualified yes. Parliament has already provided tools to the competition regulator to challenge entrenched digital market power. The problem is not legislative capacity but political strategy. Cloud computing is only one example. The same logic applies wherever government buys technology. Procurement does not simply purchase capability; it determines where future capability is built.

Fourthly, we have created strategic vulnerability: from Microsoft, which suspended services used by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and refused to answer questions from Police Scotland about where sensitive law enforcement data was being processed; to Elon Musk withdrawing Starlink access from Ukraine’s military operations; President Trump’s decision to limit access to AI models Fable and Mythos 5 to US nationals only; and this week’s news that an OpenAI agent has autonomously hacked Hugging Face, just weeks after OpenAI’s chief executive argued that frontier AI should be regulated under US leadership. The US has no such regulatory regime, and the risks are imminent.

Together, these reveal the problem of allowing critical public capacity to depend entirely on infrastructure controlled offshore. I fear that those who argue that Britain must wait for global agreement are whistling in the wind. History suggests that meaningful international regulation follows major incidents rather than prevents them. Meanwhile, across government, hospitals, schools, critical infrastructure, and security and intelligence communities, we are replacing technologies whose risks we broadly understand with systems whose capabilities and failures remain, at best, uncertain. A nation that depends on decisions beyond the reach of its own Parliament and Government and its own regulators and courts has, in practice, surrendered its sovereignty.

We have a new Government, and that is an opportunity to lead. Britain begins from a position of enormous strength. We have world-leading universities, exceptional scientists, some of the richest and most trusted datasets in the world in the NHS, the BBC, the Met Office and beyond, and institutions, such as the AI Security Institute, that have demonstrated international leadership. These are not simply public services; they are strategic national assets that we could capitalise on to drive prosperity and independence across some of the technology stack—from AI and quantum to specialist models, medical advances, infrastructure and even a new media environment.

During the passage of the Data (Use and Access) Bill, I argued that these unique datasets should be formally categorised as sovereign datasets. Those working at the frontier of artificial intelligence accept that high-quality data is the scarce resource of the future, but it is a resource that we have in abundance. That is why my noble friend Lord Tarassenko has repeatedly argued that Britain should develop a publicly supported foundation model, so that data generated by the British people continues to create value for Britain. The objective is not to build the world’s largest model. Systems that may or may not be sentient and that foment unemployment for half the world’s population, with no corresponding plan for humankind, are Silicon Valley’s vision, not ours. The objective is to build models that are responsible and trusted, trained on known data, capable of audit, secure by design and, most of all, tailored to the needs of British businesses, public services, legal frameworks and security requirements. A trusted AI ecosystem also requires robust systems of transparency that protect our national security and present an opportunity for licensing at scale.

Government must get off the fence. Companies that refuse to respect British intellectual property should not expect access to public contracts. Britain should create conditions for its intellectual property to be licensed and commercialised across the global economy.

It is time for government procurement to support British values and build national capability: a “sovereign as service” unit across government, promoting British business, including SMEs, enabling pre-authorised procurement and ensuring that public money develops future skills and capability. We want procurement that rewards openness, interoperability, competition and genuine exit strategies, so that the Government never again mistake convenience for resilience or political access for innovation. They should always ask, “Efficient for whom?”—not just whether savings are made but where value is created and where it stays, so that public spending strengthens regional and household prosperity, not simply the market cap of overseas firms. Above all, government contracts should go only to companies that commit to respecting British law.

Finally, we must transform sovereignty from a strapline into a measurable strategy. Ministers speak about reducing strategic dependence, increasing resilience and retaining leverage. They have spoken about building British capability and working with trusted partners. Yet in practice they have pursued the logic of dependence, buying, subsidising and valorising foreign technology, in the belief that being close to power is the same as exercising it. It is not.

I have been working with colleagues at the British Computer Society to develop a national sovereignty dashboard so that we have objective measures of resilience, dependency and capability. Governments already measure inflation, productivity, emissions and debt, because what gets measured gets managed. To ensure sovereignty, we must have a way of measuring it. France, Switzerland, India, Brazil, UAE and South Korea have all made sovereign decisions about aspects of their technology infrastructure. They are investing in their capability and simultaneously protecting their future security. For too long, our approach has been subservient to the lobbying trope that all but America and China are too late. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population live outside those two superpowers, and tech multilateralism offers the UK a powerful role.

Sovereignty never meant doing everything ourselves; it means retaining the freedom choose now and to make another decision tomorrow. Sovereignty is not protectionism; it is statecraft. There is a different sovereign future available to Britain, built on capability, confidence, trusted systems, respectful partnerships and, above all, the capacity to choose. I beg to move.

12:22

[Baroness Berger (Lab)]

My Lords, we stand today at a moment of profound vulnerability for the United Kingdom. Our economic security, our national safety and even our long-term sovereignty are at massive risk because we do not yet host or own enough of our own computing infrastructure, our own cloud services or our own advanced AI capabilities. By relying so heavily on foreign businesses and Governments far from our shores, we leave ourselves exposed to the possibility of remote disablement, restriction or withdrawal of the very systems that our society, our public services and our businesses increasingly depend on.

Today, the UK relies almost entirely on American and Chinese companies for the most capable AI models. Recent events, including the United States restricting access to one of Anthropic’s most advanced systems, show how fragile that dependence is. In a world where AI increasingly underpins economic growth and national security, Britain must develop homegrown capabilities. Yes, we have a sovereign AI fund, but it is just a fraction of what our neighbours are pursuing. Other nations are already building sovereign AI systems at scale. The United States, China and the European Union are investing billions into domestic computing infrastructure, national-level model development and secure AI infrastructure. France has launched a sovereign AI initiative centred on national cloud and compute capacity, the UAE is developing its own frontier-led models, and countries such as Japan, South Korea and India are rapidly expanding state-backed AI ecosystems.

Here in the UK, we have one of the largest and richest bodies of public data anywhere in the world, not least from our NHS. As the cost of building capable AI systems continues to fall, we have a genuine opportunity to harness that data for ourselves, to help clinicians reach diagnoses faster, and to build public services that reflect our own standards and accountability, rather than simply adopting whatever the market happens to offer us.

But we must also confront the elephant in the room: leading AI companies are racing towards superintelligence, despite acknowledging that it could pose an existential threat to humanity. Sovereign AI is absolutely critical, but it is worth investing in only if other AI models can be kept under control. As we welcome our new Prime Minister, there is a danger that could overshadow all his important goals: the real possibility that advanced AI systems become uncontrollable. How the incoming leadership chooses to approach AI risk will shape our entire future.

Over 120 parliamentarians so far have called for superintelligent AI to be formally recognised as a national and global security threat. I am one of them. Simply put, the UK must lead an international agreement to prohibit the development of superintelligence until it can be proven safe. If we fail, every other ambition for our country risks being swept aside. The clock is ticking. Some AI systems already exceed human abilities in narrow domains, such as Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold. In June, the director of the US National Security Agency revealed that Anthropic’s Mythos model identified vulnerabilities in classified systems. This should be a wake-up call for every Government, including ours.

We are only just beginning to see a shift in the West towards an appetite for government action. At the recent G7 summit, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind both called for a US-led standards body to test the cutting-edge frontier AI models for national security threats. But there is no indication that this is actually coming—and there are agitators that we should all be aware of. It was only this week on X that President Trump’s former AI adviser, David Sacks, called for “permissionless innovation”.

Building more of our AI at home is vital to our security and our economy, but none of it will count for anything unless humans stay in charge. The day that someone builds a true superintelligence or we lose our grip on a powerful AI system, that sovereignty is gone. This week—in fact, just the other day—we witnessed a taste of what happens when humans lose control: the unintended and unprecedented accidental cyber attack by the new GPT-5.6 Sol and other models on the very platform that was hosting a test. Perhaps it should concern us all that that did not make some of the front pages of our newspapers.

This debate shines a spotlight on something vital for our country: that building sovereign AI capacity is absolutely essential. But, if any nation or company builds a true superintelligence without guardrails, that sovereignty disappears everywhere. We need urgent action to develop our own models to ensure that we have rapid investment in our own AI infrastructure for our economy, for our security and for our resilience. But we also need urgent action to prohibit the development of superintelligent AI until scientific consensus shows us that it can be made safe. The time to act is now.

12:28

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, it is time for the formal and ritual congratulations to the noble Baroness, Kidron, not merely on starting the debate but for recognising her enormous energy, concentration and focus on the real issues, which I am glad we are debating now at the end of this term. Of course, the key issue is who holds power and how on earth, in the new conditions in which power is shifting all the time, we will maintain some control—the noble Baroness who has just spoken rightly reminded us of this—over areas that we can realistically control, rather than pursuing hopes and slogans that would only raise hopes when nothing can be done.

I say, incidentally, that the slogan “Take back control” is one of the silliest, most immature and most useless slogans that has been thrown into the political debate over the last decade or so. That is not the question; it gives us no guidance as to how on earth we establish the new powers, how we can contribute to them, or how we retain the areas where sovereignty has obviously been completely changed and partly dissolved from what existed 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Where does it lie now? It lies increasingly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and others know perfectly well, with the great platforms—I am not sure whether it is the four American ones, the two or three Chinese ones or other platforms that are emerging. We try our best in some areas, but it is with the platforms that the power exists. The question is how on earth we are to identify areas where we can retain maximum influence internationally as well as retaining our own systems much more efficiently than we do.

As an example, the whole of world trade has changed beyond recognition in the last five years. It is now a seething mass of supply chains covering almost every product and a whole range of countries, usually with computers—and computers containing Chinese parts, at that. That requires a completely different approach to bilateral trade control than anything we have had before.

On energy links, people talk about independent energy in this country. Frankly, that makes absolutely no sense when you look at the technology of energy. All the major sources, both traditional, fossil fuel and new and renewable ones, are heavily dependent on international networks of enormous complexity. Even on our nuclear side—where I think we all, or most people, favour development—people think that if we can build enough large nuclear power stations, we will be all right. That is complete nonsense. It only requires one difficulty in a Korean nuclear power station, or in any part of any system, for the entire world network to be badly affected. If we are talking about electricity and trying to move towards an all-electric economy, we know that we depend on endless interconnectors, linkages and supplies that come only from being heavily dependent on elaborate networks to which we must contribute rather than dance around and try to avoid.

Defence and security are intensely linked, as never before. We say that we must spend more on defence, and of course we must, but what is this defence? Does it really exist? Are we in fact more vulnerable than ever, with strategic threats from hypersonic missiles? Someone pointed out the other day that the V2 came at the end of the Second World War. It was wildly inaccurate, but no one had any conceivable means of stopping it. We were completely defenceless against it. The only defence in the end was for the allied troops to overrun the launching stations and the factories where slave labour was manufacturing these things. That was the only solution. We have not really solved the international missile situation now. We are, in fact, still defenceless.

On the climate, we can do our bit, but CO₂ does not obey national frontiers and borders, nor do its effects. This is an area where we obviously have to work entirely new systems and make them operative internationally. Otherwise, we will merely see the continuation of the rise in emissions, which is happening just as fast as it ever was despite all our efforts.

Then there are all the areas that the noble Baroness quite rightly mentioned, as well as inflation, pensions and pandemics. All these are globalised issues. My conclusion is, for the moment, quite simple: we need new, strong, multilateral institutions, which we do not have. In 1945, our brilliant people in America, Britain and other countries came together and created an entirely new international order with strong institutions. Today, that does not exist. I listen in vain to hear that real efforts are being put into restoring the respect and trust that these institutions must have—the UN, the IMF, the World Trade Organization, formerly GATT, the International Maritime Organization and courts of justice. The whole rule of law is being internationally flouted. If I have one wish, it is to hear that new energies are going into that area to provide a shell for what we have to do ourselves as a law-abiding country. A shell is essential because otherwise, without that shell, we shall have the same fate as a snail who proceeds without one. We all know what that is: they get gobbled up.

12:35

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for facilitating this debate on such an important topic. It is, as always, a pleasure to follow my noble friend, who makes such thoughtful contributions.

I want to concentrate on artificial intelligence. As I think we all know, alongside magnificent opportunities, it presents many risks. The greatest of those risks is not intelligence or what the technology can do, but the concentration of power in too few companies, in too few countries and, ultimately, in too few hands. We have seen the consequences—the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has talked about some of them—when digital markets become dominated by a small number of powerful platforms: reduced competition, weaker innovation and increased dependency.

The question, therefore, is not whether concentration of power matters—it plainly does—but how we respond. I share with many noble Lords the concern that the UK should not become dependent on a handful of foreign tech companies for critical digital capabilities, but I am not convinced that the answer is more regulation. The largest and most dominant frontier model developers benefit if Governments believe that only they can be allowed to develop safely the most powerful AI. They benefit from a resulting policy debate in which ever greater risks are assumed to require ever greater regulation. That, to me, is the real danger of regulatory capture. Regulation introduced in the name of safety can become a barrier to entry that protects today’s dominant platforms from tomorrow’s competitors.

Before we legislate, we should ask not only whether a risk is sufficiently real and significant to justify intervention—of course, this week’s OpenAI breakout cyber attack makes that question a live one—but whether the proposed intervention will strengthen competition or simply reinforce existing market power. The answer to concentration is competition. The open-weight foundation models are the greatest enabler of competition that AI has yet produced. They fundamentally change the economics of innovation by lowering the cost of deployment and entry—I refer noble Lords to an article in the Washington Post this week by Bill Gurley. These open models allow many more companies, including British start-ups, to build world-class AI applications without first having to spend billions training frontier models. Recent developments have demonstrated that this is no longer theoretical. The emergence of highly capable, low-cost open- foundation models, including from China, shows that cutting-edge AI is no longer confined to a handful of closed proprietary systems. We should welcome that, not because we wish to depend on China—we obviously do not—but because competition is the surest antidote to concentration of power.

Britain does not need to own a frontier model to achieve AI sovereignty. We need the freedom to choose between competing models, the ability to build on them and the capability to deploy them securely, on our terms, into our economy and public services. As I and many other noble Lords have argued before, Britain’s challenge has never been inventing technology; it has been scaling technology companies. Open-foundation models give more British firms the opportunity to compete, grow and retain strategic capability here, as in not bought or moved elsewhere. That is why competition policy matters and why, only where relevant and necessary, the CMA must use its powers in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act to ensure that AI markets remain open, competitive and capable of supporting new entrants.

Competition must of course go hand in hand with protection for creators, and the arrival of open foundation models makes getting copyright right more, not less, important. Creators should have the technological means to know when their work is being accessed, to decide whether and at what terms it may be used for AI training, and to receive fair compensation when it is. Measures such as the Private Member’s Bill that my right honourable friend Damian Hinds is introducing in another place about online software access and transparency point towards the kind of targeted transparency that can help achieve those objectives.

The UK has an opportunity to take a distinctive path, embracing open foundation models, protecting intellectual property, using our competition powers robustly and creating the best environment for AI companies to start, scale and compete. If sovereignty is our objective, competition, not concentration, must be our strategy, and competition in AI will depend on whether we embrace the technology that enables it, which will be open-weight foundation models.

12:41

[Baroness Gill (Lab)]

My Lords, my congratulations and gratitude go to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this debate. Though it feels like we have an almost weekly debate in your Lordships’ House on one aspect or another of AI, I think it is most welcome, given that this is one of the most concerning, unregulated areas that affects our daily lives, and is likely to remain so in the future. Nevertheless, there has been little debate about how our national sovereignty is being slowly eroded, in real time, by those who control our data, our infrastructure and our algorithms. Most worryingly, they are not bound by our laws. I believe we are standing at a critical crossroads.

As we have heard from noble Lords who spoke before me, not controlling our own digital destiny risks our becoming a digital colony of the American monopolies and being subject to powers who are, let us say, our fleeting friends. That is why I strongly welcome Prime Minister Burnham’s decision to bring the AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan, to the Cabinet table. This structural promotion signals and recognises that artificial intelligence is the very foundation of our future national security and public services, ensuring economic growth. However, while this is a welcome change, our defensive and regulatory framework remains dangerously behind the curve. Building fences for the large language models of today could mean being completely defenceless against the autonomous threats of tomorrow.

I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, said: yesterday, we heard about another example of AI moving rapidly from a contained tool to an agentic system that can actively operate across networks without any human intervention. The true threat to our national sovereignty is from the weaponisation of rogue, cross-border AI. Future frontier models will have the capability to bypass localised testing sandboxes, dynamically rewriting their own code to evade containment protocols. Once free, these models can act as borderless, self-replicating digital entities, infiltrating critical national infrastructure, military networks and private cloud storage across the globe. Just imagine if they were subverted by an adversarial foreign nation or cyber-criminal syndicate. These autonomous agents could execute co-ordinated, low-observable attacks on our financial systems and power grids without leaving a traditional digital footprint.

One of my hobby horses when we are talking about AI is how predatory bots are aggressively scraping valuable copyright content from UK website owners without their consent, starving our homegrown creative industries, a major contributor to our economy. True digital sovereignty requires us to protect our creators from intellectual property theft, to break up market monopolies and to build predictive and hardened defences.

I have a couple of questions for my noble friend the Minister. When will the Government issue a refreshed strategic steer to the CMA to reaffirm its independence and inject urgency into its enforcement, ensuring that it acts at a pace that matches the speed at which the AI stack is being monopolised? Secondly, will the Government explicitly rule out new copyright exceptions for AI and support legislative efforts to give UK content creators the legal certainty and transparency they need to block predatory scraping bots?

12:46

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in this debate, and I add to the plaudits directed at the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who has prosecuted her agenda on digital safety and digital rights for more than a decade with acute skill and has certainly moved the dial on many occasions. May I also say how pleased I am that the Minister has survived the reshuffle cull? As she knows, I had a small desire that she would move to the environment department, so that we could refer to her as Baroness Lloyd of Effra of Defra, but we will have to wait. And may I say how sad I am that the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, has left the Government? She was an absolutely excellent Minister. I declare my interest as an adviser to Digital Futures, which deploys AI engineers into companies and assesses their AI capabilities.

In November, the House of Lords Science and Tech Committee described the UK tech economy as an incubator economy. More recently, Amanda Brock from OpenUK made the point that we should not seek, when we talk about AI sovereignty, to build the whole AI tech stack by ourselves. Somewhere between those two statements lies the way forward, because we are in an interconnected world: we cannot simply ignore the rest of the world, but we must do better than be the incubator economy we have been for so many years. We must support British companies to scale and grow in this area.

Let me make five recommendations to the Government. The first is obviously to invest in our infrastructure: to invest in the UK companies that are making the chips, building the data centres and investing in the cloud. I was lucky recently to meet a British company, Fractile, which makes chips. It is a British company, based between Bristol, London and Cambridge, and it has recently raised $200 million, but it plans to stay and grow in Britain. This is exactly the kind of company that we should be supporting. As for not building the stack ourselves, let us look at our competitive advantage, of which Fractile is a good example. It is in a very niche business and has identified a need for a particular chip to support large language models which uses less energy and generates less heat. It is this kind of small infrastructure play that can reap huge dividends for the UK AI economy and is exactly what we should be looking at. We should be looking at grid connections and at building British data centres.

I also echo the earlier comment about creating a national data sovereignty platform. It is absolutely right that one of our unique advantages in this space is the access we have to the data of British citizens, which should be handled carefully but which gives us an enormous advantage, particularly in areas such as the NHS.

The third way forward is to invest as much as possible. I am delighted that the Government have set up sovereign AI—it is only £500 million, but that is still a significant sum; it is less than the €5 billion that the EU has set aside, but we are just a small island—and the fund that has been set aside for AI hardware. I hope that the Minister will reassure us that that £500 million will be fully allocated to sovereign AI and clear up some of the confusion. Her colleague said yesterday that it was moving to DBIST, but I am now told that it is moving to the Cabinet Office. Some clarity on that would be useful.

I referred earlier to my work with Digital Futures. Skills are hugely important in this area. I gather that there are predicted to be around 900,000 vacancies in the tech economy in the next few years and there was a drop in engineering apprentices of some 42% over the last few years. A focus on building the skill economy that we so vitally need to support these industries is important.

Finally, my killer point is that the best way forward would be to abolish the government department that is laser-focused on science, innovation and technology, and to scatter its constituent parts across three different departments and No. 10. That would be a masterstroke, and would allow our civil servants to spend six months trying to sort out where on earth they are meant to be going, rather than implementing policy and delivering. The Minister will not be surprised that I have descended into my default state of facetiousness. The abolition of DSIT is a huge error, considering the urgency this agenda requires and that it has taken three years to get this department up and running and to find its feet. It was a beacon of excellence in Whitehall; many people in the tech economy are sad to see its demise.

12:51

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this debate and for a powerful and incisive introduction which rightly identified that what we are talking about today is a constitutional issue—among the many that the British state currently faces, which has a lot to do with the state of Britain today. Governments must be able to make decisions and laws for the good of the British people, not for the profits of a few foreign Governments or at the behest of a capricious foreign regime.

That is not what is happening in the digital area. As the noble Baroness outlined, and others have referred to, we see a situation where decisions are made once. A contract is awarded in a choice between two or maybe three giant companies out of the handful that might have put in for it. Then we are locked in, unable to go anywhere else because the costs of changing horses would be too great.

We must acknowledge that the UK has a terrible record on sovereignty. This is not an isolated issue, and here I respectfully entirely disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Howell. The slogan “Take back control” in the last decade showed that the public understood this problem very clearly. That concern was entirely misdirected—it was directed to the east when it perhaps should have been directed to the west—but none the less the public could see the problem that was arising. Another example which fits nicely with this is the issue of secret courts for ISDS—investor-state dispute settlement procedures. A study from April said that the UK was the worst among European countries in empowering this profoundly undemocratic procedure that stops Governments making decisions in the interests of their people.

Digital sovereignty is particularly important here because the digital realm has taken so much control over our lives, our data, our infrastructure and the very actions of our Government. Meanwhile, many of us are left behind. This is the reality; we are told how great these systems are, but tell that to someone trying to get a system to recognise that this is a photo of them and that it should therefore give them a card—yes, I am reflecting on a recent personal experience.

I will make two key points about who we have handed control to and the nature of that. For the first, I draw on the work of a Danish academic, Ali Rıza Taşkale, who has looked at the Silicon Valley tech bros—the owners of the handful of companies we are talking about that have such a place in the British state—and sees in them an attachment to a philosophy of reactionary futurism, or

“the deployment of science-fiction aesthetics to advance anti-democratic political projects”.


They explicitly set out that they want to engineer a return to an idealised, brutal past—19th-century frontier capitalism with radical individualism, unregulated markets and a rejection of democratic government, but armed with all the technology of the 21st century. This is a handful of men—they are all men—who have control over much of the operation of the British state and British society.

In many areas of the country now, as I canvass for the Green Party, I see Ring doorbell after Ring doorbell. Behind that door, I speak to NHS patients who are acutely aware that Palantir, which they know is a concern, very likely has control over their data and private details. We also see stacks of Amazon packaging waste—often beside, not inside, the bins because they will not fit in them.

To put this in the international context, these are individuals who operate in close, often obsequious, contact with the American regime. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, spoke about the “activist White House”. I want to put this in the context of a piece published in the Guardian yesterday by Robert B Shpiner about three speeches given in one day. The Secretary of State said that the counterterrorism architecture should be directed against left-wing political activists—peaceful people. He said that, if they claim that their human rights are being denied, anyone who believes them must be on their side. The White House deputy chief of staff spoke about “left-wing political terrorism”, suggested that you could tell who these people were by what they looked like, and said that any appeal to human rights must “fall on deaf ears”. Then, the American President called the American election system indefensible, claiming that a foreign power had control over it through digital means.

Let us think about the situation that we are in. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, that we cannot have autarchy in a digital world. But we must decide who we are lined up with and partnered with. Crucially, to come back to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, we must have the power to change our mind, to move and to not get locked in.

12:58

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my membership of a number of APPGs on digital inclusion. I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on securing this debate today. Like her, I am not against technology, AI or any of the platforms that exist. However, I worry about the numbers of people who remain excluded from being able to utilise it for their own knowledge and protection. That is why I wanted to speak in this debate.

A few days ago, I was watching a television programme about two types of intelligence: artificial intelligence and latent or civilizational intelligence, which we as human beings have had over centuries in our capacity to learn, to retain and to pass on. It made me think about this debate today. While we can talk about the wider implications of a few companies having such an impact on us in the UK and more widely, it made me think about it being a new form of colonisation across the world, one in which there is very little power in the hands of leaders who do not have access to the complex technologies that exist in only a very few countries on the planet. While we are very keen to cut down the time it takes to get answers, it also removes the ability for a large majority of people to be part of a debate in which they can fully question what is happening to them.

The role of government and Houses such as this is to scrutinise what we are going to deliver and lay out for the majority of the population of the country we serve. I felt quite helpless when I thought about the large part of our country that still has very little access to even basic technology—let alone trying to understand the complexities of artificial intelligence—all the companies that are going to utilise their platforms and our data, and the defence mechanisms that we hold individually but lose because suddenly we have abdicated our power to someone else.

If I step back a little and look at the wider context of why we are having this debate on policy for the digital and technological world, one of the things we should be mindful of is that while a small number of countries are in a mass race to be the most powerful, a large part of the planet remains in the slow lane. I call it colonisation because I could not think of another word for it, but I want us to look at history and what happens when power falls into the hands of the few. The majority’s ability to challenge that without the tools, knowledge or platform to voice their concerns suddenly becomes a difficult issue for me as a public servant in your Lordships’ House.

When I was listening to the opening remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, I was trying to think of where I can navigate some of my fears about what is unfolding rapidly in front of us. While this technology fast lane has been going for some time, our resilience to stop and challenge it has developed very slowly. As I said up front, I have no problem with utilising technology, but I do not want technology to utilise me, and I have feeling that that is the path we are going down. It is frightening, because I work with communities that are so behind the curve on access to even the basics. Can the Minister say how we will secure our sovereignty when our duty is not only to the more than 60 million people in this country but to our place on the global platform? I do not think we have been vocal enough about making sure that, when we disagree with some of the actions taken on our behalf and of the many billions on the planet, we do not remove ourselves from the position of power we have always held, which is the convening power of being a voice for the majority.

13:04

[Lord Moraes (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the initiative from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I have just finished her book, and it is a good read, but I have only one niggle: I really gasp at the cost of hardbacks. Maybe I am stingy, but they told me it is a whole year or so until there is a paperback so more people can read it. That was just a thought—I digress and should get back to the point. I welcome my noble friend the Minister back to her place, and I am happy that she can continue her work in this important area.

Digital sovereignty means agency. It is such a profound thing: the capacity for we in this country to make choices about everything, from the online safety of our children to the smooth running of our economy. That is a vast area in which to have damaged sovereignty, or a sovereignty gap. Yet, we are now in the simple position whereby a handful of US firms own the digital infrastructure the UK economy runs on, including search browsers, the cloud, app distribution and business software. As my noble friend said, those same companies are now also monopolising the AI stack. In simple terms, this leaves UK firms, public services and consumers dependent on suppliers who are governed elsewhere. That is a very profound thing. We need to understand it, but the more difficult part is how we deal with that reality.

This process did not begin with this Government—it is of neither their making, nor the last Government’s, nor the Government before that. It began in one country in the 2010s, with another country slightly catching up. An extraordinary thing happened in the 2010s: the US tech companies determined that they would weaken oversight of the digital space and not have federal legislation. Today, there is the extraordinary position in the United States whereby there is no federal regulation, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, or regulation at all in this space. I repeat that because it is hard to believe. It all exists at state level, with the weakened oversight of the Federal Trade Commission and all the other organs which are traditionally very powerful in American democracy. Congress has no say and does not want to have a say—that is a whole other debate. This reality affects our reality, because those are the organisations that exist in relation to our economy. This is a factual situation, and I want to get on to the issue of how we at least try to deal with this sovereignty gap.

I also want to mention what has happened to this country and its sovereignty in the digital space from that period up until today. We were in the European Union, which has a regulatory weakness. Unlike the United States and China, it does not have the digital infrastructure, and yet it is the best regulator we have globally—there are only three global regulators. When were in the EU, we had that benefit of not only EU legislation and regulation but the protection in court of limiting the cross-border transfers of our citizens, because that is what those companies are monetising. That is point of all this.

In the 2010s, I chaired the Facebook inquiry and I met Mark Zuckerberg. He literally said to us that GDPR is a great thing. He went to Congress and said so—you can see it on YouTube. He admitted that regulation was essential for human beings in the United States, China, here and all around the world. However, they determinedly went on an opposite path, and we are now left with this situation.

There are a number of things we can start doing, because we have to do something—there is no point in just throwing up our hands and saying that this is how it is going to be. I will suggest a couple of things. First, we have to understand what we can do as a country to re-establish that kind of sovereignty. They seem small things, but they are within our capacity. I ask a specific question of the Minister. Take Palantir, which at least everyone knows about. Palantir is trying to take health data, make a cross-border transfer to the United States and sell it. That is what it is doing, and why it is paying us very little for the contract. Even the public, and certainly those who work in the NHS, are aware that the systems are not even that good.

One of the things we need to do, which is within our capacity, is a cost-benefit analysis of the contracts we undertake, because there will be sovereignty issue to that. Are we actually doing that? Secondly, we need to be really clear about what is happening here and what we can do about the blockages. For example, the US CLOUD Act grants US authorities the power to request access to data held anywhere in the world from providers subject to US jurisdiction, with no legal requirement for providers to inform customers. The whole issue of the US CLOUD Act has been raised in Parliament, and I know the Minister in the other place has commented on it, but DSIT has not made any central assessments of what the US CLOUD Act is or what it is doing to our infrastructure and sovereignty. These are the kinds of questions we need to try to answer and make progress on.

Another area—very quickly—is EU alignment; we have safety in numbers if we align. We have good data adequacy agreements with Europe and the European Union. We do not have a good data adequacy agreement with the US, for obvious reasons. Can we at least align on regulatory aspects that help us in this country, and our sovereignty: not everything from the European Union, but at least those aspects where we can align with a data adequacy agreement to help our sovereignty position?

13:11

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate. In doing so, I declare my relevant technology interests as adviser to the Crown Estate and to Simmons & Simmons LLP.

I must start by congratulating my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on her brilliant and blistering introduction to this debate. The noble Baroness is having quite a month of it: this debate today, a new book out and a fantastic White Paper published just last week. I know it is only a matter of time—and quite right—before moviegoers will be treated to “Baroness Beeban: The Biopic”. I will be speaking with Christopher Nolan later today.

The departmental chairs have been rearranged. What does this mean, though, for digital sovereignty? Yesterday, the Minister, Jonathan Reynolds, described the new department as a “genuinely new beast”. Make of that what you will, but largely, the technology industry was dismayed that DSIT is no more. I ask the Minister: can they all be wrong?

We also have GDS on the move. Rather than being the positive, impactful, cross-departmental force, it will now be within DCMS, so it will be part of a department, giving a departmental view with a departmental Secretary of State, seeking to influence other different government departments. How will this play out?

Similarly, we have the separation of AI sovereignty and digital infrastructure, now relying on co-ordination where before we had effective oversight. How will this benefit digital sovereignty?

We have the AI Security Institute now responsible within that office for increasing take-up of technology across government. If you have the same group responsible for testing the tech and deploying and supplying the tech, ask anybody what the outcome will be and you will get a single—and in this context, unhelpful—answer. Add to that what is happening with AI IP and copyright and AI growth zones and you have quite a cocktail, none of which on the face of it seems to have an effective and laser focus on digital and AI sovereignty.

So, what do we require? As is always the case, I take your Lordships back to the three Cs: clarity, consistency and coherence of approach. It does not matter whether you are a citizen, creative, consumer, innovator or investor: it is about clarity, consistency and coherence. In the specific context of digital sovereignty, it is about definitions, dependencies and decisions. There are as many definitions of sovereignty as you care to take, but the Government need to pick one, stick to it and clearly and coherently communicate it.

On dependencies, what are the Government prepared to tolerate? We do not need to—nor could we—do full-stack sovereignty. But the truth of it is that no nation, not even the United States of America, nor China, has true, pure, full-stack sovereignty. It is not doable and it is not necessary. What is the risk profile that the Government are prepared to tolerate, and what do they say in terms of broad resilience? To govern is to choose: ultimately, these decisions have to be made.

We have heard variously from the Minister over debates and Oral Questions in your Lordships’ House that digital and AI are now across all domains. Nobody would disagree with that, but would that not suggest that we need a cross-departmental, cross-domain approach when it comes to our legislation and regulation? That is the approach being taken with the cyber Bill, and I agree with it—although it is deficient and absent in some serious areas, with no mention currently of AI, and we will be coming back to that in the September sitting. If it makes sense to have a cross-sector cyber Bill, surely it makes sense to have a cross-sector, cross-economy AI Bill.

For digital sovereignty and AI sovereignty we must think cross-sector and be principles-based and outcomes-focused, with inputs understood. Those principles include trust and transparency, inclusion and innovation, interoperability and an international outlook, accountability, assurance and accessibility. Many of those principles have been weakened by the recent changes to departmental responsibilities, and there needs to be that laser focus on clarity, consistency and coherence. Ultimately, digital sovereignty, AI sovereignty and data sovereignty are all essential elements, and we need to look at how we take an approach which enables, empowers and fundamentally allows all of us as citizens to say, with full throat, that our data, our decisions and our digital futures, together, are human-led, inclusive digital futures.

13:17

[Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and I thank him for all his work. Echoing all the praises, I, too, express my gratitude to my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for her very powerful leadership, including in this debate.

My contribution today is framed in the context of having organised numerous discussions and meetings in relation to the APPG on digital transformation, of which I declare my membership, and policy on technology as it affects society. In this context, sovereignty is a matter of national security, and promoting our national security is an absolute objective for all Members of the House of Lords and across the other House.

For their support, I acknowledge the Library briefing, ControlAI, and Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh for her ambitious efforts in relation to advancing sovereign AI stack, which I will make some reference to later. I also thank Dowshan Humzah for his precious time, wisdom and foresight.

Sovereignty used to be visible: in borders, laws, currency and armed forces. Today, much of it is indiscernible: it sits in cloud contracts, chips, codes, data and algorithms. The question is not whether Britain can govern Britain; as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, it is whether Britain can still choose when the systems supporting our public services, businesses and families are designed, owned and operated elsewhere, outside our legal reach.

Digital sovereignty is therefore not technological isolation. Britain cannot, and need not, build every chip, cloud or frontier model, as has been said. It is about retaining the agency, capability and alternatives to act when circumstances change and to build the foundation of the economic power needed for public services, national security and statecraft itself.

Digital sovereignty shapes national sovereignty in at least three critical ways. The first is strategic autonomy, as has been repeated in this House. Can Britain continue to provide essential services, to protect sensitive data and to change direction if a supplier, another state or dominant monopolies dictate trade terms that are not acceptable to our national requirements and standards?

The second is economic resilience. Consider what plans are in place to improve investment that addresses British capability and expands skills and employment. Will these fast-paced developments leave us permanently renting access from elsewhere, which may endanger future-proofing the protection of national procurement? In this context, I refer to the work I have convened in the House on the Sovereign AI Power Index, which was developed by Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, a former MP. It is one disciplined way to measure whether our current trajectory will deliver real sovereignty.

The third is citizen protection and rights, especially those of our children. Can a citizen challenge an automated decision? Can a parent reach a competent human being? Can a child grow up without their attention, identity and vulnerability becoming somebody else’s commercial asset? Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh’s Sovereign AI Power Index offers a system to measure whether investment is translating into genuine national capability, control and resilience.

Dowshan Humzah, a futurologist, technology practitioner and author, says that technology should be our servant, not our master—as it seems to be now. Yet, too often, digital transformation removes human competence, quality and kindness. Digitising a broken service does not transform it; it industrialises the failures. AI can make a good institution better, but it can also make a bad institution fail faster and more consistently, and with no one held accountable. There are sombre considerations ahead of us regarding the governance and accountability of major public services, including the criminal justice system, education and the autonomous use of weapons in warfare.

On daily matters, I ask the House to imagine two different UK parents in 2031 whose children use AI tutors at school. For one of those parents, the system is transparent, independently tested and subject to UK law. A teacher can explain its recommendations. That parent can challenge an error, and the school can change the supplier without losing the child’s history. Technology is serving the family and society. For the second parent, the child is labelled “low potential” by the system, and nobody can explain why or locally override it. The school is locked in, the data cannot easily be moved, and the human teacher becomes the administrator of the machine’s judgment, with a consequential impact on that child for many years. One parent is a citizen using technology; the other will be captured in a never-ending circle of machine-centric decisions that are difficult to challenge or manage.

In five years, AI agents may mediate education, employment, welfare, health and even warfare. In 10 years, AI will be the infrastructure of the state. In 20 years, today’s primary school children will be the workers, parents and leaders. The defaults we tolerate now—opacity, manipulation and dependency—may become the unwritten constitution of their digital lives.

Digital sovereignty is not about building walls; it is about keeping the keys to our own doors and ensuring that our children inherit them. It is about our children’s future. We cannot place our sovereign digital system in anyone else’s grasp, while we do everything we can to ensure—

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath) (Lab)]

Excuse me.

[Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)]

I am finishing. We must do everything we can to ensure that AI does not become sovereign over Britain. We cannot wait for others to determine the future of our citizens and our children.

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

I must ask the noble Baroness to conclude her remarks, please.

[Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)]

We must invent it with honour and dignity for human lives.

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind some Members that the speaking time limit is six minutes for Back-Benchers. I urge all noble Lords to keep within that limit so that the debate may conclude within the time allowed, without cutting short the Minister’s remarks.

13:25

[Lord Drayson (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a science entrepreneur and, in particular, my roles as chairman and shareholder in Locai Labs and Freevolt Technologies. I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on securing this debate and, frankly, her outstanding impact in campaigning against the harms of big tech, which were brilliantly set out in her recent book.

On tech sovereignty, the public are well ahead of Westminster. On AI, they are both alarmed and impatient. Polling published last month found that 80% of the UK public distrust our Government’s ability to control AI at all. The dependency they sense is real and structural. US hyperscalers dominate the UK cloud market. Despite us being a leading nation in AI science, the UK has failed to invest in the infrastructure needed to enable our science to scale a modern industry. It has allowed the infrastructure it does have to be controlled by US companies.

This risk is not hypothetical. Under the US CLOUD Act, American authorities can compel a US-owned provider to disclose data held anywhere in the world, including data held in its UK-resident data centres. Asked under oath by the French Senate whether he could guarantee that French citizens’ data would never be handed over, Microsoft France’s legal director answered: no. When Washington sanctioned officials of the International Criminal Court, its chief prosecutor lost his Microsoft email and a Canadian judge lost her Google and Amazon accounts. Yet in this Parliament we are still using Microsoft 365. Why? Government cloud spending runs at over £6 billion a year across the public sector, paying annual rents on infrastructure that we do not own and do not control.

These decisions to buy from big tech, rather than procuring from businesses owned and managed in the UK, are why we do not have a globally leading British-owned tech company resident in the UK. Either they have been sold, like DeepMind and Arm, to foreign companies, or they have moved offshore using the Delaware flip to access US capital. Your Lordships’ Science and Technology Committee reported in November that our failure to scale has reached “crisis point” and that our economy is “bleeding out” as a result.

The causes are three self-inflicted wounds: procurement that finds that the foreign big tech offer is the cheapest on the day and ignores the strategic cost of failing to build our own industry; capital markets that no longer finance our own companies, with London having shed some 800 listed companies since 2015; and UK pension funds holding as little as 4% of their capital in UK assets. When UK founders incorporate in Delaware, they are not being unpatriotic; they are just going where the capital is.

We already know how to solve this. When we name the capabilities that must be sustained onshore—such as designing and building nuclear submarines—sustained procurement, aligned with strategic sovereign clarity over decades, has meant that Barrow-in-Furness is world leading, and we export these submarines to our allies. This method works.

So I have three asks of the Minister. The first is to make UK government procurement seriously support the British tech sector. The Prime Minister has said he wants to reindustrialise Britain. That means ensuring that the billions currently spent with foreign-owned tech companies are spent at home. Will the Minister commit to creating a strategic sovereign list naming the digital capabilities this country will not outsource? The second is to turn the capital taps back towards Britain. Will the Government now mobilise our pension savings into UK businesses and UK infrastructure? We have the laws to do so. We just need to do it. The third is to buy open, not closed, systems. Germany, Denmark, France and others have moved public employees off Microsoft. Yes, that Microsoft Office 365 that we are all using comes under the US CLOUD Act. There are plenty of open-source alternatives we could be using. I know that some will say it is too difficult or there is no practical alternative to what we are doing but it is not true. Last week, Airbus announced that it is moving its systems off Amazon Web Services to the French provider Scaleway. If a company of that scale and complexity, regulated as it is to manufacture aircraft, can do it, we can do it.

This is not a question of capability but of will. By ensuring that the digital technology shaping our lives is built to our values, rather than somebody else’s, and that it respects the rights of creators, protects children, creates British jobs and pays UK taxes, we have an alternative.

13:32

[Lord Ranger of Northwood (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Drayson. We share our views on the Science and Technology Committee. I know his passion and commitment for British technology. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this debate at this crucial time, and declare my interests in supporting British tech businesses VE3, Great Wave AI and Automated Analytics and as a co-founder of the Business AI Alliance.

Future generations will look back at this period of the 21st century as the moment we unlocked the next stage of human potential. Through our advancements in science and technology, we stand on the cusp of dramatically accelerating change in our lives, our societies and perhaps even our politics. In a relatively short time, we will see legions of driverless vehicles, flocks of flying taxis, oodles of agentic digital money, armies of personal robots, precision preventive medicine, and wearable and even bionic enhancements. I believe we shall solve some of the greatest challenges of our age. We shall redefine what we mean by work and leisure. We shall create, discover and travel further than we have ever travelled before, even to the stars.

This is all to come but at this still early stage of our technological evolution, we must think carefully about the foundations upon which these extraordinary achievements will be built. Beneath the excitement lies a rather traditional contest between nation states for technological supremacy. That brings me to the question before us today. What do we mean by national sovereignty in the digital age? For decades, we assumed that globalisation would diminish the importance of borders. That era is changing. We are witnessing the fragmentation of that globalised settlement. Economic security has become national security. Data has become a strategic asset. Artificial intelligence has become an instrument of geopolitical competition. Increasingly, political influence is exercised not only through Governments but through globally significant businesses that carry the strategic interests of their home nations. The United States has made its choice. China has made its choice. The question before us today is whether Britain is prepared to make ours.

Having spent much of my career working with some of the world’s largest tech businesses across multiple continents, I have seen first-hand that the relationship between Governments and global technology companies has become one of the defining features of modern statecraft. Their influence on investment, standards, infrastructure, talent and, increasingly, national resilience cannot be ignored. We know that sovereignty in the digital age is no longer simply about where our borders lie but about whether Britain possesses the capability and confidence to shape our own technological destiny rather than merely consume technologies designed elsewhere.

The choice is where our sensitive data resides, who builds critical infrastructure and how emerging technologies reflect our values and serve our national interests. Against this backdrop, I confess to finding it regrettable that at precisely the moment technology is becoming central to every aspect of government the Government have chosen to abolish the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Departments matter. Priorities matter. Institutional structures signal intent. Sovereignty is not achieved through talking about technology but by making clear strategic choices about where Britain will lead and where we will compete.

Are we truly prepared to back our world-leading universities and research institutions to provide the innovations that will define tomorrow’s economy? Are we prepared to ensure that our entrepreneurs and start-ups and scale-ups secure the investment they need to scale globally while remaining proudly British? Are we determined that the City of London will remain the world’s leading international financial centre in the age of digital assets, digital money and tokenised finance? Are we prepared to invest in sovereign capabilities that will determine our competitiveness for generations to come?

Digital sovereignty is not simply about artificial intelligence but about ensuring that British ideas become British industries and that British innovation creates British prosperity. Then British values will continue to shape the technologies that will shape the world. I do not believe that the nations that prosper in this century will have to invent and scale every technology. There will be those with the confidence and strategic clarity to decide which capabilities matter most to their national interest and then back those choices with conviction.

Britain has led great technological revolutions before, and history teaches us that success is never accidental. It requires clear political vision and enduring partnerships and structures between government, academia and industry. Above all, it requires the resolve to stay the course until the job is done. So let us be clear about the choices we make. I ask the Minister and the Government to define with confidence and ambition what British digital sovereignty means, not only to ourselves but to the rest of the world. Then we can measure and manage our sovereignty posture. If we can do that, Britain will not simply adapt to the technological age, we will play our full part in defining it.

13:37

[Baroness Shields (Con)]

My Lords, I too begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for once again bringing us together for this important conversation at a moment in time when AI is emerging as the operating system of all our lives.

In May, I cautioned this House that frontier AI systems were shaping our world, that we were being controlled by an extraordinarily narrow concentration of power, capital and data, and that most nations were not participating in that process but inheriting it. I return to that argument today because it is no longer a forecast. It is now a fact pattern. Frontier AI capability sits overwhelmingly in the hands of a few companies headquartered mainly in the United States and China. Every other nation participates by permission, not by right. That permission can be withdrawn arbitrarily in an instant.

We saw this explicitly on 12 June, when the US Department of Commerce directive forced Anthropic to suspend access to its most advanced model, Claude Fable, for foreign nationals worldwide, including its own foreign national researchers. They were unable to touch the model they had built because of the passport they held. Access was restored on 1 July. However, sovereignty was not.

The UK has no seat at the table. Taken together, this incident, along with this week’s reports of an autonomous AI agent powered by OpenAI models escaping its research sandbox and interacting with the Hugging Face open-source repository, illustrate a profound shift now under way. Our security institutions have been built on the assumption that agency is human. That assumption no longer holds. We are entering a world in which software agents will increasingly make decisions, negotiate with one another and act on behalf of people, companies and nations.

Both incidents report to the same underlying truth—sovereignty is not simply a function of computing power. It is a function of control over access, deployment and consequences, and that is where Britain’s real vulnerability lies.

This Motion is about policy, but we cannot make good policy the way we normally do, through debate, precedent and incremental regulatory convention, when the assumption that those conventions rest on is that intelligence and decision-making are exclusively human. That no longer holds. This is a new magnitude of change. It transforms both the nature of global competition and the meaning of sovereign control.

No single country can dominate every layer of the technology stack, and we should not delude ourselves. UK public investment measured in hundreds of millions can never compete with private capital measured in hundreds of billions. The strategic question for Britain is therefore not whether we can match the raw capability and scale of foreign frontier models but where our genuine advantage lies. Our specific strength is our vibrant British tech ecosystem—in the domain-specific models it is building; the physical systems it is creating, including advanced robotics and drones; and deep vertical applications, on which Britain already holds genuine competitive advantages.

There are risks in that domain as well. Just last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned of what he calls a “reverse information paradox”. Organisations that plug directly into foreign frontier models are paying twice: once with their capital for access and again with their institutional knowledge, which they leak prompt by prompt. Palantir’s Alex Karp puts it more bluntly: he calls this losing your alpha—your core intellectual property handed to a competitor that never had to earn it. This reflects a broader shift in where strategic value now resides.

The AI frontier is also commoditising faster than anyone predicted. Intelligence is becoming a utility. Consequently, durable value and, with it, strategic risk have migrated to the layer that interfaces with our critical infrastructure, including our health service, energy grid, transportation and agriculture systems.

The Government’s role should be to set the gold standard by certifying the boundaries around critical infrastructure, ensuring that personal data is protected, data leakages are prevented and British intellectual property is defended. By certifying that protective layer to rigorous standards, we allow our tech ecosystem to flourish safely. We maintain sovereign control over our data, even when the underlying frontier models change, turning digital sovereignty into a competitive asset for British industry.

To achieve this, the Government’s immediate priority must be auditing our dependence on foreign frontier models and establishing strict procurement standards for data sovereignty. That is why I propose a special inquiry into AI power and sovereignty, focused on three non-negotiable pillars: national sovereignty, data sovereignty and cultural sovereignty. Beginning alongside the UK’s G20 presidency in 2027, it would bring together those who build the most advanced AI systems with those who govern them, identifying where Britain’s strategic autonomy is strong, where it is vulnerable and what can be done to protect it. The timing would lead this international conversation with authority at exactly the moment we assume this responsibility. Britain still has time to strengthen its strategic autonomy, but the window is closing. We must not wait until permission is withdrawn to discover what sovereignty was worth.

13:44

[The Lord Bishop of Oxford (Valedictory Speech)]

My Lords, it is a real honour to take part in this debate, and I join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for her penetrating analysis.

In the words of our new Prime Minister on the steps of Downing Street a few days ago:

“Britain needs to show the world that we can regain our stability once again”.


Stability is a deeply Christian virtue, as well as in many other world faiths. The psalms speak of God as a rock, our refuge and strength, and our very present help in times of trouble. The rule of Benedict, with his emphasis on stability and faithfulness, underpins many of our institutions, from schools, hospitals and universities to our great cathedrals.

In recent years, new technology has become one of the many factors at work in undermining our stability as a nation. There are many gains from technology, but as we know there are existential risks to mental health, our climate, cohesion, truth, relationships, community, patterns of work, the distribution of power—which affects every part of society—and the international order. The risks inherent in AI are, in part, a product of its accelerating speed of development. Many speak now, and the language has been properly used this afternoon, of a race to artificial general intelligence and frontier AI.

The speed of change and the significant power unleashed make this revolution distinct from other technical developments in the past, because there is a risk that the speed of change will itself undermine the very benefits that change brings. There is simply no time for public trust and confidence to grow, and we have heard of the growing public awareness of risk and the desire that something be done. Debate consistently lags behind the deployment of technology and public awareness. Institutions that give stability to society are undermined. New markets and new jobs have no time to grow where existing ones are superseded so rapidly. There is little time to build capacity in industry, local authorities and Governments internationally.

The acceleration we see at the moment is not inevitable but is almost entirely driven by commercial factors. The huge investment required to develop AI demands massive returns in a very short and contracting space of time. Every example of future scenario planning I have read identifies growing existential risk. We can identify the accelerators, but where are the brakes on AI development globally? Where are the constraints and the restraints for responsible AI which ensure that harms are mitigated, trust is built and benefits justly shared?

A responsible, balancing slowing down can and needs to come only from two sources. The first is the assertion of sovereignty by individual nations, and that assertion of sovereignty needs to be clear, ethically shaped and in the interests of our whole society. Sovereignty will always be a basket of different things—there are no absolutes—but sovereignty must be clearly expressed as a standard by which to measure each new development and each new investment, as others have clearly argued this afternoon. The United Kingdom does not yet have that clear standard and statement of intent. We need it urgently. What steps are the Government taking to make clear our position and our willingness to slow development to a manageable pace? The second source is the combined and collective power of nation states acting in concert. Again, the United Kingdom has a major role to play in drawing together a common approach. What steps are the Government taking to draw such a coalition together for the good of all?

I have been immensely grateful for the opportunity to serve in this house. From beginning to end, the experience has been a sharp learning curve. I have learned so much from colleagues in debate, including today, in APPGs and, in particular, in the Select Committee on AI and the Environment and Climate Change Committee. I am immensely grateful to the staff of the House, the doorkeepers and those who keep us safe. I record my thanks to my researcher, Simon Cross, and to Simon Stanley and Richard Chapman, of the Church of England’s parliamentary unit, for their expertise and wisdom.

The most important part of a building is its foundation. The most vital part of a boat in a storm is the keel, giving stability in the water. As the world navigates the transition to the age of artificial intelligence, we will need more than ever before the values and ethics of our common tradition, rooted in centuries of Christian faith and practice. AI can be a tool for the common good and a source of great benefit, but only if Governments remain sovereign. Does the Minister agree?

13:50

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a consultant to DLA Piper on AI policy and regulation and as chair of the board of the Authors’ Licensing Collecting Society. I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Lloyd, on her reappointment, but the bed of nails that is having a debate on the last day of term comes with it.

It is both a privilege and a sadness to follow the right reverend Prelate in his valedictory speech. Before turning to the substance of this debate, I hope that the House will allow me to say a brief word about him. He has, unusually, served both as a Bishop of Sheffield and of Oxford in this House, the latter for exactly 10 years this month. Bishop Steven has been an influential and instrumental voice on artificial intelligence in this House, a member of our original House of Lords Select Committee on AI and crucial in developing the principles for AI development set out by the committee. We just avoided designating them our 10 AI commandments.

He was a founding board member of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, and is someone who has always put the ethical and human dimension of these technologies—dignity, trust, the value of work and human flourishing—first. He was a co-founder member of the House of Lords Select Committee on the Environment and Climate Change. He anticipated the NEETs and AI human flourishing debate by emphasising the importance of adequately preparing young people for changing economic and technological conditions by providing meaningful routes from education into work and ensuring that technological change does not undermine opportunities for younger generations.

It is fitting that his last contribution to this House should be in a debate on digital sovereignty, since the question he has pressed throughout his time here—whether we are shaping these technologies or being shaped by them—is precisely the question that this debate poses at a national and European level. With his insights, collaborative spirit, friendship, and enduring dedication to ethical innovation and policy-making, he will be greatly missed. I know I speak for all of us across the House in wishing him well and all best wishes for the future.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this debate and for her superb introduction, and to all noble Lords who have spoken today. I congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Moraes and Lord Drayson, on their summer reading material. The debate has ranged widely, from infrastructure to intellectual property and from procurement to accountability, but a single thread runs through it: digital sovereignty is not an abstract concept but crucial for our economic, societal and security future.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron, Lady Berger, Lady Gill and Lady Shields, reminded us of what the absence of that sovereignty looks like in practice. Last month, the US Government placed export controls on Anthropic’s newest models. President Trump gave the company less than 90 minutes to cut off non-US citizens. This restriction was lifted on 1 July, but this episode—and, potentially, the recent OpenAI episode mentioned by some of the noble Baronesses—shows that what we have built in this country is not technological independence but, in the AI Minister’s own phrase, a search for strategic leverage. However, leverage is not control. Karim Khan, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, could tell us the same. Sanctioned in 2025, he lost his Microsoft 365 email account on the decision of a boardroom in Redmond, Washington state, not a court.

There is an economic cost to this dependency. The Competition and Markets Authority found that AWS and Microsoft hold 70% to 90% of our cloud market, as the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, said. This costs UK customers in the region of £500 million a year. The same is true of the rest of the AI stack. We are heavily dependent on US big tech. The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, used “colonisation” in this context. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, said, this is not isolation and as the noble Baroness, Lady Shields, said, we need to determine where our advantages lie.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said that this persists not because of market failure alone but regulatory timidity. I believe very strongly in competition, but I part company with the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, in that I believe strongly in regulation and competition. I agree with the possibilities of open-source and open-weight models. The CMA, with strong cross-party support, has the powers that it needs under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, but only three designations as an SMS of big tech services have been made. The CMA declined to designate Amazon or Microsoft in cloud services as having strategic market status, despite strong recommendations from an independent inquiry. A requirement for Google to negotiate fair and reasonable payment terms with news publishers has been repeatedly delayed. A new strategic steer, which could be issued within weeks, directing the CMA towards binding remedies and reaffirming its independence, would cost nothing and require no legislation. Will the Minister commit the Government to that?

The noble Baronesses, Lady Berger and Lady Shields, and the noble Lords, Lord Vaizey, Lord Drayson and Lord Ranger, talked about data. The noble Lord, Lord Ranger, used the expression “data assets”. I agree that it is very much about exploiting the sovereign data assets that we have in the UK. It is not only about where the data sits. The security systems that protect our networks must read the data that they are guarding to do their job, so a residency promise does not get to the heart of the problem. Microsoft’s own European digital resilience commitment, a pledge to legally contest any order to suspend services here, may be welcome, but, as critics rightly call it, this is “sovereignty washing”. A contractual promise cannot override a foreign law. I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, in wanting answers in this respect.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Gill, touched on the importance of copyright. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has already secured the Minister’s confirmation on the record in this House that the sovereign AI fund recipients must comply with UK copyright law. Yet she has called that assurance disingenuous, pointing out that some funded firms will not disclose whether their training data complies at all. We need transparency. I share that scepticism. Confirmation of compliance is not the same as verification of it. I would welcome the Minister’s assurance today that the difference is understood.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron, Lady Bennett and Lady Sheilds, and the noble Lords, Lord Moraes and Lord Drayson, all raised the importance of procurement. In that context, many of them also mentioned Palantir. The Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee found that the Government was “worryingly comfortable” with dependence on a small number of providers and named Palantir specifically. The Financial Times has reported that the Ministry of Defence’s own data systems are now built on architecture that only Palantir is licensed to support—lock-in by design, not accident.

The noble Lord, Lord Moraes, drew an instructive comparison with Europe. On 3 June, the European Commission adopted what it explicitly called its “tech sovereignty package”. President von der Leyen was blunt:

“We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure”.


Set against our own sovereign AI unit, I think the contrast is stark. The EU has a structured, published, cross-sectoral strategy; we do not.

Many noble Lords raised the question of accountability. Indeed, the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Bennett, referred to the “constitutional” issue. This is particularly the case with the prospect of artificial general intelligence and the reality of agentic AI. Sovereignty is hollow without this; we need a single or lead AI regulator, mandatory algorithmic impact assessments, an accountability for algorithms Act and a strict human-in-command standard. We need to ensure responsible AI through that, as the right reverend Prelate said.

I leave the Minister with two questions already put by several noble Lords, in different forms. First, will the Government publish a clear, measurable cross-departmental definition of digital sovereignty, addressing infrastructure, standards, data and procurement, which would replace the current fragmented approach? Secondly, will they commit to reporting annually to Parliament on our strategic dependency risk, as our allies in the EU, Japan and the United States are already doing?

Every procurement decision that embeds foreign dependency is an accumulation of strategic vulnerability. It is time to decide our digital future in Westminster, not Silicon Valley. As the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, said, it is a question of will, not capability. Like the noble Lords, Lord Vaizey and Lord Holmes, I am not convinced by the reorganisation of AI and tech structures in government. But with the new Government there is an opportunity for a new effective sovereignty policy. I very much hope that they take it.

14:01

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this important debate, and I thank all those who participated. It has been fascinating throughout and brilliant points have been made from all sides. I welcome the return of the Minister to her place. As ever, the reward for hard work turns out to be more hard work, but I certainly welcome the continuity and wish her well for the future. I add my own thanks and comments to those of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford. My dealings with him have always been a pleasure and he has shown true leadership on the subject of AI, in bringing the ethical dimension to our deliberations. He will be greatly missed.

I am delighted that we all recognise the growing importance of and the complex dynamics behind this debate. The risk of the erosion of Britain’s strategic position in digital technologies is real. The capacity of most nation states to shape their own digital future is far lower than we might imagine or wish. From critical national infrastructure to our public services, the need to strengthen our sovereign capability is both acute and growing in urgency.

The British Government need to be working towards a coherent holistic sovereignty strategy—one that assesses our strengths and weaknesses relative to the full range of sovereignty risks and that sets out a path to fortify our position. But, in a quandary familiar to noble Lords who take an interest in the cyber security Bill, we are trying to assess Britain’s digital sovereignty policy without the Government having first published a comprehensive digital sovereignty strategy. As of this week, we do not even know which ministry to ask for such a strategy.

I fully accept that Ministers have set out various measures, including the sovereign AI fund, the compute road map and some industrial strategy initiatives, but where is that overarching programme? Where is the White Paper that brings all these elements together? Where is the strategy and where is the explanation of how these disparate powers and initiatives fit within a broader holistic approach to protecting our digital economy and strategic resilience?

I turn now to the nature of the risk and some of the boundaries of our actions. I will not try to repeat or outdo the brilliant summary of those risks by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, but I offer a further refinement. The risks to sovereignty come in different forms but public discussion often focuses on the extreme end of the risk spectrum: the catastrophic loss of access to or control of our digital systems as a result of decisions made in other countries, which we have heard about from a number of noble Lords. But while we must constantly bear that risk in mind, there are a range of more probable, if lower-impact, risks that deserve more attention than they often receive.

We may find that, even while our systems continue to function, we lose access to the most advanced capabilities or cede control of our data. When our hospitals, energy systems, financial infrastructure and Armed Forces depend on technologies to which we lack genuine alternatives, we face the risk of strategic disadvantage. Of course, the further we fall behind, the more we risk depending on others for the innovations that confer competitive advantage.

I worry that we are edging towards strategic drift. We need clear answers to essential questions. Where is sovereignty genuinely essential, perhaps starting with defence and cyber, and how do we retain it? Where sovereignty is not achievable, how do we become indispensable? Where neither sovereignty nor indispensability are possible, how do we develop resilience? Perhaps when the Minister responds, she can explain how the Government intend to answer these questions, in addition to the excellent point about measuring the results of their intervention, made by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. Maybe the inquiry brilliantly proposed by my noble friend Lady Shields is the right step forward as we develop a holistic strategy.

I am sure many noble Lords will agree that the stakes are highest in artificial intelligence. The noble Baroness, Lady Berger, set that out clearly and well. At a certain level of artificial superintelligence, at which it becomes impossible to control, our species is in mortal danger. There is universal agreement that we must collaborate to protect ourselves against this. However, there is a level of AI beneath that, at which its developer attains permanently unassailable strategic, commercial and military advantage—the “winner takes all” model. We heard the leaders of the AI labs, and indeed the People’s Republic of China, earlier this month, calling for international safety collaboration and regulation while, behind closed doors, remaining in hot pursuit of those sovereign AI models that confer on them unprecedented power. The “winner takes all” dynamic in AI means that public commitments to safety measures, even if made sincerely, are systematically subordinated to the strategic imperative of technical advance.

This raises troubling questions about the adequacy of a strategy that relies primarily on inward investment from large, foreign, technology companies. As the previous Prime Minister’s approach prioritised short-term inward investment over long-term sovereign capability, will the new Government alter that calculus?

I suggest that there are available to us at least three levers to address the sovereignty problem. The first is the use of open-source and open-weight models, as my noble friend Lady Stowell set out so well and clearly, to build AI tools and, in so doing, to develop sovereign capability around building our applications from their foundations. This would not just reduce the costs of and time for development but also reduce the “winner takes all” incentives of the AI labs that are driving the AI industry towards what I might call a Darwinian oligopoly—and, eventually, monopoly—of sovereign solutions. Can the Minister confirm what proportion of the sovereign AI unit’s funding is directed towards open-source components of the AI stack?

The second lever is government procurement, as others have observed, both central and local. Here I should declare my interests, as set out in the register, in early-stage tech ventures. The state continues to be the largest technology buyer in the United Kingdom. We are very fortunate here in the range and technical accomplishment of our start-ups, but the state does not buy enough from our early-stage tech ventures. We often worry here, as my noble friend Lord Vaizey described, about how to convert more of our start-ups to scale-ups. A large part of the answer is for the state to be more open to being their customer. The noble Lord, Lord Drayson, set this out brilliantly. This creates credibility and cashflow for the start-up, and it brings innovation and productivity to the state. As they show us every day in the United States, it creates the sovereign technologies of the future. I refer noble Lords to Oracle, Palantir, SpaceX and many others, all of which started out through government procurement in the United States.

Will the Minister outline what proportion of government procurement in digital technologies is currently directed towards early-stage British tech ventures? What benchmark are the Government using to assess whether procurement is being deployed effectively in the service of sovereignty? I am going to accelerate to the end of my speech, otherwise the Whip will need to hurry me along. I have written too much, but I say briefly that better use of the digital markets Act is going to be the third lever, and I feel we should make more and greater use of that.

In conclusion, I ask the Government to provide as soon as possible a comprehensive digital sovereignty strategy, clear criteria for determining where Britain invests in direct sovereignty versus strategic leverage, a coherent procurement strategy aligned with sovereign and capability objectives, an explanation of how digital competition policy serves sovereignty rather than undermining it, and clarity on the data and copyright policy that preserves our strategic leverage. These seem to be critical and urgent questions. I, too, deeply regret that we no longer have a single front door to a ministry that can answer them all, and that those civil servants who could be focused on answering them will instead spend the coming months in a complex reorganisation.

14:12

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (Baroness Lloyd of Effra) (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to respond to this debate and I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for bringing forward the discussion on this significant issue. Despite the fact that we discuss the important issues of AI once or possibly twice a week, I always find that noble Lords raise additional points for thought and reflection to discuss with colleagues afterwards. I will endeavour to respond to the points made today, and if I do not, I will follow up afterwards.

To respond immediately to the questions on the publication of a digital sovereignty strategy, we have heard this request from one of the committees and from your Lordships and are reflecting on it, but I cannot at this stage confirm that we will be publishing such a strategy as proposed by a number of your Lordships today.

This debate raises fundamental questions concerning our economy, society and national security. The question of how we ensure that the remarkable capabilities of modern technology work in the interests of society, support economic strength, protect citizens in the UK and around the world, and remain rooted in British values is incredibly important. As many noble Lords have mentioned today, the UK has huge strengths: subsea cable connectivity; telecoms companies investing in and connecting citizens throughout the UK; our world-leading universities; and incredible companies involved space, autonomous vehicles and chips.

As the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, reminded us, now more than ever, technology is a part of global supply chains that link the smartphones we use every day to critical minerals from all around the world. The Government are committed to ensuring that the UK has the right balance between access to the best technologies that global markets have to offer and ensuring our national growth, resilience and security.

In respect of AI, as many interventions have made clear today, a small number of global firms now underpin critical infrastructure, from cloud computing to advanced AI systems. In the light of this, the Government are focused on ensuring long-term resilience, security and control over critical systems. Our approach is about reducing overdependencies and increasing resilience in key national strategic priorities.

The UK believes that the extraordinary complexity of the critical technologies of the present and future, and the range of inputs needed to bring them to market, means it is unlikely that any single country could achieve independence, let alone dominance, across the entire supply chain. Therefore, there will be an inevitable and essential interdependence hardwired into the tech stack.

The noble Lord, Lord Ranger of Northwood, and others asked what our strategy is. It is not to dominate an entire technology but about developing world-leading research and industry in specific elements of the stack; ensuring that we have sufficient domestic capacity in key elements such as compute; and having a resilient, diversified set of relationships with allies to underpin reliable access to our wider supply chain needs. As part of this, in our modern industrial strategy’s Digital and Technologies Sector Plan, the Government set out the plan to back six frontier technologies that drive growth and support UK security and sovereignty. These are advanced connectivity technologies, AI, cyber security, engineering biology, quantum and semiconductors.

As many noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, and my noble friend Lord Drayson highlighted, we are also working to create the necessary conditions for innovative companies to grow and existing companies to adopt new technologies. The UK has a strong private capital ecosystem—the third largest in the world—but there is more that we can and should do to support companies to access the capital that they need. That is why we are expanding the British Business Bank so that high-growth tech firms can access the capital they need, doubling its annual investments to £2.5 billion and committing £5 billion to growth-stage funds.

As referenced by my noble friend Lord Drayson, the Pension Schemes Act will also drive consolidation in the pensions market and boost investment in UK plc. Through the Mansion House commitments and new British Business Bank vehicles, such as the British growth partnership and venture link, we are enabling pension funds to invest at scale in UK science and technology firms, supporting high-value jobs and innovation in the UK.

The UK has one of the fastest growing and most competitive AI sectors in the world. UK AI firms raised £6 billion in investment in 2025, with estimated GVA among dedicated AI firms nearly doubling to £2.2 billion in 2024.

In respect of the sovereign AI fund, which has £500 million, we are backing strategically important UK AI companies. I was asked about the specific areas. They are infrastructure, life sciences and AI assurance—apologies, I do not have the full list here when I thought I had—so that the UK has greater resilience and influence in a global AI economy. Alongside that, in response to my noble friend Lady Berger, there is £1 billion to expand the AI research resource 20 times by 2030, including £750 million for a new national supercomputer in Edinburgh, as well as the five AI growth zones and a £1.1 billion AI hardware plan, combining to make Britain an AI maker, not just an AI taker.

On the points and questions raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Stowell of Beeston, and the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, we are building non-language frontier models, such as Ineffable Intelligence, and we believe that the approach for language models can look different. The recently announced BOLD lab, based at the University of Oxford, will develop human-centred, resource-efficient AI systems that can operate safely and effectively in the real world. We are also backing the UK tech sector by committing up to £2 billion to establish the UK as a world leader in quantum, and we have made the world’s first commitment to procuring large-scale quantum computers in the early 2030s.

The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, raised points about skills and digital inclusion. These are absolutely essential. We have published a digital inclusion action plan, we are investing £187 million in the TechFirst programme, and we are supporting companies to adopt AI so that we can be absolute users and shapers of AI as it is adopted, as well as in its development.

The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, raised important points about the rest of the world and ensuring that all countries contribute to the discussion on the future of AI adoption and AI governance. We are funding practical partnerships with the OECD, the African Union and south-east Asia to support responsible AI adoption, and we participated in the UN’s Geneva AI week, which encourages a role for the UN that promotes sharing science-based information.

The investment in UK companies, UK skills and UK infrastructure puts us in a good place. However, noble Lords raised legitimate concerns about the risks of AI. Where abuses of AI technology are happening and facilitating harm to UK citizens, we have shown that we will not shy away from taking on AI firms and acting decisively—for example, in our response to Grok’s generation of vile and degrading non-consensual sexual deepfakes earlier this year.

On cyber threats and the recent cyber incident referenced by my noble friends Lady Berger and Lady Gill, the cyber capabilities of leading AI systems are indeed advancing rapidly. The UK’s AI Security Institute, as part of its world-leading efforts to make frontier AI safer, is studying the behaviour seen in this incident of an AI system pursuing goals through unintended and unauthorised means. As AI capabilities evolve, it is important that everyone steps up their cyber defences. Ministers have written to UK businesses with clear and practical steps that they can take to do so. AISI continues to work with all labs to better understand AI capabilities and improve safeguards.

Many noble Lords raised the importance of British values and British culture in shaping the development of our technologies, and many asked specific questions around where we are in our approach to copyright. In March, recognising that the previous proposals on copyright did not command widespread support, we set out a new way forward. We want creators to have greater control over how their work is used, and we will take steps to drive best practice on transparency and the use of mechanisms available to creators to control their works online. We recognise that it is right that we value and protect human creativity by labelling content so that it is clear whether it has been made using AI. This will help inform people’s choices. We will also establish a taskforce to put forward proposals for government on best practice for labelling.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and others, raised questions about public datasets. The Government have launched a call for evidence on the marginal cost restriction on public sector data reuse, seeking views on whether charging for access to public sector data should be reformed to better support innovation, growth and public value. That call for evidence explores whether the current approach of charging for access to public sector data remains appropriate, including the potential impacts of greater cost recovery on data availability, reuse and investment.

Many noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Moraes, asked about the Government’s strategy on data sovereignty. The Government’s approach is to ensure that the UK has the right balance between access to the benefits of international data flows and carefully protecting both personal and non-personal data. This is underpinned by data protection law, UK security standards and international obligations. We continue to monitor these trade-offs and seek the best balance for the UK. The department recently published a call for evidence, Data Flows You Can Trust, which seeks to gather views from the public and businesses on the approaches they would like to see the Government take in this space.

Many noble Lords raised our public sector, rightly highlighting the role of the Government in procurement and the role of the public sector in adoption. It is crucial that the public sector has access to the best technologies offered on the market, while also supporting UK industry to strengthen capabilities across key technologies. Across the public sector, we are embedding frameworks, standards and guidance to ensure that AI is deployed in a way that is fair, transparent and accountable. This includes the Data and AI Ethics Framework and sharing resources through the AI Knowledge Hub, such as the AI Playbook. The Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard ensures that the public can understand how systems are used. This is critical not just for risk management but for building public trust in the systems we use.

The Government recognise that cloud services underpin many public services and that concentration in a small number of suppliers can create risks for resilience, competition and value for money. We are improving the visibility of cloud use, strengthening resilience standards and using procurement to secure better value, greater choice and stronger public services. The national cloud infrastructure programme is exploring how the Government can better co-ordinate the way they buy cloud services, work with industry and secure better outcomes for taxpayers. It aims to create genuine opportunities for a broader range of suppliers, including British firms and SMEs. The recently published Cloud Challenge Book supports work to help the public sector act as a more co-ordinated customer at national scale.

Noble Lords are right to highlight the importance of international co-operation and leadership and the vital role of the UK. The UK’s first digital standards strategy, released on 17 June, recognises the important role that digital standards play nationally and globally, from strengthening national security resilience to contributing to economic growth and the innovation behind technological development. We want to ensure that the international standards development ecosystem remains effective, efficient and responsive, and that the standards it develops reflect our society’s values and interests and deliver market benefit. We will continue working strongly with the G7, the OECD and other multilateral partners to shape the future of the governance and adoption of AI globally.

Noble Lords raised the centrality of technological developments for our war-fighting capability and in defence. The Defence Investment Plan sets out the programme of investment to support this in the UK, in particular—to the points raised by a number of noble Lords—its role in procurement and in supporting novel technologies. It clearly set out the proportions in the Defence Investment Plan that will be allocated to novel technologies.

I pay tribute to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford for his work over many years, and in particular for my engagement with him in preparing for the debate instigated by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury on AI and society. It is worth remarking to noble Lords that I launched the OECD policy handbook only a few weeks ago. This was informed by the work of many of your Lordships over many years. So that impact will continue.

To conclude, the UK will not be a passive technology taker in this world. Our ambition is to shape how frontier technologies are built, trusted, deployed and governed, looking not inwards but outwards with others and on our terms. We will continue to collaborate closely with global partners in the multilateral system to maximise our reach, delivering UK tech priorities through the most suitable forms and scaling up achievements with our partners. We will continue to invest in infrastructure, digital skills and AI adoption for all. Those noble Lords who have not yet had the pleasure of meeting Minister Kanishka Narayan, who will have a seat at the Cabinet table, will be pleased that he brings clarity of focus and an extraordinary amount of energy to the role of bringing this together at the centre of government. If we can seize this transformative opportunity of technology in a way that puts society first and benefits citizens across the UK and globally, the prize for all of us is significant.

14:31

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

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.

Motion agreed.

Young People: Gambling Harm

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

Question for Short Debate

14:34

Asked by

[Lord Foster of Bath]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to reduce gambling harm among young people.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the Minister on what appear to be yet more responsibilities that she is taking on. I welcome this opportunity to debate with her what the Government plan to do to reduce gambling harm among children and young people. In doing so, I declare my interest as chair of Peers for Gambling Reform.

We have long accepted a simple principle: where there is clear evidence that commercial activity harms children, government has a duty to intervene, adopting a public health approach. We have accepted that principle in relation to tobacco, to alcohol and, more recently, to vapes. We are applying it to unhealthy food, to social media, to alcohol and again, more recently, to high-caffeine energy drinks. The same should surely apply to gambling. Yes, of course it is illegal for children to gamble, but a very large number do, so we are clearly not doing enough, despite the protection of children and young people being a core licensing objective in the ill-conceived Gambling Act 2005.

Last year, the Gambling Commission found that 59% of young people had taken part in some form of gambling in the previous year, that 30% had used their own money in doing so and that three in 10 children see members of their own family gambling. Most worryingly of all, it found that some 80,000 children are suffering gambling harm: in common parlance, 80,000 children are gambling addicts and many thousands more are at risk of becoming so. We need to do more to catch up with the rapidly changing gambling landscape, because children today encounter gambling brands almost everywhere. They see gambling companies sponsoring football shirts, stadiums and competitions. They watch televised sports with gambling promotions before, during and after the event. They receive gambling-related content through social media algorithms. They see influencers promoting betting products. Many play games containing gambling-like features such as loot boxes and social casinos that blur the line between gaming and gambling. This constant exposure matters, because it normalises gambling for children, who are learning to see gambling as a routine part of sport, of entertainment, of gaming and of online life.

Dealing with all this is a public health issue, and while the Government are not doing enough, many parts of local government are doing their best. Many councils have already banned gambling advertising on their premises, their land and their vehicles, and others have gone even further. For instance, ahead of the 2022 World Cup, one council launched its anti-gambling harms campaign, “Odds Are: They Win”. It pointed to harmful industry practices having a negative impact on people’s, including children’s, health and well-being, finances, work, relationships and so on. It made it clear that whatever the gambling product, whoever the gambling operator and whichever way you look at it, the odds are they win. The council leader said

“the main aim of the gambling operators is to maximise profits. These profits are the result of customer losses which, particularly during this cost of living crisis, risk having a seriously detrimental impact on people’s lives”.

He went on to say:

“The review of the Gambling Act is now well overdue and the Government must take this opportunity to do more to protect our residents and people right across the country from the harmful practices of the gambling industry”.


That council leader was our new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, so when she responds, I hope the Minister will have her Prime Minister’s words ringing in her ears.

To identify what more could be done, Peers for Gambling Reform recently hosted a round table of experts in the field. Their recommendations included, first, ending the Government’s nonsense claim that that it is possible to grow the gambling industry while reducing gambling harm. Way back in 2018, academics claimed that

“preventing gambling-related harm is not possible without limiting the overall volume of the activity, and hence the profits for the gambling industry”.

Recently, four reports all show that by reducing the volume of gambling activity in the country, the country’s economy would be strengthened and not weakened. Will the Minister at last accept that the Government have got this wrong?

Secondly, experts recommended restricting gambling advertising, marketing and sponsorship. Clearly, with 79% of children recalling gambling advertisements, current safeguards are not working. I even saw a computer game the other day with an age rating of 4+ containing gambling advertisements. The UK has more evidence on the harmful effects of gambling advertising than almost any other country in the world, but we are taking much less action. Does the Minister accept that reducing harm among children and young people requires reducing their exposure to gambling advertising? Does she agree with her Prime Minister, who said:

“For the sake of children and young people, it’s time to take a stand … we can relegate gambling sponsorship of sport to the history books”.


I entirely agree with the Prime Minister.

Thirdly, there were recommendations to require greater accountability of digital platforms. Children encounter gambling marketing online through content marketing—designed not to look like advertising—sports commentary, influencer-style content, livestream gambling, affiliate promotions and, of course, illegal offshore operators. Can the Minister say whether the Government will place a specific duty on online platforms to prevent under-18s being exposed to gambling advertising?

Fourthly, experts recommend addressing the convergence of gaming and gambling. Loot boxes, skin gambling, crypto gambling, social casino games and esports-linked gambling are all areas where existing legal definitions and voluntary approaches are insufficient. There is clear evidence of a stable and consistent association between loot box use and problem gambling, with risks likely to be higher for children and young people. Will the Government move beyond the failed industry self-regulation and bring loot boxes and gaming-like digital products within a stronger regulatory framework?

The round table identified other recommendations, such as greater protection for young adults, who are more likely than older adults to experience gambling harm, and further development of the welcome introduction of a gambling element into the PSHE component of the school curriculum—I believe that should be strengthened still further, and my noble friend Lord Addington will touch on this later. All need to be addressed as public health issues, without the involvement of the commercial interests of gambling companies.

Future generations will not ask whether Parliament debated these issues; they will ask whether we acted while the evidence, a vast amount of it, was already before us. I hope that when they do, they will be able to say that this House once again played its part in putting the protection of children ahead of commercial interest. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

14:43

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster, on securing this short debate and on his long-standing work on preventing gambling harms. Like him, I am very pleased to see the Minister continuing in her role at DCMS.

I will focus on the international implications of gambling harms experienced by young sports players. I am a member of our International Agreements Committee and we are currently scrutinising the impact of the Government’s proposal to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Competitions, known as the Macolin convention. It is the first and only international treaty on the manipulation of sports competitions.

I am grateful to all those who have given evidence to our committee. We have learned a great deal about how young sportspeople can fall into the traps set by those who organise international illegal operations and bribe them. Young people who are just starting out on their careers may be easy targets. We heard compelling evidence from ex-footballer Moses Swaibu about his experience of match fixing and the broader systems behind it, and about how easy it is to get sucked into the illegal gambling world, whether you are playing in league or non-league matches.

His entry into professional sports started when he was 16 and playing for his Croydon state school. He secured a one-year professional contract with Crystal Palace FC and entered an environment of mentors, structures, big brothers and discipline—a new world for him. When he moved to Lincoln City aged 19, a teammate introduced him to the world of match fixing for the first time. It was a phrase he had never even heard of. He knew that it was morally wrong; he just wanted to play football. However, he did not feel that he had the power or confidence to go to Chris Sutton, his first team manager, and say, “The teammate who introduced me to match fixing is the captain”.

Fast forward to 2015, and Moses was sentenced to 16 months in prison for conspiracy to commit bribery following his role in a 2013 match-fixing scandal during his time at Bromley FC. The prosecution said that two Singaporean businessmen were the central figures in the conspiracy. Since his release from prison, Mr Swaibu has devoted his career to combating match fixing. He has become one of the UK’s most active voices in sports integrity education and reform, with a particular focus on educating young footballers who might well fall into the same traps as he did.

Mr Swaibu told our committee that

“if you have a young Moses Swaibu at 18, look at his background, his family, and his siblings: what were the influences around him that shaped this opportunity for crime and corruption?”

We were also given evidence by Dr Madalina Diaconu. She told us that:

“In the past 15, maybe 16 years, we have seen a tremendous increase in the infiltration of organised crime into match-fixing”


of a wide variety of sports, including e-sports. She went on:

“This is where the Macolin convention comes in, because no single sports organisation or sports betting organisation can fight international organised crime syndicates. That is a job for law enforcement and international co-operation in this field, which is precisely what the Macolin convention does”.


The UK signed the convention in 2018, but the Government have only very recently brought it forward for ratification. Can the Minister explain why there has been a delay in seeking to ratify it? I understand that there may be good reasons for this, but what are they?

14:48

[Baroness Gerada (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for bringing this debate and for the unfailing, tireless work he does in this area. I declare my interest as medical director of the Primary Care Gambling Service, which treats patients experiencing gambling-related harms in services across England.

No matter how good my service is, when a young person walks through that door, we have already failed them. As noble Lords have heard, the numbers tell their own story: nearly half of 11 to 17 year-olds have gambled in the past year and 30% have spent their own money doing so, which is up from 27% last year. Most strikingly, the increase is being driven almost entirely by unregulated gambling, which has risen from 15% to 18% in just one year. Separately, the Gambling Commission finds that one in five 18 to 24 year-olds now gambles to relieve stress. These are not statistics about a handful of unlucky individuals. They describe a generation growing up in an environment designed to make gambling feel normal, safe and sociable—on their phones and in their feeds, increasingly disguised as a game and with no meaningful age gate.

That is why prevention cannot begin only once harm has appeared and cannot mean simply warning young people about risks. It must mean intervening upstream: in product design, in advertising and in the “free-to-play” and loot-box mechanics that train children in gambling behaviours before they have ever placed a bet with real money. It has to mean treating gambling harm, as the health Select Committee of this House argued and as the noble Lord, Lord Foster, said so eloquently, as a public health issue, not simply as a matter of consumer choice.

This brings me, briefly, to the statutory levy. We finally have a statutory levy replacing the old voluntary system. In principle, that is real progress. It has raised £120 million this year, roughly triple what voluntary donations ever achieved, and gives us a sustainable foundation for research, prevention and treatment. But while the levy gives us more money, it does not in itself give us a gambling prevention strategy.

GambleAware closed its doors at the end of March, after more than 20 years, warning that the transition risked fragmentation. That uncertainty has had consequences. Last year, citing a lack of sustainable funding, GamCare ended its young people’s provision, which had reached more than a quarter of a million children, young people and parents over the past five years. Coming as the new levy settlement leaves youth prevention work unfunded, it is exactly the kind of capacity we should be protecting, not losing. I raise this not to relitigate the levy but because prevention—school-based education, youth work, early intervention and public awareness campaigns around major sporting events, as we have just had with the World Cup—is precisely what suffers when funding is unstable or unco-ordinated. Prevention depends on continuity.

My central ask today is not about the levy. It is this: if we are serious about preventing gambling harm in young people, we need to close the gap between how we regulate gambling and how fast the products marketed at young people are evolving. Unregulated gambling products, influencer marketing and constant gambling content on social media are shaping attitudes long before young people are legally allowed to gamble. We need to keep asking, as this House has before, whether we are designing policy around what protects children or around what the industry finds tolerable.

Prevention is not measured by the number of people it treats; it is measured by the number of people who never need treatment in the first place. If we get prevention right, we will spare thousands of young people avoidable harm and spend far less on treatment in years to follow. That is the investment, and the responsibility, that I hope this Minister—who I am pleased is remaining—will keep firmly in view.

14:53

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for tabling this debate on reducing gambling harm among young people. That sounds admirable but, hot on the heels of the Academy of Ideas World Cup sweepstake, organised by one of our young team, Jake Weston, an enthusiastic gambler himself, I want to appeal for perspective.

As a reminder, for the vast majority of people across all age groups, gambling is harmless. As Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has noted, it can bring joy to millions of people who enjoy a regular flutter. So many get their pleasure from honing their skills in working out—and hopefully beating—the odds. Others just enjoy the thrill and challenge of taking a risk, often the sorts of instincts we want to encourage, for example in would-be entrepreneurs. Yet too often in debates in this Chamber, we discuss this legal, legitimate leisure activity as though it inevitably leads to ruin. It is unfairly characterised as toxic and pathologised as addictive, a threatening destroyer of individuals and family life.

I thought of all this when watching a lovely clip of the football icon Kevin Keegan—in my opinion, the real king of the north—from a filmed interview doing the rounds since his sad death. Kevin movingly recalled how his dad used to back the horses regularly, just like most miners at the time. One year, he won a few quid on the Grand National and used all the money to buy his young, football-obsessed son some second-hand football boots, an act of fatherly love and generosity paid for by his hobby and not some sordid, dodgy, selfish activity. Will the Minister reassure us that the Government will avoid policies that purport to protect the young but, in reality, are a puritan Trojan horse for a prohibition that unfairly demonises gambling per se?

Do not get me wrong, I know from personal experience how out-of-control gambling can bring misery, but we need to be honest that this is a small minority. Acknowledging this will allow for bespoke policies that target real problems, rather than a blanket culture of disapproval or a catch-all of ineffective, excessive state intervention into people’s private choices.

We also need to interrogate some of the data and terminology that can misleadingly suggest that this is a growing problem. We are not helped by the fact that there is no single dataset that measures problem gambling among young people. There is not even clarity about our definition of young people. In gambling-related law, “young people” can refer to adults between the ages of 18 and 25, who can legally gamble with licensed operators but with age-targeted restrictions. Then there are under-18s, defined as children, who are prohibited from gambling in that way. This can be confusing—for example, having two categories of adult of 18 to 24 year-olds and 25 year-olds and over. Apart from anything else, are we in danger of infantilising young adults, who we otherwise expect to be responsible grown-ups? The prospect of 16 year-olds being considered adult enough to vote will not help this muddle. Unfortunately, too many commentators in gambling have developed the bad habit of using the phrase “young people” to cover both the under-18 and the under-25 categories.

Regardless, what does the data show? The NHS’s Health Survey of England, which confusingly uses the age range of 16 to 24, shows that problem gambling rates fell from 1% in 2018 to 0.5% in 2024. So why is this age group a focus of special concern? Are we really worried about gambling by children, given that it is stated as fact that 80,000 children suffer from gambling harms? But that number is extrapolated from 25 schoolchildren—yes, 25—who were classified as problem gamblers in the Young People and Gambling Survey 2023. To note, “harm” is classified at a hugely lower threshold than for post-18s, so what has been labelled harmful gambling—it has been described as “addiction” here—for those 25 children should make us pause before we panic. Two-thirds self-report playing amusement games such as crane grabs at seaside arcades—shock horror. Half are called problem gamblers because they place bets with friends and family, and 40% play cards with mates and siblings or occasionally buy lottery products such as scratch cards. What constitutes illegal gambling for children is even more banal. If kids bet using pocket money or school lunch money, it is against the law, even if it is spent on forms of gambling that are legal.

Counterintuitively, even the pantomime villain of online gambling has one of the lowest rates of participation in this age group. As an antidote to those who are oversimplistic on the stats, children gambling online are largely getting access from their adult parents, who are allowing their children to use their online gambling accounts. To conclude, let us tell the kids some home truths about the pitfalls of gambling, but let us not scaremonger them or ourselves in this House.

14:58

[Lord Herbert of South Downs (Con)]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating the Minister on her reappointment. We are discussing gambling harm among young people, but perhaps we should spare a thought to the trauma caused to the Ministers responsible for gambling policy. I apologise if I am about to add to that.

Children under 18 are prohibited from gambling, but we also need to protect young adults—the 18 to 25 year-olds who are permitted to gamble—from harm. Fortunately, problem gambling rates among young people remain low. The problem gambling rate for 16 to 24 year-olds, according to the NHS Health Survey for England, fell from 1% in 2018 to 0.5% in 2024. Gambling for young people is regulated, with additional safeguards, including lower online slots stake limits for under-25s, age-targeting restrictions, deposit-limit prompts and financial vulnerability checks.

We can debate the scope of these safeguards but I want to draw attention to the danger of making the wrong policy choice, with particular reference to horseracing. There is a strong case for saying that racing is different and should be treated differently when it comes to policy relating to gambling harm, which I fear it is not. First, British racing is financially dependent on a strong legal betting market. A long-standing, mutually dependent relationship exists between racing and betting, worth approximately £350 million annually to the sport through key revenue streams such as media rights payments, sponsorship and the horserace betting levy. Secondly, the potential harm from betting on racing is relatively low. It actually carries roughly the same risk as that of betting on lottery scratchcards.

Nevertheless, two weeks ago, the Gambling Commission announced that, following a protracted pilot period, there will be a phased introduction of financial risk assessments, known as affordability checks, on betting over the course of an implementation period of unspecified length. These checks will have severe financial implications for racing and the economy, as well as subjecting racing betters to unwarranted levels of intrusion. Independent modelling has suggested that British racing could lose up to £250 million in five years due to the checks, while customers refusing to provide financial documents will lead to significant reductions in betting turnover and an estimated loss of more than £13 million per year in horserace betting levy receipts. We were promised by the previous Government that the checks would be introduced only if they were “fully frictionless”, but the checks have been proven by the Gambling Commission’s own pilot not to be so.

The crucial point of relevance to this debate is that, far from protecting consumers, these checks will have the opposite effect. They will drive more customers to the illegal market, which puts them at far greater risk of gambling-related harm, as well as starving the Treasury of much-needed revenue. Young people are rightly being taught about credit checks in school and will be increasingly worried about their credit rating. So now we have a new generation who will actually be incentivised to avoid financial risk checks and instead turn to the black market. Illegal operators can advertise without age controls and offer none of the protections required in the regulated sector. Black market advertising is extremely effective, not least because its prices are so much better because it does not pay tax or the levy. During the World Cup, several illegal adverts appeared using AI-generated versions of Harry Kane promoting wins on illegal sites. That is something that regulated UK operators are rightly not permitted to do.

Concerns about affordability checks for adults are shared by the betting industry, politicians, campaigners and policymakers, all of whom have repeatedly warned of serious unintended consequences for British racing. Those adverse consequences have been highlighted in this House and by concerned Members of Parliament. I find it difficult to understand why Ministers have allowed the Gambling Commission to proceed. Further, the policy has been signed off by the commission without key stakeholders in racing and betting being able to see vital evidence about the impact of the pilot. That is deeply unsatisfactory.

Perhaps I may ask the Minister two specific questions. How are the Government measuring the impact of affordability checks? When will the data from the pilots be available for all to understand? The perverse consequence of current policy is that people, including young adults, will be driven to the unregulated black market. Of course that is not the intention of the Government but it is the risk. Affordability checks were not this Government’s policy. The plan was inherited from the last Conservative Government. Even when shadow Ministers and the think tank architects of the policy now warn that the checks are not proceeding as they intended and should be halted, the Gambling Commission ploughs on regardless.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

I apologise to the noble Lord, but this is a timed debate, so can he come to his conclusion?

[Lord Herbert of South Downs (Con)]

I shall conclude in five seconds. With a new Prime Minister and new priorities, I respectfully suggest that this would be a good time to recalibrate a misguided and ill-targeted policy, give clear direction to the Gambling Commission and focus on the real issue here, which is problematic and harmful gambling in other areas.

15:04

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, I put on the record that the Green Party very much supports the affordability checks that the Government are planning to introduce. We have an awful lot of money sloshing around in the UK economy in all sorts of areas, and keeping a closer eye on it is clearly a very good idea. I should perhaps declare an interest in that tomorrow I will be speaking at a protest on the 100th anniversary of the first official greyhound race, calling for a ban on greyhound racing in England to follow those in Scotland and Wales.

I declare my position as a member of Peers for Gambling Reform and thank our formidable leader, the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for securing this debate. I echo his hope that our new Prime Minister might act at scale to reverse many of the disastrous impacts of the ill-conceived Gambling Act 2005.

We are focusing today on children and, like many noble Lords, I will draw on the Young People and Gambling 2025 report from the Gambling Commission, particularly looking at advertising. Essentially, half of young people—children under 18—are exposed to gambling-related adverts weekly. Boys are more likely than girls to be exposed, because of the very strong sporting link, which has been closely identified. They also have a huge amount of exposure to social media personalities promoting gambling.

Another report, released last year, from GambleAware, revealed that children as young as 11 reported that they are regularly tempted to try betting, after being flooded on their social media feeds on the apps with celebrities and sports start promoting gambling. As the noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, said, this an avoidable harm, to which we are subjecting our young people.

I want to go to the young people themselves, because the GambleAware study found that nearly four in five children said that nobody under the age of 18 should be exposed to gambling adverts. We often hear about how we should listen to the people affected. Let us listen to the young people who are saying, “Stop exposing us to this”. We know it is harmful and very seductive. That is the reality.

On that, I come to something that is absolutely directed at young people. Anyone who has a young person in their life will probably be aware of Roblox—a hugely popular gaming platform. I have to credit Sky News, particularly reporter Mickey Carroll and colleagues, who have demonstrated again and again how much illegal casinos are advertising on Roblox to children. After that group of journalists reported in 2024, some of the illegal casinos were shut down. Roblox Corporation, with its capitalisation of $40 billion and 2,400 staff, shut down some of those casinos. But, just in May, the reporter found an email in their inbox, stating, “BloxFlip is Back!”. This is an illegal casino, operating on this children’s gaming platform. It emailed her, because she had signed up to research it, to say that it is now back and she could play.

Yes, many of these illegal casinos have a geoblock, so, theoretically, you are not able to access them in the UK. I am sure that most noble Lords in this debate do not need to be reminded about VPNs, but should any of the children happen not to know about VPNs, you can find on all the chat platforms the casino operators helpfully telling people how they can get round geoblocks by using VPNs. I have based that on the research and media reports.

I finally come to the cry from the heart from a woman, who is a mother of two children, including a 10 year-old called George, who is autistic and has ADHD. This ties to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, about the convergence of gambling practices and gaming practices. This mother reflects on how randomised rewards, rare item drops, daily log-in streaks, limited-time events and constant prompts to return use many of the same behavioural principles as gambling. I ask noble Lords to imagine one final story. There was a reward that was available only if you played on Christmas day. This mother talked about Christmas day being a warzone in her family as a result of that.

15:09

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for speaking in all three debates today, and I too congratulate the Minister on her additional appointment. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster, on securing this debate. He has identified a problem that requires government action. However, action by government alone is not sufficient.

Too much time in our courts is taken up with violence and theft caused by alcohol abuse, drug habits and gambling addiction. The problems are not unrelated. Public Health England’s 2021 report on gambling harms found a clear link between alcohol consumption and harmful gambling, with 35% of non-drinkers participating in gambling, compared with 74% of those who drank 50-plus units of alcohol per week. In terms of problem gambling, court appearances are the tip of the iceberg.

As we have heard, the extent to which gambling affects young people is apparent in the figures. Online marketing is a particular problem, given that it is inherently skewed towards young people. They are susceptible, given that studies show that they do not fully understand how odds work, adopting simplistic views of risk. One study found that, among children who gamble, the most common reason for doing so is because it is fun. Once hooked, we know the problems in terms of psychological distress. Young people in the 18 to 24 age range who experience problem gambling are around 50% more likely than average to be experiencing high psychological stress and low mental well-being, and are over five times more likely to be at high risk of suicide.

The problem is getting more severe as young people rely increasingly on social media and have difficulty distinguishing advertising from independent comment. One study found that most 11 to 17 year-olds have seen or heard gambling advertising through online platforms, with such platforms rarely including visible risk warnings or transparent disclosure. I should add that I was not surprised that one survey found that certain adverts for safer gambling make the viewers want to gamble more. There is a problem especially with unlicensed gambling sites and with influencers—a rather benign term for what are manipulators—who advertise gambling-related content.

The problem is not confined to online betting. One study found that, of 11 to 15 year-olds who reported gambling, 8% had been to a betting shop. As the briefing paper from the Library reveals, of 11 to 17 year-olds who had experienced gambling, more than a third had played arcade gaming machines.

This is an issue for government. I do not share the Government’s somewhat rosy view of the robustness of the current statutory and voluntary framework. We need much tougher controls. I concur with the recommendations of the various parliamentary bodies adumbrated in the excellent Library briefing. My view is that we need to go further and give more powers to local authorities to regulate casinos, clubs and bookmakers.

I appreciate that a task force addressing illegal gambling has been established and that a consultation is under way. However, it would be helpful if the Minister can tell us what is being done to tackle what is known as skins betting—I know the Government are aware of the issue—and what plans they have to ensure that gambling ads emphasise the dangers of gambling. Children in particular, as we have heard, need educating as to the dangers.

My final but most important question derives from the number of online gaming sites that operate outside national jurisdiction. As the speech of my noble friend Lady Anelay showed, action by the UK Government is necessary but not sufficient. There needs to be greater cross-border co-operation. Can the Minister update us on what is being done to generate international action to tackle what is a major and growing problem?

15:14

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Foster for bringing this subject before us. It is a difficult one. We all know why it is a difficult one. If you are taking money out of somebody’s pocket for gambling, it is not there for other subjects. It can become an addiction and destroy their life. If we forget that, we forget why we are concerned about it. The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, made the secondary but very important point that sport is threatened and potentially destroyed by gambling. The whole essence of sport is threatened. The World Cup could have been made an irrelevance by a betting conspiracy. All that excitement, all that adrenaline, all that bringing together, all that positiveness could have been ruined by one betting scandal. Cricket came close at one point.

Racing is the most experienced bit of this. I live in the village of Lambourn. The amount of energy that goes into stopping illegal interference through gambling in racing is massive and has gone on for a long time. I know people who have been involved in this, hopefully all coming out on the right side of the law, but accusations have gone to the police. It can pervert things. What are we doing to stop betting behaviour becoming endemic and uncontrolled in the young? That is the question we are asking ourselves here. We had only one voice saying that this is not a problem, but the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, is used to being by herself.

What are we doing to get in? There is PSHE and GambleAware. Do we do enough in other bits? I have often guarded against this when it comes to education, but are we teaching people that at the roulette table, it is not that you will win big once in a while? The odds that you will win are always pretty bad on every single turn. Gambling is there because somebody expects to make money from you and normally does—that is why they are still there.

This is something that I do not think we get across enough. There is a difference between playing cards for a few pennies but then suddenly realising, “Oh, I’m going to lose if I play against somebody else”, and going to one of these big, organised sites that are always at your pocket, always telling you that you might win big when we know that, the vast majority of times, you will not. That is why they are doing it. They are saying to you, “Yes, here’s a gamble that gives you a small buzz”, but it will take your money off you consistently. Kevin Keegan’s father may have won big to give him football boots. If he had not bet on the horses regularly, he might have got him new ones earlier.

We have to make sure that we get information about the damage into the young and their parents. There are age barriers over these new formats that people do not understand. Are we making sure that people understand the inherent dangers? My noble friend and I have often talked about loot boxes. I have met distinguished games designers who think they destroy the essence of many of the challenging and more complicated games out there, ones with some intellectual content: “Spend some money and you might get the thing you need to carry on with your activity—but you probably won’t, so you’d better buy a few more”. Then you have lots of wasted product, but the essence is there. What are the Government doing to inform those involved, those who are at risk and those who influence them that this activity will take money off you and give it to somebody else? No matter what the buzz is, that is the answer. Unless we get that established, we will miss the essence of it because that is what it is about. That is why it happens.

15:19

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for this very important debate. I also welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, back to her place.

First, it is important to define what is meant by young people. Those under the age of 18 are classed as children and, despite the Government’s incoherence on this in other policy areas, gambling remains prohibited for children. Adults aged 18 to 25, on the other hand, are free to gamble but with additional safeguards such as financial vulnerability checks, deposit limit prompts and other age-targeted restrictions.

The previous Government were proactive in tackling issues related to gambling. In 2019, a gambling clinic for those aged 13 to 25 was introduced as part of the NHS long-term plan. We published a review of the Gambling Act 2005 in December 2020 to assess whether it provided the right balance. In 2023 the gambling White Paper sought to strengthen protections for children and young adults significantly, including through the statutory levy and stake limits on online slots.

That is not to say that there are no longer any problems. More than 16% of calls to the National Gambling Helpline came from those aged 18 to 25. Technology is constantly evolving, and co-operation with the sector is crucial.

However, the regulated sector is itself threatened by the illegal gambling market, whose operators can advertise without any of the protections mentioned in your Lordships’ House. According to forecasts from the World Advertising Research Center, advertising spend by licensed operators is expected to decrease by more than 9% this year, while spend by unregulated operators is projected to grow by 32%. By 2028, this could mean that illegal firms account for the majority of gambling advertising spend. That is why any government action to tackle the issues must be thought through.

A strong legal betting market can also provide notable benefits—for example, accumulated spend by betting companies in horseracing is around £20 million on direct sponsorship and £165 million on marketing. Media rights, sponsorship and the horserace betting levy together contribute around £350 million every year to British horseracing. We therefore do not want to drive more gambling activity into the illegal market and negatively impact other industries and legal sports.

The Gambling Commission found a 3% increase in the number of 11 to 17 year-olds participating in unregulated gambling between 2024 and 2025. This can be just a bet between friends, but children can also be targeted with advertisements via social media. We on these Benches have argued for a social media ban for under-16s that would remove children’s exposure to advertisements on unregulated sites. I would appreciate it if the Minister could give us on an update on the Government’s progress in finally implementing a social media ban.

In addition, will the funds raised by the statutory levy, which came into force last year, be used for an evidence-based response to the issues raised by noble Lords today? What other steps are the Government taking to crack down on the black market? I am grateful for the valuable insights of noble Lords to this debate and I look forward to the Minister’s response.

15:23

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, and The Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Twycross) (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been an important debate, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for securing it and all noble Lords who took part. I also thank noble Lords from across the House for their kind words.

Let me be clear: this Government are fully committed to ensuring that the protections are robust to shield children and young people from gambling-related harm. Over the past two years, important progress has been made to strengthen protections to reduce the risk of gambling-related harm for young people.

I say in response to the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox—and, I hope, with all noble Lords’ support—that we will always follow the evidence in the policy-making process in this area. We know that the digital world moves faster than traditional regulation; this is why we introduced a £2 online slots stake limit for 18 to 24 year-olds—a targeted intervention aimed at young people, who are particularly vulnerable to unaffordable losses. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, said, harmful gambling appears higher among boys and young men.

The noble Lord, Lord Evans of Rainow, asked about the definition of age. I think we are clear on what categorises children and young people within gambling policy, but I am happy to discuss that with him if he thinks that we do not have it clear enough.

In the land-based sector we have rolled out Think 25, replacing Think 21. We believe that this will minimise underage in-person betting among children, which has remained at about 1% since its introduction. We recently consulted on raising the statutory age limit for category D cash-out slot-style machines from 16 to 18. Legislation will build on the sector’s voluntary commitment to ensure that land-based venues further protect children and young people from gambling-related harm. A response to that consultation will be published in due course.

A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Foster, spoke about the impact and potential impacts of advertising on children and young people. The Government recognise those concerns, which is why we have existing robust protections in place to ensure that advertising does not exacerbate harm among children and young people. The ASA requires that online operators use all available tools to exclude under-18s and vulnerable groups from advertising exposure and, since October 2025, has prohibited influencers with more than 100,000 under-18 followers from promoting gambling, to ensure that it is not marketed as a risk-free lifestyle choice. I hope that will be music to the ears of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth. The Government’s planned social media ban for under-16s will also help to reduce exposure to gambling adverts on social media.

The noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, highlighted issues around illegal gambling, which was also mentioned by a number of other noble Lords. While licensed operators are subject to strict advertising rules, illegal operators present a very different challenge. This is not a matter I take lightly, which is precisely why I personally established the Illegal Gambling Taskforce in January this year and have chaired it. It includes an illegal advertising subgroup. I hosted the most recent meeting of the taskforce last week. By bringing together industry platforms, regulators and the Government, we are collectively identifying ways to clamp down on illegal advertising and ensure that exposure is reduced for young people. I will provide an update on our progress later in the year.

The noble Lords, Lord Foster and Lord Addington, and the noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, raised the question of loot boxes. We recognise the close links between gaming and gambling, especially through loot box mechanics that can imitate gambling. Alongside the independent research on skins gambling that we published last year, we have also commissioned independent research to assess the effectiveness of the industry guidance on loot boxes. We have engaged relevant government departments, regulators and industry to consider the results and will publish the report and set out our next steps in due course.

The noble Lord, Lord Norton, raised a particular point about skins gambling. There are currently no licensed operators that offer skins gambling, meaning that any websites doing so may be operating illegally. The Gambling Commission is clear that, where products amount to illegal gambling, it will take swift action.

The noble Lord, Lord Evans of Rainow, and the noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, talked about evolving products. I absolutely recognise that this is fast-moving. DCMS and the Gambling Commission are working together to understand the market, including evolving products, and monitor developments closely.

The noble Lords, Lord Norton and Lord Addington, raised education and how children might be taught about odds in school. Since 2020, children have been taught about the risks relating to gambling as part of the relationships, sex and health curriculum. The Gambling Commission publishes an annual survey on children’s exposure to and involvement in all types of gambling to help us monitor gambling-related harm.

The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay of St Johns, asked what progress has been made in ratifying the Macolin convention. I am delighted to say that we are making progress with the ratification of the Macolin convention —the Convention on the Manipulation of Sports Competitions. The explanatory memorandum laid by the FCDO is undergoing scrutiny by the Lords International Agreements Committee. Ratifying the convention will demonstrate UK leadership and our commitment to working with international colleagues to tackle match fixing.

The noble Lords, Lord Herbert and Lord Evans, raised points around the importance and financial significance of gambling to horseracing, and the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, in particular, raised financial risk assessments. We support the recent announcement by the Gambling Commission about implementing FRAs for online gambling through a carefully phased approach, working with the sector in an implementation phase. This was a decision for the Gambling Commission, which has met stakeholders throughout the recent pilot process to ensure that implementation is focused on protecting consumers. The Government have encouraged the commission to continue and increase engagement with the gambling industry. Successful implementation is vital, and this requires engagement from all interested parties.

The vast majority of customers will never require an FRA. People who place an occasional bet or even regularly spend hundreds of pounds would be unlikely to need a check. I am happy to meet any Peer to discuss FRAs, as is the Gambling Commission. We can arrange that subsequently. The noble Lord, Lord Herbert, also talked about publishing data and measuring the impact of FRAs. The Government will work with the Gambling Commission to ensure successful implementation. There will be a significant implementation phase that will involve key stakeholders, including the horseracing sector and operators’ implementation groups. I will raise the point about what data can be released with the Gambling Commission. Where it can, we are encouraging it to do so.

The noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, raised important points about how we need to be proportionate in our response to gambling. I reassure the noble Baroness that we understand the importance of striking the right balance between acting on problem or harmful gambling and ensuring that there are no unintended consequences for those who enjoy a casual bet and do not suffer gambling harm. As I said earlier, we are determined to follow the evidence in how we implement gambling-related policies.

I thank again the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for bringing this important debate before your Lordships’ House. I thank all noble Lords for their thoughtful contributions. Today’s debate has demonstrated our shared determination to protect children and young people from gambling-related harm. We have built a strong foundation over these past two years to ensure that those most at risk, including young people, are protected from gambling harm. We have committed to reviewing a range of selected policy measures through the Gambling Act review evaluation to ensure that they had the intended impact. We also look forward to any future evaluations to understand the impact of our measures and inform future policy-making. We will continue to work closely with the Gambling Commission, the industry, and health and education partners to keep pace with emerging risks and to do everything we can to protect children and young people from gambling harms.

Creative Industries: Qualifications

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

Motion to Take Note

15:33

Moved by

[Baroness Keeley]

That this House takes note of the role of the current level 3 qualifications for the creative industries, and of the potential impact of their replacement with T Levels and V Levels on the creative industries.

[Baroness Keeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to open this debate on the important role of current level 3 qualifications for the creative industries and the potential impact of their replacement with T-levels and V-levels. While this debate affects the wider creative industries, I will focus on music education and the BRIT School as case studies to draw out the current strengths and some of the risks of the Government’s reform proposals. I thank UK Music and the Musicians’ Union for their support with a briefing for this debate, and the BRIT School, the University of the Arts London, Rockschool/RSL Awards, the ISM and the BPI for briefings.

At its heart, this debate is about whether replacing large numbers of existing level 3 qualifications, such as extended diplomas and BTEC nationals, will improve quality and clarity or will reduce choice for learners and remove programme pathways that currently enable many young people to succeed.

This issue has been a source of concern across the creative sector and among awarding bodies, including the University of the Arts London, since the reforms to post-16 education were first proposed by the Conservative Government in 2019. Those reforms sought to simplify level 3 qualifications around A-levels and T-levels, while removing public funding from qualifications deemed to overlap with them. However, campaigners argued that this risked removing successful applied qualifications which served different learners and different purposes.

It was therefore right that the Labour Government reviewed those reforms in 2024. My noble friend the Minister, writing about that review in FE Week in September 2024, stated:

“Where the review identifies the balance of learner and employer needs within a sector requires level 3 qualifications other than T-levels and A-levels, we will maintain the relevant qualifications. This may well be in areas that overlap with T-levels, which is a change from the approach”


of the previous Government. For creative subjects, and music in particular, that principle is essential. However, in October 2025, the Government’s White Paper on post-16 education proposed the introduction of V-levels and T-levels to replace many existing qualifications. I feel it is important that in this debate we consider the potential implications for the creative industries before any more work is done to make changes.

The UK music industry is one of our great success stories. It generates £8 billion a year for the economy, supports 220,000 jobs across the country and projects British culture around the world. Yet every performer, producer, composer, sound engineer, technician and educator begins somewhere. If we weaken the educational pathways into music, we weaken the future workforce of the sector itself. Music education is not simply about producing future music professionals. It equips young people with creativity, confidence, resilience and the skills of collaboration, and it improves well-being while delivering significant cultural and social benefits.

The music industry has concerns about the proposed reforms. Reflecting these concerns, I will argue for four specific adjustments to the Government’s proposals. First, the Government should be willing to keep existing successful vocational level 3 qualifications. Secondly, they should work with industry and educators to develop larger V-levels that meet the needs of the creative industries. Thirdly, they should consider whether the T-level model can work to address the technical skills needed in the music sector, and with industry and educators to develop music T-levels that are appropriate for the sector. Fourthly, they should take urgent action to address the decline in A-level music.

On the case for retaining existing Level 3 qualifications, at present, V-levels are a blank slate. They could become successful qualifications if they build on the strengths of established ones but, until that happens, it is vital that successful applied general qualifications, including extended diplomas, remain available. That is particularly important because the numbers taking vocational music qualifications are growing, at a time when GCSE and A-level music entries have been declining. Between 2018 and 2021, the number of pupils taking vocational music qualifications after key stage 4 increased by 48%, demonstrating strong demand and significant untapped potential to engage young people in music education.

The IFS has argued that the Government’s post-16 reform proposals are especially likely to affect those groups who benefit most from vocational pathways: students from lower-income backgrounds, pupils eligible for free school meals, students with special educational needs, students with disabilities, and those who are not yet ready for T-levels. The Cultural Learning Alliance reports that 54% of schools in the most deprived fifth of local authorities have no GCSE music entrants, compared with 21% in the least deprived fifth. Any reduction in proven vocational pathways is therefore likely to have a disproportionate impact on disadvantaged young people.

Successful institutions such as the BRIT School rely heavily on qualifications such as the UAL level 3 extended diploma. There remains no clear like-for-like replacement, and that is putting proven pathways at risk. The value of these pathways can be seen in the achievements of BRIT School alumni including Amy Winehouse, Raye, Olivia Dean, Jessie J and Katie Melua. Over 30 years, the BRIT School has shown how specialist vocational education can transform opportunity. In 2025, 98% of its students progressed to higher education, apprenticeships, employment or further training. The BRIT School warns that if future qualifications move away from the characteristics that have made vocational creative education successful—accessibility, depth of learning and authentic assessment —there is a real risk of narrowing the pipeline of talent entering what is one of the UK’s fastest-growing sectors. Can my noble friend the Minister therefore clarify whether she will look again at retaining current creative sector level 3 qualifications?

If some existing qualifications are ultimately replaced, it is essential that any replacement can serve the same function. The proposed model of small V-levels, equivalent in size to a single A-level, is seen as unlikely to equip students sufficiently for further study or skilled employment in music and the performing arts. Progression within music, the performing arts and other creative industries requires learners to build a portfolio of creative, technical and professional skills over time. Applied level 3 programmes, equivalent to three A-levels, are particularly well suited to supporting that progression.

The proposed focus on V-levels risks dismantling established two-year programmes, including the UAL and RSL extended diplomas, which currently provide successful progression routes into higher education and skilled employment. In specialist areas, such as music performance or music technology, there is a fear that learners could be left without a coherent programme of study. There are also concerns about whether campuses delivering a broad range of subjects at single V-level may lack the specialist facilities—such as recording studios, rehearsal spaces, and music technology equipment—essential to high-quality music performance, composition and music tech courses. I hope my noble friend the Minister can tell me whether the Government will actively consider the larger V-levels, equivalent in size to current extended diplomas, for specialist creative subjects, as recommended by the Becky Francis review.

The question of larger V-levels leads directly to my third point: T-levels. At present, there is no music T-level. However, the challenge is not simply the absence of a music T-level but that the current T-level model is not seen as compatible with the realities of employment within the music industry and other creative industry roles. The music industry is characterised by freelancers, portfolio careers, micro-businesses, project work and self-employment. The proposed T-levels, with their one-size-fits-all lengthy industry placement and narrow and prescriptive national occupational standards, are seen as incompatible. The Curriculum and Assessment Review explicitly recommended a large, flexible V-level for creative disciplines. Replacing this with a single, narrowly defined T-level risks misunderstanding how careers in music develop. Without significant structural changes to T-levels, it is difficult to see how T-levels in their current form could achieve broad uptake among music learners and the music sector.

A triple-size V-level would be much more likely to meet the needs of learners and the music sector. The Government could also work closely with the music sector to develop a broader variety of T-levels that address the range of technical skills needed in the music sector. However, that would need to be accompanied by the financial support that would enable SMEs and other small music businesses to offer placements. So, alongside considering a large, flexible V-level, will my noble friend the Minister commit to working directly with music industry employers, educators and representative bodies to develop a qualification framework that genuinely reflects employment patterns within the sector?

We cannot discuss post-16 education in isolation from what happens earlier in the system. The decline in A-level music that we are seeing begins with declining opportunities to study music at earlier stages of education. To ensure the health of the creative talent pipeline, we must also address the decline in A-level music as a matter of urgency. As I said in our recent debate on live music, our Labour Government inherited an education system in which the EBacc had squeezed music education from the curriculum, damaging both music teacher recruitment and retention and contributing to declining GCSE and A-level entries. A-level music remains in crisis. Entries have fallen by 41% since 2013 to a record low of 4,635 students, while GCSE music entries are around 27% lower than in 2010. Disturbingly, in 18 local authorities, either only one school offers music qualification, either A-level or vocational, or no schools do. That declining trend must be reversed if we are serious about protecting the music talent pipeline into universities, conservatoires, orchestras and the wider music industry.

The Government’s planned reforms to EBacc and Progress 8 should help strengthen arts provision and encourage greater uptake. However, reversing the cumulative effects of many years of curriculum narrowing and funding pressures will require additional action. That should include reforming A-level music in close collaboration with the music sector; broadening the syllabus to reflect the diversity of musical traditions, including black music, that are shaping contemporary British music; completing the current GCSE music review in partnership with the sector; and investing in the music education workforce by improving recruitment and increasing teacher training incentives. Finally, it should include expanding access to music-making opportunities in and beyond school for children from lower-income families.

As I have said, the case for music education extends beyond the needs of the creative industries. Academic research has consistently demonstrated its benefits for cognitive development, the acquisition of adaptive and collaborative skills, and mental health. Research by Making Music and the Association of British Orchestras found that most adults who received music education or learned an instrument at school credit it with providing vital skills that supported their careers, regardless of sector. As we heard on Monday, my noble friend the Minister progressed with both the piano and the cello, so she will understand the skills that she acquired.

Studies suggest that pupils who continue learning music throughout school tend to achieve higher academic outcomes than their peers. Public support for music education is strong. Research commissioned by UK Music found that more than half of parents whose children learn an instrument believe that it enhances creativity, confidence, perseverance and resilience. These educational and social benefits should be considered alongside the economic value of music education when decisions are being made about future qualifications.

This debate is fundamentally about talent, opportunity and growth. The United Kingdom’s creative industries are admired throughout the world, but their future success is not guaranteed. It depends on the choices we make now about education and skills. The question before us is not whether reform is needed but whether reform expands opportunity or narrows it. My concern is that, unless the Government build on what already works, some of the most successful pathways into our creative industries may be lost. Existing level 3 creative qualifications have enabled thousands of young people, including many from disadvantaged backgrounds, to progress into higher education, skilled employment and successful careers in the creative industries. Unless suitable alternatives exist and are shown to work, those pathways should be protected. I therefore urge the Government to retain successful creative level 3 qualifications, to work closely with industries and educators on larger V-levels and fit for purpose T-levels in technical music skills, and to take urgent action to reverse the decline in A-level music.

If we get this right, we will do more than reform qualifications; we will widen opportunity, strengthen social mobility, secure the talent pipeline for our world-leading creative industries, and ensure that the next generation of musicians, producers, composers and creative entrepreneurs can fulfil their potential. That would be good for our young people, good for education and good for the future prosperity of our country. I beg to move.

15:47

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, so early in this debate, and I thank her for securing this subject for us to discuss. I echo much of what she said, which I will return to in a moment.

I congratulate the Minister on surviving the reshuffle cull. I have seen on social media how pleased she is to have held on to her role and how much she enjoys it. In principle, it is great to see her on the Front Bench because the future success of our creative industries, led by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, depends very much on close co-operation with the Department for Education. It is an interesting point that the music education system that the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, spoke of so eloquently is effectively funded out of the Department for Education via the Arts Council. Many of the high-level schemes that support elite arts education—I am not embarrassed to use the word “elite”—such as the music and dance scheme, are also funded by the department of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith. It is vital to see this co-operation.

Although the noble Lord, Lord Gove, is often criticised for the EBacc, it was thanks to him, when he was Education Secretary, that we were able to bring some form of strategy to music education, with the creation of music education hubs, a more uniform funding system for local authorities and a joining up of separate initiatives, such as the In Harmony scheme, to ensure their success.

I will dwell briefly on the In Harmony scheme, which represents a massive career-enhancing opportunity for the noble Baroness on the Front Bench. Although inspired by Julian Lloyd Webber, it was implemented by a Labour Culture Secretary known as Andy Burnham. I visited one of the In Harmony schemes when I was a Minister. It was in west Everton, not unadjacent to a football club supported by a man called Andy Burnham. I will always remember that visit. It was a very emotional one, because the sheer power of music to inspire children from difficult backgrounds, their parents and their carers was a wonder to behold. I hope that, in the next three months, I will see the Minister and the Prime Minister visiting the In Harmony scheme in west Everton, to emphasise the importance of music education, as the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, pointed out, in not just creating the musicians of the future but inspiring many young people with the rigour, discipline and sense of responsibility that will enhance their prospects in many different ways.

It is good to have a former Culture Secretary as our Prime Minister. The more I debate issues in this place, the more I think not about picking winners but that this is a fantastic country that should be focusing on our natural advantages. We need a Government who will focus and double down on them. It goes without saying that the creative industries are one of those advantages—film, television, video games, fashion and indeed music. The noble Baroness mentioned the BRIT School. It is a phenomenal institution, set up by the record industry, which has itself, perhaps inadvertently, been picking winners, from Adele to Olivia Dean, throughout its existence. It obviously needs continued support from government, but it is important that we understand just how important the creative industries are, not just for our national life but, frankly, for our economy.

In looking at the future of T-levels and V-levels for the creative industries, I wonder whether I am wrong in thinking that perhaps they have been put at the back of the queue. The first V-levels coming in 2027 are, as I understand it, digital, accounting and child development —very important issues—but creative T-levels are due to arrive only in 2029 and creative V-levels a year later in 2030. They are the last carriages on the train. I would be interested to hear from the Minister how the department decided to sequence the introduction of these new qualifications. If it is because they are harder to design, that would be understandable.

I hold some reservations on the evidence so far, and I think the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, referred to this in her remarks. A V-level carries 360 guided learning hours, but the BRIT School has said that something like 1,000 guided learning hours are needed—360 hours is the equivalent of a single A-level. The qualifications being replaced, including the larger BTECs, offer a great deal more. In the Government’s own consultation response, industry and universities both said that 360 hours was not enough to give them confidence.

V-level content is tied to occupational standards set by Skills England. That might be a perfectly sensible discipline for accountancy, where an accountant is a recognisable thing, but UK Music put the difficulty well: creative careers are portfolio careers, and forcing qualifications to align with occupational standards that do not exist risks making them irrelevant to how the industry actually works. In 20 years around this sector, I have met very few people in the sector doing one job. The Government have promised to consult on content before these courses launch, and I would like the Minister’s assurance that this means the sector will be helping to co-design them, not merely commenting on a fait accompli.

15:53

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, for initiating this debate. I should also like to give a shout out to level 1 and level 2 qualifications, because level 1 may go to an adult who has never gained a national qualification, and the boost to confidence around learning and the sense of achievement can be life-changing. Level 1 may well lead to someone going on to level 2 and even level 3—someone who had written themselves off as dim and useless until national recognition, even at a lowly level, encouraged and incentivised them. Level 3 is evidence of someone who has the skills and knowledge to operate on their own in their chosen field.

Creative skills used to be validated and awarded by City & Guilds, where I worked for 20 years, initially on hairdressing, wig-making and beauty therapy—one can be quite versatile in this life, I find—and allied skills. In all those areas, it was possible to go all the way to fellowship at level 7. I then moved on to look after the senior awards, levels 4 to 7, with post-nominal letters and gowns and hoods to indicate their parity with university degrees.

Sadly, City & Guilds was betrayed by the then chairman, chief executive and finance officer, who managed to bypass the trustees, council and president—the Princess Royal—of this long-standing royal charter charity founded by the City of London and livery companies in 1878 and highly regarded around the world for the quality and standards of its work-based qualifications. They sold the awarding part to a foreign-owned commercial company, PeopleCert. A small team has been left under the title of the City & Guilds Foundation to continue to support the charitable activities and sustain the royal charter. Two of the three perpetrators were given lucrative welcomes and subsequently sacked. How strange life can be. Anyway, the Charity Commission is investigating how this could happen, as is a growing band of staff, members, fellows and friends of the institute, but what is crucial is that candidates do not suffer for this. The qualifications that they are working for will continue to be delivered, because they do not deserve to be deflected by the machinations of people who should have known better. We have been assured that this will be the case and that the qualifications will continue to be to the highest standard, as they always were.

There is always a problem with vocational practical technical qualifications. Most parliamentarians and civil servants have gone the university route. They do not know about further education colleges and the amazing work that they do or the very wide range of qualifications and individuals they support, so they meddle, in a way that we do not see with GCSE or A-level. We continue to have BTECs, understood by students, universities, employers and, crucially, many parents, but they are now under threat as the newer, shinier T-levels—technical, you understand, being so much classier than vocational—arrive on the scene, to be followed by V-levels. Come back, vocational, all is forgiven. It takes a while for any new qualification to be understood and valued, more so for practical than academic ones. Just as T-levels have taken a while to find their place, who knows how long it will take for V-levels to be the talk of the town?

We should thank the university technical colleges, the valuable UTCs of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, which provide a clear path to skilled employment, because a number of them have developed particular expertise in supporting the creative industries, where employers continue to face skills shortages. The creative industries are among the most valued and valuable of our industries. The UK leads the world in many of these skill sets. The Heritage Crafts Association produces a regular list of endangered crafts, some continued by a sole trader, where taking on an apprentice would severely affect their ability to earn a living. Yet anyone who embarks on silversmithing, clock-making, enamelling, basket-making or upholstering knows the immense satisfaction in creativity. I will not talk about music, because the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, has spoken so eloquently about that, but music and dance are vital skills which really enhance life. If we lost any of these skills, it would be a real loss to our quality of life as well as to the economy, so we should venture with extreme caution in changing qualifications that are valued and understood.

Why not put effort into attracting the young, and not so young, into supporting crafts in danger which could enrich their lives? Why are the Government embarking on V-levels when there are already established qualifications for the creative industries? Many are under threat and need support, not a pointless exercise in rebranding. There are level 3 diplomas and extended diplomas with some 84,000 students, who do not need to be distracted by the arrival of a new kid on the block in the form of mysterious V-levels. Please will the Minister commit to pause defunding of existing creative levels 1, 2 and 3 qualifications until creative T-levels and V-levels have been fully designed and piloted and shown to deliver work-based standards and comparable outcomes for progression? This is particularly important for SEND learners and disadvantaged students, many of whom may have talents in creativity far in excess of their abilities in other subjects. I look forward to the Minister’s reply and, like others, I welcome her back to her brief.

15:59

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my education interests, in particular as a member of Pearson’s qualifications committee. It is always a joy to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and I, too, pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, for securing and introducing this debate. I add that I am delighted that the Minister is still in her place after the reshuffle.

My first job, at 13, was in the West End production of “Oliver!”. Seven years later, I co-founded a theatre company with Sam Mendes and went on to manage arts centres. My wife, after drama school, spent years delivering Creative Partnerships in schools. My daughter Ruth is now a successful opera director. All three of us have done well thanks to the vocational pull of the performing arts. But this is an industry that cannot be measured by productivity and earnings at 30; it is about vocation and about weaving the cultural fabric that binds us together—witness the connection between fans and players created by “Wonderwall” at the World Cup.

I want to focus today on why T-levels and V-levels, as designed, cannot deliver the talent that our nation needs to maintain our status as a creative superpower. I am a keen supporter of the post-16 reforms in general but not as currently applied to this sector. T-levels and the proposed V-levels are built on national occupational standards—competencies mapped to defined jobs. How will that work for creative artists?

My good friend Emily Burnett is a BAFTA-winning actor for film and TV and a theatre performer; she is also a writer, a director and a producer. Steve McQueen is a Turner Prize winner for video installation, has been shown at the Tate and the Serpentine and won an Oscar for the film “12 Years a Slave”—one career, moving fluidly between fine art, documentary and narrative film. No single occupational standard could describe these trajectories, let alone train for them. While the creative arts require technical skills, they also need aptitude, fluidity and inspiration. They are more than the sum of their constituent skills.

This points to a category error at the heart of the reform. T-levels are, by design, technical qualifications, built to prepare a student for a specific occupation, with a narrow specialism at their core. The craft and design T-level’s occupational specialisms map to single, narrow trade standards: ceramicist, bespoke furniture-maker, garment-maker and jewellery-maker. Each is precise and each is far narrower than the breadth that a young person needs to build a creative career. Practitioners move fluidly across creative, technical and entrepreneurial work over a single career—what the sector calls a polymathic, portfolio-based working life.

That mismatch has already shown up in the numbers. Two creative T-levels have now been through full commissioning and delivery. Craft and design managed just 136 starts in its debut year; media, broadcast and production managed around 600. Combined, this is a rounding error against the roughly 84,000 learners currently on large, creative level 3 qualifications.

Creative education is vocational not technical; it builds a craft and a practice, not entry to one job title, and that distinction has a practical consequence in learning hours. A T-level runs to around 1,800 hours across two years, weighted heavily towards one narrow specialism and a placement. A single V-level, by contrast, is projected to be 360 guided learning hours, like an A-level. Neither fits creative training, which needs not the narrow technical depth of one occupation or the shallow breadth of 360 hours but sustained studio and rehearsal time across a broad practice. That is precisely what the UAL extended diploma’s 1,080 to 1,170 hours currently provide.

Two further technical problems would need to be resolved. The first is assessment. T-levels require substantial examined assessment, but A-level art and design, as an example, has long relied on non-examined, portfolio-based assessment, precisely because it captures the creative process and development that a timed exam cannot. The BRIT School told the Curriculum and Assessment Review that learners must be graded on vocational ability, not solely on written ability under pressured exam conditions. Push creative qualifications towards examination and we repeat a known mistake: students writing about practical outcomes instead of producing them.

Secondly, on industry engagement, T-levels currently require a discrete 45-day placement, which depends on employers being able to host it. The extended diploma embeds industry engagement continuously, with live briefs and employer-set projects running throughout the course.

I know the Minister is listening to these arguments and I hope the creative sector can engage with her to find the right way forward. To do that, the engagement needs to quickly resolve whether we can rebuild occupational standards for creative jobs. If not, the sector should then be given the certainty of retaining the extended diploma. This existing qualification already delivers the right hours, the right assessment and continuous industry engagement, with progression into higher education that nearly three-quarters of the creative workforce holds. Ministers can then confirm its funding on a permanent footing, rather than a repeated reprieve to 2030, and then let T-levels and V-levels find their places alongside it, not in place of it.

16:05

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Keeley for introducing this debate in such a thoughtful and compelling way. I am delighted to follow my noble friend Lord Knight.

This House has many times focused on the importance of the creative industries to the economy and our social fabric. It cannot be emphasised enough how much creators enhance our reputation and soft power across the world, and our productivity at home in theatre, film, dance, music, computer games, craft, design, visual arts—indeed, any area in which individual creativity, skill and talent play a key role. Those who are able and willing to advance those skills need to be encouraged, supported and given freedom to fly, not thwarted, straitjacketed or discouraged by any entry system of examinations which is not targeted to their needs or the industries they aspire to enter.

Others in this debate have real knowledge of the requirements for entering these subjects and the impact of the specific changes currently being considered, as we have already heard. I do not, but I have learnt a lot. The Library brief was excellent, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Keeley for a thorough grounding in the ongoing discussions with the Government and their intentions.

I will make three brief and broad points. First, and most importantly, the creative industries are too vital a part of our economy to get this wrong. When tens of billions of pounds of gross value added and the jobs of two million people are at stake, we need to attract the best recruits and ensure that no unhelpful obstacles or poor offerings impede keen youngsters, whatever their background. It is clear that the Government want exactly that.

Secondly, creative roles increasingly blend technical fluency, software and digital production data with distinctly human capabilities such as originality, storytelling and collaboration. It is clearly a sign of the times that I met recently a senior executive in a company who was indeed “director of storytelling”.

A creative economy that wants to keep growing needs a pipeline of people who can move fluidly between craft and technical skills. It is clear that placements are an important part of these qualifications. I was very struck by the responses of students who struggled to find placements, particularly in the creative industries sector, given that 95% of companies are microbusinesses and up to a third of the workforce is self-employed. Can my noble friend say how the Government will address the placement issue?

Thirdly, digital technologies and AI are increasingly being used to create exciting opportunities, but there will need to be continuous learning to enable them to update technical skills. This is linked to the growing demand for collaboration across disciplines. Creative professionals now often work alongside software developers, engineers, marketers and data analysts. Therefore, communication, teamwork, problem solving, adaptability and leadership skills need to be developed. Anybody who has seen the film “The Odyssey” and sat through what must be at least five minutes of acknowledgements at the end of the film for all the crafts and skills involved would echo that.

All of this points to the need for close consultation and co-operation with those charged with developing the courses, exams and assessments for these subjects. It is clear that providers want to work with the Government to get this right, but it is also clear they have significant concerns. Many students who thrive on coursework-based learning may find the structure of T-levels less accessible. There are concerns about the number of guided learning hours in V-levels, with industry and higher education stakeholders anxious that it will not be enough to assess levels of applied experience and practical competence. UK Music has argued that national occupational standards are not appropriate for creative careers, and University of the Arts London called for the Government to allow flexibility of content.

I know higher education institutions support a diverse post-16 qualifications landscape, with multiple pathways beyond A-levels and T-levels, particularly in creative and practice-based disciplines. But arts and vocational subjects have already been squeezed by previous policy decisions. Reforms need to strengthen not reduce creative pathways, ensuring parity of esteem between vocational and academic qualifications, and protect progression opportunities into creative careers.

Finally, echoing one of the points made by my noble friend Lady Keeley, I ask my noble friend the Minister whether she will pause decisions on funding existing successful creative level 3 qualifications until the new T and V-levels have been designed, piloted and shown to deliver comparable—or even better—outcomes.

16:10

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, for securing this very well patronised debate, our last debate before Recess. It was pointed out in the last debate that I am taking part in all three debates today, and one of the advantages of that is that you can make links between them. So, I want to link the first debate, in which the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, talked about digital sovereignty and linked it to constitutional weaknesses in the UK, to this debate, and point out how constitutional weaknesses are affecting creative education, the subject we are discussing here.

The first past the post electoral system has traditionally produced a see-saw between two parties and two sets of policies and plans, if not always with much ideological difference. Creative education has been very much a victim of this see-saw. We saw the noble Lord, Lord Gove—now a Member of your Lordships’ House—make an active attempt under the previous Administrations to suppress creative subjects in schools with the EBacc, to push for a focus on a handful of subjects and exam results. That saw many creative subject teachers leave education—certainly leave schools—and move on to other careers, and active discouragement of new teachers coming into the area. I note that among many others, the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, referring to music education, has focused on the chronic shortage of teachers, as the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, referred to.

Now, we are seeing the see-saw come down the other way. We have a Government who last year said they would end what the playwright James Graham described as the madness of the last decade, when cultural subjects had been so devalued. Let us look at the reality of that. Since 2010, enrolment in arts GCSEs has fallen by 40%, and the number of arts teachers has fallen by 23%. Several noble Lords have already made really important points on the question of A-levels and T-levels, such as whether, as the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, said, these will have the depth of learning and effective assessment. The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey—not currently in his place—asked whether there were enough hours. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, made powerful points about the difficulty of something structured for accountancy, for example, being applied to the creative sector.

I am going to park all those questions and simply ask the Minister: given the background I have painted, are the Government confident that there will be enough resources in terms of human capacity, such as trained and experienced teachers, to deliver what the Government are proposing? Along similar lines, I reflect back on a Learn with the Lords visit to a school—which I am going to anonymise, so as not to get anyone into trouble—where the arts teacher told me that when he started, a decade or so earlier, he had a budget of £3,500 a year for materials. His current budget for materials is £500. I am not talking here about inflation adjusting—I am talking about raw pound figures. Are the Government going to resource these arts subjects in the way they need to be resourced?

I want to take a step further back. If these V-levels and T-levels are to work, we need to see students taking them up and being encouraged to follow their interests and passions. I imagine that the Minister is aware of the recent Nuffield Foundation report that focused on the underrepresentation of women and girls and people from lower-income backgrounds in the creative industries. That is a pathway that narrows and narrows along people’s life courses. It looked at 1.7 million students in England and surveyed people working in creative fields. Encouragingly, almost half of 14 year-olds said that they enjoy creative subjects, but just one in 25 was working in a creative occupation by their early 30s. At every stage—GCSE, post-16 and higher education—there was a fall-off in the figures, but particularly among poorer students and girls, with girls from lower-income backgrounds doubly affected. What will the Government do to ensure that we have a real flow of the range of students we want to see into these V-levels and T-levels?

I have two final brief points. I am sure the Minister is also aware of the creativity collaboratives programme, which has piloted embedding creativity in classrooms by addressing not just specific subjects but the entire curriculum. It is an approach that focuses on pupils’ ability to think imaginatively, to make connections and to generate original ideas. Again, if we have that education right from the start of primary school and onwards, that could feed pupils into these T-levels and V-levels. Will that happen?

Finally, there has been a lot of focus in this debate on the importance of creative education and the creative sector to the economy. I will focus on something more important. We often hear talk of STEM subjects providing solutions to our polycrises: the climate and nature emergencies, poverty, inequality, dissatisfaction with politics and the sense of disempowerment in communities. However, solutions often must come from the creative sector—from people coming up with new ideas, new solutions and new approaches to living on this battered planet, and from people getting together and co-operating. It is crucial that the Government get this creative education right. They are heading in the right direction in reprioritising it, but there are many questions that your Lordships are rightly asking.

16:17

[Lord Isaac (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Keeley for initiating this important debate on the future of post-16 creative education, an area that is often neglected when we focus on universities —it is the Cinderella sector, as many have noted. I declare an interest as the chair of governors of the University of the Arts London, which, as the House will have heard, runs the awarding body for the current diploma and extended diploma system.

As noble Lords have heard today, the arts are central to our cultural life. I have spoken about that many times in this Chamber. They are central to our economy, to social mobility and to the general well-being of society. As we have heard, they foster imagination, collaboration and, most importantly, innovation. That is why the Government have rightly identified the creative industries as one of the eight priority growth sectors in their industrial strategy. However, since 2010, the number of pupils taking GCSE creative subjects—as we just heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett—has fallen by 40%, and the number of specialist arts teachers in state schools has fallen dramatically too. It is therefore vital that post-16 education provides strong pathways into employment, and further and higher education, for the diminishing number of students who wish to develop their creative skills.

This debate is not about undermining apprenticeships, T-levels, V-levels or A-levels. It is about ensuring that, in simplifying post-16 qualifications, we do not damage the established creative pathways that already serve students and employers well. Creative level 3 courses, as we have heard, must be broad, practical and portfolio based. They must allow time for experimentation, rehearsal and studio practice. They are essential to developing successful artists, designers, performers, filmmakers and media professionals—the names that we have heard this afternoon: Steve McQueen and Adele, as well as Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry.

We also need the creative industries to draw on talent from every background. Existing qualifications provide opportunities for disadvantaged students, young people with SEND and those at risk of becoming NEET. Together with A-levels and foundation courses, they are important routes into the workplace and higher education. In 2023, 96% of applicants holding the UAL level 3 extended diploma received a higher education offer, and I am delighted that 85% of those offered them accepted places. I fear that the new arrangements mean that fewer creative students will qualify for university or be able to develop the skills that employers need. The UCAS tariff for T-levels means that students must achieve a distinction to secure the points that many extended diploma students routinely attain. Some universities, as I understand it, are already declining to accept T-levels for certain creative degree courses.

There are also questions about capacity and scalability. This year, only 814 students started one of the two creative T-levels, compared with 84,000 studying level 3 creative diplomas and extended diplomas. How will we address those scalability challenges? I would be happy to explore that with the Minister and her colleagues. Colleges are also saying that current T-levels are too narrow and do not replace existing qualifications. Exeter College is a case in point. The college tells us that T-levels and extended diplomas are both on offer to their students but that the creative media course as a T-level lacks artistic context and focuses only on technical skills. We also know that the Becky Francis review recognised that, as currently anticipated, creative V-levels will not fill that gap and are too narrowly defined.

Until T-levels and V-levels can demonstrate the same breadth of learning, progression and outcomes as current creative qualifications, there is a compelling case for retaining successful level 3 creative diplomas. Without that safeguard, I fear these reforms risk narrowing opportunities for the next generation of creative talent. Our young people, our creative industries and our country deserve better.

16:22

[Baroness Caine of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, I warmly thank my noble friend Lady Keeley for securing this debate and warmly welcome my noble friend the Minister back to her place.

To add to the statistics, Skills England estimates that the creative industries will need to fill around 1 million vacancies by 2035, a significant increase. Crucially, 82% of those roles will require qualifications at level 4 and above, compared with an economy-wide average of 62%. That means that occupational standards exist, where they do, largely at level 4, not level 3, which is the basis for the T-levels that are under discussion. Some 90% of creative businesses are micro-enterprises, as we have heard, employing fewer than 10 people. More than 30% of the workforce is freelance, but that critically increases in some key subsectors such as film and television, where it is over 50%.

For many years, the Department for Education has tended towards one-size-fits-all policies, designed around larger employers and more traditional sectors. Creative industries have repeatedly been recognised as atypical, yet the flexibilities needed to support them have too often been absent. As a result, employers have frequently developed their own solutions. When the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education mapped the creative and design pathways a few years ago, it concluded that T-levels were not the right qualifications for music, performing arts or graphic design. Two technical T-levels were introduced, craft and design—as my noble friend Lord Knight mentioned—and broadcast media production, with 678 students over two years now studying it.

To repeat, because T-levels exist, funding will be removed from alternative level 3 qualifications of 1,080 or more guided learning hours that map across to them for the 2027-28 year. What does that mean for the screen industries? What does it mean for the Ofsted “outstanding” London Screen Academy, founded and supported by leaders from the film and television industries? It delivers UAL level 3 and level 4 diplomas across a range of screen disciplines. Will parts or all of that provision be defunded? What does it mean for Birmingham Ormiston Academy, whose innovative partnerships are helping to build Birmingham’s fast-growing screen cluster? Which parts of its screen and stage academy BTEC provision are now at risk? I ask the Minister to consider aligning funding and change timelines, so that the sector and its providers can be considered strategically and as a whole. Important though those T-level students are, their numbers do not come close to meeting future workforce demand, and nor do they justify destabilising successful institutions and courses at such speed.

To turn to another example, on visual effects, animation and games, 10 years ago industry leaders UK Screen and Ukie decided not to wait for policy to catch up. They created the NextGen/AIM extended diploma in VFX, animation and games, and established the NextGen Skills Academy network, supporting partner colleges across England and Northern Ireland. More than 3,000 young people have since benefited from high-quality education and strong progression routes. That success now faces uncertainty, as Skills England develops a T-level focused solely on visual effects. UK Screen is clear that industry needs a broader qualification in computer-generated screen content, one that reflects the reality of modern production, is viable for colleges to deliver at scale and supports progression opportunities for young people into adjacent sectors.

In addition, there is an issue with finding work placements in industries that are populated by small companies. They are also an issue in the nations and regions of the UK. The main cluster of these industries is placed in London and the south-east. To have opportunities to experience them, people and young people elsewhere will require different forms of accessing them. If not, we face a Catch-22. Creative investment will not go to largely deprived rural and coastal areas where skills provision does not already exist, and skills provision cannot exist unless there are local employers to supply the placements. It is a Catch-22.

As the Creative Industries Council has made clear to government, the existing level 3 qualifications and the key institutions that deliver them are a vital part of the UK’s creative ecosystem. I declare an interest, having led skills and education for the Creative Industries Council for over a decade.

Qualifications need updating and simplification is important, but a simplification-first approach risks destabilising successful provision and limiting opportunity. Without employer confidence and support, change will not succeed. We must find a more flexible and pragmatic way forward that protects opportunities for young people and strengthens the talent pipeline on which these growth industries depend. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

16:28

[Baroness Gill (Lab)]

My Lords, I join the chorus and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, for securing this debate. I associate myself with the comments she made. It is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Caine, with her track record in leadership at Goldsmiths. It is thanks to that college that my son is in the creative sector and I get this knowledge. The UK film and television sector is a global powerhouse. The Government’s commitment to securing its future pipeline is highly commendable. The Department for Education’s constructive approach in its recent post-16 level 3 pathways consultation response is to be welcomed. By proposing a phased, route-by-route transition over the next four years and introducing alternative fee levels, the Government have shown that they are listening to the education sector in trying to simplify a complex qualification landscape.

However, as the DfE moves towards publishing its implementation plans, we must ensure that the unique project-based reality of the British film industry is fully integrated. The film and media sector does not operate like the traditional corporate environment, as I understand from my son and his friends. It thrives on collaborative, deeply immersive and fluid craft skills that cannot easily be retrofitted into standard technical boxes. Our current level 3 landscapes, specifically large-scale qualifications such as the diploma in creative media production, succeed because they provide the immense studio hours and creative freedom needed to write, shoot, edit and produce a film portfolio. As we look to the newly designed T-levels and single A-level-sized V-levels, a dialogue between government and industry experts is vital to address some of the structural challenges around recognising that film and high-end TV productions are overwhelmingly staffed by short-term freelancers and micro-businesses operating on a project-by-project basis.

As has been stated, finding thousands of structured, mandatory 45-day T-level industry placements within this highly transient ecosystem is a massive logistical challenge for colleges. Leading sector bodies, and your Lordships’ House today, have expressed concerns that the standardised 360 guided learning hours proposed for V-levels may not provide the deep practical immersion required for technical film crafts. A student cannot master cinematography or advanced visual effects as a minor, part-time component of a broader curriculum.

A lot of concern has been expressed here about the Department for Education’s decision to list the level 3 extended diploma in creative media for defunding because of the overlap with T-levels. As we have heard, this risks dismantling a highly valued, industry-approved talent engine before the new 2029 and 2030 creative qualifications are fully mature. Like other noble Lords, I mention the success of the BRIT School, the education that it provides for many children with SEND and the success it has had in placing them in full-time work.

The Government’s recent updates allowing for placement flexibility, such as utilising group projects, remote elements or multiple employers, show an excellent willingness to adapt. We now need to build on that flexibility to co-design a framework that protects our world-class film sector. To help strengthen this transition and support the department’s mission skills agenda, I have a couple of questions for my noble friend the Minister, whom I congratulate on her reappointment.

First, given that the film and television workforce is composed overwhelmingly of freelance crews and temporary project-based productions, my first question is: how can the department work alongside ScreenSkills and major UK studios to design a bespoke, flexible placement model that works for independent film sets, without placing an unmanageable bureaucratic burden on independent producers?

Secondly, while I welcome the introduction of V-levels to provide vital vocational choices alongside A-levels, many universities and film colleges worry that the standard 360-hour model lacks the practical studio depth of current extended diplomas. Will the Government collaborate with creative awarding bodies to approve larger, double-weighted or triple-weighted qualification sizes, specifically for technical, film, media and production pathways?

16:35

[Lord John of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Keeley on securing this important debate. I know from many conversations with her that she is utterly passionate about support for education in the creative industries and that she brings real expertise to this subject. I have enjoyed this debate so far, because I also discovered that a friend of mine was Oliver when, in the same production, my noble friend Lord Knight was the Artful Dodger. Who knew?

I have spoken before in the House about my support for centres of artistic excellence in south London—in particular, Mountview theatre school, the Central School of Ballet and the Old Vic Theatre. I declare my interests as a member of the president’s circle at the Central Ballet School and a trustee at the Old Vic. I thank my noble friend the Minister for the wonderful visit that we paid to the Central Ballet School a few weeks ago, when we both saw brilliant classical ballet teaching in action. We did not dance; we saw the students.

While Central Ballet School is not a level 3 provider, I think our conversation that day underlined the thrust of this debate: every cultural education provider, usually because of its size and specialism, is unique in the teaching and courses it provides; consequently, so are the financial challenges it faces. But one size rarely fits all in the cultural sector, especially in teaching and qualifications. At Mountview, students who do not have level 3 qualifications can enrol for foundation or Certificate of Higher Education courses. They are intensive, they are popular and they work, meeting the needs of students who then move on to degree courses.

We all know the importance of the cultural industries to the UK economy. Last year, they contributed more than £145 billion in gross value added, and they are growing at an incredible rate of nearly 5% a year—if only the rest of the economy was matching that growth. This is especially true in London. Only today, the Times reported:

“The capital’s cultural pull is increasingly visible in the booming film and television industry. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney are expanding their British operations, while Pinewood and Shinfield Studios are operating at capacity. Film London estimates that £9.5 billion will be invested in production across the wider capital area in the next five years”.


Citing the Hollywood Reporter, the article said that

“London has become ‘more Hollywood than Hollywood’, driven by generous tax incentives, premier infrastructure and”—

here is the important point—

“a deep pool of creative talent”.

This is all great news, but it makes it even more important that our approach to future creative talent is not undermined by complacency.

So we need to listen to the University of the Arts, as my noble friend Lord Isaac said, and the BRIT School, which said that

“large vocational qualifications do not narrow opportunity but, instead, unlock multiple successful pathways, including higher education, further training and employment”.

To paraphrase: leave it alone—it works. As others have observed, courses that open doors by their flexibility and inclusion increase social mobility.

This Government and this House have many Members with a deep-rooted commitment to and love of the arts and culture, so I hope that my noble friend the Minister is able to give us some cause for optimism today. This is a week of hope and change. I hope that there will be a change in the Government’s approach to this subject, and I ask my noble friend the Minister quite simply: will this debate have an impact?

16:39

[Baroness Kingsmill (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to participate in this debate. I am by no means an expert in the field that we are debating; I know very little about creative qualifications, but I have been involved in the creative industries for most of my career. My first career, I suppose, before I became a lawyer, was in the fashion industry, where I spent seven years working with designers, photographers and all sorts of other creative people. I declare an interest in that I am currently back in the fashion industry, and have been for the last 10 years, as a director at Inditex—otherwise known as Zara. Furthermore, I declare an interest in this specific area as a trustee of the Conran Foundation. I have also been a board member at the Design Museum for many years.

The United Kingdom has for a very long time enjoyed the reputation of being one of the greatest creative economies in the world, yet we too often discuss it as though it were simply a matter of cultural interest, rather than a strategic national asset. The facts tell a different story. Our creative industries now contribute almost £126 billion to the economy, support around 2.4 million jobs and generate a substantial trade surplus through exports of services, intellectual property and digital content. They are growing significantly faster than the economy as a whole and are rightly recognised by the Government as one of the United Kingdom’s priority growth sectors.

These industries are also a powerful source of Britain’s soft power. Around the world, people know this country through our music, theatre, film, television, architecture—which has not yet been mentioned—publishing, design, fashion and, increasingly, digital creativity. They strengthen tourism, attract investment and encourage talented people to study, work and collaborate here.

That success, however, depends on one essential ingredient: people. If we wish to remain a global leader in the creative industries, we must ensure that talented young people continue to have clear and credible routes into creative careers. That is why level 3 qualifications matter so greatly. I welcome the Government’s recognition that a broader pathway is needed alongside A-levels and T-levels. The proposed introduction of V-levels represents an important acknowledgement that creative careers rarely follow a single, narrow occupational route.

But qualifications alone will not guarantee success. We must ensure that creative education continues to value practical learning. We must recognise that portfolio development, collaborative projects and interdisciplinary skills matter just as much. We must further recognise that many creative businesses are, as has been mentioned, small, project-based or freelance and must also be part of the system. It should not be that only large employers should be considered.

Above all, we have to avoid an unintended contradiction in public policy. If the Government identify the creative industries as a priority growth sector within their industrial strategy, the education system must actively support the pipeline of talent on which that strategy depends. Creative education should therefore be seen not as a cost but as an investment in one of Britain’s strongest competitive advantages. Investment in studios, specialist teachers, technical facilities and high-quality vocational pathways should be regarded in precisely the same light as investment in scientific research, advanced manufacturing or digital infrastructure. Our competitors certainly understand that. If Britain wishes to remain a world leader in creativity and innovation, we cannot simply celebrate past success; we must continually renew the talent that sustains it.

I therefore hope that Ministers will continue to ensure that qualification reform, industrial strategy and regional growth policy move forward together. What mechanisms are in place to ensure that the Department for Education and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport jointly assess whether level 3 qualification reforms are strengthening, rather than weakening, the future workforce of one of the United Kingdom’s designated priority growth areas?

16:45

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Keeley has done us all a service by facilitating this important debate in an area—the development of a new landscape for 16 to 19 qualifications —that has been the source of more than a little controversy since the introduction of T-levels in 2020. I was one of a number of noble Lords who joined the campaign by the Protect Student Choice coalition that secured delays to the defunding of applied general qualifications, such as BTECs, meaning that at least 300,000 16 to 19 year-olds have either already studied qualifications that would otherwise have been scrapped or will be studying them in the years ahead. Retaining AGQs has enabled many young people to progress to higher education and/or skilled employment, a journey that would otherwise have been out of reach, and it has avoided the creation of a “qualifications gap” that tens of thousands of students would have fallen through.

The announcement in March by the Minister, who I am delighted will be continuing in her post, of a stay of execution for popular courses while alternatives are developed was most welcome. That said, the problematic nature of the package of reforms to 16 to 19 education goes beyond the timetable. The most important of them is the replacement of numerous existing diplomas with V-levels, which are being designed as A-level size equivalents. The first three V-levels will begin next September. One of the causes of concern is the speed with which they will be introduced. I add that the lessons of T-levels should be noted.

T-levels are well intentioned, and I have always said that I want them to succeed, but their combination of tight specialism and their level of difficulty, as other noble Lords have mentioned, means that there are many young people for whom they are simply not the right choice, and they have not yet become established. Indeed, in the sixth academic year—that is the one that has just finished—only 27,000 students began a T-level. Part of the problem with T-levels is that they are not widely enough understood and still struggle to gain recognition. The same must not be allowed to happen with V-levels.

In the creative sector, T-levels remain tiny in scale, and providers say they cannot grow to replace the existing provision. UK Screen Alliance represents companies in the animation, visual effects and video game sectors, which together contribute more than £10 billion to the UK economy and employ almost 50,000 highly skilled people. They are among Britain’s most productive industries and are repeatedly identified by government as growth priorities. At the moment, the future of the sector skills pipeline is threatened by the Government’s determination to impose—this is possibly the phrase of the afternoon—a one-size-fits-all approach, which is quite unsuited to the creative sector.

As my noble friend Lady Caine said, more than a decade ago, employers in those industries recognised that the education system was simply not producing enough young people with the right mix of creativity, technical ability, mathematics and digital skills, so, being creative people, they created their own pipeline. In the 10 years since the level 3 qualification, the AIM extended diploma, was introduced, more than 3,000 students have completed the programme, with nearly three-quarters of those young people progressing into higher education, with others moving into apprenticeships and employment.

The students tackle live industry briefs, receive feedback from professionals, visit studios and showcase their work to leading companies. This is employer engagement at its best. Yet despite its success, the qualification faces defunding because it does not fit neatly within the architecture of T-levels and occupational standards. As other noble Lords have highlighted, T-levels involve industry placements, which rarely work in the creative industries, and for colleges in rural, coastal or disadvantaged areas, mandatory placements can become an impossible barrier, even after recent announcements on placement flexibilities.

My noble friend Lord Knight—still an artful dodger after all these years—spoke of the use of portfolios in assessments. Creative employers do not recruit on the basis of exam performance alone; they use portfolios, collaboration and demonstrated ability. The sector’s own qualifications reflect that reality through continuous assessment and group project-based learning, not just talent, in a way that reflects how creative work actually happens. The AIM diploma is a success and yet it faces defunding in 2029. I have to ask: where is the sense in that?

As the University of the Arts London Awarding Body has said, the DfE should not introduce exams, prescribed controlled conditions or prescribed content into creative subjects by default. Larger, scalable and successful qualifications that already contribute to the creative industries should be retained. I suggest that the DfE should listen more to creative industry employers, because employer engagement and buy-in will be key to the ultimate success of T-levels—in any sector, it should be said.

I want to say something about a study and skills option that only one other Peer has mentioned so far today —it was the noble Baroness, Lady Garden—and that is university technical colleges. UTCs seem to fly beneath the radar, but they provide an important alternative to a predominantly academic route through secondary and post-16 education. Working with universities and local employers, they offer specialist technical pathways including the creative industries, which are designed around local skills needs. It is important to point out that they account for 2.9% of all T-level enrolments, despite representing only 1.2% of schools. I would be interested to hear from my noble friend what role she believes UTCs can play in delivering both T-levels and V-levels, as well as courses in the creative subjects.

In conclusion, the Government and DfE simply must take account of what the creative sector is saying about the potential impact on that sector of the replacement of current level 3 qualifications with T-levels and V-levels. To paraphrase my noble friend Lord John: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

16:51

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, as the last Back-Bench speaker I have to congratulate my noble friend Lady Keeley on having promoted a really interesting debate in which, on the whole, I have very little to disagree with and little extra to add. I should congratulate my noble friend the Minister, were she in her place—and I shall not take it at all personally that she left the Chamber just before I stood up. None the less, I will keep talking in the hope that she will catch some of it. I really will not take it personally—I look at my noble friend Lord Katz, who is on the Front Bench at the moment, and I am sure he will assure her of that.

My professional career has been spent in the cultural sector, specifically the performing arts, where much of my time over many years involved the finding, assessing and employing of performers and directors for theatre and musical productions. Unfortunately, it did not include the talented child who went on to become my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth. But it did include, at a very early stage in his career, his friend Sam Mendes, whose incredible career now could not have been predicted at the time that we both knew him best. I make the point that you cannot always see what is coming in this particular field. I am approaching this subject not from any expertise in the relative value of this qualification over that, but from extensive practical experience of what works for employers and employees in this complex area.

I have got only a couple of points that I want to reinforce; they have been cogently outlined by a number of other speakers, but they will bear a bit of emphasising. I am instinctively disinclined to special pleading and exceptionalism, but I believe that education and training for the creative industries is unusual, if not unique, as we have been hearing. To make it clear why understanding this is so important, I can do no better than quote from a recent edition of FE News, which was helpfully included in the Library briefing. It said:

“Creative industries education has never been about training for a single job role. It is about developing transferable, adaptive capabilities that allow learners to thrive across multiple sectors, careers, and economic shifts. Most creative professionals do not follow linear career paths. Instead, they build portfolio careers, combining freelance work, short-term contracts, cross-sector projects, and entrepreneurial ventures. This reality demands education that prioritises flexibility, creative problem-solving, collaboration, communication, resilience, and self-direction—skills that are inherently transferable and increasingly valued across the entire economy”.


My experience entirely bears this out, including watching my own two children—both conservatoire-trained performers who are now well into mid-career—progress in exactly this way and arrive at quite different and unexpected places.

Like others, I want the new vocational qualifications to succeed, but—as we have heard over and again in this debate—as currently envisaged, they are not well matched to the needs of the creative industries. I hope my noble friend will reassure us that the promised consultation on how to structure new qualifications for the performing arts will not just listen to the concerns of employers, practitioners and education providers but genuinely hear and understand what they are saying. I will not repeat the mantra of the day, except to say that, if it has not dawned on my noble friend already, one size does not always fit all.

The UK’s creative industries are precious. We are rightly proud of them, and the Government are relying on them to continue contributing to economic growth and our international reputation. However, they are also vulnerable. If we do not protect and enhance the pipeline of talent into the sector, and if we fail sufficiently to recognise its special nature, we will eventually lose the pre-eminence in this field that we currently enjoy. That would be a tragic mistake.

16:56

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Minister on being in her place, although a debate when you have 10 Back-Benchers behind you, all firing shots at the back of your neck, may not be the most welcome way of coming back. They may not all be killing blows, but they are there. There are certain themes that have been clearly established in this debate. We still have our question mark about T-levels and V-levels—we do not really know what they are yet. If the Government are going to get rid of qualifications that work, we would like their replacements to be a lot better presented, and to know a lot more about them than we currently do.

T-levels have not had a great start. When they first came out, I remember there was one course where nobody finished. The fact that you have this big block that means you cannot do anything other than a T-level was one of the scariest things about it. The V-level does not have that; it fits in with the A-level structure. This may be a strength, or it may be a weakness; we do not quite know yet, but it is certainly an idea for a new examination that will come in to do a job and may remove examinations and structures that are achieving. Could it be better? Could it be worse? We do not know.

However, one thing that goes with this change in structure is something that has not been touched on: what is careers guidance going to tell pupils—and, more importantly, their parents—that this will do for them in the future? If you get that wrong, I do not care how good it is; it will fail because nobody will do it, or people will do it only as a last resort. That happens to exams: you come down, and go forward on, the established pathway.

GCSEs and A-levels are your absolute solid standard, and the previous Government’s reforms have made them even more solid. What are we going to do with them? How do they fit into this structure? That is something that I hope the Minister will be able to answer, because unless you know how they work together and what opportunities they are seen to create, you cannot give advice.

I have learned quite a lot in this debate—and not only about the ability of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, to pick a pocket. I am sorry; I could not resist that. Much of the discussion is about how we have a structure that works very well but most people will not hear about it. I am sure that people bypass very good training processes because they do not know what is there. When I looked at this debate initially, I thought about support services for film and other forms of creative activity: the things that go around them—technical support structures and innovations—which I have worked on in the DCMS brief.

How do you get qualified with these universal skills, which can be taken across the world? We do not know how to do that. We have lots of English graduates coming in and having to reskill at, say, levels 4 or 5 and going through. How do these exams allow you pathways to level 4 and 5 skills? That is good old-fashioned technician-level education: the thing we have had a problem with for decades—more decades even than I have been in this House. How do we make sure that that goes through? How will we educate the population about that being the way forward?

This means giving a little more status to further education. Let us face it, at the moment the higher education sector might look back over its shoulder and say that a university will not lose too much sleep if it starts to skill people at levels 4 and 5. We have graduates on level 6 courses in further education colleges, so let the two of them interact, because they will have a connection and will understand what is going on. I have hope for this current Government, with their huge majority and the new saviour from the north—I keep thinking “winter is coming”, but there we are. Unless we get that interaction between the various bits of the education system, it will go wrong, because that is what has happened in the past.

I am sure the Minister would send me rude notes if I did not raise my next subject: special educational needs. I see her nodding. The way forward, the entrance into this, tends to be English and maths at GCSE. I hope that, with the creative industries, we will be a little more flexible about how we allow people in and through. My noble friend Lady Garden, who is now on the Woolsack, mentioned this initially: what are the ways through? If we are still going to be obsessed by the GCSE entrance-level barrier for English and Maths—it used to be C-D and now it is 3-4—we will continue to exclude. I would say that, wouldn’t I? I am a dyslexic who is president of the British Dyslexia Association and who also happens to be chairman of an assistive technology company, Microlink PC. There are ways round and through.

Can the Minister say how we are being actively encouraged to show that somebody can communicate using technology in English and possibly maths? Dyscalculia and dyspraxia mean that you cannot finish exams. If this sector—which should be more flexible, as everybody has said—cannot take the first step forward and say, “Can you demonstrate that you can communicate using this technology?” but not in the conventional exam situation, we are missing an opportunity. Let us make sure that we get people into something that is developing and growing, and make sure that we have a structure in which people can strive. The performing arts are one thing, but it is about the people around the sides—the person who makes sure the set is there; the person who helps at a technical level to make sure the computer graphics work properly—who are there to support them. That is where the big figures for employment are, and it is providing that support that will help.

At the end of this, I think everybody has said to the Government, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. One size—or even two or three sizes—won’t fit everybody”. How will we get the best out of a sector that is growing and providing economic benefit, and indeed a more pleasant time, for the rest of society? It is a win-win if we can get it working properly. However, that requires, first, knowledge of the opportunities out there and how you get through and, secondly, greater flexibility of approach to get people in. Once you have done that, you can finish it off with a bit of status—and that status also comes with knowledge. This is an opportunity for this Government and future Governments to take. I hope we will embrace it, because it just might make our lives more pleasant.

17:05

[The Earl of Effingham (Con)]

My Lords, we thank the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, for securing this debate and for her long record of work with the arts on protecting copyright for creators against generative AI, championing inclusive music and arts education and advocating for the financial resilience of the UK’s theatre and cultural sectors.

It was not a surprise that the noble Lord, Lord Isaac, gave us an in-depth insight into the creative industries, given his role as chair of the Court of Governors at the University of the Arts London, nor that the noble Baroness, Lady Kingsmill, given her directorship at Zara, flagged fashion design among other things. The noble Lord, Lord John, talked about a “deep pool” of creative talent: the creative industries combined contribute £124 billion to the economy and employ 2.4 million people, over 7% of the national workforce. Their output has grown at more than 1.5 times the national average since 2010.

Creative education is valued. That is not in doubt. The question is whether these reforms will produce qualifications that enable people for jobs, for university and for higher technical study. This process has cross-party parentage. It began with the report from the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, in 2011, which found that too much post-16 vocation provision had little or no market value. When in government, we started to remove overlapping qualifications, and the current Government have continued. Rationalising a landscape of more than 900 such courses is essential in principle, and His Majesty’s loyal Opposition support the momentum. The “Wolf test”, if I might call it that, remains entirely correct: a qualification exists to serve the learner, not the system that awards it. However, reforms should derive from evidence-based data and analysis. Skills England’s assessment of the creative industries, published only last month, excluded media and communication courses from its priority analysis because, historically, it is a low portion of those education leavers who progress into priority occupations.

My noble friend Lord Vaizey flagged the 360-hours limit, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, referenced a “shallow breadth” and the Government’s own consultation response reported that both industry and higher education warned that 360 guided learning hours is insufficient to establish practical competence. That warning was overridden. The extended diplomas being defunded carried 1,080 hours of study; their replacement carries only 360. UK Music points out that occupational standards for portfolio-based music careers simply do not exist, while the Minister for Skills conceded that the original transition was, in her words, “too aggressive”. It is the case that the timetable was fixed before the design existed.”

We believe that a qualification must do at least one of three things. It must confer occupational competence that employers recognise; it must carry currency with universities; or it must provide a ladder to higher technical study at levels 4 and 5. The new system appears to fail those tests. T-levels, after five years, are enrolling around 28,000 students, just 2.5% of the 1.1 million-strong level 3 cohort. Creative placements are structurally the hardest to supply, because a sector of freelancers and small firms cannot provide 45-day placements at scale. V-levels will be classroom only and one A-level in size. They cannot realistically confer occupational competence; their currency with universities is untested; and no progression route to levels 4 and 5 has been published. Prima facie, this looks like simplification, not reform, which is the failure that the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, identified.

Some 78% of creative employers report shortages in their three highest occupational groups, against a benchmark of 31% across all other industries. The Government’s skills audit, published in May, highlights the shortage occupations of software developers, graphic and multimedia designers and advertising and marketing executives, with 63% of creative employers expecting digital skills demand to rise, driven by artificial intelligence.

The noble Baroness, Lady Caine, referenced Skills England highlighting that over 1 million new workers will be needed. Some 60,000 creative workers are currently not proficient in their roles, because technology is outpacing the training. Skills England has projected this large number of workers needed in priority creative occupations by 2035, many requiring qualifications at level 4 and above. Based on that evidence, the pipeline the country needs is technical, creative, digital and higher level. Yet, with all due respect, nothing the Government have published maps creative V-levels or T-levels to a shortage occupation. Surely, the right course of action is to build replacements that are demonstrably better. Both T-levels and V-levels should offer this, yet at the moment neither does.

The noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, talked about the two-year UAL extended diploma. In terms of transition, the University of the Arts London extended diploma in creative media production and technology will be defunded from autumn 2027, due to a suggested overlap with T-levels. The UAL disputes the merit of that, in both content and approach, and is appealing against it. The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, quite rightly referenced the last carriage of the train, the back of the queue, because creative V-levels will not arrive until 2030, which means a three-year void with no large creative qualification. The reality is that providers act on defunding dates years in advance: courses close, specialist staff leave and recruitment collapses ahead of the deadline.

The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, talked about west Everton parents, carers and disadvantaged students; the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, talked about disadvantaged people; and the noble Lord, Lord Isaac, flagged that students may not achieve the grades they need. We should also be asking what will happen to the students who will be deplaced. T-level entry requirements commonly demand five GCSEs at grade 5 or above, including English and maths. However, the Association of School and College Leaders has confirmed that students on these qualifications are disproportionately special educational needs pupils, as referenced by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, or disadvantaged pupils without those grades. What will happen to them?

Would it not be fair, reasonable and sensible to first undertake a mapping of courses with the labour market? Which shortage occupation on the Government’s own audits will each creative V-level and T-level serve? Secondly, we need to publish the progression routes for students. What articulated routes to levels 4 and 5 will be attached to each qualification? Thirdly, we must understand and publish whether any new qualifications will be accepted by employers and universities before, not after, the existing qualifications are switched off. We would also suggest addressing the communication problem seemingly reflected in T-level uptake rates. A 2% uptake rate indicates that they are not as widespread as they should be or the Government hope they will be.

Finally, the noble Baroness, Lady Caine, repeatedly and quite rightly asked: what exactly does this mean? The noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, said to pause for thought and reflection on what will happen. The noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord John, suggested not changing it without full analysis. His Majesty’s loyal Opposition believe that the measure of this reform is not just the number of qualifications to be streamlined but whether a talented 16 year-old in 2028 will have a route into that workforce as good as the one that is now being taken away. If the answer is yes, that is a great result. But if the answer is no, which appears to be the case, based on many noble Lords’ reflections today, we hope that the Government will address the constructive challenges from all sides of your Lordships’ House on this incredibly important issue for the creative sector.

17:16

[The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend Lady Keeley for introducing this debate, and noble Lords around the House for congratulating me on maintaining my role. I am absolutely delighted about it, not least because what would I do on a Thursday afternoon if I did not have the opportunity to engage in excellent debates such as the one today? This discussion has rightly focused on a matter of great significance: how we ensure that all young people, regardless of background, can access high-quality routes into the creative industries, while also building a qualification system that is stronger, clearer and fit for the future.

My noble friend Lady Kingsmill was right, as were others, to identify that the creative industries are one of the United Kingdom’s great success stories. They contribute approximately £145 billion to the economy and have grown four times faster than the rest of the economy since 2010. I think those figures are slightly higher than some others have suggested, but they demonstrate the success of our creative industries. That is why the Government’s industrial strategy recognises the creative industries as one of the growth-driving sectors that will help to power our economy in the years ahead. That success depends on a steady pipeline of talent and that is why the education and skills system must work for this sector.

Before we come on to some of the other creative areas, I point out—I think this was a point made by the noble Earl, Lord Effingham—that a significant proportion of the skills needed in the creative industries fall within that digital and technical area, as Skills England has demonstrated. That is one of the reasons why digital is a successful T-level already, why it will be one of the first V-levels to be introduced and why, in the growth and skills levy, digital areas and artificial intelligence are some of the very first apprenticeship units to be developed and offered.

However, a key part of the plan is a continued commitment to specialist education to develop the next generation of music performers, producers and industry professionals. I am sure that noble Lords will have noted the Government’s publication last week of the music plan and the commitment that it showed to a wide-ranging approach to supporting and developing music in this country, including through our education system.

I begin by being clear, as I was even before this debate, that the Government recognise the concerns that have been expressed about qualification reform and the future of creative education for 16 to 19 year-olds. We are listening carefully to creative industry employers, education providers, awarding organisations, higher education institutions and representative bodies. We understand that the creative industries have distinctive characteristics and that qualifications must reflect those realities.

In thinking about the wider reforms in which we are engaged, the objective is not, at its heart, simplification. That would never be enough. These are not the reforms of the former Government, which were too narrow and did not recognise vocational breadth, which was precisely the point recognised by my noble friend Lady Gill. The priority for level 3 reform is a system which provides high-quality options, whether you study better academically or want more applied learning and assessment. The latter, of course, has not been well enough served in our education system, with lower status for vocational qualifications, however high their quality, and confusing routes for young people to where they want to get in their lives.

This is why, in future, young people will have three distinct level 3 routes. A-levels will remain the academic route and V-levels will become the vocational route, supporting broad study and progression. My noble friend Lady Warwick was right about the breadth of study that we increasingly need to provide for our young people. That is the reason why we have designed vocational V-levels to be the same size as A-levels—so that a young person can develop a broad vocational set of qualifications, including linking and partnering them with academic A-levels as well. It is right that, if somebody is choosing to take a large qualification because it is the area they want to focus on, we make sure that that qualification is the most likely to be able to deliver that, with the sort of progression that noble Lords have talked about. That is why we believe that T-levels should be the large technical route for students who want to specialise in a particular occupational area. We are also reforming T-levels, as I will come on to later.

In this reform, we are taking a phased and careful approach to implementation. No qualifications will lose funding approval during the academic year 2026-27. We will introduce new qualifications in the creative and design route for first teach in September 2030, and there are no further plans for the removal of funding for qualifications in creative art and design until 2030. The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, questioned whether creative areas were at the back of the queue, but he also provided the answer. They are not at the back of the queue. Although we recognise many of the points made today, we will take our time while maintaining the existing qualifications to get this right for young people and the creative sector. We will work closely with the sector to ensure that the change is manageable, supports stability and delivers what is needed. Along with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, we will work with the sector, taking into account its expert advice, and I have asked the department to convene a creatives advisory group for qualifications reform, led by those with knowledge of what has worked for the sector. We will bring it together in the autumn to address many of the points raised today.

T-levels are already delivering strong outcomes. Across the programme, 92% of students progressed into work or further study, and around two-thirds progressed into the same broad subject area as their course. More than a quarter of those entering employment do so with the organisation that hosted their industry placement. But we know that reform was needed. One of reasons relates to the point made by my noble friend Lord Watson and others about the levels of prior attainment that were needed in order to access T-levels. I am sure that noble Lords will therefore be reassured that young people with a range of prior attainment are accessing T-levels.

In fact, the GCSE grade split for students receiving T-level results is now very similar to those receiving results for applied general qualifications. The proportion of T-level students without 4s or above in both GCSE English and maths has also increased each year, showing that T-levels are becoming more accessible. Given the challenge, rightly, from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, we are also seeing an increasing proportion of students with special educational needs and disability taking T-levels.

We already have T-levels in media, broadcast and production, and in craft and design. While in relatively small numbers, because this is the very first cohort, we will see them completing their qualifications and getting their results this summer. The National Theatre supported the shaping and the rollout of the new creative T-levels. It reports that T-levels are helping to engage a younger generation and strengthen talent pipelines into the sector, with flexible industry placement models providing hands-on experience across departments and projects, and developing specialist skills within the theatre, such as lighting, AV and sound technology.

We are expanding T-levels so that more young people benefit from their progression opportunities and outcomes. That is why we are considering further creative and design T-levels in art, performing arts and visual effects subjects for introduction from 2029 or 2030. As I have said, we will work closely with employers, providers and the creative sector to ensure the content accurately reflects what employers want and delivers what the sector and young people need. That is why the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, was wrong to say that we are defunding prematurely. As I have pointed out, there will not be defunding up to the point at which those T-levels and V-levels are introduced.

I take the very important point made by my noble friend Lord Knight about the nature of the creative sector and the breadth necessary for those who are engaged with it. We recognise that many creative careers involve portfolio working, self-employment and movement across multiple occupations throughout a career, and we know that the future qualification landscape must reflect that reality. That is why we are in ongoing discussions with Skills England on occupational standard development, where there are gaps in future T-level areas, with a view to developing standards that are needed to support future skills pipelines.

My noble friends Lord Knight and Lady Kingsmill made points, as did others, about the nature of assessment, whether in V-levels or in T-levels. Of course, it cannot be right that there is only a traditional exam focus in courses that are precisely about more practical application and different styles of learning. That is why we are already working on how we can develop new forms of assessment, doing that carefully with Ofqual in order to ensure that those remain of a high quality.

There is also an important point about how we get the message out about new qualifications. Our network of more than 1,400 T-level ambassadors champion T-levels and industry placements across the business community—including the National Theatre, which acts as a T-level ambassador for the creative industries.

Quite rightly, several noble Lords, including my noble friends Lady Caine, Lady Warwick and Lady Gill, talked about both the benefits and the challenges of developing sufficient industry placements for T-levels. That is why we have already introduced significant reforms to industry placement delivery. They are providing fantastic opportunities for students. Around 25% of students who progress into work get jobs with their industry placement employer. I have already identified how the National Theatre, for example, speaks very positively about the benefits of hosting T-level students.

However, we recognise that a conventional placement could be challenging in the creative industries. The reforms to industry placements that have already been introduced will allow providers to better tailor provision to meet the needs of the sector, including more scope for remote placements, which help freelancers and SME employers. We will work with the creative sector advisory group that I am setting up to consider whether further adaptations for placements are needed for these subjects.

V-levels will be the new flagship vocational qualification that supports young people who want more applied learning and practical assessment. We are in the early stages of the development of V-levels, and we are determined to do that—as my noble friend Lady Gill noted—on the basis of thinking about different routes and ensuring that the system works together to provide pathways. I am pleased that we moved quickly to publish the national content for the first V-levels in accounting and finance, digital systems and data, and education on 9 July. These V-levels will be taught from September 2027. We are working with Ofqual, which has consulted on assessments and grading for V-levels.

As I have already suggested, the proposals aim to give students more opportunities to show what they know and can do through a mix of different types of assessment, taken over the course of their studies. We have already set out that we are exploring future V-levels in art, the performing arts, and creative media and design. I know that these will not necessarily be appropriate for those who want a large qualification, but, as I have said, given the breadth of the creative sector, they may well be appropriate for people who want to put together a set of qualifications to recognise that breadth. The first teaching for these is planned for 2030. The nationally set content there will also be developed in partnership with those with deep experience of the sector. Importantly, existing qualifications will continue to be funded until replacement qualifications are introduced.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, suggested that people do not know much about V-levels at the moment. That is a fair charge, given the earliness of their development. That is why, to ensure that providers are well supported through this transition, we have established a group of qualification pioneers. They will play a vital role in supporting our work to support provider transition plans, share effective practice and advise on the support required to help providers successfully navigate this change. It is why we have provided information, graphics and resources to schools, colleges and careers guidance, to help explain V-levels.

As noble Lords have pointed out, it also important to ensure that the pre-16 curriculum delivers, in the areas of arts and music, what is necessary to create that pipeline. That is why there is considerable work going on as a result of the curriculum and assessment review to ensure—for example, in music—that this is now, from key stage 1 to key stage 4, a rigorous, equitable and inclusive curriculum that will support more people to be able to take A-levels. I understand my noble friend’s concern about the fall-off in the numbers taking A-level music. It will also be supported by continued investment in music hubs and the new national centre for arts and music education, which will help schools deliver new curriculum content effectively.

We have also touched on A-levels today. There are A-levels in art and design, dance, drama and theatre, music, music technology, design and technology, and film studies. While uptake varies between those creative subjects, entries have grown steadily in areas such as art and design, and media and film, since 2019. Although the curriculum and assessment review concluded that A-levels were generally working well, we will certainly want to make updates, where necessary, to ensure that A-levels remain coherent, particularly with the revised GCSE qualifications. We will update AS-levels and A-levels, ready for first teaching in 2031 and 2032.

I will also say in relation to higher education that I share the view that it is important that new qualifications have good progression to higher education. That remains central to our thinking. Almost 200 higher education providers across Britain accept T-levels for at least some courses, including the majority of Russell group institutions, and 81% of T-level applicants secured a higher education place in the 2025 admissions cycle. We will continue to push HE to recognise T-levels and we will develop V-levels and their content with higher education to ensure progression and, to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Effingham, to ensure progression on to level 4 and 5 courses as well.

We cannot deliver this change—the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is right—without the workforce and capacity to deliver them. That is why this Government are significantly investing in relation to level 3 in further education. We have announced additional funding of £120 million for this academic year, rising to £365 million in the next academic year, to help support particularly the workforce that we need. Together with wider post-16 funding increases, that means that funding for 16 to 19 year-old students has increased by more than 12% over two years. At the same time, our increases in teacher pay are helping us to deliver that 6,500 target for additional teachers that we have set out. We will provide new technical and vocational subjects for the specific professional development programme to help support our teachers to deliver the new qualifications.

We all share the same goal: ensuring that young people can develop their talents, pursue their ambitions and contribute to the continued success of our creative industries. The Government are committed to a qualification system that is ambitious, coherent and responsive to the needs of learners, employers and the economy. We recognise the strength of feeling across the creative sector about maintaining high-quality progression routes. That is why we are proceeding carefully, engaging closely with stakeholders and investing in the workforce, the creative sector, the qualifications and institutions that will support the next generation of creative talent.

I again thank my noble friend Lady Keeley for bringing this debate before the House and all noble Lords for their valuable contributions, and I look forward to continuing this important dialogue as we build a qualification system that serves both learners and the creative sector as they deserve to be served.

17:37

[Baroness Keeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the Minister’s reappointment, and I was glad to hear almost everybody else mention that. We are so glad to see her back with us and thank her for what she has just said.

I shall reflect for a moment or two on the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, raised the In Harmony scheme. I had not heard of it, but that could be a good descriptor for this debate because we have been harmonious in what we have said. We obviously think across the piece that the BRIT School is wonderful and the creative industries are vital for the economy, as evidenced in successes in places such as the BRIT School and, I will hazard, although I have not been there, the In Harmony scheme as well.

I did not know about the issues in City & Guilds which the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, raised, but she said, and it is important, that we should have extreme caution about replacing qualifications that have stood the test of time—absolutely. That has been echoed by many noble Lords. My noble friend Lord Knight illuminated us about his role in “Oliver!” and founding a company with Sam Mendes, which is another theme, it seems, for today. My noble friend was clear-headed about the category error that T-levels are technical and creative skills and careers are not, as many others have said.

My noble friend Lady Warwick raised another theme: that the creative industries are vital, so we cannot afford to get it wrong. Many contributions have made that point and that we need people who can work with fluidity between disciplines. She made the point that arts and vocational qualifications have already been squeezed by earlier policy decisions.

I should congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on squeezing in the subject of first past the post and the Nuffield report on the position of women working in the creative industries—that was very creative in itself.

I thank my noble friends Lord Isaac and Lord Knight for their work in gathering information that went into the briefing. That was useful, but my noble friend Lord Isaac made the point, echoed by my noble friend Lord John, that we should not damage successful qualifications.

The noble Baroness, Lady Caine, brought her extensive experience in the creative industries, and particularly in screens, and said that one-size-fits-all is the wrong approach. She asked, quite importantly, what removing funding from existing qualifications means for, for instance, the screen industries, and whether it could put at risk regional clusters, such as those developing in Birmingham. That is an important point.

From the noble Baroness, Lady Gill, we heard about the project-based reality of the film industry. That has to be recognised. She made the point that collaborative skills and deeply immersive craft skills are needed, and that single V-levels would not provide the fluidity needed.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kingsmill, was a roommate of mine, but I did not know that she had fashion industry experience, but looking at her I am not at all surprised. The important point was made that DCMS and DfE need to jointly assess whether these qualifications are suitable.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, on working on the Protect Student Choice campaign. That clearly did some good, and meant that tens of thousands of young people were able to do courses and were not defunded. He asked what role UTCs would have, which is an important point.

The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, had a link to Sam Mendes, which has been an interesting aspect of this. She made the point that the creative industries are unique, so it has never been about training for a particular job or role. It is not one-size-fits-all.

I very much welcome what my noble friend the Minister said about the creative advisory group. I urge her to include the music industry in that, because it is very insistent that it wants to be heard. I welcome the other point she made that it is not just about simplifying qualifications.

Finally, to go back to what I said earlier about the BRIT School, future qualifications should not move away from the characteristics that have made our vocational creative education so successful. We do not want to narrow the pipeline of talent which we so value in our creative industries.

Motion agreed.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

My Lords, in adjourning, I hope the House will indulge me in wishing all noble Lords, the clerks, the staff—especially the doorkeepers—and everyone involved in the House a very happy and restful Summer Recess.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

I echo that. Have a very well-earned rest.

House adjourned at 5.42 pm.