King’s Speech

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, on 24 August I landed in Delhi to take part in the B20 before the G20. India was celebrating because the day before, on 23 August, Chandrayaan-3, the Indian spacecraft, landed on the south pole of the moon—the first time ever a spacecraft has done that. India is only the fourth nation to land a spacecraft on the moon, at a cost of $74 million. Now that is cost-effective science; that is world-beating science beyond compare, described as “a victory cry of a new India”.

In the summer of 2019, I was in Oxford to witness the honorary doctorate being given to my friend Dr Cyrus Poonawalla, the founder and chairman of the Serum Institute of India, and a fellow Zoroastrian and Parsee. On that day I spoke to Professor Sir Adrian Hill, who told me of the amazing work they were doing in a race to develop a malaria vaccine, working very closely with the Serum Institute of India to achieve this. This year, we heard the great news that this vaccine has now been approved. It is 75% effective, it is cheaper than the other vaccine that is available and it is going to save millions of children’s lives, particularly in Africa.

Covid was not even on the horizon when I met Sir Adrian Hill in the summer of 2019, yet, because of this cross-border collaboration between Oxford University and the Serum Institute of India, when Covid hit, Oxford partnered with AstraZeneca and they went to the Serum Institute of India and the Serum Institute of India produced 2 billion doses of the Covid vaccine, more than anyone else in the world, again saving many millions of lives. It is no wonder that Dr Poonawalla is being spoken of as a future recipient of a Nobel Prize, because if you go back through the decades of the SII’s existence, by providing cheap, affordable vaccines for developing countries, it is estimated that 30 million children’s lives have been saved.

The gracious Speech promises

“to lead action on tackling climate change”.

As Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, I remember when, a few years ago, the railway department received the Queen’s Anniversary Prize at Buckingham Palace. Fast forward to COP 26 in Glasgow and that railway department, in conjunction with Siemens, a German company, with government help from Innovate UK, developed the world’s first hydrogen-powered train, hydroFLEX. As President of the CBI at the time, I was on board that train with His Majesty the King and Prime Minister Boris Johnson. It was a great example of universities, Governments and business working together. What are the Government doing to promote this phenomenal collaboration even further?

AI was mentioned in the gracious Speech, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and others have spoken about it. In February this year, I was in Chennai, as Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, to announce the first master’s between the University of Birmingham and the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, one of the highest ranked Indian institutions at the moment. It is a joint degree in AI and data science, with the students spending time in both England and India. We need many more such initiatives.

The gracious Speech mentions negotiating free trade agreements. Can the Minister tell us when the free trade agreement between the UK and India will be signed? It was meant to be Diwali last year, according to Boris Johnson. Well, we have had Diwali this year and it still has not been signed. It will greatly enhance trade, business and investment between our two countries, and we need to invest much more in research and development and innovation. We invest less than 2% of GDP. America invests more than 3% of GDP. What are the Government doing to increase investment in R&D and innovation?

I have just taken over from the late, great Lord David Young of Graffham as patron of the Small Business Charter. In conjunction with the Chartered Association of Business Schools, we provide, through 60 business schools, the Government’s Help To Grow Management Course, an initiative of Rishi Sunak when he was Chancellor. Already, over 5,000 businesses have gone through this course. It is amazing: the Government pay 90%, and the business pays only 10%. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The turnover of MacMartin, a marketing and design agency —Claire, one of the partners, took part in the course—has tripled, and the head count has grown by 60%. Can the Government make this great programme available to SMEs with fewer than five employees? At the moment, they cannot take part.

I am a proud manufacturer. I manufacture an award-winning product, and the vast majority of it is manufactured here in the UK. Manufacturing makes up less than 10% of GDP, yet we are one of the top 10 manufacturers in the world, and I chair the Manufacturing Commission. The noble Lord, Lord Rees, spoke about our universities’ rankings. In February, I took part in the QS World University Rankings annual conference in India, and in my keynote speech I pointed out with pride that the UK, with less than 1% of the world’s population, has four out of the top 10 universities in the world and 17 out of the top 100 in the world, including the University of Birmingham.

I am co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on International Students and president of UKCISA. We have a record 690,000 international students, which is wonderful. Some 25% of world leaders today have been international students in the UK, yet net migration is 600,000 and we include international students in those figures. Please could we exclude international students from the net migration figures in the way that America and Australia do? That would scare people less, and that figure would come down by probably half. We could then activate the shortage occupation lists that are desperately required across all sectors.

Finally, in this debate on the gracious Speech today, we speak about science, technology, media and culture. This is the best example of the UK having the strongest combination of hard and soft power in the world, whether it is our manufacturing; defence; financial services; the Royal Family, led by His Majesty the King; the BBC, watched and listened to by 500 million people; or of course, Premier League football. We should be proud of our combination of hard and soft power: the best in the world.

Beyond Digital (COVID-19 Committee Report)

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, the Covid-19 pandemic was the worst global crisis since the Second World War, an event that changed the world for ever. It came from nowhere. How many people predicted that it would happen? How many people predict these black-swan events that change the world? How many people predicted 9/11? How many people predicted the financial crisis 15 years ago? I have learned from my own experience over the last three decades of building my business, Cobra Beer, from scratch—a business that I nearly lost three times—that crises almost always come out of the blue. No one predicts them. What matters is how you deal with these crises, how you survive, how you get through and how you learn from the crises and from the mistakes that have been made.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, and her committee for their report, Beyond Digital: Planning for a Hybrid World. I emphasise a point she made: it was published more than two years ago, on 21 April 2021, but better late than never that we are debating this really important issue.

In her opening remarks, the noble Baroness highlighted how the committee looked at issues concerning hybrid, the high street, parents and children, as well as the resilience of the UK. The report clearly says that

“dependence on the internet as a result of the pandemic has led to a massive acceleration in many pre-existing digital trends: from online shopping to online GP appointments, automation of jobs to remote working”.

From my experience, I remember that many of the financial transactions I have been involved in—the deals, mergers and acquisitions in my business over the years—used to be conducted face to face, with the lawyers and everyone gathering around a table in a boardroom. Then we moved on to conference calls more than face-to-face meetings. The technology for videoconferencing was there; we just were not using it. The pandemic led to this technology being used, which I will come to later.

The report also clearly highlights the “huge inequalities” that exist in our country, which have been spoken about; how children lost so much of their schooling; how businesses could not move to trade online because they just did not know how to do it; and the isolation created by the pandemic. The future was always going to be hybrid—a mixture of online, offline and real-time—but due to the pandemic, as the report says, the future “is here now”.

I am happy to note that the report states that digital is

“a very poor substitute for ‘in person’ services and interactions”.

There is no beating that. You can never replicate what we are doing here: having this debate face to face. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, I commend the House of Lords for adapting so quickly and enabling us to continue to function as a Parliament even during the lockdown and to operate remotely. We did it, in many cases from abroad. We functioned, but nothing beats what we are doing now.

The report also mentions and recommends that, like many other cross-cutting issues, such as Brexit and devolution, responsibility for the Government’s strategic response should lie with the Cabinet Office. I presume that is where it sits now. It also quotes Yuval Noah Harari as saying that, pre-internet,

“if you ordered the entire population of a country to stay at home for several weeks, it would have resulted in economic ruin, social breakdown and mass starvation”.

The internet made it possible for us to stay at and work from home, and kept us safe.

In July, I was privileged to be the guest of honour of one of my old schools in India, the Hyderabad Public School, for its centenary investiture ceremony. The school has many illustrious alumni, including Ajay Banga, the president of the World Bank, and Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft. I have quoted many times what he said at the beginning of the pandemic, which the report also quotes:

“We’ve … seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”.


That is where necessity becomes the mother of invention. We did it. Research by the Royal College of General Practitioners found that

“at the peak of the pandemic, around 71% of GP consultations were conducted remotely by telephone or video”,

compared with 25% for the same period the year before. A hybrid world is very beneficial. We are now living in that world, where we make the most of in-person interactions and the virtual interactions that the technology allows us, which we demonstrated throughout the pandemic.

The problem is that we can have a truly good hybrid world only if it is truly inclusive and everyone has access and is able to use the technology and the internet. The reality is that at the end of 2019, before the pandemic, there were more than 600,000 premises that were unable to receive decent broadband. Of course, many of those were in rural areas. I ask the Government to confirm whether they have a target of 100% broadband coverage throughout the United Kingdom, and by when they hope to fulfil that.

Then there is the aspect that a huge proportion of the population are digitally illiterate. Up to 9 million people—some say more than 11 million people—do not have the ability to use this technology in the way that many of us, fortunately, can. Some 9% of households with children have access to the internet only through a smartphone. The Sutton Trust found that 15% of teachers in the most deprived schools said that more than one-third of their students did not have adequate access to an electronic device for home learning, compared with 2% of teachers in the most affluent schools. In the United States of America students and teachers in all government schools are able to have computers or laptops. Will the Government confirm how many of our students and teachers have that 100% access to computers and digital devices?

The noble Lord, Lord Hain, mentioned that many children missed out on their schooling because of the pandemic. I know, from personal experience, that children lucky enough to have access to broadband, their laptop, a room and teaching taking place—forget missing lessons, they did not miss even an art lesson or a music lesson. Yet at the other extreme, we had children on a council estate, in a tower block, who had no laptop, no broadband and no room in which to have access. They missed, many of them, a year of education.

Another area where the Government could have done more is that they were too late in implementing lateral flow testing. As president of the CBI from June 2020 until June 2022, I was one of the first people in the country, in August 2020, to recommend to the Government to implement lateral flow mass testing. The Government would not listen. As an entrepreneur, you never give up; I persisted and eventually the Government did listen. They listened in November 2020, and it was the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, who said, on the Floor of the House, “Lord Bilimoria, you have won this argument”, and they started to implement lateral flow testing. By the time it was fully implemented, it was November 2021, running into December 2021 and January 2022. Noble Lords will remember that we ran out of lateral flow tests because they were being offered, as I recommended, free to the public and to businesses.

How many people—not many—have heard of the Oxford University test that was done in 200 schools with 200,000 children and 20,000 staff? Half used a bubble system, isolating, so that when one person got Covid, the whole bubble would isolate and miss their schooling; the other half used regular lateral flow testing. They found that the ones in the bubble missed out on schooling while the ones with regular lateral flow testing, except for the individual who tested positive, did not miss out at all. We could have saved so many more school days if we had implemented lateral flow testing earlier. I go further and say that if we had implemented lateral flow testing earlier, we would have avoided the second and third lockdowns and would have saved hundreds of billions of pounds, let alone lives wasted and school days wasted. I hope that is one of the lessons that is learned.

To conclude, we have a digital divide that has been highlighted by the pandemic, digital poverty, digital access, digital illiteracy. I make the point that, going back, my first government appointment was in 1999 as a member of the New Deal task force, which then became the national employment panel in the Department for Work and Pensions. I remember there that the whole idea of getting people from welfare to work was not just to save money and help the economy but to help those individuals, because experiment after experiment, research after research, showed that work is actually good for you. It is good physically and good mentally.

When you are in a face-to-face working environment, you have the ability to be more creative, to be more innovative, to have that buzz and to have the social interactions. There is also the ability for your local high streets to survive. I am sorry to say that the high streets have suffered hugely because of the pandemic. They need support, and one area would be a reform of our business rates. Will the Government acknowledge that we desperately need to reform our business rates to save our high streets?

I conclude by saying that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. We need to learn from our mistakes.

Advanced Artificial Intelligence

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, I spoke in the “AI in the UK” debate just over a year ago, on 25 May. At that time, I was the president of the CBI, which I stepped down from in June last year after completing my two-year term. I quoted Susannah Odell, the CBI’s head of digital policy at the time, who said:

“This AI strategy is a crucial step in keeping the UK a leader in emerging technologies and driving business investment across the economy. From trade to climate, AI brings unprecedented opportunities for increased growth and productivity. It’s also positive to see the government joining up the innovation landscape to make it more than the sum of its parts … With AI increasingly being incorporated into our workplaces and daily lives, it’s essential to build public trust in the technology. Proportionate and joined-up regulation will be a core element to this and firms look forward to engaging with the government’s continued work in this area. Businesses hope to see the AI strategy provide the long-term direction and fuel to reach the government’s AI ambitions”.


At that time, I made the same point I have made many times: if we are to achieve this ambition, I do not think we can do it by investing 1.7% of GDP in research, development and innovation compared with the 3.1% and 3.2% that America and Germany do. We need to increase our investment in R&D and innovation by at least 1% of GDP. Does the Minister agree?

Since the mid-1990s—in less than three decades—we have had the internet, dotcom, blockchain, and now we have AI; by the way, hand in hand with AI, quantum is the next big leap. AI is developing at a rapid pace and, since we debated it just over a year ago, there is much more on the agenda, from generative language models such as ChatGPT, to medical screening technology. It is computer vision; it is speech to text and natural language understanding; it is robotics; it is machine learning; I could go on with the amazing capabilities.

The UK Government, in their National AI Strategy, say that AI is the

“fastest growing deep technology in the world, with huge potential to rewrite the rules of entire industries, drive substantial economic growth and transform all areas of life”.

Such transformative technology brings both risks and benefits, which we are discussing in this debate.

A point that has not been brought up is that 96% of companies involved in AI are SMEs. Around 75% of those are based in London and the south-east, and the headings are technology, healthcare and science, professional services and financial services. Although 96% of them are SMEs, £7.6 billion in revenue—well over half—is from the large companies. That is, of course, not surprising at all.

If I had the time, I could list all the benefits of AI, from safer cars and transport systems to benefits for businesses and public services, to democracy being made stronger and to crime prevention and defence, as we have heard from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton. I could list the risks, including a lack of transparency, bias and discrimination, privacy and ethical concerns, security risks, concentration of power, dependence on AI, job displacement, economic inequality, legal and regulatory challenges, an AI arms race, loss of human connection, misinformation and manipulation, and unintended consequences. As the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale mentioned—I thank him for leading this debate—the existential risk is frightening, to say the least. PWC has said that 7% of jobs in the UK were at high risk of being displaced, but the overall conclusion is that, broadly, it should be neutral. Would the Government reassure us that that will be the case?

There is a call for rapid regulatory adaptation. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, has warned about the potential harms of AI and called for a “suitable regulatory framework”. BCS has issued a report outlining how AI can be helped to “grow up” responsibly. The Russell group of universities—I am chancellor of the University of Birmingham—has said that AI should be used for the

“benefit of staff and students—enhancing teaching practices”,

and that we should not be frightened of it.

I am proud to announce that the University of Birmingham, along with IIT Madras, one of the leading Indian educational institutions, has just announced a joint master’s degree in AI and data science, conducted on both campuses, with the students coming out with a joint degree. This is a first. The report of Sir Tony Blair and the noble Lord, Lord Hague, has been referred to: A New National Purpose: AI Promises a World-Leading Future of Britain.

Collaboration is absolutely crucial, but no one has mentioned this. Can the Minister assure us that the Horizon programme, which is sitting on the Prime Minister’s desk, is going to be activated? The sooner that is done and the sooner we have collaborative research, the more it will help AI to accelerate.

I turn to public trust. AI will be undermined unless the public are informed. What are the Government’s plans to educate the public on AI?

My final point is on labour shortages. We need to activate the labour shortage occupation list to enable us to have access to the talent to actually make the UK a world leader in AI. Will the Government do that?